Chapter 22
TWENTY-TWO
She let herself in at twenty past four.
Mira was in the kitchen, in her work clothes, with the kettle on. She had, by the look of the post on the counter and the half-eaten apple on the chopping board, been home for about twenty minutes. She turned when Chloe came in.
She looked at her.
She did not, immediately, speak.
“Tea?” she said.
“Yes.”
“Sit down.”
Chloe sat at the kitchen table.
Mira made the tea. She did it slowly. She did not, while making it, ask anything. She brought two mugs to the table. She brought a packet of biscuits from the cupboard. She sat down opposite Chloe.
“All right.”
“Yes.”
Mira drank.
She set her mug down.
She said, “Tell me.”
Chloe told her.
She did not, in the telling, perform any of it.
She told the story as she would have told it to a colleague — flatly, with the small clean linearity of a person reporting an event.
She told her about the box. About the folder.
About the letter. About the second letter.
About the sentences. About Eleanor coming home early from the train.
About Eleanor sitting on the floor of the study.
About leaving the key on the console table in the hall.
She did not, while telling it, cry.
Mira did not, while listening, interrupt.
When Chloe had finished, Mira drank her tea.
She drank it without speaking for almost a minute.
Then she said, “All right.”
“Yes.”
“All right.” She nodded. “Are you — are you able to — ”
“Yes.”
“I — ”
“Don’t say it.”
“I’m not — ”
“I know you’re not. I know. But don’t — don’t even — ”
Mira lifted her hand. A small open-palmed gesture. The kind a person made when she was, by mutual agreement, withdrawing from a sentence she had not been going to finish anyway.
“All right,” she said.
Chloe drank her tea.
Her hands were, she registered, no longer steady. The steadiness she had walked home with had been a kind of post-event lull. The hand on the mug, now, was shaking very slightly.
“Chloe.”
“Yes.”
“Do you love her.”
Chloe did not, immediately, answer.
She set the mug down. She put both hands on the table. She looked at the small chip in the wood at the edge — the chip Mira had made, a year ago, with a knife she had been using to open a parcel.
“Yes.”
Mira nodded. Did not say anything.
“Is that going to be enough.”
“No.”
“Are you sure.”
“Yes.”
“Are you certain.”
“Mira.”
“I am — I’m sorry. I’m asking because I — because I don’t want to be the one — ”
“I’m certain.”
Mira looked at her.
Mira’s face — Chloe registered, in the small distant clean part of her that was still keeping accurate records — did the thing it had done across the table on the morning after the dam, which was that it received, without performing, a piece of information that was both a relief and a grief, and held both without showing the holding.
“All right,” Mira said.
“All right.”
“Are you going to go back.”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Honestly.”
“Honestly, I don’t know yet.”
Mira drank her tea.
“That’s — ” she said. “That’s an honest answer.”
“Yes.”
“It is not necessarily — ”
“I know.”
Mira nodded again. The biscuit she had been holding she now, finally, opened. She bit it. She offered the packet across the table. Chloe took one. She did not, for a long minute, eat it.
She held it.
Then she put it down on the table beside her mug and put her face in her hands.
She did not, even then, cry.
“I have a — ” Mira said, after some time. “I have a thing I have been wanting to say to you.”
“Yes.”
“I am going to say it once. Then I am not going to say it again.”
“Yes.”
“You are — you are not the person you were three months ago.”
Chloe did not, immediately, lift her face out of her hands.
“I’m not saying that as a — as a criticism.
I’m saying it as an observation. You have — when you came in that first night, after the interview, you were — I had not seen you look like that since — I don’t know.
University, maybe. Like someone had finally let you in on a thing.
And I have, since then, watched you become — increasingly — ”
She paused.
“Smaller.”
Chloe lifted her face.
“I’m not saying she made you smaller. I don’t — I don’t know whether she did or you did.
I am saying that the woman sitting at this table tonight, telling me about the letters, with no — no anger, no — none of the things you should be having — is not the woman who came in here, in the storm, two months ago, and defended a stranger to her ex-boyfriend in a wine bar.
The woman who came in here in the storm was — was angry.
She didn’t know yet what she was angry about.
She was angry. And the woman at this table tonight is, instead, — accurate. ”
“Mira — ”
“I’m almost done.”
“Yes.”
“Accuracy is — accuracy is a very good thing for a journalist. It is not, necessarily, a very good thing for a young woman who has just been — ” She stopped. “Who has just been used as a category.”
Chloe did not, in the moment, answer.
“I think you should — ” Mira said. “I think you should let yourself be angry. Not at her. At — at whatever needs it. At — at the fact that, whatever else, this — this is the kind of thing one is, eventually, in one’s life, going to be angry about.
And I would rather you were angry now than at thirty-five with someone else. ”
Chloe nodded.
She did not, after that, speak for some time.
She slept badly.
She did not, however, sleep the way she had slept on the night of the Monday in October, when she had told herself she was going to be less and had slept oddly well as a result.
She slept the other way. She slept thinly.
She slept with her mind moving across the surface of the day, picking at the letters, picking at the line about admiration and love, picking at Eleanor sitting on the floor against her own desk in her own coat.
She woke at twenty past three in the morning.
She lay in the dark for some time and did not, by any active effort, try to go back to sleep.
She got up. She did not turn on the overhead light. She went into the kitchen. She made herself a glass of water. She drank it standing at the sink.
On the kitchen table, where she had left it the night before, was the biscuit.
She had not, in the end, eaten it.
She picked it up. She turned it over. She put it back down.
She went back to bed at four.
She did not, this time, fall asleep immediately.
She let herself, for the first time since walking out of the door of the townhouse, think about Eleanor.
She let herself think about Eleanor sitting on the floor.
She let herself think about Eleanor in the doorway with her coat still on and her cheeks cold from the train.
She let herself think about Eleanor’s thumb against her cheekbone on the night of the small kiss.
She let herself think about Eleanor coming undone quietly on the rug in the firelight.
She let herself think about Eleanor’s hand at the small of her back, the night of the first cool day, the hand placed there to keep inventory of where Chloe was in the bed.
She let herself think about all of it in one continuous unbroken minute.
At the end of the minute, she registered a small fact she had not, before that moment, retrieved.
She had heard the name Marian once before.
In October. Through the wall of the kitchen, on the Saturday Eleanor’s phone had buzzed at the sink — the voicemail prompt had played the caller’s name out loud, very briefly, and Chloe had not, at the time, attached the syllables to anything.
She had filed the name the way one filed information one had no use for.
She retrieved it now, in the dark at twenty past four in the morning, with the small steady accuracy of a person doing the work of joining up the pieces of a thing she had been keeping, all along, on separate shelves.
She did not know who Marian was.
She had not, in the end, asked.
She suspected she was never going to know. She suspected, also, that the not-knowing was, by some measure, part of what the woman in the upstairs study against her own desk on the afternoon of the Jess letters had been — for the entirety of the time she had been in love with her — protecting.
Chloe did not, at that, cry.
She did, however, register the smallness of her own access. She had not been the only woman in the house. She had not, also, been the only woman whose name Eleanor had been keeping from her.
She did not, at any point in the minute, cry.
At the end of the minute, she discovered — clearly, with no possibility of mistaking it — that Mira had been right. She was, this morning, not angry. She was, this morning, accurate.
The accuracy was the thing she was going to have to give up before she could be anything else.
She did not, lying in the dark at twenty past four, know how to give up the accuracy.
She thought it was, perhaps, going to take some time.
She closed her eyes.
She slept until ten.