Chapter 9

9

Lily sat at a little table, a woven bamboo basket before her, watching her grandfather watch her in turn. She had spent her morning insisting on being a part of whatever it was that Andrew was planning to do in Bristol. Now, she was forcing her way into her grandfather's life. The look on his face—the drawing down of his eyebrows, the compression of his lips—made her feel as if he were contemplating a partially feral animal rather than the granddaughter he'd raised.

Her ah gung had once been so kind to her. She'd always been a little brusque, a little impatient—from her very first words, her ah gung said. Lily had never been the kind of person who knew what people implied when they spoke in polite fictions. Once upon a time, he'd explained it to her obligingly.

Now he was looking at her as if she didn't belong.

"I brought tea," Lily said.

"Oh, that's tea you have there?" He glanced at the bamboo basket, then at her. "In a woven tea basket? How surprising."

"You always used to say that you missed the tea from home." Lily swallowed. "So, I asked. My grandmothers said that the village two li down made a dark tea called liu bao. It took me a while to find some, but…"

He heaved a sigh.

"But may I make some for you?"

"You might as well." He waved a hand.

Lily was saying something wrong. She could tell by the twitch in his jaw. All she had done was bring tea. What was wrong with that?

Lily had never been good at conversations that meant a different thing than what was being said. The air between them felt strewn with unspoken rules, all of which Lily was violating.

"Right." Lily stood. "I'll just go…put the kettle…" She gestured to the little stove.

He frowned. "Do you think I can't do it myself?"

"No." She could feel her fists curling at her side. "Of course I don't."

He had taught her that a conversation wasn't a real conversation when responses had nothing to do with queries. She wrinkled her nose in frustration. What did making tea have to do with her grandfather taking care of himself? How was she supposed to talk to him when he wouldn't say what he was really thinking?

He stood and made his way to the back, before pouring water from the same earthenware jug he'd had since she was a baby. He stayed back with the kettle, humming to himself, keeping his back turned as if the extra ten feet of space between them were necessary.

As he stood, he slowly straightened, then made fists of his hands and began rhythmically beating his lower back.

"Have you been well, grandfather?"

His fists marched up his spine, to his kidneys, then back down again. "Never better," he replied, a moment too late, before transitioning to open slaps down the back of his legs.

It was a routine she'd watched him do every morning as a child—to wake up the meridians, he'd told her.

Now it felt like an excuse not to speak with her.

"You're still doing the self-massage?"

His head swiveled a quarter-turn, just enough to catch Lily's eye. "It keeps me young. Or are you surprised at how I've aged?"

"Not at all." She shook her head. "Did I say that?"

"Hmph." He turned away from her once more and began slapping down his arms.

With so many people, Lily felt as if dialogue was a game of sport like shuttlecock, with oblique rules that were never spelled out. One side (never Lily) kept score according to arcane, ever-shifting principles that could not be explained. Lily attempted to follow them with varying degrees of failure and was assigned penalties for reasons that were frankly baffling.

Her grandfather had never used to make her feel like she was losing at conversation.

Rather than losing more conversational points, Lily found a teapot and cups and began to set them out.

"These are new. Very nice."

"Kai made them for me." Her grandfather's jaw twitched. "He's very good. Very respectful. He's been like my own grandchild."

Lily swallowed the sting in her throat. If he'd wanted a grandchild, he shouldn't have sent her away.

"That's nice," she said miserably. "I'm glad you have…" What was the word to use for a person who had replaced her? "Friends."

He took the kettle off the hook with a towel and brought it over.

"Here." She reached for it. "Let me?—"

"Oh, you know how to brew the tea from my ancestors' village now?"

"No." Her voice felt small. "But I will accept your instruction."

"Hmph." He poured the water into the pot. "Of course you know how to brew the tea. It's just tea. We were farmers. We didn't have time to fuss around with finicky tea procedures."

"Oh." Lily winced. "You're right. I should have made sure that I knew how to brew it properly before coming. I should have asked first grandmother. She always knows everything."

Thunderclouds gathered on his brow. He picked up the pot and swirled it around. "That is a good description for your first grandmother. But don't worry. I sent you to her because she had more important things to teach you." He looked up at her. "Did she do a good job?"

That was what he called her: first grandmother, and not my wife. Perhaps that was unsurprising, since he hadn't seen either of his wives in over twenty years.

He still sent money.

Her ah gung poured the tea and took a sip.

Lily had spent months finding the right tea. She'd brought it back specifically to show him that whatever was wrong between them, she was still his granddaughter. She still cared about him. And yes, he might not like parts of her—technically most of her—but she still loved him, and if he wanted, they could still be family.

He swirled the liquid in his mouth before swallowing. "Passable."

"Passable." Lily's heart fell. "I thought you missed the tea from your village."

"I do. Particularly in spring. The green tea, made with the first new leaves. There's a freshness to it." A hint of nostalgia crossed his face. "People think tea is just dried leaves, but it's so much more. Green tea is magical: a way to keep leaves green after drying, while imparting a special toasted flavor. There's nothing else like it anywhere in the world."

Lily spread her hands across her knees. "I see." She'd had it all wrong. "I'm sorry."

"Eh? What for? There's nothing to be done."

"You're right again." She drank her own tea. "I'm sorry." The liquid tasted woody and pale—how could she have imagined he liked this? She'd tried it herself and had wondered what he'd seen in it, but she'd imagined that it was the nostalgia of it.

She'd given him a whole basket of it.

Now that he'd said it, she could recall the signs. He'd always talked about tea from home over a pot of fresh nettle leaf. How had she not made the connection? Green. Fresh.

"Tea made with the first two leaves and a bud." He shook his head. "Ah, well. That's what happens."

So. She'd made an error. Nothing new to Lily. Her errors were only exceeded by her dogged determination to keep trying.

She clenched her hands. He wanted green tea. That, she could manage. She was going to Bristol with Andrew. Now she had an extra excuse to come along if he tried to fob her off again.

She'd landed in Bristol when she'd arrived in England, and she still remembered the sign she'd seen on her way to the inn: Edmonds and Company, Tea Dealer. All kinds of tea.

She felt her spine straighten in determination. "We should do this again."

"We should?" He looked as if she'd suggested a village-wide murder spree. "Why?"

"For…fun?" She looked beseechingly at him.

"Are you having fun?"

"No, but…"

He shook his head. "Then don't force it."

"But in the past…"

"Leave it in the past." He looked away. "There's no point losing good memories to bad."

"But what about more good memories?" Lily held her chin very stiff. She could feel tears threatening. Crying would indicate that she was weak; it would also mean that he needed to comfort her, and nothing was less comforting than having her grandfather, who no longer liked her, feeling obliged to pat her back and tell her that everything would turn out.

It wouldn't.

Her grandfather wasn't unkind. Blunt, maybe, but Lily had liked his bluntness. It wasn't nearly so endearing when it was a constant reminder of her own insufficiency.

She lifted her chin. "I enjoyed having tea with you, ah gung."

"Ha." For the first time, his lips curled in a smile. "I knew your grandmothers could teach what I could not. Look at you." He shook his head. "You've learned the polite lie after all."

Lily escaped as soon as she could. The wind was a little blustery today; gray clouds slithered across the landscape, and Lily tightened her cloak around her body.

Her grandfather had been wrong. Her grandmothers had taught her nothing of the sort.

Lily had learned some semblance of tact working as the shop girl for the Tallant brothers. She had learned to put on that cheerful mask by understanding that it was her employment to do so. She'd never imagined having to talk to her grandfather as if he were a customer. He was the one who had explained it as much as anyone could to her.

You weren't supposed to lie, he'd told her, but you also weren't supposed to tell the truth. What did that leave? Talk about the weather. Gossip. That sort of thing: words that had no meaning except to say, "here I am, conversing with you in a willing fashion."

That was what her grandfather had told her once: that the little chit-chat didn't mean the words that people used. Nobody needed to be told it was a fine day. Everyone already knew. Instead, it was a way of reassuring people that you liked them, they liked you, and it didn't matter what you said so long as you kept saying it.

"Nobody is keeping score," he'd assured her.

"Then why do I keep losing?" she'd demanded. It hadn't made sense. What was the point of deploying words if you didn't mean them? How did one know which meaningless words to use?

She hadn't understood why someone would say meaningless, false things until just before she left England.

After she and Andrew had intercourse, they'd both been in the unoccupied bed in Lily's childhood home down in the village. She had been young and a little frightened by the feelings she was having. She hadn't known what they meant. They'd felt too large for her body.

A virtuous young lady did not do those sorts of things. That had been the exact point: for Lily to stop being a virtuous young lady.

That hadn't stopped her from wanting things. She had known it was unfair to want them: to tell Andrew that she might feel more, under the circumstances, would have been despicable. It would have trapped him in a way that he had not agreed to be trapped. He'd made an offhand remark about what they'd done.

And Lily had prevaricated. "Good thing," she'd said, as breezily as she could muster, "that we aren't conventional, and you won't insist on owning me after that."

He'd looked at her, his eyes dark.

It had been mildly true: she hadn't wanted to be owned by any man. But it had been a feint, a side-step. In that moment, she had wanted to be cherished. She had wanted the chance to cherish in return. But she couldn't command someone else to cherish her. She'd wanted him to do what she wanted, to tell her what she wanted to hear, without having to say the words to compel him to do so.

She'd made up her own unarticulated rule, one she'd been afraid to give voice to. She'd realized it days later, at sea, in the throes of the worst menstrual cramps she had ever experienced. She'd realized that what she had wanted in that moment was to be loved, and it hadn't happened. She'd sobbed in the tight bunk in steerage.

Honesty was hard; honest wants that you weren't likely to get were the hardest.

Maybe that was why Andrew had lied to her about stealing the log. Maybe that was why he'd suggested a visit to Bristol. Hard truths were hard, and whatever reason he had for concealing this one had to be difficult indeed.

Lily looked down at Wedgeford. From here, the inn appeared to be toy-sized, a thing she could pick up and push around. But Lily knew that Wedgeford was immovable, and Andrew the most stubborn of them all.

Be patient, she imagined his mother saying. He is not always good at speaking his mind.

She had to believe it was that—a difficulty in expressing a hard truth, and hopefully, a temporary one. It hadn't even been fifteen hours since the log had been stolen. Surely she could wait.

The alternative—that Andrew might have stolen from her, lied to her, and now promised to take her on a fool's errand, all without intending to tell her the truth—was too painful to contemplate. It would mean that he, too, had decided that Lily was not good enough.

Lily bit her lip and glanced at her grandfather's cottage.

She had her own hard truths to tell. There had been more than one bout of sobbing in steerage. It had hurt when her grandfather had sent her away on next to no notice.

Up until that moment, she had never questioned his love, and to have it yanked away so abruptly—even now, seven years later, the sting had not faded.

Her visit with him felt like a finger poked into an old, unhealing wound.

The morning air was brisk; the sun was bright. All alone, near the top of the hill, Lily spoke the hardest truth aloud.

"I'm still not good enough." She had never been one to devolve into self-pity, though, so she felt her jaw square and her spine straighten.

Did she not have a volume of poetry to print? She was going to start typesetting the form today, start printing the first signature. Her fists clenched until she could feel the bite of her nails through her knit gloves.

"I'm not good enough yet," she promised the tiny village of Wedgeford below her. "But I will be. I will be."

When people thought of books, they often thought of the process of making one as being gentle, the way reading was: type being quietly set by a man (why was it always a man?) with a monocle and a gentle manner.

By contrast, Lily stood in her shed, whacking softened paper with a brush. It was the kind of activity that got the blood up, the kind of activity where one could think about one's day and banish all the untoward thoughts.

Andrew telling her lies? Ha. Take that! Her brush flashed out.

Her grandfather no longer wanting to speak to her? Boo. But the beating brush could fix it.

Of course one had to be careful; one could not strike too hard. One had to strike evenly, carefully, repeatedly. One had to turn the brush just so, to avoid tearing the flong. And one had to beat, repeatedly, smacking the bristles against the paper until the dark type could just begin to be seen through the material.

"Dear me," a voice said, as she raised her hand again. "Am I interrupting something?"

Lily turned, still holding her beating brush.

There, in the opened doorways of the shed, stood Chloe.

"Chloe!" Lily started to put the brush down, then remembered that she could not let the paper dry. "You're here."

"I brought the woodcut so you could make labels from it."

"Did you?" Lily tried to think of a polite way to start beating her flong again. "There was no need. I would have come by for it."

"Not at all. I wanted to see your workshop. Am I prying?" She came over and set the woodcut on a table near Lily.

Lily glanced at it. "Hmm. The edges aren't deep enough—but never mind. I can fix it."

"I would bet you can." Chloe showed no sign of leaving.

"If you don't mind." Lily gestured. "I have to finish this before it dries."

"By all means." Chloe looked fascinated. "What is it?"

Lily turned back. "I'm stereotyping," she said, raising her brush and striking the mold beneath her. "It's a process called papier-maché. After one sets the type, you put damp tissue and paper on top, then beat the paper into it, to make a mold that captures all the indentations. But you really must be—quite—thorough." She directed her attention to the edges of the mold.

"Amazing."

"Once it dries, you can cast a plate from it, and print directly from the plate. And if the plate wears out, you can cast another. In the meantime, you can reuse the type that you set for anything."

"When you say ‘cast a plate'—you mean…" Chloe came to stand on the other side of the beating table, which meant that Lily had to look at her.

"Oh, the usual. You melt metal, pour it in, wait for it to cool. That kind of thing."

Chloe looked admiringly. "You literally melt metal?"

The flong was almost beaten into the type. Lily knelt, examining it at eye level to make sure she hadn't missed any spots. "It's not any harder than boiling a soup."

Even without looking at the other woman, she could sense the disbelief wafting off her.

"Oh, very well. It's a smidge harder. But it's the same concept. There's a recipe, except the ingredients are ingots. You heat it. You put it in a vessel. I don't know why people think it's a man's job when it's no different than any other form of cookery." Lily set down her brush. "There. That's done. Now we've just got to let it dry."

"And how long will that take?"

"Minutes at most. It's quite a swift process. It would be less if I had an oven in here, but as I haven't, we'll just wait." Lily turned to clean up shreds of paper, then started to put away the oil rag she'd use to prepare the type form for the papier-maché.

"I've always admired you, you know," Chloe said.

Lily fumbled the rag. "Me?" This was something she did not know. Frankly, it did not sound true at all. " You admire me?"

"You always say what you want and never care what people think about you." Chloe smiled. "I always wished I had that ability."

Lily shook her head and picked up the rag. "I care."

Chloe looked at her quizzically.

"I know everything I say is always wrong." Lily tapped the edge of the flong to see how much moisture remained. "But it is not for lack of caring. It is strange, to hear someone say I don't care what people think about me, when I have cared my entire life."

Chloe didn't say anything, but something in her gaze shifted. It felt…almost sympathetic, and Lily didn't want that.

"Don't feel badly about it. It's like playing cricket, I suppose. You may want to be good at it, but you're not. You learn you're not. You stop playing in the games. You make other choices. You find other things you're good at, like beating flongs."

"Flongs?"

"This." Lily tapped the paper once again. It was dry to the touch, almost ready to be taken off.

"But…" Chloe reached out and tapped the brush. "Conversation is not like cricket. It's a little harder to opt out of conversation."

That feeling Lily had harbored all morning—that feeling that she was not enough, that she was never going to be enough—welled up in her with a fierceness that she could scarcely contain. She was only able to shove it back inside because she refused to cry in front of Chloe.

"Truuue." Lily let the word linger. "But one does get used to failing at conversation all the time. It's close to the same thing." So saying, she reached out to the flong and carefully, carefully peeled it away from the type. The dried, beaten paper came off in perfect stereotype form; Lily crouched down to examine the result, making sure that it captured every last serif from every piece of type.

"It comes off so smoothly!" Chloe marveled.

"It's just like baking bread. You oil the type beforehand. Nothing sticks if there's enough oil. Ah, damn! Why does this always happen?"

"What's wrong?"

"I used an e instead of an a in the third line." Lily rubbed her eyes. "I always check thrice before I beat my mold, but every time! As soon as I take the flong off, I discover an error. The error elves must sneak in and switch the type when my back is turned."

"Are there error elves?"

"How else do you explain this?" Lily gestured.

That was a mistake. Chloe crouched down, taking the spectacles from the top of her head and setting them on her nose.

Oh, dear. She was reading the poem.

It wasn't easy—the indentations were white on white. But of all the poems for Chloe to read, Lily would not have picked this one. Chloe was happily married. Chloe was in a love match. Chloe was going to find the poetry offensive.

My heart has been consecrated to another's care

I am his branch reaching over moonlit water

His limb stratching out

His breath rushing through the leaves

My own wishes sinking

To the bottom of the pond

Until his presence is so loud that my own thoughts drown.

There was so much for Chloe to dislike about the poem. The content was not indirect, nor was it subtle. The import was plain to see, and Lily could feel her consciousness rise. Any good person would object to the things it was saying about the hallowed institution of matrimony. Lily had never been good; just honest.

Also. There was the stratching. Lily hadn't caught the typographical error after four read throughs. Chloe must think her the sloppiest, most foolish person alive.

Chloe stayed silently, painfully still after she finished.

"Not all the poems are like that," Lily offered. Some of them were worse. Some of them were better.

"This is the poetry you spoke of, from your aid group in Hong Kong?"

"Yes." Lily knew what questions would come next. What sort of depraved aid group wrote this sort of thing about their husbands?

"It's…" Chloe did not say more than that, staring at the flong with her jaw set.

"Don't worry about it too much," Lily said desperately. "You and Jeremy are a love match; it's not meant to speak on all marriages."

"Oh, no." Chloe looked up. "This isn't what Jeremy thinks of me. But everyone else out there? It captures the feeling perfectly."

It was Lily's turn to be stunned.

"I am in the best situation imaginable," Chloe said. "My husband adores me. I am not expected to be conventional; I could not be so, even if I tried. Still it's not enough. The fact that the world is hostile to so many others in my situation still has an impact on me. Too many people constantly remind me of how well I have it, how grateful I must be that I was graced with a good man. And I am. I am very, very grateful."

Chloe stood for a second, hands clenching into fists, eyes sparkling with a hurt that Lily had never expected to see on the other woman's face.

"But you see," Chloe whispered, "nobody ever tells him that he should be abjectly grateful to have me. And I am amazing."

"Well." Lily took a careful, tentative step toward the other woman. "Let me be the first. Jeremy always struck me as too nice for his own good. He is absolutely the luckiest man on the planet to have someone like you at his side."

Chloe smiled a little. "He is, isn't he? He knows it. He tells me it is so. But even when everything is right between us, if the world is wrong, the best situation imaginable still requires improvement."

Chloe had said earlier that they were friends. Lily had taken the remark in flabbergasted silence.

Now, it occurred to her that perhaps Chloe truly thought they were. She'd taken Lily into her confidence. Perhaps they were friends—friends who as children had not been able to see how to be vulnerable with one another. Perhaps they could only come into it as adults.

"That's very good of you," Lily said. "Most people, I think, when they realize that they've landed the best situation imaginable, think ‘Well, that's good for me; who cares about anyone else out there?'"

Chloe smiled. "Let me be the first to buy your book. May I?"

Lily felt strangely, oddly, deeply touched. "I would be honored."

Chloe nodded her head. "I'll let you get to switching out that last a, then."