“That is not what you were thinking about,” Albina said.
“Mother,” Temperance stopped too and turned to look at her.
“Be honest with me.”
“If you really must know,” Temperance sighed, “then I don’t know what the real one is anymore.”
“Yes you do,” Albina said simply. “You are just choosing not to look at it.”
They began walking again, slowly.
“He is everything I was looking for,” Temperance said, after a while. “Kind and sensible and he respects me and he would never try to manage my life. The practical arrangement would be a good one.”
She paused for a moment.
“He is exactly what I was looking for.”
“And?” Albina said.
“And I feel nothing,” Temperance said, and then corrected herself. “Not nothing, I mean I do feel fondness and respect. I suppose I am glad he exists but that is the extent of it.”
It was the first time that Temperance had admitted such a thing out loud, and it felt oddly freeing.
“Can I tell you something?” Albina said.
“Yes.”
“I spent thirty years married to your father,” she said. “And I knew, before I married him, that I did not feel love for him. I knew it clearly and I told myself the same things you are telling yourself now. That fondness was enough and a sensible arrangement was worth more than feelings that were uncertain and inconvenient.” She looked at the street ahead.
Temperance found herself suddenly invested in whatever her mother had to say, and listened closely.
“I was not entirely wrong. Fondness is worth something, as is respect. But I will tell you what thirty years of a sensible arrangement taught me.”
Temperance listened.
“A life without love is always slightly cold,” Albina said. “No matter how warm the room is. You can be in the same house as someone for thirty years and still be entirely alone in it. And you know it every day, and you get very good at not showing it, and that costs more than you expect.”
They had reached the end of the street, and now the house was visible from here. Both of them slowed down to keep the conversation going just a little bit longer.
“I am not saying Elias Talbot is your father,” Albina said. “He is clearly not. He is a good man and your father was not, and thatmatters enormously. But a good man who does not make you feel the passion that comes with love will still leave you cold. I know what that feels and would not wish it on you.”
Temperance looked at her mother and thought about thirty years and a dining table and a woman sitting in a window looking at something nobody else could see.
“What if it cannot go anywhere,” she said quietly. “Love…. What if the person I feel it for is not…”
“Have you told him?” Albina said, as though she was already privy to what Temperance felt like was her best guarded secret.
“No.”
“Then you do not know that,” Albina said. “You are deciding something based on an assumption you have never tested.”
“It is not that simple.”
“I know,” Albina said. “But the alternative is a life that is always slightly cold. And I think you are brave enough to choose something harder than that. I hid what I felt for thirty years because I was afraid and told myself I was being sensible. Do not make the same mistake.”
They stood outside the house. Temperance looked at the familiar door and the garden wall that needed repointing on the left sideand the window of the sitting room where she had spent the morning not being at breakfast.
“He might not feel it back,” she said.
