The first deliberate evening was a failure, and they both knew it within about a quarter of an hour.
Victoria had proposed it — one hour, no ledgers — and Thomas had agreed readily, and they had sat down opposite each other in the good chairs by the fire with the whole thing arranged in advance, and had discovered almost immediately that arranging a conversation is not the same as having one.
"How was the eastern spur?" Victoria said.
"You were at the meeting."
"I was. I'm aware." She adjusted her skirts. "I'm attempting to begin somewhere."
"Beginning at the eastern spur rather defeats the object."
"I'm aware of that too, Thomas, and I'd point out that you have contributed nothing whatsoever." Her voice had the particular edge it got when she was embarrassed. "This was your hour as much as mine."
They sat.
The fire did what fires do. Somewhere outside a dog was having a disagreement with something.
"This is absurd," Thomas said.
"It is deeply absurd. We have been married eleven years."
"We have been married eleven years and we have had approximately four thousand conversations and every single one of them has been about something." He rubbed his face. "That's the problem, isn't it. We've never talked. We've conferred. There's always been a subject."
"The subject was frequently you dying."
"The subject was frequently me dying, yes, which is admittedly a strong subject, and I am no longer providing it."
Victoria made a noise that was not quite a laugh.
"Say something you wouldn't say in a meeting," she said.
"That's a terrible instruction."
"It's the only one I've got."
Thomas thought about it for an uncomfortably long time.
"I don't like Osbern," he said finally.
Victoria's head came up. "Hamo's Osbern? At the school?"
"Hamo's Osbern. He's perfectly competent, he's good with the children, Cecily rates him highly and Cecily is never wrong about people." Thomas spread his hands. "And I find him tedious in a way I cannot justify or explain, and I have been nodding pleasantly at him for six years, and I have never said that out loud to a living soul because there is no version of saying it that isn't petty."
Victoria stared at him.
Then she laughed — properly, helplessly, with her hand over her mouth, for a considerable time.
"What?"
"He is tedious," she managed. "He is monumentally tedious. He once talked to me for forty minutes about the ventilation of the north room."
"The ventilation of the north room is his great subject."
"I know it's his great subject! I have heard about it twice!" She was wiping her eyes. "Thomas, I have thought this for six years and never said it either, for precisely the same reason, and I have been nodding pleasantly at him in parallel with you the entire time."
They talked for two more hours after that, about nothing of any consequence whatsoever — people they found irritating, a horse Victoria had hated as a girl, whether the Ashfield inn's food had genuinely declined or whether they had simply got older. Thomas told her about a thing called a motorway, badly, and got most of the way through before realising he could not adequately explain why anyone would want one.
It was, by any reasonable measure, a wasted evening.
"Same again next week," Victoria said, at the end of it, in the tone of a woman minuting a decision.
"Same again next week."
"And Thomas — I'd like it understood that nothing said in this hour is admissible anywhere else. If you repeat the Osbern thing I will deny it under oath."
"Understood."
She did, in the event, repeat the Osbern thing herself, four years later, to Cecily, at a public gathering, having had rather more wine than she intended.
Cecily said she had known for a decade and had assumed everybody did.