Portrait of an Unknown Woman. Vanora Bennett

we couldn’t quite look into each other’s eyes, and I was snatching sideways glances at him instead – committing to memory each feature and joyfully relearning the contours of cheek, nose, throat and chin as if I were caressing them with my eyes. His dark hair was just as I remembered it, though with a dusting of silver at the temples now. His eyes were the same: light blue and piercing, with that heartbreaking hint of learned sadness always in them.) ‘Sometimes, it’s good to be so at ease with a person that you don’t have to say anything. I’ve missed that. I don’t know many people this well, anywhere.’

      At ease was absolutely the opposite of how I was feeling at this moment; but the wonder of this joyful embarrassment I’d been stricken with stopped me from laughing at the idea. I couldn’t quite believe he was feeling so at ease with me either. He couldn’t meet my eye even more than I could his. But hugging that secret knowledge to myself only made me happier.

      He was matching his long, athletic stride to my shorter one. I could feel him reining back his legs. We were so close I could almost feel the muscles in his legs brushing against my skirt. I was half-turned towards him, against the wind, my arm hovering weightless and nervous above his, trying not to melt into the warmth we made together. But, all down the side of my body that was next to his, I couldn’t help but feel the line and life of him, and rejoice in silence at the loveliness of it.

      ‘I could walk like this forever, with you,’ he said, almost whispering.

      I made a small sound back; I didn’t know what to say, because I couldn’t say, ‘I’ve been waiting for years for you to come back, and if I died now I would die happy just to have seen you again’, but it didn’t matter. Because I’d just half-seen him snatching one of the same glances at me that I’d been secretly throwing at him – memorising my features before turning away back into his silent contemplation of his memory of me – and a new soft little explosion of happiness was happening inside me.

      He laughed. ‘But it is cold,’ he added. We were down by the river already, with a bank of snowdrops coming up behind us under the oak tree and a fierce glitter on the water, and the wind was coming at us hard and fast, snatching at his foreign-looking black beret. ‘Shall we sit down somewhere, out of the wind? In one of the gate houses – maybe this one right here?’

      I didn’t understand the surge of feeling sweeping me along. All I knew was that there was nothing I wanted more than to be alone with him, somewhere warm and still, so that I might at last be brave enough to look into his face and we could talk forever. I started to nod my head, feeling my body slide closer into his arm. Then I realised what he was pointing at: the westernmost of the two gatehouses. The place I never go.

      ‘No,’ I snapped, surprising even myself with the sharpness of my tone. ‘We can’t go in there,’ I added, feeling his surprise and making an effort to keep my voice calm. ‘Father’s started keeping … things … in that gatehouse. Come away. I can’t tell you about that yet.’

      Urgently I pulled at his arm, aware with another part of my mind of the closeness of his chest as he laughingly surrendered and let me manoeuvre him away. It was three hundred yards upriver to the second gatehouse. ‘But this other gatehouse is all right, is it?’ he asked breathlessly, catching me up and sliding his arm around my waist now as we walked towards it. I could feel it across my back. Fingers on my hip bone, moving. ‘What does he keep in here?’

      What he kept here was his pets: a fox, a weasel, a ferret, a monkey, all on chains; rabbits in a wooden hutch; and a dovecote of fluttering white birds on the roof. Erasmus used to watch Father’s doves with me, out in the gardens at Bucklersbury, long ago. ‘They have their kindnesses and feuds, as well as we,’ he wrote afterwards. And he loved to tell how we’d seen the monkey, off its chain because it was ill, watching the weasel prising loose the back of the hutch. That monkey had run over, climbing on a plank and pushing the wooden back into a safe position again, saving the rabbits. Animal humanism – just the kind of story that Erasmus would treasure. Just the kind of thing that used to amuse Father, too, before his life took the turn it has now.

      It was peaceful in the eastern gatehouse. It smelled of straw and feed and wood – calm country smells. We pushed open the door and sat down on a bench, side by side, with his arm still round my back, and listened to the wind on the water.

      With his free hand, John Clement loosened his cloak, and turned to gaze down sideways at me. The arm behind me was bringing me round to face him, a process my body seemed, independently of my brain, to be joyfully helping. There was a little smile playing on his lips. He lowered his head and nudged his nose against mine. His eyes were cast down still, but his lips were so close now that he only had to whisper. ‘So, grown-up Mistress Meg Giggs – what shall we talk about?’ He smiled wider, and his smile filled my whole field of vision. ‘I hear that while I’ve been away becoming a doctor you’ve been becoming one too.’ His fingers were exploring my side, his arm was drawing me closer. ‘And I want to know all about that. But first, I want to say,’ he paused again, ‘how beautiful you’ve grown,’ and he looked straight into my eyes at last.

      And then, somehow, we were kissing, and I was so dizzy with longing that I found myself clinging to him, aware of his cloak and the ribbons on his foreign-made jacket sleeves and the heat of my blood and – at the same time as losing myself in the bewildering mix of hardness and softness and wetness and roughness and gentleness and sensation on every inch of our bodies as they strained together – feeling touched to have the power to make his heart pound so audibly in his chest, and his hands shake so.

      With a sigh, we came apart, and sat, rumpled and flushed, looking at each other from under our eyelashes, and laughing at our own shared confusion. ‘Oh Meg,’ John whispered. ‘Now I know I’ve really come home at last. You’ve always been home to me.’

      Which was just about exactly what I had wanted to hear him say ever since he went away, almost half my life ago. And just about exactly what I had begun to think that neither he nor any other man ever would say to me, while I passed my empty spinsterish days buried alive in the countryside, watching all the others get fat with happiness, and became more isolated and eccentric and embittered by the day. So almost all of me wanted to believe the wonderful words I was hearing now. But I couldn’t stop myself also hearing another voice. It was Elizabeth’s, and it was taunting, ‘He’s been back in London since last summer,’ and ‘Father got him the job.’

      I looked up at him, hesitating over how best to put my difficult question, with prickles of frustration in advance at trying to believe the answer could only be simple and honest, and at the same time feeling almost dizzy with the desire to slide back into his arms and lose myself in another kiss.

      ‘So tell me …’ I began, feeling my way into a new kind of uncharted territory. I couldn’t bring myself to say, ‘You’ve been back in London for six months, just one hour’s boat ride away, and never sent word; you went off abroad ten years ago; you never once wrote – and you expect me to believe you’ve treasured your walks with the little girl from all those years ago so much that you’ve always thought of me as your home?’ So I started as gently as I knew how: ‘What has it been like being the King’s server for all these months?’

      He met my eyes now with a different kind of look, a little wary. Then he nodded once or twice, as if he’d answered some mysterious question of his own, and kissed me chastely, a brush of lips on lips.

      ‘Well, it’s a sinecure; a place at court while I set myself up properly; your father’s kindness to me for old times’ sake,’ he said. ‘But I know what you’re really asking. You think I should have done something better than just turn up out of the blue to see you after so long. You’re asking for explanations.’

      I nodded, relieved that he’d grasped my thought. He paused again. He was thinking hard. I became aware of the rabbits scratching around in their straw.

      ‘Listen, Meg,’ he said at last. ‘I can’t give you enough explanations to satisfy you completely. Not yet. But you have to trust me. The first time I asked your father if I could marry you was nearly ten years ago, when he took me abroad for the summer.’ I held my breath. I hadn’t expected to hear that.