Chapter 7
SEVEN
The weather warning came in at six minutes past seven, while she was making tea.
Storm Alma. Amber alert. Winds gusting eighty miles an hour by mid-afternoon, falling debris expected, do not travel unless necessary.
The notification sat at the top of her phone with the small red triangle that, in the years she had owned the phone, she had only ever seen for floods in places she did not live.
She read it. She put the phone face-down on the counter. She continued to make tea.
“You’re not going in.”
Mira was at the kitchen door in pyjamas. She had just come off a fourteen-hour shift, and her hair was still in the rough knot she had put it in at four that morning. She was looking at the phone.
“I’m going in.”
“Chloe.”
“It’s not amber until two.”
“It’s amber now. Look.”
“I’ll come home if it gets bad.”
Mira looked at her. Mira had been looking at her, all week, with a particular alertness Chloe had started to find unbearable. It was not the looking of someone keeping watch. It was the looking of someone keeping count.
“All right,” Mira said. “Text me when you get there. Text me when you leave.”
“I will.”
“You won’t.”
“I will.”
She put on her coat.
She walked from the bus stop into a wind that had already arrived ahead of schedule.
The hedge in front of the house had taken on a slightly different shape overnight, leaning further from the road than usual.
The gate would not stay open behind her; she had to use her body to hold it.
By the time she reached the steps her hair was in her face, and her face was wet, and her hands were cold inside her pockets in the particular way they only got when she had been gripping the lining.
The door was already open. Eleanor was standing in it.
“Quickly.”
She came in. Eleanor closed the door behind her and turned the latch and stood with her back briefly against it, as though the door had been trying to come in too.
“I wasn’t sure you would.”
“I said I would.”
“Yes.” Eleanor took her coat. Hung it. Turned. “And I was not sure you would, anyway.”
She did not, this time, mean it lightly. She said it without any of the small armour of the not-smile. She said it the way she had said please sit, on the first morning. With weight.
Chloe did not, in the moment, know how to answer. She did, eventually, say what was true.
“I wanted to.”
Eleanor looked at her for a beat longer than she needed to. Then turned toward the kitchen with the small efficiency Chloe had come to recognise as the way she moved when she had decided not to make a thing a thing.
“Come through. The kettle’s on. The storm isn’t, yet.”
For most of the morning, the storm was a sound rather than a fact.
The wind got into the gutter above the bay window and made a thin, persistent whistle that became, after an hour, something Chloe had to actively decide not to hear.
Branches occasionally hit the window. The sky, when she looked up from the desk, had gone the colour of slate, and then a darker slate, and by twelve was already darker than it had any business being.
Eleanor did not, today, sit in another room.
She brought her own work into the study at half past nine and set up at the second small table by the bookcase — the table Chloe had not previously seen used for anything other than a pile of journals.
She had a notebook open in front of her, and the green pen, and two books of her own which she did not open.
She wrote for short stretches, then stopped, then wrote again.
She did not look at Chloe. She was, however, in the room with her, and the being-in-the-room-with-her was the news.
Chloe registered this fact in the first twenty minutes and spent the next four hours trying to read as though she had not.
She did not succeed.
She read the same letter three times. She put it down. She picked it up. She read the postscript and could not — when she set the letter down again — have told anyone what the postscript said.
At one o’clock, Eleanor went to make sandwiches and came back with two plates.
She set one on the desk in front of Chloe without comment.
She sat down at her own table again with the other.
She ate, slowly, with her left hand, while writing with her right.
Chloe ate, slowly, with both hands, and did not write at all.
At two, the rain arrived.
It arrived all at once — not the gradual increasing rain Chloe had been expecting, but the actual front of it, a wall of water moving down Banbury Road from the direction of the city, audible before it was visible.
The window went grey. The whistle in the gutter became a moan.
From somewhere upstairs, a sash rattled against its frame and was, after a moment, addressed and stopped.
Eleanor set down her pen.
“That was lucky.”
“What.”
“That you came in when you did.”
Chloe did not have an answer to that either. She looked back down at the letter.
The wind got worse. The rain got worse. By half past four the streetlights down Banbury Road had come on, although the day was not yet over.
The light in the study had gone from grey to dim to almost-dark in less time than Chloe would have believed; she had switched on the desk lamp at three and the standing lamp by the sofa at four, and even with both on, the room had the quality of a room being held very thinly against a much larger weather.
At a quarter past five, Eleanor said, “Stay.”
Chloe looked up.
Eleanor had not lifted her head from the notebook.
“Stay for dinner. I’m not going to send you out into that for a bus. I have soup. We’ll eat. The storm will get worse before it gets better. You can go later when it’s only rain. Or you can stay until tomorrow. We’ll work it out.”
Chloe heard the offer land in three different parts of her at once.
The practical part — yes, it was sensible, the storm was real.
The professional part — it was generous, a kind employer’s gesture during bad weather, nothing more.
The third part — which she could feel, sitting just under her collarbones — was not asking either of the other two for permission.
“All right,” she said.
“Good.”
Eleanor turned a page.
At half past six, the power went out.
It did not flicker. It went, with the absolute completeness of a switch being pulled, and the house was suddenly and entirely dark.
For a moment, nothing happened. Chloe did not move.
She had been mid-sentence in a letter, and her hand was still on the page.
The wind outside was very loud now. The whistle in the gutter had become something else — a high, almost animal sound, the sound of air being forced through a place it had not been designed to go.
A match struck.
Eleanor was already at the mantelpiece. Chloe had not heard her get up.
The first match took. The first candle bloomed.
Eleanor moved, in the small new circle of light, to a second candle on the bookshelf, and then to a third on the low table by the sofa, and then, in three further movements that Chloe found she was watching the way one watched a small private ritual, to two candlesticks on the desk that Chloe had not previously noticed were candlesticks.
Six candles. Two matches. Less than a minute.
The room came back, not as the room it had been, but as another one.
Eleanor blew out the match. Set it down on the mantelpiece. Came back to the table where she had been working, but did not, this time, sit at it.
“Have you ever read by candlelight.”
“No.”
“You’ll find your eye doesn’t need as much as it thinks.”
She crossed the room. Stood, for a moment, in front of the sofa, looking down at it as though she were arranging it in her head. Then sat. The same place she always sat. The left side. The cushion next to her empty.
She did not look at Chloe.
She did not, also, need to.
Chloe got up. She brought, without being asked, the letter she had been reading.
She brought it because she could not, in the moment, think of any other reason for getting up than to bring something.
She sat down beside Eleanor on the sofa, on the same cushion, the same inch away, and Eleanor, without turning her head, took a book down from where she had — at some point, when, Chloe did not know — placed it on the arm of the sofa.
It was a slim book. A grey paper cover. A small white label with a year. 2009.
“This is mine.”
“I know.”
“You’ve read it.”
“Yes.”
“This essay. The first one. I would like to hear it read.”
She held the book out.
Chloe took it.
She opened it to the page Eleanor had marked with a thin ribbon.
The essay was eight pages long. She had read it twice before her job interview.
She had read it three more times since coming to work in this house, although she would not have admitted that even to Mira. She knew the first paragraph by heart.
She read.
She started in a voice that was nothing like the voice she had used for the draft a week ago.
It was lower, slower, and entirely conscious.
She did not pretend to herself, this time, that she was reading neutrally.
The act of pretending not to perform would have been, in this room, in this light, a greater dishonesty than the performance itself.
The essay began with a memory of being read to as a child.
It moved, inside the first page, to the question of why being read to by certain women in adult life felt like an inheritance of that childhood pleasure, displaced into another register.
It used the word attention nine times in the first three pages.
It did not use the word desire at all. It did not, by the third page, need to.
Eleanor poured wine.