Chapter 17
SEVENTEEN
She woke into the smell of coffee.
She was on her stomach. Her face was in a pillow that was not her pillow. The light coming through the curtains was the kind of late winter light that did not arrive until after nine, the kind of light Chloe had not, since she was an undergraduate, woken into without anxiety.
She did not, immediately, move.
She lay still for some time and let her body inventory itself.
She was not in the cream jumper. She was not in anything.
The duvet — heavy, soft, slightly old — was tucked over the small of her back, which had been, she registered with an embarrassment that was not entirely embarrassment, deliberately arranged.
Her clothes — the jeans, the bra, the cream jumper from downstairs — were on the chair by the door. Folded.
Folded.
She turned her face into the pillow and made a sound that was halfway between a laugh and a small sob and then was, briefly, only a laugh.
She had spent the night with Eleanor Vale.
She had spent the night and her clothes had been folded.
She rolled onto her back. She looked at the ceiling. The ceiling was painted a colour Chloe did not have a name for — not quite white, not quite cream, the soft old-paint colour of a room that had been painted twenty years ago and not since.
She put her hand against her own cheek, the way she had done in the dark on her bed two nights before, and pressed.
Her face was hot.
She did not, immediately, want to get up.
She got up after twenty minutes.
She found, hanging on the back of the door, an old shirt — Eleanor’s shirt, blue, larger than anything else Chloe had seen Eleanor wear — and she put it on. It came halfway down her thighs. It smelled, faintly, of the perfume Eleanor wore on her wrists and not, ever, on her neck.
She went down the stairs.
The stairs creaked. From the kitchen came the sound of a kettle. A radio playing softly somewhere — Radio 3, she thought, by the sound — turned low. A drawer opening and closing.
She stood in the kitchen doorway in the shirt and her own bare legs.
Eleanor was at the counter.
She had on a pair of soft grey pyjama trousers and a jumper Chloe had not previously seen — older, more worn, the kind of jumper one only wore in one’s own kitchen on the morning of a day one had not yet decided what to do with.
Her hair was loose. Her feet were bare. She was, when Chloe came in, in the act of taking the butter out of the fridge.
She turned.
She looked at Chloe in her shirt.
She did not, for a moment, speak.
Then she said, “There’s coffee.”
“Yes.”
“Sit down.”
Chloe sat at the long pine table. Eleanor brought her a mug. The mug was — Chloe registered, with a small twist that was not, this morning, painful — the small chipped white one.
She drank.
Eleanor sat down opposite.
She did not, for a while, say anything. She drank her own coffee.
She looked at Chloe in her own shirt across her own table in her own kitchen in her own quiet house.
She looked at her, Chloe registered, the way one looked at a thing one had not, this morning, been entirely sure would still be there when one came downstairs.
Then she said, “You sleep on your stomach.”
“Yes.”
“Is that all right?”
“What.”
“For me to have noticed.”
Chloe felt something small and absurd move in her chest. She nodded. She drank.
“It is more than all right.”
They had breakfast.
Eleanor had made, at some point earlier in the morning, the kind of breakfast Chloe would not have predicted of her — eggs, scrambled slowly in butter, on toast that was not burnt.
She apologised, once, for the eggs. She said she had been out of practice.
Chloe ate them. They were better than the toast on Saturday morning at the flat had been.
She said so. Eleanor looked at her over the rim of the coffee mug.
They did not talk about the night before.
They talked, instead, about the manuscript.
Eleanor had been thinking, she said, about the order of the second section.
She had been thinking about it through her sleep.
She thought she had been wrong about the chronology.
She talked about it with the small careful concentration Chloe had been listening to for three months, and Chloe listened the way she had been listening for three months, and the only difference between this listening and the previous three months of listening was that her bare foot, under the table, was resting against Eleanor’s bare foot, and neither of them was, by any means, pretending that it was an accident.
Eleanor’s foot moved, after a while, alongside Chloe’s. The instep against the side of her ankle. The small bone there. They stayed like that for the next twenty minutes while Eleanor talked about the second section.
Eleanor poured more coffee.
She buttered another piece of toast.
She handed it across.
She put on it — Chloe watched her do it — exactly the amount of butter Chloe had been putting on her own bread, at this same table, for three months.
At eleven, Chloe said, “I should — I should go home.”
Eleanor nodded.
“Yes.”
“I — Mira will be — ”
“Yes.”
“I’m not — I don’t want to.”
“I know.”
“All right.”
She went upstairs. She put on her own clothes — the jeans, the bra, the cream jumper — and folded the blue shirt at the foot of the bed because she did not, at the moment of leaving, know what else to do with it.
She came back down. She drank the last of her coffee standing at the counter. Eleanor watched her drink it.
In the hall, Eleanor helped her with her coat.
She did the small adjustment of the collar that Chloe had been waiting for her to do for nearly nine weeks. It lasted four seconds.
“Chloe.”
“Yes.”
“I — ” Eleanor began.
She did not, this time, fail to finish the sentence.
“I would like you to come tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow is a working day.”
“I am aware.”
“All right.”
“Not for the work.”
“All right.”
Eleanor kissed her, once, in the hall, with the same small carefulness she had used in the sitting room on Friday night. It lasted, this time, four seconds also.
She opened the door.
Chloe went out.
Sunday at midday was a different city.
She walked.
She did not, at any point on the walk, take her phone out.
She did not need to. She walked down Banbury Road in last night’s clothes with her own coat over the cream jumper and her bare neck against the wool of the collar, and she could feel, against the small piece of skin behind her ear, where Eleanor’s thumb had been.
The city had changed colour.
It was the same city — the same shop fronts, the same buses, the same students with their coats and their headphones.
But the light on the stone of the colleges, the small grey light of a January Sunday at noon, had become a colour she had not previously had a word for.
She walked past Wadham. She walked past the New Bodleian.
She walked down Broad Street and the Sheldonian was, somehow, a different shape from the shape it had been on Friday afternoon.
She was — she registered, halfway down Cornmarket — almost embarrassed by herself.
She let it happen.
She was, in the moment, prepared to be embarrassed by anything her body did.
She got home at ten past one.
Mira was at the kitchen table in pyjamas reading the paper.
Mira looked up.
Mira did not, this morning, ask anything.
She got up. She got out a mug. She made Chloe a coffee. She put it on the table opposite her own chair. She sat back down.
“Toast?”
“No.”
“All right.”
Chloe sat. She drank. She did not, immediately, speak.
After a while, Mira said, mildly, “Did you sleep.”
“Yes.”
“Good sleep?”
“I — yes.”
“Good.”
Mira turned a page.
Chloe felt, sitting in her own kitchen with the small chipped mug from the cupboard which was not, this morning, the small chipped mug from Eleanor’s shelf, an unfamiliar small steady warmth that she did not, for some minutes, identify.
She identified it eventually as the feeling of having been chosen — not by Eleanor, although that was a fact she carried with her into the kitchen as well, but by Mira, on the morning after, in a room that was not asking her to account for anything.
She did not, in the moment, say so.
She drank her coffee.
At three in the afternoon, she lay on her bed in her clothes and thought, with the small specific honesty she had been practising since the morning she had written the line in the empty notebook — she makes me feel like a real person — about what she had done and what had been done to her.
She had spent the night.
She had eaten breakfast at the table.
Her foot had touched Eleanor’s foot for twenty minutes.
Her clothes had been folded.
Her butter had been right.
The smallness of the third and fifth items — small physical facts she had not, before that morning, known how to receive — was the thing that made the day’s small unsteadiness settle, in her chest, into something with a shape.
She had been touched at the right amount.
She had been touched at the right amount by a woman who had spent three months noticing, without speaking, what the right amount was.
It was not — she registered, lying on her back in her own room — the same thing as being loved.
It was, however, indistinguishable from it from where she was lying.
She did not, for the moment, see a reason to distinguish.
She closed her eyes.
She slept for two hours, in the middle of the afternoon, in her clothes, in the dim grey light of an Oxford Sunday in winter, with her hand against her own cheek and her own thumb in the small place where Eleanor’s thumb had been.