Chapter 19
NINETEEN
She let herself in at twenty past six.
She had told Eleanor she would come at six.
She had been on the bus at five forty and the bus had been late.
She did not, at the gate, message to apologise.
She did not, on the steps, message either.
She had a key now. The key had been given to her three days earlier, in the kitchen, with the casual half-sentence that had accompanied it: there.
So you don’t have to wait. The casualness had been the gift inside the gift.
She used it.
She turned the latch. She pushed the door open. She closed it behind her with the small careful motion of a person who had been letting herself into someone else’s home for less than a week.
The hall light was on.
Eleanor’s voice was in the sitting room.
Chloe set her bag down. She took off her coat.
She hung it on the second hook from the left.
She did this without looking down the hall toward the sitting room, because she could hear, from the doorway, that the voice was on the phone, and that the voice was not the voice Eleanor used for any caller she would have wanted Chloe to hear.
It was the low voice. The professional one. The one that flattened on certain consonants in the way Eleanor’s ordinary voice did not.
She crossed the hall slowly.
She did not, when she reached the door of the sitting room, go in. She paused at the threshold.
Eleanor was at the window with her back to the door.
She had the cordless landline against her left ear. Her right hand was on the curtain — not pulling it, not adjusting it, only resting on it, the kind of hand a person used when it had nowhere else to be.
“Yes,” she said. “No. I understand.”
She did not, this morning, turn her head.
Chloe stood in the doorway for the count of five and Eleanor did not, in any way that could be attributed to having sensed she had come home, register her presence.
“No,” Eleanor said. “I am aware. I will write. I — yes.”
She was quiet for a while.
Then she said, “Marian. I cannot do this tonight.”
Chloe registered the name without meaning to.
She had not, until this moment, heard the name in this house.
The name was not — she registered, in the second after registering it — a name she had encountered in any of the boxes.
Eleanor did not use the name as one used a name of someone one had known for a few years.
She used it as one used a name one had been saying for thirty.
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” Eleanor said. “I — yes. Yes. I’m sorry.”
She set the receiver down.
She did not, immediately, turn.
Her hand stayed on the curtain.
After a long beat she lifted her head, registered Chloe in the doorway with the small fractional re-composure of a woman who had not been making herself ready to be looked at, and said, “You’re here.”
“Yes.”
“Sorry. I lost track.”
“It’s — ”
“Come in.”
She poured wine.
She did this without asking. She poured Chloe a glass.
She did not pour herself one. The bottle had been opened, Chloe registered, before she had arrived — possibly some time before.
There was, beside the bottle on the low table, a tumbler with a finger of something darker in it that she had not seen Eleanor drink before.
Eleanor sat down in her usual chair.
She did not sit on the sofa.
She did not, also, gesture Chloe toward the sofa.
She did not, in any way that could be attributed to choice or to its absence, look at Chloe the way she had been looking at Chloe for the last fortnight.
The looking was not cool, exactly. It was — Chloe would have said, if she had been asked to articulate it in a room she was not currently in — withheld.
The looking was sitting somewhere behind Eleanor’s eyes, deciding whether to come out.
“How was your day,” Chloe said.
“It was — it was a day.”
“All right.”
Eleanor drank from the tumbler.
She set it down. She picked it up again. She set it down.
“Was that — was that someone — ”
“It was an old colleague. Nothing you need to worry about.”
“I’m not worrying.”
“No. I — I know.”
Chloe did not, in the moment, know how to answer that. She drank from her own glass. The wine was, she registered with a small distant clarity, the same red they had drunk on the night of the kiss. The bottle had been left out — uncorked, breathing — but not for her.
She did not ask whether it had been for someone else.
She also did not, when the small thought arrived in the back of her mind, immediately push it away.
Eleanor did not, the whole evening, recover.
She tried. She made, around eight, an effort that Chloe registered as an effort — she got up, made the small linguistic noise of beginning a different conversation, and asked Chloe what she had been reading.
Chloe told her. Eleanor listened, and the listening was a fraction off — the small fractional off that Chloe had been calibrated, for three months now, to detect at a distance of feet.
Eleanor’s eyes were on her face but Eleanor was not entirely in the room.
Chloe answered the question.
She answered it for two minutes and then, when she realised she was, found she had run out of the small social fuel one needed to keep talking to a person who was elsewhere.
She stopped.
Eleanor said, “Sorry.”
“It’s — ”
“No. It’s — it isn’t.”
Chloe set down her glass.
Eleanor got up.
She crossed the room. She came to the chair Chloe was sitting in. She did not, this time, ask. She put her hand on Chloe’s jaw the way she had done in the same chair on the night of the small kiss, and tilted Chloe’s face up, and kissed her.
The kiss was not the small kiss.
The kiss was a kiss that had something underneath it Chloe had not previously been on the receiving end of from this woman.
She let it happen. She kept her own hand on her lap for the first two seconds and then put it against the front of Eleanor’s cardigan. The wool was rough. Eleanor’s hand on her jaw was firmer than it had ever been.
Eleanor pulled back.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I — I’m sorry. I am not — I don’t want to talk tonight.”
“All right.”
“I want you.”
Chloe heard it.
She heard, also, what was underneath it.
She did not, in the moment, allow herself to put a word to the underneath.
She said, “All right.”
Afterwards.
It was not a long afterwards. They had not gone upstairs.
They had not, in any sense, gone anywhere.
The sofa, the rug, the half hour that had unfolded with the small efficient heat of two people whose bodies now knew each other — Chloe afterwards would have been able to describe each minute of it, but the describing would have been a description of motion rather than of any of the things the motion had previously been about.
Eleanor had brought her, with the precision Chloe had now learned to expect, exactly to where she had brought her on the night of the rug, and not the night of the bed.
Eleanor had not, this time, let Chloe reciprocate.
When Chloe had moved to, Eleanor’s hand had caught her wrist — not hard, only firm, the small absolute reduction of an option — and Eleanor had said, against her temple, “Not tonight.”
And then, two seconds later, “Sorry. Not tonight.”
And had got up.
She had gone to her study. She had not, on the way past, said anything else.
Chloe had sat on the sofa with her jumper around her shoulders and her jeans unbuttoned and her own hand against her own face, and registered — clearly, with no possibility of mistaking it — that her body had been used as a stopgap.
The word, when it arrived in her head, was not a word she had previously used about anything Eleanor had done.
It sat in her chest for a while before she moved.
She redressed.
She did not, on the way through the hall, take her coat. She took, instead, two glasses of water from the kitchen — one for her, one not for her — and went up the stairs.
Eleanor’s study, on the first floor, had the light on under the door.
Chloe knocked.
“I’m sorry,” Eleanor said. “I need an hour.”
“All right.”
“There’s — the spare room is the second on the left. The bed is — it’s made up. I think.”
“All right.”
She stood at the closed door for another second, in case there was anything else Eleanor wished to add.
There was not. She left the second glass of water on the small table on the landing.
She went into Eleanor’s bedroom, not the spare one.
She got into Eleanor’s bed. She did not, for some time, turn out the light.
Eleanor did not come up for nearly two hours.
When she finally did, she undressed in the dark and got into the bed with her back to Chloe.
Her hand came around, after a while, and found the small of Chloe’s back, and rested there.
Chloe registered the hand without comment.
She knew, with the absolute small clarity she had been refusing to use about anything in this house, that the hand was not affection.
The hand was a hand placed there by a woman keeping inventory of where Chloe was in the bed.
She did not sleep for a long time.
She slept eventually. She slept thinly. She dreamed, at some point in the middle of the night, that she had been reading aloud in a room she did not recognise, with a woman in the chair opposite who was not Eleanor but who was wearing Eleanor’s cardigan, and that the woman had at some point in the reading become Eleanor, and that the reading had at some point in the becoming stopped meaning anything either of them had been able to follow.
She woke at five.
Eleanor was already up.
Chloe could hear her, very faintly, in the kitchen downstairs.