Chapter 6
SIX
For four days, nobody mentioned a hand.
On Monday, Chloe came in at eight thirty and Eleanor said good morning and made the coffee herself and gave Chloe a printed list of correspondents she would like to start with, sorted by year.
At no point — at lunchtime, when Chloe ate a sandwich at the desk; or at four, when Eleanor came in to take a book down off a shelf and left without acknowledging she had come in for a book at all; or at six, when Chloe put on her coat and said goodbye — did Eleanor look at her hand.
Chloe was particularly aware of not having her hand looked at.
The not-looking was a thing they were now doing together.
On Tuesday, the same.
On Wednesday, Eleanor brought her a different mug — a small one, white, slightly chipped — instead of the one Chloe had been using all week, and did not explain.
Chloe drank from it and learned, with a small embarrassment she could not have named to anyone, that she preferred it.
The handle was the right size for her hand.
The chip was on the side opposite where her mouth went.
She suspected Eleanor had chosen the mug. She did not ask.
On Thursday, Theo texted.
The text arrived at twenty past four, while Chloe was halfway through a 1996 letter Eleanor had written to a publisher she had hated.
The letter was a complaint about a proof.
The letter was also, in its closing paragraph, somehow about loneliness, which Eleanor had not, of course, been writing about overtly, but which Chloe — by now several weeks into the woman’s handwriting — could read as easily as she could read the formal complaint.
drink saturday? been a minute.
She did not, immediately, answer. She read the letter to the end. She put it down. She picked up the phone. She read the text three times before she understood what it was asking.
She typed: sure, where?
She did not delete it. She did not redraft it. She sent it because deleting and redrafting would have made it a thing, and she could not, on a Thursday afternoon in this particular room, afford for a text from Theo to be a thing.
He wrote back inside the minute. wine bar near gloucester green. 7. don’t be late.
She put the phone down and felt, sitting in the chair where she had been sitting all week, a small unfamiliar disquiet, as though someone had moved a piece of furniture in the next room.
Saturday arrived. She wore the same cream jumper.
The wine bar was the one they had used to go to — Theo’s choice, by the look of it — and the choice itself was, she suspected, a small kindness, an attempt to put them on neutral ground rather than somewhere new of his choosing.
He was already there. He stood up when she came in. He had cut his hair.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
He kissed her cheek the way he kissed everyone, briefly, dryly, the kiss of a person who had been brought up in a house where the cheek-kiss was the answer to most arrival situations.
He had ordered a bottle of the red they had used to drink.
He had ordered two glasses. She sat down opposite him and registered, with a small private grief, that he had ordered the wine without checking that she still wanted to drink wine, which she did, but which he had not, in the year since she had last seen him, had occasion to verify.
She checked her phone under the table. There were no messages.
She had not been expecting any. She had also, she registered, been entirely expecting one — the small irrational expectation that Eleanor, who had not asked where she was going tonight, had been somehow tracking her movements and would, on registering Chloe’s arrival at a wine bar in the city, find a reason to make contact.
Chloe set the phone face-down on her thigh.
It stayed there for the next forty minutes.
“You look well.”
“Do I.”
“You look — tired. I mean — sorry. You look well and tired.”
“That sounds about right.”
He laughed. He poured her a glass. She took it. The wine was warmer than she would have liked. She drank it anyway.
“How’s the new — job.”
“Good. Yes. It’s good.”
“Mira mentioned it. Said you were — she said it was unusual.”
“Mira said unusual?”
“She said unusual.”
Chloe smiled at the wine. Mira would have said unusual. Mira would also have said other things that she had, evidently, not said to Theo, which was a kindness Chloe did not, when she registered it, feel she deserved.
“It’s — yes. It’s archival work. There’s a — a writer, an academic, she has a lot of paper she wants — sorted. Read through. Categorised.” She drank. “It’s quiet. It’s good.”
“Eleanor Vale.”
She put her glass down.
He had said the name carefully, the way one said a name one had heard from someone who had said it with weight.
He was not looking at her. He was, ostentatiously, not looking at her, which was, she registered, exactly what Theo did when he was paying close attention to something he did not want to ask about directly.
“Who told you that.”
“Sam. Sam Pritchard. You remember Sam. He saw you on the bus.”
“I see.”
“Sam said — Sam mentioned the name, and then I — I knew the name. From — well. From when it was in the news, I suppose. Years ago.”
Chloe registered, lifting her own glass, that she was holding it by the bowl and not the stem. She had — she would have sworn under oath, three months ago — never held a wine glass by the bowl in her life. She set the glass down. She picked it up by the stem. She drank.
“Yes.”
“Is it — are you all right? Doing that?”
She had been about to answer carefully. She heard the answer she was about to give — measured, light, slightly amused, the kind of answer she would have used on her mother — and felt it not match what was happening in her chest. The mismatch came up too fast.
“She is one of the most intelligent women I have ever met, Theo. The thing that happened — what’s in the papers — was a long time ago. She has been entirely professional with me. I won’t — I won’t be having this conversation with anyone who has read three articles.”
It came out faster than she had meant. It came out, also, a fraction louder. The couple at the next table looked over. Theo was looking at his glass.
She heard her own voice land in the room and registered, with a humiliation she could not, this time, fully process at the speed at which the conversation was moving, exactly what she had just done.
She had defended her. She had defended her hard.
She had defended her in a tone that was not the tone of a person who had spent six weeks doing archival work for a writer she found interesting.
It was the tone of a person who had spent six weeks doing something else, and who was now alarmed to have been touched on it by someone who was not even, particularly, asking.
She drank. The wine helped only with her hands.
“Sorry,” she said. “That was — I don’t know what that was.”
“It’s all right.”
“I’m — I’m sorry.”
“Chloe.”
He set his glass down. He had — she had always loved this about him, even when she had been failing to love anything else — a particular, slow way of choosing not to make a thing worse. He did it now.
“I didn’t ask because I was worried about her,” he said. “I asked because I was worried about you.”
“I know.”
“I’m not — I’m not trying to get back together. I want to say that. So that we — so that we can actually talk.”
“I know.”
“You were always — you were always quite far away. You’re a long way away tonight.”
She looked at him properly for the first time since she had sat down. He had cut his hair. He had, possibly, also lost weight. He looked — kind. He looked like he had been kind for a year.
“I’m sorry,” she said again.
He waved it off. He drank. He told her about his sister’s wedding.
He told her about a colleague he was thinking of asking out.
He told her about the flat in Cowley he had bought, which she had not known he had bought, and which she felt, hearing it, a clean and unexpected relief at.
He had moved on. She had been afraid, without admitting the fear to herself, that she had been the only one of them who was moving on.
After an hour, he said, “I should get back.”
“All right.”
“Are you — are you walking?”
“I’ll get the bus.”
“Don’t get the bus. I’ll get you a cab.”
“I’m fine, Theo.”
“All right.”
They stood. He put on his coat. He paid the bill before she could move on it, the small old chivalry that, this evening, did not annoy her. At the door, he paused, the way he had used to pause before saying something he was nervous to say.
She had, by the time they had finished the bottle, checked her phone twice more.
Each check had been worse than the last. The second one had been in the bathroom with the door locked.
The third had been at the table while Theo was talking about his sister, which was — she had registered, putting the phone back face-down — the kind of moment in which she had once been physically incapable of being elsewhere with her attention, and was, this evening, plainly elsewhere.
She was on Banbury Road. She was in an upstairs study.
She was in a house she had let herself into for nine hours that week.
She was not, in any usable sense, at the wine bar.
“You used to laugh at my jokes.”
It was not — she registered — said sharply. It was said with a kind of bemused fondness, the way one observed a thing from a distance one had become comfortable with.
“I know.”
“I’m not — I’m not having a go.”
“I know.”
“I’m just — I’m noticing it.”
“I’m tired, Theo.”
Both true. Both, also, only the smallest fraction of the truth.
He nodded, the way he had nodded at the end of arguments they had had the energy to abandon, and held the door open for her, and they walked out into the cold of Gloucester Green together and parted at the corner.
She watched him go up George Street without looking back, and was glad, at the same instant, that he did not look back and that she had not, at any point in the last hour, asked him a single question about himself.
She walked.
She did not get the bus. She did not, in fact, walk the most direct way home.
She took the long route — through the covered market, past the Bodleian, down the small street where in second year she had once cried in a phone booth because someone had told her she was not as clever as she thought she was.
The cold was good for her. She walked with her hands in her coat pockets and her phone in one of them, and did not, for the first forty minutes, take it out.
Under a streetlight on Holywell, she stopped.
She did not, immediately, know why she had stopped. She had stopped, she discovered, because she had taken her phone out, and she had taken her phone out because she had decided, at some point in the last block, that she was going to send a message.
She opened the conversation. There was none. There had never been a conversation. Eleanor had her number. Chloe had Eleanor’s, from the very first email a month ago. Neither of them had texted the other. Eleanor had her landline, and used it. The work was conducted in person.
She typed.
She typed and deleted and typed again. She typed three things she would not have sent. She typed, eventually: I finished the second box today.
She typed: I’m walking home and I’m thinking about you. She deleted it.
She typed: are you alone tonight. She deleted that one faster than she had typed it.
She typed: I wish you would tell me something true. She held her thumb over the send button for three full seconds before deleting it also.
It was not, in any sense, true. She had not finished the second box on Saturday, because she had not been at the house on Saturday.
She had finished the second box on Thursday afternoon, before Theo’s text, and had not, in the moment, thought of telling Eleanor.
The message was, therefore, both delayed and pointless and also, in some respect she could not have justified, the most honest thing she had said all evening.
She sent it.
She put the phone away.
She walked another three minutes before she let herself check.
Eleanor had replied in ninety seconds.
Ninety seconds was, by no possible reading, a passive interval.
It was the interval of a woman who had been within arm’s reach of her phone at twenty to eleven on a Saturday night and who had, on the message arriving, picked the phone up immediately.
Eleanor — who had never, in three weeks of having Chloe’s number, sent her an unsolicited message — had been at home, awake, with the phone in her hand.
Chloe registered the timing once and let it go.
She would, on the cab home in two weeks’ time from a wine bar in Jericho, register it again, properly, and not let it go.
Come earlier tomorrow.
Chloe stood in the dark for a moment with the phone in her hand. She read the message. She read it again. She turned the screen face-down against her thigh inside her pocket so that she would not, on the rest of the walk home, take it out and read it a third time.
She did not, in any case, need to read it again.
She had memorised it.