She Was Having Tea Alone—Until Duke’s Quadruplet Boys Whispered Pretend You’re Our Mother…

Chapter 19

The old woman stayed for a fortnight, which was longer than anyone, including the old woman herself, had expected. And in that fortnight, the house, which had been slowly warming for two years, and which had stopped being cold some time ago, changed in a way that Eleanor could not quite locate.

It was not that the old woman was warm. She was not, in any conventional sense. She was exacting, and she was opinionated, and she quarrelled, mildly and with great enjoyment, with the rector, and with the schoolmaster, and once, memorably, with William, over a matter of grammar that William insisted was his own property.

But she was present. That was the thing. She was present in the house in a way she had not been present for years, and her presence, which was formidable, was also a kind of reassurance, and the boys, who had had no grandmother to speak of and had had to make do, for four years, with a father who was in mourning, and a household that was grieving, found that they had, suddenly, a grandmother.

Tom took to her most. This surprised no one, because Tom was the quiet watcher, and the old woman was the sort of person who could be read, and Tom read her, and he found, to his own obvious delight, that the old woman read him back.

They were to be seen, in the afternoons, in the garden, a great many times, the old woman in her chair and Tom perched on the wall that he was not supposed to climb, and they would be talking, in low voices, about things that no one else was permitted to hear.

Eleanor asked him, once, what they spoke of, and Tom considered the question with the gravity of a boy who had been asked to surrender a secret.

“She tells me about my mother,” Tom said.

Eleanor was quiet.

“She tells me the things that are true,” Tom said. “She does not tell me that my mother was a saint. She tells me that my mother was difficult, and that she loved me, and that she tried, and that she was not always able, and that she was sorry, though she did not always say so.”

He paused, and looked at Eleanor, and his eyes, which were so like his father’s, were grave and clear.

“I think,” he said, “that I am old enough to know the truth about my mother now. And I am glad I know it, even the parts that are not easy.”

“Are you?” Eleanor said.

“Yes,” Tom said. “Because the truth is better than the story. The story is a thing you make up to make yourself feel better. The truth is a thing you live with, and it is harder, but it is real.”

He looked at her, and there was something in his face that was not quite like a boy.

“You have been the truth to me,” he said. “You have not pretended to be my mother. You have just been here, and you have been real, and I would rather have a real stepmother than a pretend mother.”

And Eleanor, whose hands were red at the knuckles and steady because she had trained them to be steady, put her hands on his shoulders, and she did not say anything, because there was nothing she could say that would not be ruined by the saying.