Chapter 15
FIFTEEN
She woke at seven.
She woke into the small clear knowledge that something had happened to her the night before.
The knowing was not, in the first moment, a sentence.
It was a fact lodged below her sternum, the way the fact of a planned journey lodged below the sternum when one woke on the morning of it.
The body knew first. The mind caught up several seconds later, the way it had been catching up with her body for some weeks now, and arrived with the two words she had been trying, in sleep, not to assemble.
She kissed me.
She lay on her back for a long time before she let herself say the words out loud, in her own room, to the ceiling.
She kissed me.
She did it twice. Both times, the words were almost embarrassing in their thinness. The kiss had been small. The fact had been enormous. The words were not, on the morning after, the right size for either.
Mira was in the kitchen at half past eight, making toast.
“Coffee’s on.”
“Thanks.”
“Sit down.”
Chloe sat.
Mira put the toast on a plate. She put the plate in front of Chloe.
She did not, immediately, sit down opposite her.
She poured two coffees. She brought them to the table.
She sat. She drank her own. She looked at Chloe with the alert observant patience she had been carrying around for several weeks, and waited.
Chloe ate half a slice of toast before she could speak.
“She kissed me.”
“Mm.”
“Last night. She — there was a — there was a conversation, in her sitting room, and she — she — ”
“All right.”
“I am not — I’m not asking you to — I just — I needed to say it out loud.”
“I’m glad you did.”
“It was — I don’t want to — I don’t want to do the thing where I describe it.”
“No.”
“It was — it was the smallest kiss I have ever — ”
“Don’t. Don’t describe it.”
“No.”
“Eat.”
Chloe ate.
After a while, Mira said, “Are you in love with her.”
It was not, Chloe registered, asked with the kind of intonation that was looking for a reassuring answer.
“I think — ” Chloe said. “I think I have been, for a while.”
“Yes.”
“Yes?”
“I can see that you have. I have been able to see it since about week six.”
“God.”
“Eat.”
Mira drank her coffee. She did not, in any visible way, react to the size of what had been said.
She had — Chloe registered, with the small warmth she had been registering Mira in for years — already done her reacting.
The reacting had been spread across the weeks of quietly noticing.
The morning after a kiss was, for Mira, the moment of receipt rather than the moment of surprise.
“Is she in love with you.”
“I — I don’t know.”
“What do you think.”
“I think she is — I think she is something. I don’t know if love is the right — ”
“Yes.”
“Yes?”
“She is something. I’ll take that as a yes from her.”
Chloe did not, in the moment, know what to do with that.
“Is she going to be good to you.”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you think.”
“I think — ” Chloe said. She put the toast down. “I think she is going to be good to me in some ways. I think she is going to be — going to be bad at it, in other ways. I think she knows she is going to be bad at it. She told me last night.”
“She told you.”
“She told me.”
Mira looked at her over the rim of the coffee mug.
“That is — ” Mira said. “That is, actually, slightly different from what I had been imagining.”
“Different how.”
“Different in that she is, perhaps, less of a — slightly less of a — ”
“Yes.”
“Slightly.”
“Yes.”
Mira drank.
She set her mug down.
“Chloe.”
“Yes.”
“I’m not going to tell you not to.”
“No.”
“I am also not going to be — I’m not going to be the person you ring if it gets bad.”
“What.”
“I will be the person you ring. I will not be the person who says I told you so. I am, right now, telling you so. So that, later, when it gets bad, I do not have to say it.”
“It might not — ”
“It might not. I hope it doesn’t. I am, however, not — I am not a fool, and I am not pretending to be one. So we are agreed: I am not going to tell you not to, and I am telling you, now, before, so that I do not have to tell you then.”
“Yes.”
“All right.”
Mira got up. She took the plates to the sink.
She washed them with her back to Chloe, in the way Eleanor had washed plates with her back to Chloe in the smaller kitchen of the older house, and Chloe felt — sitting at the table in her pyjamas at twenty past nine on the morning after the kiss — the simple uncomplicated love she had not, in three months, allowed herself enough room to feel for her flatmate.
“I love you,” she said.
“I love you too. Eat the rest of the toast.”
She did not, all of Saturday morning, look at her phone.
She did not look at her phone, principally, because she did not want to discover that Eleanor had not texted.
The not-texting, she had decided in the bath, was something she could survive while it was unverified.
Once verified, it would become a different thing — a thing she would have to assemble feelings around, on a Saturday afternoon, in her own flat, without supervision.
She walked.
She walked along the canal. She walked to Jericho. She stood for ten minutes outside the Phoenix and did not, in the end, go in. She walked back along the canal in the other direction. She came home at one o’clock and ate the soup Mira had left in a pan on the hob.
At three, she finally looked at her phone.
There was no message from Eleanor.
She set the phone down on the kitchen table face-down.
She made tea.
She did not, while the tea was brewing, take the phone out again.
She did not, while she was drinking the tea, take the phone out again.
She did not, while she was reading the novel she had brought to the kitchen table to perform the kind of self-possession she was not actually having, take the phone out again.
She drank a glass of water.
She picked up the phone.
There was, still, no message from Eleanor.
She put the phone down.
At a quarter past four, with the daylight already failing, she went out again.
She did not, at first, know where she was going. She had her coat on and her keys in her pocket before she had given herself an answer. She walked north — toward the city, then through it, then out the other side, past the Ashmolean, up St Giles, and onto Banbury Road.
She knew, by the time she reached the second pedestrian crossing, where she was going.
She knew this and she did not, also, allow herself to admit it.
She walked to within a hundred metres of Eleanor’s house.
She stood under a lamppost on the opposite side of the road for some minutes.
She did not, in any sense she could have justified, intend to go in.
She was looking. She was looking at a building, in the dark, with the light on in the upstairs window, the way a woman did when she had been kissed in a sitting room downstairs and was now, on a Saturday afternoon, performing for herself the small embarrassing pilgrimage she had been told all her life not to perform.
The light in the upstairs window was on.
After a minute, a shadow moved across it.
She did not see whose shadow it was.
She turned. She walked back into the city. She did not, at any point on the walk home, take her phone out of her pocket. She did not, on the bus, take it out either. She got home at six. She told Mira she had been for a walk. She had a bath. She lay in the bath for a long time.
At nine, she ate beans on toast.
At ten, she read, badly, for an hour.
At a quarter past eleven, she went to bed.
She lay in the dark with the phone face-down on the bedside table.
She did not take it out.
She did not need to.
It buzzed.
The screen lit her ceiling.
She did not, this time, take her time with it. She turned the phone over. She unlocked it. She read.
Eleanor.
Come back. Now. If you want to.
She read it once.
She read it twice.
She did not, the second time, register anything more than the first time had registered.
The message was three sentences. The third sentence was a clause.
The if you want to was — Chloe could feel it, in the way one could feel a small private architecture inside an apparently transparent sentence — Eleanor’s way of leaving the decision entirely on Chloe’s side of the room.
Eleanor was not, this time, summoning her.
Eleanor was making available an option Chloe could decline without consequence.
She did not, in the moment, particularly want to be made the chooser.
She had been the chooser at the threshold the previous week — Wednesday — and she had been the chooser at the threshold the previous night — Eleanor — and she had been, in her own kitchen this morning, the chooser of telling Mira.
She had spent the day not choosing further things and had been almost successful at it.
Now Eleanor had given her another one.
She lay in the dark with the phone against her chest for some time before she sat up.
She did not turn the light on. She got out of bed. She went to the wardrobe in the dark and put on the cream jumper over her pyjama top, and a pair of jeans, and a different pair of socks, and her coat. She picked up her keys. She picked up her purse. She picked up the phone.
She typed.
On my way.
She sent it.
She left the bedroom.
Mira was on the sofa, watching a programme, in the small blue light of the screen. Mira looked up.
Chloe said, “She — ”
“I know.”
“I’ll text you.”
“I know.”
“Mira.”
“Go.”
Chloe went.
She did not get the bus.
She found a cab on the High Street within four minutes.
The driver was a woman in her sixties who had the radio on low.
The radio was playing something Chloe did not recognise — slow piano, a woman singing in another language.
The cab took the bridge in five minutes, the city in eight, and was on Banbury Road by twenty past midnight.
“Anywhere along here, love.”
“Just — yes. Just here is fine.”
She paid. She got out. The cab moved away.
She stood on the pavement opposite Eleanor’s house.
The light was on in the downstairs sitting room.
The light was on in the upstairs landing.
She crossed the road.
She did not, when she reached the gate, allow herself to slow down. She did not, on the path, allow herself to slow down. She did not, on the three stone steps, slow down. She lifted her hand to the knocker, and the door opened before she touched it.