Chapter 9 #2
She continued to dry the spoon Chloe had just handed her.
The phone buzzed twice more. It was not a call, then — it was a sequence of notifications. Texts, perhaps. Or one long message arriving in parts. Eleanor did not look.
The phone, eventually, went quiet.
Eleanor set down the spoon. She picked up the next thing Chloe had washed. She dried it.
“You don’t want to —”
“No.”
“All right.”
Chloe became aware that she had asked a question she did not have the right to ask, that Eleanor had answered it with a no that was not a refusal but a closure, and that the small flat fact of the phone behind them on the table had now made a third presence in the kitchen that she did not want to look at.
She also became aware, with a small unpleasant clarity she would have preferred not to be on the receiving end of, that she had registered the buzzing of someone else’s phone as a threat.
She heard, very faintly, from the table behind them, Eleanor’s phone buzz for a sixth time.
Then a seventh. Then it went quiet. Then it began again — a different rhythm this time, longer pauses, the rhythm of a call coming in rather than a message arriving in instalments.
Eleanor’s body did not, this time, register the new sound.
The first six had cost her composure. The seventh had crossed some threshold where she could no longer afford to register it without breaking.
Chloe heard, very faintly, a name come up from the phone’s speaker as the call connected to voicemail — the small distant click of an answerphone message recording, with the caller’s name briefly audible in the room.
Marian.
She registered it without registering it. She would not, for nearly two months, recall having heard the name.
She did not, in the moment, ask Eleanor about it.
The kitchen was quieter after that.
They finished the washing in silence — not an uncomfortable silence, exactly, but a silence that was now carrying something.
Eleanor folded the tea towel. Hung it. Wiped down the worktop.
Looked, briefly, at the phone on the table, and did not, even now, pick it up.
She left it where it was. She went past it to put the kettle on for tea.
Chloe watched her not pick up the phone.
She did not know if the not picking up was a kindness or its opposite.
The afternoon ended, as the previous Saturdays had ended, gradually.
They had tea in the sitting room. They did not, this time, sit on the sofa together.
Chloe sat in the armchair opposite. Eleanor sat in the armchair beside the fire.
They talked about nothing in particular.
The phone, on the kitchen table, did not buzz again.
At a quarter to six, Chloe stood.
“I should go.”
“Yes.”
Eleanor walked her to the door.
In the hall, she helped Chloe with her coat in the way she had now helped Chloe with her coat — Chloe counted, walking down the path — twelve times. Her hand brushed the back of Chloe’s collar. The brush was less than a second. The brush was not accidental and they both knew it.
At the threshold, Eleanor said, “You don’t have to keep washing.”
“I like it.”
“I know.”
Chloe lifted her eyes. Eleanor was looking at her with the watching expression again — the one from the study, the one that had stopped being only intellectual some time in the previous week and had become, now, simply attention.
“Wednesday,” Eleanor said.
“Yes.”
She closed the door behind Chloe.
Chloe walked down the path. She did not turn around.
She did not, this time, need to. She walked to the gate, through the gate, and along Banbury Road toward the bus stop, with her coat collar against her jaw and the small ache of being in someone else’s kitchen for four hours still warm in the muscles of her forearms.
Eleanor closed the door.
She did not, immediately, move.
She stayed with her back against it, her hand still on the latch, and looked across the dim hall at the empty coat hook where, a minute ago, Chloe’s coat had been.
The hall smelled — faintly, fadingly — of the perfume Chloe wore.
Eleanor had not asked her what it was. Eleanor had been intending, for several Saturdays now, to ask, and had not yet, because to ask would have been to admit she had been counting Saturdays.
She had been counting Saturdays.
She tilted her head back against the door. Closed her eyes. She thought, with the small clinical accuracy she applied to most of her own behaviour: I have done this before. I have done it badly. I am about to do it badly again.
She opened her eyes.
She went into the kitchen. The phone on the table was still face-down where she had left it. She did not pick it up.
She did not, the whole of that evening, pick it up.
She did not, after she had closed the door behind Chloe, go upstairs.
She went into the kitchen. She did not turn the overhead light on. The kettle was still warm from Chloe’s last cup of tea, an hour earlier, before the dishes. She did not, however, make tea.
She stood at the counter for some minutes. Then she took the phone out of the dish by the door, and she went back into the kitchen, and she dialled — without consulting the contact list, without hesitating over the dialling — a number she had not, in the previous six weeks, dialled at all.
It rang four times before it was picked up.
“Marian,” Eleanor said.
She listened.
“I know. Yes. I know.”
She listened again. For longer this time. The kitchen was very quiet. The fridge was the only thing in the room that was making any sound at all.
“I can’t,” Eleanor said.
“Not yet. No. I know.”
“Marian — ”
She stopped. Whatever Marian had said had cut her off.
She did not, for some seconds, speak. When she did, her voice — Eleanor’s voice, in her own kitchen, at twenty to ten on a Saturday evening, with no one in the house to hear her — had the small fractional unsteadiness that she had not, in twelve weeks of being watched, allowed Chloe to hear.
“Yes,” she said.
“I know.”
“I will. Yes. I’ll try. Yes.”
She listened for nearly a minute.
“Goodnight, Marian.”
She set the phone down on the counter.
She did not, for a long time, move from the spot where she had been standing.
She did not, that night, sleep upstairs.
She slept in the second armchair in the sitting room for the second time in three weeks, with the same blanket she did not remember pulling over herself, and the candle that had been lit in the window for Chloe’s cab was, this evening, the candle that was lit for no one and was going to burn down anyway.