Chapter 3
THREE
The smile lasted to Headington roundabout, where it dissolved without her permission.
It went, she thought, because she had become aware of it, and a smile noticed from the inside was a different thing from a smile that belonged to a face.
But it also went because there was a low, persistent question now sitting underneath her sternum, asking to be addressed properly rather than carried home half-acknowledged: who, exactly, was the woman she had spent the day inside the house of.
She took out her phone.
She did not — she would tell herself later — intend to search anything.
She intended to text Mira. The text she typed was: it was strange but I liked it.
She did not send it. She backspaced. Tried again.
she’s strange but i liked it. Backspaced again, because she could not put strange in writing about a woman she had also just decided, without consulting herself, to spend six months alone with.
The screen went to her home page. She opened the browser. She typed E-L-E-A-N — and the autocomplete arrived three steps ahead of her.
Eleanor Vale Oxford
Eleanor Vale scandal
Eleanor Vale literature
Eleanor Vale Jess Carter
She read the suggestions twice without selecting one. The fourth, in particular, was a piece of information she had not yet been entitled to. Someone else’s name. A person who was, presumably, the subject of all those cut-off letters in the brown spiral notebook and the white archive boxes.
She tapped the second.
The bus carried her past the Plain. Past Magdalen.
Past the spires, which she did not look at, because she was looking instead at a 2014 article in the Times Higher Education whose headline used the phrase “professional misconduct” and whose second paragraph used the phrase “unsuitably close to her students.”
She read it once. She read it again, more slowly, because the first read had given her only the shape of it — a postgraduate, a complaint, a department, a resignation — and not the texture.
Eleanor Vale, Dr Vale, had been forty-one.
Jess Carter had been twenty-three. The relationship had been technically consensual.
The relationship had also, in the language of the article and presumably in the language of the formal complaint, “involved a significant power asymmetry.” Eleanor had resigned before the investigation reached its conclusions.
No public statement from her had ever been made.
The bus went under the railway bridge.
Chloe opened a second article. A blog post, a long one, by a woman she had not heard of, written six months later, framed as a personal essay about being a graduate student in a department where this kind of thing happened.
Eleanor was not named in the first half.
By the second half, she didn’t need to be.
The writer described a woman — careful with attention, precise with compliments, who could make a younger woman feel like the only person in a room of seventy.
The descriptions did not feel like exaggeration.
They felt like a textbook Chloe had been quoted from for an hour that morning.
She lowered the phone.
She did not, at this point, look around the bus.
The other passengers did not require knowing what she had just read.
She was — she was aware she was — already separating things.
The public from the private. The discoverable from the held.
She had a sudden, unwanted, sharp memory of Eleanor’s hand resting on the green book on the low table.
The way she had looked away from it on purpose and known she had been seen looking away.
She put the phone back in her pocket.
She did not put it back for very long.
By the time she got home, she had read four articles. By the time she had put her coat on the hook in the hall, she had read the original blog post a second time. By the time the kettle was on, she had moved to image search.
There were not many photographs.
A faculty headshot, Bodleian-grey background, Eleanor at thirty-eight with reading glasses on and a slight, almost suppressed amusement in the corner of her mouth, as though the photographer had said something that wasn’t supposed to land but had.
A black-and-white shot from a panel at Hay in 2009.
A picture from a college dinner, taken candidly, in which Eleanor was leaning across a table to listen to someone Chloe could not see; her hair was longer then.
A small photograph from the Times piece — younger, less composed, looking past the camera at someone off-frame.
Chloe stood in the kitchen with the kettle screaming and stared at the candid picture for a long time before she switched off the hob.
“You’re back.”
Mira was in the doorway in scrubs, her hair wet from a shower, eating cheese out of the wrapper.
The wrapper was not Chloe’s cheese. It was the cheese they had agreed last week, in writing on the fridge, was Mira’s.
The fact that Chloe noticed which cheese it was, and chose not to mention it, struck her as a useful small symptom of how distracted she was.
“How’d it go?”
“Fine.”
Mira tilted her head.
“Long,” Chloe said. “Fine. Quiet.”
“Quiet?”
“It’s mostly reading. There’s a room. Boxes. I’m sorting through them.”
“What’s she like?”
Chloe paused. She knew, as she paused, that she was about to lie.
She could feel the lie being assembled. She also knew that the truth, available to her in some other form, would have been: she’s the most attentive person I have ever been in a room with, and I have just spent forty-five minutes on the bus learning that the last person who said that about her left academia.
“She’s exact,” she said.
“Exact.”
“She uses words like she’s chosen them.”
“Doesn’t everyone.”
“No.”
Mira frowned. Took another piece of cheese.
“Is she nice?”
“She’s — yes. I think so. She’s not, um.” Chloe stopped. Started again. “She’s not warm in the usual way. But she’s not unkind.”
“Cool,” Mira said, which Mira used to mean either fine or noted, depending. This was noted. “You want pasta? I’m doing pasta.”
“Yes. Please.”
She drank one glass of wine while Mira cooked and a second while they ate, and at no point — through Mira describing a bad cannulation, through Mira describing a worse consultant, through the dishes — did she stop having half her attention behind a closed door three miles north of where she was sitting.
She kept Eleanor in her head as a set of small inaccurate details, because she was trying not to keep her there as anything else. The hand on the green book. The brush of fingers settling a coat collar. The pause before Chloe in the doorway. The reading glasses removed.
Mira put on a programme. Chloe watched twenty minutes of it without taking in a sentence.
“I might go to bed.”
“It’s nine.”
“I know.”
Mira looked at her properly for the first time since she had come home. “You all right?”
“Tired.”
“You don’t normally get tired.”
“It was a lot of reading.”
“Right.” Mira’s gaze stayed on her for a beat. “Right.”
Chloe took her glass and got up.
In her room she did not put on the light.
She sat on the bed with the wine and her phone and read everything she had not read on the bus.
Two more articles. A 2015 piece in the Guardian that mentioned Eleanor in passing as an example of how certain departments handled complaints.
A short forum thread on a women’s academic site where, in the middle of a discussion of something else, a poster had said: I had her in second year and she ruined me.
I was eighteen. She didn’t touch me, she just looked at me like that for nine months and I had to drop her seminar to graduate.
Chloe set the phone face down on the duvet and looked at the ceiling.
There was a sensation in her chest she did not, immediately, want to name.
It was not horror, although she could feel where horror would have belonged.
It was not, exactly, disgust. It was, she found, when she made herself name it, a small, low, irresponsible curiosity.
The information was supposed to have warned her.
Instead it had thickened the air in the room.
She thought: I am going to do a stupid thing.
She thought: I am going to do it anyway.
She picked up the phone again.
She did not search for anything else. She went to her search history. Twelve entries had been added that evening. Eleanor Vale scandal. Eleanor Vale Oxford. Eleanor Vale Jess Carter. The blog title. The image search. The forum thread. A small embarrassing chain.
She deleted the lot.
She watched the screen confirm the deletion and felt — clearly, without being able to mistake it — that the deletion was the answer. Not the questions she had been asking. The act of erasing the asking. That was the thing that told her where she had already gone.
She put the phone on the bedside table.
She lay back in her clothes.
She did not, after a while, turn out the light, because the light was already off, and she was not quite ready to be the kind of person who could choose to fall asleep in this state.
When she finally did, it was very late, and she dreamed, with embarrassing literalness, of a hand on a green book.