Chapter 7 #2
Chloe heard the bottle uncork and looked up despite herself.
Eleanor’s hand on the neck of the bottle was — Chloe registered, the small distant honest part of her keeping inventory — not, this evening, entirely steady.
The pour was slow. The neck of the bottle clinked once against the rim of the glass.
Eleanor adjusted, completed the pour, set the bottle down.
She did not, in any visible way, acknowledge that the small clink had happened.
Chloe did not, in any visible way, acknowledge it either.
She registered it as the first sound she had ever heard Eleanor’s body make against its own intentions.
Chloe heard the bottle uncork and did not look up.
She heard the splash of red into a glass, heard a second glass being filled with a smaller amount than the first. She heard the second glass set down on the low table — without a sound, somehow, the wood making no contact with the glass that Chloe’s ear could register — and she heard, after a moment, Eleanor’s own glass returning to her own hand.
The second glass was for Chloe.
She did not, while she was reading, take it.
She kept reading.
By the bottom of page three the room had reduced.
The radius of candlelight was no longer the size of a room.
It was the size of a sofa. The bookshelves at the far end of the study had gone into a darkness Chloe could not, when she briefly looked up, see the back of.
The window had gone black. The wind outside had become, somehow, less audible — not because it had quieted, but because the candlelight had absorbed the room’s attention away from it.
Chloe looked at the page.
The page was very close to her face. She did not, she registered, need to hold it that close. Her eyes, as Eleanor had said, did not need as much light as they thought.
She lowered the page.
The lowering brought her face into the same plane as Eleanor’s.
Eleanor was looking at her.
Not at the page. At her. The fingers of one hand were holding the stem of her wine glass — by the stem, not the bowl, Chloe registered, the small alteration — and her other hand was resting along the back of the sofa, the way it had not previously rested.
She had moved, sometime in the last page, perhaps two inches closer.
Chloe had not seen her move. The movement existed only because Chloe could now see, by candlelight, that Eleanor’s face was closer to her own than it had any business being.
She kept reading.
She read into the fourth page. The essay, on the fourth page, made a turn — from the eroticism of being read to, into the more particular question of what one was being given when one was read to by a woman one was already in love with.
The word love appeared in this section twice. The word attention four more times.
Chloe could feel her own pulse in her hand.
She could also feel — and this, she registered with a small irreversible clarity, was new — Eleanor’s exhale against the small piece of her neck just above the collar of the cream jumper.
She did not stop reading.
She tried not to stop breathing.
She failed.
She came to the end of the paragraph on the fourth page and her voice did the thing she had been afraid it would do — it did not arrive at the next sentence.
She did not, exactly, stop. She simply did not start the next one.
She sat with the book open at the page, the candle in front of them making the print blur slightly at the edges, the line she had not yet read sitting there in plain view.
For a beat, nothing happened.
Then Eleanor said, quietly, “You stopped breathing during the last paragraph.”
Chloe lifted her eyes from the page.
“I didn’t mean to.”
“I know.”
She did not move. Her hand did not lift off the sofa back. Her face did not come closer. Her face also did not move away.
They sat. The room — the storm, the candles, the wind, the dark window, the radius of warmth — sat with them.
Chloe drew breath, deliberately, and discovered, with a faint embarrassment at the obviousness of her own body, that she had to draw it twice before her lungs would take it.
She closed the book.
She did not put it down.
“I think — ” she said. “I think that’s enough for tonight.”
“Yes.”
“I should — ”
“No.”
It was not, Chloe registered, said in any voice she could have objected to.
It was said the way Eleanor said most things: at her own pace, with no upward inflection at the end.
The word no was, in Eleanor’s mouth, simply an answer.
It was not — and this was the more disquieting thing — a refusal of anything Chloe had been about to ask for.
“Soup,” Eleanor said. “First. Then we’ll see about the storm.”
She stood.
She took the wine glass that had been on the low table for Chloe — untouched — and put it into Chloe’s hand.
Chloe took it. Eleanor’s fingers were briefly against her own.
The contact was not, this time, two seconds.
It was less than one. It was, also, more deliberate than the contact had been the week before.
“Drink that.”
She went out.
Chloe drank the wine.
She drank it in three swallows. She did not, immediately, register the taste, only the temperature — the small private warmth of red that had been at room temperature in a room slightly warmer than her own.
She set the glass down on the low table without making a sound.
She did not look at the candles. She looked at the book in her lap.
When Eleanor came back, she had two bowls of soup on a tray.
They ate on the sofa. The soup was hot. The bread, on the side plate, had been buttered already — with, Chloe registered, the small detail going through her chest like a wire, exactly the amount of butter Chloe had been putting on her own bread for a week, at the desk, in the kitchen, when she had thought she was eating unobserved.
Eleanor did not, while they ate, mention the reading.
Eleanor did not, also, sit any further away.
They were halfway through the soup when the lights came back.
They came back the way they had gone — all at once, with the absolute completeness of a switch being flipped — and the study was suddenly bright again, the standing lamp by the bookcase and the desk lamp and the ceiling light all blooming at once, and the candles, which had been the entire light of the room a minute ago, were suddenly small and yellow and superfluous.
Eleanor set down her spoon.
She did not look pleased. She did not look unpleased. She looked, briefly, like a woman whose evening had been interrupted by a thing she had been counting on.
“Ah,” she said.
She got up. She crossed to the mantelpiece.
She blew out the first candle. The smoke rose grey and thin into the now-bright air.
She moved to the second candle, on the bookcase, and blew it out also.
She moved, one by one, around the room, putting out each candle in turn, with a small precision that suggested she was not, in fact, blowing out the candles because the candles were no longer needed.
She was blowing them out because the candles had been hers, and they were now finished with.
The room came back as itself.
The radius of warmth she and Chloe had been sitting inside disappeared. The bookshelves came back. The window came back. The black of the storm beyond the window was suddenly only a black storm rather than the edge of a small lit world.
Eleanor blew out the last candle. The one nearest the sofa. She did it standing very close to Chloe. She did not look at her while she did it.
“You should eat the rest of the soup.”
“Yes.”
She did not, immediately, sit back down.
She remained standing for another beat. Chloe could feel her there — the cashmere of her cardigan, the soft wool smell of her, the warmth of a body that had been sitting next to hers for an hour. Then Eleanor moved. Sat. Picked up her spoon. Ate.
They finished the soup.
At half past nine the storm had eased to ordinary rain. Eleanor called Chloe a cab, paid for it in advance — Chloe registered the small humiliation of this and did not argue — and walked her to the door.
In the hall, settling her coat, Eleanor said, “Monday.”
“Yes.”
“And Chloe.”
Chloe looked up.
“You don’t need to pretend you didn’t read it the way I asked you to.”
She closed the door.
Chloe got into the cab. The cab driver said something about the storm.
She replied with something she did not afterwards remember.
The cab moved off down Banbury Road into the dark, and she watched the house go past in the rear window, and saw — once, briefly, before the road turned — a candle still burning in the study window.
A single one. Lit again. After Eleanor had blown them all out.
She turned her face to the front of the cab.
The spell had not ended with the lights.
She had known that the moment Eleanor crossed the room to put out the first candle.
So, she suspected, had Eleanor.
Eleanor stood at the window for some time after the cab had gone.
She had relit one of the candles before she went to the window.
She had done it without thinking about why.
She did, after some minutes at the window, register why.
The candle was — she could have said, if she had been asked to articulate it to herself — the small physical fact of the evening she was not yet ready to let end.
She watched the road for nearly an hour.
She did not, when she finally moved, blow the candle out. She let it burn down. She went upstairs. She did not, that night, sleep in her own bed. She slept in the second armchair beside the dead fire with a blanket she did not, in the morning, remember pulling over herself.