The Jane Austen Society by Natalie Jenner Page 0,112
their lives. He allowed himself to think even further back, to the burial of his late wife in the parish graveyard, and his own wedding day decades earlier inside the little church, and the playing in the woodland with Frances and Andrew as little kids.
All of these memories, big and small, were equal in only one—but one very significant—way. They all belonged to the past, they were invisible matter, they could leave no trace or mark on the present. Only life in the moment could do that—only this second in the hour—only this one fraction of time that was gone before you could even complete the thought. It was all both that ephemeral, and that infinitely reliable.
If Dr. Benjamin Gray could have strung even just a few seconds from the past into something permanent, it would have been the feel of Jennie’s cheek against his neck. He missed that so much—missed her loving touch—missed being loved.
Instead he was reduced to being a lonely widower in need of salvation. Goodness knows where Liberty Pascal got some of this stuff, but when it came to Adeline Grover, Liberty never appeared to miss her mark. Dr. Gray had not been able to stop thinking about her suggestive comments since their walk.
It made a lot of strange sense. He had always felt as if Adeline was trying to prod him back to life somehow, back when they had crossed paths the most, when she was teaching at the village school—as if she was daring him into some kind of action. He saw now that on some unconscious level he had been asking her to. He had assumed at the time that the friction between them had all been to do with the school—the syllabus, the other trustees, the collective resistance to her teaching style.
But now he also saw—he hoped—that it was not about any of that. It was about him.
And he knew that she had cared.
He turned from the lime grove and headed through the woodland, then up a small incline into the walled garden made up of two different “rooms”: a front enclosure full of symmetrically planted lilac trees, and behind that another even larger space full of rosebushes and vegetable patches and fruit trees, surrounded on all sides by towering redbrick walls. In each of the three outside walls was a dark-red wooden door, leading to where he was not sure. He realized that in all the years he had visited the estate, he had never opened any of those doors.
When he entered the second enclosed garden space, he right away spotted Adeline sitting on a little bench against the farthest back wall, the small copy of Pride and Prejudice that he had given her at Christmas sitting open on her lap.
“Why, hullo. What are you doing here?” he asked in surprise.
“What are you doing here? Playing hide-and-seek with Liberty?”
“Just hiding.” He smiled and came over and sat down next to her on the bench. “Well, all’s well that ends well.”
“It was definitely like something out of Shakespeare, all those weddings at once.”
“Or Austen.”
She laughed. “It’s nice to see something work out, for once, even after all that time.”
“And they say you can never go back.”
“Do you believe that?”
“No, not now. Not after that.” He looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “No one is more rigid and unyielding than Andrew Forrester.”
“No one, that is, except you,” Adeline countered.
“You’re probably right,” he gave in with a grin.
They stayed there quietly for a few minutes, listening to the starlings and finches singing from the tops of the orchard trees.
“We haven’t sat like this in a while,” Adeline finally spoke.
“Not since last summer, I think.”
She closed the little book on her lap. “We were discussing Emma, I believe.”
“The obtuseness of old men.”
“Knightley’s not so old.”
“Old enough to know better,” Dr. Gray said. “Although perhaps age has nothing to do with it. Look at Evie. She’s, what, all of sixteen, and she’s got the entire British literary canon of the nineteenth century figured out.”
“What do you wish you had figured out?”
“You,” he said quietly, and she leaned her head against his shoulder, and he realized he wanted to capture this moment forever. Wanted—finally—to try to string these seconds into something permanent all over again, however ephemeral and futile and fleeting this moment, too, would always be.
“I was pretty obvious, you know. I practically handed you teacher’s notes.”
He laughed. “And I failed the catechism miserably.”