Chapter 11
ELEVEN
Eleanor did not, that night, sleep.
She drafted the email six times.
The first draft was four hundred and twenty words and contained the phrase *I owe you an explanation that I am not, in this email, going to give you.* She deleted it.
The second draft was two paragraphs and apologised three times in different registers. She deleted that one without finishing it.
The third draft was a single paragraph and contained — Eleanor registered, reading it back — too many of the small careful things she had been saying to Chloe for twelve weeks. She deleted it.
The fourth draft she got as far as the salutation before she stopped.
The fifth draft she wrote without sending and saved as a draft, in which she said, in three lines, the only thing she would, on this Monday in late January, have been able to truthfully say: that she had not been ready for the woman in the navy coat in the upstairs room of the bookshop, and that she had been doing the same thing she had done every other time something had threatened to require her to be honest, which was to retreat into a register Chloe would mistake for displeasure and which she would not, when she was ready to, correct.
She did not send the fifth draft.
The sixth draft was two sentences.
It was the version she sent because it was the version that required the least of her. She sent it at twelve past midnight on Tuesday from her own kitchen with the candle from Saturday still — by some absurd small economy of wax — refusing, four days later, to be fully done burning down.
The email arrived at twelve past midnight on Tuesday night.
Chloe was, at the time, on her side in bed with her phone face-down on the bedside table, in the eleventh hour of an effort not to be the kind of woman who picked up her phone in the dark.
The phone buzzed once. The screen lit her ceiling.
She lay for a moment with her eyes on the small rectangle of light above her.
She turned it off, in her head, several times, before she turned it on with her hand.
Subject: Wednesday.
Eleanor Vale.
She opened it.
I was unkind. Don’t be late.
That was the email.
Two sentences. No salutation. No signature. No further explanation. The cursor had been allowed to blink at the end of the second sentence and then the message had been sent.
Chloe read it three times.
She read it a fourth time, more slowly, because she could not afterwards have said what was in the second sentence.
She had only been able to register the first one.
She had been wrong all of Monday afternoon and all of Tuesday morning.
She had not made too much of it. She had not been visible, needy, transparent.
She had been — Eleanor had used the word herself — the recipient of an unkindness.
The unkindness had been Eleanor’s. Eleanor had named it as Eleanor’s.
She lay very still in the dark.
She did not, immediately, reply.
She did not reply because to reply was, in the moment, beyond her physical capacity.
Her hands had begun to shake very slightly.
She did not, also, want to reply with anything other than the right thing, and the right thing was not yet available to her.
She put the phone face-down on the bedside table.
She lay on her back. She tried not to smile at the ceiling.
She failed at this within ninety seconds.
At twenty past midnight, she wrote: I won’t be.
She sent it.
Eleanor did not reply.
Chloe did not, again, need her to.
She slept, very deeply, until eight.
She had been at the gate at twenty past eight.
She had walked past the house twice. The first time she had walked the length of the hedge, past the gate, past the next two houses, to the corner of the next street, and then turned and walked back.
The second time she had walked the other way, past the gate, the other direction, to the next pedestrian crossing, and turned and come back.
She had done both walks without admitting to herself that the walks were what she was doing.
By eight twenty-six she had, by an accidental piece of mathematics, used up the surplus and was at the gate at exactly the time at which not being at the gate would have been a piece of information she would have given Eleanor about her own pride.
She arrived at eight twenty-eight.
Eleanor opened the door before she touched the knocker. The door opened, and Eleanor was already in the hall, and Chloe could see, in the first half-second of looking at her, that the temperature of the air had gone back up the degree it had gone down on Monday — and further.
Eleanor was not the woman who had said “Why would you assume it was about you?”
Eleanor was, instead, the woman who had said, by candlelight, “You stopped breathing during the last paragraph.”
She was wearing a soft jumper Chloe had not previously seen — pale grey, the cuffs slightly stretched, the kind of garment a woman owned for years and used only on days she wanted to be touched without being asked to be touched.
Her hair was, fractionally, less tidy than Chloe had ever seen it.
She was holding two mugs. The mug she handed Chloe was the small chipped white one.
“Come in.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re not late.”
“You said not to be.”
“Yes.”
The single syllable, said without the upward inflection at the end, did something to Chloe’s chest that she did not, this time, want to analyse.
Eleanor closed the door behind her. Took her coat. Hung it on the second hook from the left and, in the act of hanging, let her hand rest on the collar — the small lingering Chloe had registered the absence of on Monday — for fractionally longer than she had ever previously rested it.
She did not, while she did this, look at Chloe.
She did not need to.
Chloe drank from the small chipped white mug in the hall, before they had moved into the study, and did not, even in the moment, pretend to herself that the heat in her chest was from the tea.
In the study, Eleanor did not go to her own small table.
She took the second chair — the kitchen chair — and brought it round to the desk where Chloe sat, and set it down beside Chloe’s, not opposite.
She sat on it. Their knees were a hand’s breadth apart, which was further than they had ever been on the sofa, and closer than they had ever been at the desk.
She did not, for a long moment, speak.
She took up her own mug. She held it by the bowl, not the handle.
She looked at the desk between them — at the box, at the letter Chloe had abandoned half-read on Monday afternoon, at the pencil Chloe had brought today, which was, finally, not a Staedtler — and exhaled, slowly, in the way of a woman composing the first sentence of something she had been composing all night.
“I treated you badly on Monday.”
“You — ”
“I’d like you not to defend me on this.”
“All right.”
“Some of what I do, in this house, I will not be able to explain to you immediately. There are things from before you. There were always going to be.”
“I know.”
“You don’t, in fact, know. You are kind enough to say that you do.”
Chloe lowered her eyes. She did not, in the moment, have an answer she would have given to anyone else.
“I’m not asking your forgiveness,” Eleanor said. “I am telling you that I treated you badly. The distinction matters to me. Forgiving me is your decision. You should not feel rushed in it.”
“I’m not — I don’t — ”
“And I’d like to ask you something.”
“Yes.”
Eleanor set the mug down. She did not, this time, look at the desk. She looked at Chloe.
“What do you actually want from your life?”
Chloe blinked.
“Not the answer you give your mother. Not the answer you give your friends. Not — and I am not asking you to take this badly — the answer you would give your ex-boyfriend if he asked it nicely over a bottle of red. The actual answer. The one you do not normally give out loud because you don’t, on the whole, know how to. ”
Chloe felt the question land in her chest at the same time as a thought arrived that she did not, at any point in the next thirty seconds, allow her face to register.
The thought was: whose face have you asked this question to before, in this chair.
She suppressed it. She did not, in the moment, know what to do with the fact of having had it.
She waited.
Chloe felt the question land in her chest as a small physical weight, the way she had felt the email land at midnight.
She did not, immediately, have an answer.
She had not been asked this question — not in any sense that had required of her the honest version — for some years.
Theo had not asked it. Her mother had not asked it.
Her thesis supervisor, in 2022, had asked her a related question, and Chloe had given the rehearsed paragraph that, twelve weeks ago, she had given Eleanor at this same desk.
She tried.
“I want — ” she said. “I want — ”
She stopped.
She tried again.
“I want to read a lot. I want to write things I’m not — not embarrassed by. I want to live somewhere quiet. I want — I don’t want to be — to be the kind of person who, who waits for things. I want to — ”
She felt herself losing the rhythm of it. She felt Eleanor not interrupting. She felt the silence around the trying as the kindest silence she had ever been allowed.
She kept going.
“I want to be looked at. I want to be — looked at properly. I want — I don’t want — sorry. I don’t want to be — ”
She trailed off. She did not, immediately, look up.
Eleanor said, after a long pause, “Go on.”
“I don’t know what else.”
“That’s all right.”
“I don’t think I know what I want, in any — in any larger sense.
I don’t think I have ever known. I think I have been — I have been spending — ” She heard herself laugh, briefly, with a thin self-aware embarrassment that she did not know what to do with.
“I think I have been spending a long time pretending I know what I want.”
She lifted her eyes.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what I want, Eleanor.”
It was the first time she had said the name aloud.
She had not meant to. It had come out at the end of the sentence as a small involuntary punctuation, and she did not, in the moment of having said it, realise she had said it.
Eleanor’s face — Chloe registered, watching it — did not change.
But Eleanor heard it. Eleanor heard the use of her name. Chloe could feel her hearing it.
Eleanor took a breath. She nodded once. Slowly. With approval.
“Good,” she said.
She picked up her mug.
“Now we can start.”
Chloe did not, immediately, understand what they had started.
She did not, also, ask. Asking would have undone the moment.
Eleanor was looking at her with the watching expression, the one that had become — Chloe could feel this without being able to itemise the feeling — something Chloe had begun, in the last twelve weeks, to require in order to feel like a person.
She drank her tea.
Eleanor went, after a while, to her own table. The morning resumed. The work resumed. They did not, again, refer to Monday. They did not, again, refer to the email. The chairs they sat in were the chairs they had been sitting in. The study was the study.
But Eleanor brought her tea in at eleven without being asked.
And again at three. And again at five. And at six, when Chloe rose to leave, Eleanor came to the door and helped her with her coat and rested her hand on the collar for, Chloe counted afterwards on the bus, four full seconds before she withdrew it.
She did not, on the way home, listen to anything on her phone.
She wanted to keep what had happened to herself.
And underneath the wanting — Chloe registered, distantly, in the part of her mind she had been training herself to ignore — a small clear thought arrived, the kind a person had who recognised a pattern she had been inside of before.
The thought was: she has given me back exactly what she took away.
The thought said: that is not love. That is something else.
The thought said this very quietly. It said it once. It did not, when she did not immediately answer it, say it again.
Chloe got off the bus.
She went home.
She told herself she was happy.
She wrote one new line in her notebook before she got into bed.
She did not, this time, hesitate over it. She did not draft and redraft. She wrote it the way one wrote down a fact one had decided was no longer worth disagreeing with.
*I am becoming someone I do not recognise.*
She did not, this time, cross it out.
She turned off the lamp.
She was, technically, telling herself the truth.