Chapter 8
EIGHT
On Monday, neither of them mentioned the storm.
Chloe arrived at eight thirty. Eleanor made the coffee.
The mug she handed her was the small chipped white one.
She made no remark about the cab, or the wine, or the candles, or the soup, or the moment in which she had taken a wine glass from Chloe’s hand with fingers that had briefly stayed against her own.
She gave Chloe a new typed list — different correspondents, different years — and went out of the study to her own work.
The not-mentioning was, by Tuesday, doing its own kind of work.
Chloe registered, sitting at the desk with letters in front of her she could not have summarised under questioning, that she had been afraid Eleanor would mention it.
Afraid, also, that Eleanor would not. Both fears had now, by the early hours of Tuesday afternoon, been replaced by a more particular one — that the storm had been a thing only she had been inside of.
That Eleanor, in her own register, in whatever room of herself she did her actual living in, had already filed it.
She tested this idea against the available evidence. The candle relit in the window as Chloe drove off — that, at least, had been incontestable. The cashmere of a cardigan within reach of her own shoulder for an hour. The exhale against her neck. The buttered bread.
The buttered bread, she thought, was the part that could not be undone.
She read.
She did not register what she read.
By Wednesday, the not-mentioning had calcified into the new shape of the room.
Eleanor was warmer than before — Chloe could feel this without being able to itemise it — but the warmth came in the form of small inattentions, not large gestures.
A tea brought in unannounced, set down without comment.
A novel left on the desk overnight with a thin ribbon at a particular page, undiscussed.
A door left open between the kitchen and the study which had previously, every day for six weeks, been closed.
These details, Chloe registered, were not nothing.
They were also — she could not, when she made herself look at it directly, escape this — exactly the kind of details a woman gave a woman she had decided not to do anything about and could not, also, stop attending to.
On Thursday afternoon, at the small unoccupied hour between three and four when the day was already losing the daylight, Eleanor came into the study with a different notebook in her hand.
She did not give it to Chloe immediately.
She crossed to the desk. She set the notebook down to the side of the letter Chloe was reading.
She did not sit. She rested her fingers — the index and middle, only those two — on the cloth cover of the notebook for a long second, the way one rested fingers on the cover of a thing one had not opened in some time and was not entirely certain about reopening.
Chloe looked up.
Eleanor was, for once, not looking at her. She was looking at the notebook.
“This one is older,” she said. “Be careful with it. The spine is going.”
She did not say which notebook. She did not say why she was giving it to Chloe.
She turned and went back to her own table.
Chloe waited a moment, in case there was a further instruction.
There was not. The room had returned to the small ambient sound it had been making for the previous hour: Eleanor’s pen moving, a clock ticking somewhere on the mantelpiece, the small high whistle that had been the gutter during the storm and was now only a faint memory of itself.
She drew the notebook toward her.
It was small. Smaller than the archive notebooks she had handled so far.
A cloth cover, the colour of weak tea, with a darker patch in the upper left corner where something had once been spilled and dried.
The cloth was worn at the corners, the linen showing through.
A black elastic loop had once held it closed; the elastic was now slack, broken in two places, lying limp against the back cover.
She opened it carefully.
The first page had a date on it.
October 1995.
Eleanor would have been — she calculated, without meaning to — seventeen.
She turned the page.
The handwriting was the same handwriting Chloe had now been reading every day for two months, except that it was not.
It was younger. Larger. More open. The leftward lean was already there but had not yet been disciplined into the tight cramped script of Eleanor’s adult letters.
The letters here were rounder. The capitals more confident.
The full stops more emphatic than they would later need to be.
On the first page, in the green ink that Chloe now recognised as a much older habit than she had realised, Eleanor at seventeen had copied out a passage from Daphne du Maurier.
Not a famous one. A short paragraph from Rebecca, the part where Mrs Danvers showed the second Mrs de Winter the dead Rebecca’s nightgown.
Underneath the paragraph, in slightly larger script, the young Eleanor had written a single line of marginalia:
I do not understand why this is the part I cannot stop reading.
Chloe stared at it.
She turned the page.
More quotations. A passage from Carson — not Anne Carson, who would not have been famous yet — but another Carson, older, less known.
A line from a poem Chloe did not recognise.
Two pages of what appeared to be the young Eleanor’s own attempts at writing — drafts of sentences, abandoned three lines in, marked through and rewritten.
The writing was not, even at seventeen, bad.
It was, in fact, slightly alarming for its competence.
The same precise pacing was already there.
The same instinct for the sentence that ended a fraction earlier than the reader expected.
Halfway through the notebook, Chloe found the flower.
It was small. Brittle. A pressed daisy, the petals nearly translucent now with age, brown at the tips.
It had been laid flat across two facing pages and the pages had been left undisturbed for so long that the cloth of the cover had taken on a faint impression of where the flower lay.
There was no inscription beside it. No marginalia.
No date. Only the flower, between two pages of green-ink handwriting where the young Eleanor had been writing about — Chloe registered this with a small inward shock — a girl in her year called Catherine.
She read the page.
The page did not say that the young Eleanor was in love with Catherine.
The page did not need to. The page described Catherine reading aloud in a school assembly, her voice doing a thing the young Eleanor was trying to put into language, the description failing in three different ways, the attempt being made anyway.
At the bottom of the page, near the daisy, in pencil so faint Chloe had to lower her head to read it:
I think I want to —
The sentence stopped.
The sentence had been started in pencil, abandoned, and never written out properly in ink afterwards.
Chloe sat with the notebook open at the daisy for a long time.
She did not turn the page.
She felt, sitting in the small late-afternoon dimness of the study with this object in her hands, that she had been let into a room she had not been invited into, and that she had also, somehow, by being given the notebook, been invited into it.
The two facts did not, in the moment, contradict.
The contradiction would arrive later, in her bedroom, in the small hours of the morning.
She lifted her eyes.
Eleanor was already watching her.
She had not been writing for a while. Her pen was set down. Her notebook was closed. She had been sitting at her own table watching Chloe read the seventeen-year-old version of herself, and Chloe had not noticed her stop.
Chloe did not, immediately, know what to say.
“Why,” she said.
Eleanor did not answer at once.
“Why this one,” Chloe said. “Why now.”
Eleanor’s eyes did not leave hers. The expression on her face was one Chloe had not previously seen on it — not the watching, not the not-smile, not the controlled warmth she gave at the door.
Something quieter. Something more exposed.
She looked, for a beat, like a woman who had given something away and was waiting to see what would be done with it.
“Because you read carefully,” Eleanor said. “Most people don’t.”
Chloe nodded slowly.
She did not, at the time, register the size of what she had just been told. The size of it arrived later, in stages.
She did not, that evening, tell Mira where she had been. She had been at work. Mira knew where Chloe worked. Mira asked if she was eating. Chloe said she was. They did not, this evening, talk further.
She went to bed at half past nine.
She lay on her side for some time, in the dark, with her phone face-down on the bedside table beside the photocopy of the essay she had not, since Friday last, taken out.
She did not, tonight, take it out. She thought instead about the daisy.
About the unfinished pencil line. About the look on the face of a forty-seven-year-old woman who had handed a sixteen-week employee a notebook containing a sentence she had begun in pencil at the age of seventeen and never finished.
She sat up.
She turned the lamp on.
She opened the drawer of the bedside table and took out the slim black notebook she had bought, two years ago, for a holiday she had not in the end gone on, and which had remained, since then, entirely empty.
She uncapped the pen on the table.
She wrote one line.
She makes me feel like a real person.
She read it.
She crossed it out.
She wrote it again, underneath the line she had crossed out.
She read it again.
She did not cross it out the second time.
She opened the notebook again at twenty past midnight.
She read the line. She closed the notebook. She opened it again at twenty-five past. She uncapped the pen. She wrote, beneath the line she had not crossed out, the four words that had been sitting in her chest for nearly six hours: *I am jealous of Catherine.*
She read the sentence.
Catherine was a girl from 1995. Catherine had, by Chloe’s estimate, been seventeen at the time of being written about in green ink on lined paper.
Catherine was, statistically, now in her mid-forties — probably married, probably a mother, probably unrecognisable to the girl in the notebook.
Catherine had not, by Chloe’s reading of the page, been kissed by Eleanor or touched by Eleanor or, very possibly, ever spoken to by Eleanor at length.
And Chloe was — she registered, lying on her side in her own bed with the lamp on at one in the morning — jealous of her anyway.
She did not cross the sentence out.
She did, however, register a second small fact about herself which she did not, immediately, write down.
She had been thinking, since the afternoon, in Eleanor’s syntax.
The sentences in her head were arriving with the leftward lean and the small held precision and the absence of the upward inflection that belonged to a forty-seven-year-old woman in a townhouse three miles north of where she was lying.
*She did not, in the moment, register*. *She did not, also, allow herself*.
*The small honest part of her that was, by some measure, now most of her.
* The sentences were not, by their grammar, hers.
She turned the lamp off.
She did not, in the dark, get the syntax to leave her.
She closed the notebook, turned off the lamp, and lay down.
She did not sleep for a long time. She did not, when she finally did, dream of anything.
The notebook stayed on the bedside table beside the photocopy and the phone, the three small objects in a row, each one — she registered, on the edge of sleep — the evidence of a different kind of confession she had recently learned how to make to herself, and to no one else at all.