Chapter 12 #2
“She’s like you,” Ines said. “Or rather she was. Years ago. Before — well. Anyway.”
“Ines.”
“What.”
“Don’t.”
Ines looked at Eleanor, briefly, with an expression Chloe could not entirely read.
There was affection in it. There was also something old — a small held grievance Chloe had no access to and did not, at the table, have any business trying to interpret.
The expression passed. Ines tipped the last of the red into her own glass.
“No,” Ines said. “Fine. Fine. I will not.”
She set the bottle down.
“Chloe.”
“Yes.”
“What are you reading.”
It was, somehow, the most disarming question Chloe had been asked all evening.
She told her. She told her about the du Maurier she had finished and the Carson she was midway through.
Ines listened, properly. Asked one follow-up question.
Made one small recommendation. Eleanor said nothing.
Eleanor was, Chloe registered, looking down at the table now, at the rim of her own glass, with an expression she had not previously had on her face in Chloe’s presence — something not quite tired, not quite withdrawn, the small private weather of a woman watching a younger woman be properly listened to by a contemporary of hers.
“Eleanor used to recommend me books,” Ines said. “Years and years ago. She has, I am sorry to say, mostly stopped.”
“I have not stopped reading.”
“I did not say you had.”
“You implied it.”
“I implied that you have stopped giving books to me.” Ines smiled. “Which is true.”
“It is.”
“She gives them to you now, presumably,” Ines said, turning back to Chloe. “Does she.”
Chloe felt the question land underneath her ribs.
“She — yes. Yes, sometimes.”
“And do you read them.”
“Yes.”
“Do you read them carefully.”
“I — ”
Eleanor said, in a tone Chloe had not previously heard from her — quiet, dry, almost amused, except that the amusement had a flat undercurrent in it: “Ines.”
Ines lifted her hands.
“I am only asking.”
“I know you are only asking.”
“Right.”
She drank.
At eleven, Ines stood.
“I should go before the trains stop pretending to run. Eleanor. Darling. As always.”
“I’ll see you out.”
“No. Let her see me out. I want to look at her in the hall.”
“Ines.”
“It is a joke, Eleanor.”
Eleanor did not, at this, smile.
Ines kissed Eleanor on both cheeks — the kissing was the kissing of two women who had been doing it for thirty years, brisk and unsentimental — and then turned to Chloe. Chloe stood. Ines did not kiss her. She put a hand, lightly, on Chloe’s upper arm, and said, “Walk me to the door.”
In the hall, Ines put on her coat without help.
She buttoned it slowly. She did not, in the hall, look back toward the dining room.
The dining room door, Chloe registered, was closed; Eleanor had closed it as Chloe had got up.
Ines drew her scarf around her neck. She found her gloves in the coat pocket.
She put them on. She turned to Chloe at the threshold and looked at her with the same diagonal frankness she had used at the start of the evening, except that now the frankness was no longer doing several things at once.
It was doing one thing.
“She does this, you know,” Ines said.
Chloe did not, in the moment, know how to respond.
“I am not — I am not warning you. I would not be so vulgar. I am only saying it, because no one is going to say it to you. She does this. Not cruelly. She just — ” She paused. Looked at Chloe properly. Her mouth was kind. “She just can’t help noticing the bright ones.”
Chloe felt her face go hot.
“I’m not — I am not the — ”
“I know.”
“I am working for her.”
“I know.”
“It’s — it’s not — ”
“Sweetheart.”
It was not, Chloe registered, said unkindly.
Sweetheart, in this woman’s mouth, was not the sweetheart of a flirtation or a mockery.
It was, in fact, the sweetheart Chloe had been called in primary school by a woman called Mrs Marsh, who had told Chloe she was clever and that this would, in the long run, both help and harm her.
“Sweetheart,” Ines said again. “I will not say it again. I am saying it once. It is yours now to ignore or not.”
She opened the door herself.
She went out into the cold.
She did not look back.
Chloe closed the door.
She stood in the hall for a long moment with her hand on the latch. She did not, immediately, go back to the dining room. From inside the closed door at the end of the hall, she could hear Eleanor stacking plates. A small clatter. The chair, scraped back. Eleanor’s footsteps in the kitchen.
She went back in.
Eleanor was at the sideboard. She did not turn. She had her hand flat on the wood for a moment, the kind of resting hand a person used to compose herself when she did not, particularly, want to be seen composing herself.
“Did she — ”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
Eleanor turned.
Chloe did not, in the moment, know what her own face was doing. She felt the heat in it. She felt the small uneven pulse at the side of her own throat.
“She’s right, isn’t she.”
It came out before she could stop it.
Eleanor looked at her for a long second.
“About what.”
“About — about whatever it is that — ”
“Chloe.”
“Yes.”
“Go home.”