Chapter 14
FOURTEEN
On Thursday, they were professional.
Eleanor opened the door at eight thirty.
She said good morning. She made the tea.
She handed Chloe the small chipped white mug and went back into the kitchen without further comment.
The door between the kitchen and the study, which had been open in the warmer days of the week before the dinner, was — again — closed.
Chloe registered the closure without distress.
She was not, this morning, in the same body she had been in two weeks earlier.
The body that had walked out of the house on Monday in October, telling itself it had been transparent, had been a different woman.
The body that had walked out last night, on the bus that crossed Magdalen Bridge, had been crying about a specific, identifiable thing — not about Eleanor’s mood, not about Eleanor’s mind, but about a kiss that had not happened on a sofa because a telephone she did not know the owner of had rung at the wrong moment.
The crying had clarified something.
The clarification was that the not-knowing was no longer an arrangement she had agreed to.
She had not, in twelve weeks of working in this house, been the one in this room who pressed. She had read what Eleanor put in front of her. She had answered what Eleanor asked her. She had been still while Eleanor came and went. She had let Eleanor set the temperature.
She did not, today, intend to keep doing that.
She also did not, today, intend to do it differently.
She did not, in fact, know what she intended.
She read.
Eleanor came into the study at ten.
She came in with two pieces of paper. She did not, this time, sit at her own table. She did not, this time, bring the kitchen chair to the desk. She set the papers down at Chloe’s elbow — one of them a printed list, one of them handwritten — and stood for a moment beside the chair.
“These are letters from 2008. I have been avoiding them. I would be glad if you could put them in order.”
“All right.”
Eleanor did not move.
Chloe did not, immediately, look up.
After a small pause Eleanor said, “Stay for a drink tonight.”
Chloe lifted her eyes.
Eleanor was looking at the desk between them.
Her hand had come, without Chloe registering the movement, to rest on the corner of the desk — the wood, not the paper, the heel of her hand against the worn edge of the writing surface.
She was not, in any sense Chloe could have pointed to, leaning on it.
She was, Chloe registered, steadying herself against it.
“All right.”
“Yes?”
“Yes.”
Eleanor nodded once. Did not smile. Did not, also, look at her.
She went out.
At six, Chloe closed the box.
Eleanor was already in the sitting room.
The sitting room — the larger room on the other side of the corridor, the one with the two armchairs by the fire and the bookcase of novels and the small low table — was lit by two lamps and the fire.
The fire had been lit recently. The wine had been opened recently.
The bottle was on the low table between the armchairs with two glasses and a bowl of olives that, Chloe registered, were not the olives Eleanor served with dinner.
They were better olives. Smaller. Black.
The kind one bought from the Italian deli on Little Clarendon Street.
Eleanor was in the chair by the fire.
She had taken off her cardigan. She had on, underneath, a plain dark long-sleeved jersey that, on a less precise woman, would have been pyjamas.
Her hair was down, the way it had been on the night of the storm, with one piece of it caught against her collarbone in a way Chloe had to look away from to keep her composure.
“Sit.”
Chloe sat in the chair opposite.
She did not, in the moment, know what to do with her hands. She put them on the arms of the chair. The wood was warm from the fire.
Eleanor poured.
She poured Chloe’s first. She handed it across. The exchange — Chloe registered, taking the glass — was the smallest of the small contact moments they had had. Eleanor’s fingertips. Chloe’s knuckles. Half a second. Both of them, this time, looking at each other while it happened.
“To Wednesday,” Eleanor said.
Chloe did not, immediately, understand what she meant.
“The last Wednesday,” Eleanor said. “Or to its absence, perhaps. Or to whatever it was we did not do on it.”
“Yes.”
“Yes?”
“Yes.”
They drank.
“I owe you a sentence,” Eleanor said.
“No.”
“Don’t — yes. I do. Let me. Let me say it.”
“All right.”
Eleanor set down her glass. She did not, in the next pause, look at Chloe. She looked at the fire. The fire moved across the side of her face in a way Chloe would not, on any later occasion, fail to remember.
“I do not, generally, allow myself to want things.”
Chloe did not breathe.
“I — I lost the discipline of wanting some time ago, and I have been, in the years since, building a life out of the absence of it. You are not the first woman to have noticed this about me. Ines is not the first person to have said it to a younger woman in my hall.”
“She — ”
“Let me. Please.”
“Yes.”
“There is a — there is a way I have learned to be in the room with women I find interesting. I have used it. I am, in some respects, still using it now. I would like to think I am being honest with you. I would also like to be sure that you know I am aware that what I do — even when I do it well — is a thing other women have not, in the past, been able to come back from cleanly.”
She looked at Chloe.
“You should know that.”
“I — I know that.”
“You know it from what I have told you. You also know it because you looked me up on the bus on your way home from your interview, and you have, since then, found the articles, and the blog post, and at least one of the forum threads.”
Chloe felt the heat rise into her face.
“How — ”
“Because everyone does, eventually.”
“I — ”
“And because, for the last week, you have been looking at me as a person who is the same shape as a piece of information you have been carrying around in your pocket. I have been watched, in this house, for fourteen years, by women I cannot pay to look at me differently. I can read it now. I am sorry. I would not have brought it up if Ines had not.”
Chloe could not, for a moment, speak.
She drank.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I — I wasn’t — ”
“You don’t need to apologise. Stop apologising. I am, in fact, asking you not to.”
Eleanor lifted her glass.
She had been holding it loosely on the arm of the chair for some minutes — Chloe registered, with the small honest part of her doing the inventory, that Eleanor had not actually drunk from the glass since refilling it twenty minutes ago.
Eleanor lifted it now and brought it part of the way to her mouth and then, on the way, the small specific thing happened that had happened, by Chloe’s count, twice before in this house: on the second wine pour of the night of the storm, and at the rim of her own plate on the night of the dinner with Ines.
Her hand was not quite steady.
The wine moved against the rim of the glass.
It moved once. It moved a second time. Eleanor’s wrist held it for half a second longer, registering, before her mind had finished registering it, that her own hand was not going to be willing to bring the glass the rest of the way to her mouth without spilling.
She lowered the glass.
She did not, in lowering it, look at Chloe.
She did, however, register that Chloe had seen her do it. She held the glass at chest height for a moment longer, deciding, and then made the small careful expedient decision of a woman who could not, in the moment, pretend the tremor had not happened.
Eleanor leaned forward.
She put her glass down on the low table. The glass made a small sound against the wood. The sound was the loudest thing that had happened in the room since the fire had been lit. She did not, in lowering the glass, lower her eyes from Chloe’s face.
“The reason I am saying any of this,” Eleanor said, “is that I have, for the last two weeks, been trying to decide not to do the thing I am about to do, and I have failed at the deciding. I am telling you so that, if you would like, you can be the one who decides.”
Chloe did not, for a long beat, have a sentence.
She found, when she went looking, that she had three sentences, and that all of them were the same sentence.
“Tell me what you want,” Eleanor said.
It was the question. The question from the second Wednesday. The question from the apology. The question from the desk and the kitchen chair and the small private rebuilding of Chloe she had been undergoing, without quite admitting it to herself, for nearly three months.
She said it.
“You.”
She had not — when she said it — meant to use one syllable. She had not meant, also, to use it as flatly as she had used it. The flatness was, she would understand later, the only register in which she had been able to get it out.
Eleanor closed her eyes for a second.
When she opened them, she was already moving.
She did not, Chloe noted afterwards, get up. She did not cross the room. She extended her hand — her right hand, the one she had been writing with all afternoon — and placed it, with a slow precision that was not, on this occasion, theatrical, against the side of Chloe’s face.
Her palm was warm.
Her thumb settled along the cheekbone. The base of her hand rested on Chloe’s jaw. Her fingers — Chloe could feel each of them individually — curved against the small line where Chloe’s hair started behind the ear.
She held the hand there.
She did not, immediately, kiss her.
She held the hand against Chloe’s face for what was — Chloe would have estimated, later, in bed — four seconds, perhaps five.
The hand was not pulling. It was not asking.
It was, simply, a hand placed against a face by a woman who had been keeping it from happening for a long time and who was, now, allowing it.
Chloe did not move.
Chloe could not, in fact, have moved if she had wanted to.