Chapter 13
THIRTEEN
She did not, between the Friday of the dinner and the Wednesday she had set, speak to Eleanor.
Eleanor did not email. Eleanor did not text.
The not-contacting was, by Sunday morning, a thing Chloe had begun to attend to in the way one attended to a held breath.
By Tuesday, the not-contacting had begun to seem deliberate.
By Tuesday night, Chloe had begun to wonder, with the small sick clarity of a person revisiting a held position, whether what she had said at the threshold — Wednesday — had been a thing Eleanor was now, in some private weather of her own, reconsidering.
She slept badly on Tuesday.
She got up at six on Wednesday and could not, even with the lamp on and her own face in the small bathroom mirror, get her hair to lie the way she wanted it to.
She gave up.
She caught the eight twelve.
She walked from the bus stop slowly enough to delay the arrival by four minutes and arrived, in the end, two minutes before the hour she had set herself.
Eleanor opened the door.
She did not say good morning.
She did not, also, say anything else. She stepped back.
She held the door open for Chloe in the way she had been holding it, three months now, without changing the procedure of holding it.
Her face — Chloe lifted her eyes to it as she crossed the threshold — was the face of a woman who had also, perhaps, slept badly.
There were small new shadows under her eyes.
Her hair was less tidy than usual. She was wearing the soft grey jumper, but underneath the jumper she had on, for the first time in Chloe’s knowledge of her, a thin shirt that did not properly belong with the jumper — the collar was uneven, the bottom of one side coming out below the knit, the kind of dishevelment one accepted in the morning if one had not, at any point, decided to fix it.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
The mug she handed Chloe was the small chipped white one. The tea in it was the right strength. There was no comment on either.
They went into the study.
Chloe sat at the desk.
Eleanor did not go to her own table. She walked to the window.
She looked at the garden for a long beat.
Then she turned and came to the second chair — the kitchen chair, the one she had brought to the desk on the Wednesday of the apology — and sat in it, again, beside Chloe, not opposite.
Their knees were a hand’s breadth apart.
Their mugs were on the desk, the rims half an inch from touching.
Eleanor did not, immediately, speak.
She drank her tea. She looked at the desk. She set the mug down. She looked at Chloe.
“I’d like to apologise.”
“About — ”
“About Friday. About Ines. About — ” She paused. “About all of Friday.”
“She — she didn’t — ”
“She did. I knew she would. I should not have — ” She stopped.
She made, Chloe registered, a small adjustment in her face — the kind of adjustment a person made when she was choosing not to use the version of the sentence she had been rehearsing and to use, instead, a more naked one.
“I should not have had her in the house with you in it.”
Chloe set down her own mug. She did not, immediately, look at Eleanor. She looked at the small chipped corner of the white mug.
“She wasn’t cruel.”
“No.”
“She was — she was, in fact, quite kind.”
“Yes.”
“She said — ”
“I know what she said.”
“Was she right.”
It came out before Chloe could stop it. It came out, also, more quietly than she had meant it to. The two of them, sitting that close, did not need it loud.
Eleanor did not, this time, tell her to go home.
She did not, this time, answer at all immediately. She drew a breath. She let it out. She looked at the desk again, at her own hands, at her own ring finger — which was bare, Chloe had registered some weeks ago, the long-faded mark of a ring that was no longer there.
“Yes,” Eleanor said.
“Yes.”
“Yes. She was, broadly, right.”
Chloe did not, for a moment, know what to do with that.
“About — about — ”
“About what she described.”
“About me.”
Eleanor lifted her eyes.
“No,” she said, with a small precision that did something to Chloe’s chest she would have given a great deal not to feel. “No. She was right about me.”
They worked.
They did not, at any further point in the morning, refer to the conversation.
Eleanor went back to her own table. Chloe opened the box.
They moved through the next several hours in a silence Chloe had not previously encountered in this house — the silence of two women who had told each other something they could not, this side of lunch, take back.
Eleanor brought her tea at eleven without being asked.
Eleanor brought her tea again at three.
By five, the day was already going. The standing lamp in the corner had come on twenty minutes earlier.
The desk lamp had been on since two. The light in the room was now the light Chloe had begun to associate with the small radius of warmth Eleanor placed around her.
The window was a black square. There was, from somewhere upstairs, the sound of the central heating coming on for the evening.
At ten past five, Eleanor said, “Come and sit on the sofa.”
Chloe did not, this time, ask why.
She got up.
She crossed the room.
Eleanor was already on the sofa. The same left side. The same cushion. The same inch. Chloe sat where she had been sitting since the storm.
Eleanor said, “Read me something.”
“What.”
“Anything. Anything you brought today.”
“I didn’t bring — ”
“The Carson. You said on Friday you were halfway through.”
“I — yes.”
“I’d like to hear some.”
Chloe got up. She went to her bag, which she had hung on the back of the desk chair. She took out the slim book. She came back. She sat down.
She opened the book at the ribbon and began to read.
She had been reading for ten minutes when she registered that Eleanor was no longer at the inch.
She had not seen Eleanor move. Eleanor had not, in any way Chloe’s peripheral vision had picked up, leaned in.
But the air against the small piece of skin on Chloe’s left jaw — the side nearest Eleanor — was warmer than it had any business being, and the body Chloe could feel without looking at it was, by some measure, fractionally closer than it had been when she had started.
She kept reading.
She read a poem to the end. She read another, more slowly. She did not look up.
She turned a page.
She heard Eleanor exhale, very quietly.
She kept reading.
At the end of the second poem, she did look up.
Eleanor was looking at her.
She had not seen Eleanor look at her like this.
The watching expression — the one from the study, the one from the candlelight, the one from the apology — was still there, but it had been opened by something.
The control on it was thinner. Eleanor’s lips were slightly parted.
Her eyes were on Chloe’s mouth, the way they had been on Chloe’s mouth during the first reading on the sofa, except that this time the looking was not, even nominally, professional.
Their faces were closer than Chloe had thought.
Eleanor had not, in any moment Chloe could point to, moved.
The closeness was the cumulative result of a thousand small unregistered increments — Eleanor’s knee, an inch ago; her shoulder, half an inch ago; her hand, on the cushion between them, somehow now without Chloe having seen it move, half a hand’s breadth from her own.
Chloe stopped reading.
She did not say anything.
Eleanor did not say anything.
The book — closed, Chloe registered, although she did not remember closing it — was face-down between them on the cushion.
The standing lamp was on. The room had reduced to the sofa, in the way it had reduced in candlelight on the night of the storm, except that this time there was no excuse for the reduction.
Eleanor’s eyes lifted from Chloe’s mouth to her eyes.
Eleanor did not, at any point in the next two seconds, look away.
Chloe leaned in.
She did not — when she went back over the next several minutes in her bedroom that night — know whether she had been the first one to move or whether Eleanor had been.
She knew only that the small fractional reduction of distance between them had been, on her side, a decision she had made very fast and that she had not, between the deciding and the moving, paused to talk herself out of.
Eleanor leaned in also.
The reduction continued.
The distance between their mouths was, by Chloe’s estimate afterwards, approximately three inches.
It was less, very briefly, than three inches.
It was — Chloe could feel it on her own lower lip, the small heat of another woman’s breath at the distance at which it was no longer ambient and had become specific — less than two.
The phone rang.
It rang from the desk, on the other side of the room, in the corner.
It was not Eleanor’s mobile. It was the landline — the old cream-coloured one Chloe had registered, on her second day, as a piece of furniture rather than an object that did anything — and it rang now with a loud antique brass mechanical bell that did not sound like any ringtone made since 1985.
It was the loudest sound Chloe had ever heard in this house.
Eleanor did not, at the first ring, move.
She did not move at the second.
On the third, her body did the small involuntary stiffening Chloe had felt against her own arm three weeks earlier in the kitchen, when the mobile had buzzed on the table behind them.
The same stiffening. The same recognition.
The same — Chloe registered with a sharp clean dread — woman, presumably, on the other end of it.
On the third ring, Eleanor closed her eyes.