Chapter 24
TWENTY-FOUR
She wrote to Eleanor on the Wednesday after the letter.
Not by letter. Not in green ink on cream paper. By text, in the small flat blue room of the messaging app, with her thumbs, sitting at her desk at twenty past two in the afternoon with a cup of tea getting cold beside her.
I would like to come and collect my things. Friday, four o’clock, if that works.
She read it before sending. She did not, in the reading, soften it. She did not add a please. She did not add an x. She did not, also, sign it.
She sent it.
Eleanor replied within the hour.
Yes. I will be in.
That was the message.
Chloe put her phone down.
She had thought — sitting at her desk in the small grey afternoon, with the tea cooling, with the letter still inside the book on the shelf, with the new notebook closed on the desk and the slim black one untouched beside it — that she would feel something specific on receipt of the reply. Relief. Dread. Anticipation. Anything.
She felt, instead, the small flat quietness of a thing being arranged.
She made another tea.
She got on with her afternoon.
On Friday she put on a jumper that was not the cream one.
It was a different jumper — older, navy, the kind of jumper she had bought in second year and worn through her undergraduate degree and not, in the previous nine months, often put on.
She put on jeans she had not worn to the townhouse.
She put on her boots. She did not, in the small ten-minute negotiation with the mirror, do her hair the way she had been doing it.
She did not, also, do it in a way that pointedly was not the way she had been doing it.
She did it the way she had done it in her second year of university, which was to say flatly, and quickly, and without thinking about whose attention it was going to be received under.
Mira was on shift.
Chloe left the flat at three.
She took the bus.
She had thought she would walk. The walk would have been the kind of walk that gave a person time to compose a script.
She had decided, on Wednesday afternoon, that she did not want a script.
The bus was the answer to that decision.
The bus was twenty-five minutes. It was not enough time to write a sentence she would, by the time she had crossed Magdalen Bridge, not have already revised.
She arrived at three fifty-five.
She did not, this time, go through the gate at five to.
She stood across the road for a minute. She watched the house.
The light in the downstairs sitting room was on.
The light in the kitchen was on. The window of the upstairs study, which Chloe had not previously identified from the street as the window of Eleanor’s study, was dark.
At four exactly, she crossed the road.
She did not, this time, use the key. The key was, in any case, no longer hers. She went up the three stone steps. She knocked.
The door opened.
Eleanor was on the other side of it.
She had on the soft grey jumper she had been wearing on the night of the small kiss.
Her hair was loose. Her feet, Chloe registered, were in shoes.
The shoes were the kind one wore to be seen in.
The wearing of shoes inside, in this house, by this woman — Chloe registered, with a small distant cold accuracy — meant she had not, when Chloe arrived, been intending to be casual.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“Come in.”
“No.”
Eleanor stopped. Her hand was on the door.
“No,” Chloe said, more quietly. “I won’t come in. I’d like to talk in the hall.”
Eleanor did not, for a long beat, react.
Then she said, “All right.”
She stepped back. She made room for Chloe to step over the threshold. She did not, this time, take her coat.
The hall was the hall.
The same coat hook. The same console table. The same small lamp on it, switched on against the early dark. Chloe registered each fact without dwelling on any of them.
Eleanor closed the door behind her.
She stood with her back to it. Her hands were not, today, in any of the small composed positions Chloe had been on the receiving end of for four months.
They were loose at her sides. She did not, also, put one of them on the door handle.
She simply stood, in her own hall, in her own jumper, and waited for Chloe to speak.
Chloe took a breath.
She had not — she registered, in the half-second between the inhale and the first sentence — rehearsed any of this on the bus.
She found, when she began to speak, that it did not matter.
“I read your letter,” she said.
“Yes.”
“It was — ” She paused. “It was honest. I think.”
“I tried.”
“I — I appreciate that you didn’t ask me to come back.”
Eleanor nodded. Did not, also, speak.
“I haven’t come back today to come back. I’ve come to collect my things. There is a — there’s a Carson on the desk in the study, and a — a notebook of mine in the second drawer of the desk, and a — there are two scarves in the box on the floor under the coat hooks. That’s all.”
“Yes.”
“Will you — would you let me go up and get them.”
“Yes.”
She did not, also, offer to come up with her.
Chloe went up the stairs alone.
The study was the study. The boxes were as she had left them.
The mug she had used the last time she had been in the room was still on the corner of the desk, no longer washed — Eleanor had not, this week, been in.
The letter Chloe had been reading on Monday afternoon, three weeks ago, was face-down on the blotter where she had left it on the Monday she had not returned.
She did not, in the moment, allow herself to read the letter.
She picked up the Carson. She opened the second drawer of the desk. She found the small spiral notebook she had kept her working notes in for four months. She closed the drawer. She crossed to the door. She went down the stairs. The two scarves she gathered from the small storage box in the hall.
Eleanor was still where Chloe had left her. Back against the front door. Hands at her sides. She had not, in the intervening five minutes, moved.
Chloe set the Carson and the notebook into the inside pocket of her coat.
She put the scarves over her arm.
She did not, in the moment, do anything else with her hands.
She looked at Eleanor.
“Eleanor.”
“Yes.”
“I’m not — I’m not going to say everything I — I had been thinking I might say.”
“All right.”
“I am going to say one thing.”
“Yes.”
Chloe took a breath. She held it. She let it out.
“You — you gave me the same sentences,” she said.
“The ones in the letters. You knew you were doing it. You knew, on the night by the fire, when you said you didn’t allow yourself to want things, that you had said that to her also.
You knew, on the night of — of the bookshelf, that you were using me to not feel something, because you have used other women to not feel things for thirty years. ”
Eleanor did not, while she was speaking, look away.
“The thing I — I want you to hear — ” Chloe said. She paused. She found her voice again. “The thing I want you to hear is that — that you knowing it, and admitting it, and writing me a — a precise honest letter about it — is not the same thing as you having stopped. You haven’t stopped.”
“No,” Eleanor said.
“And — and the precision of the letter is — is also a thing you did to her. You did the same exact apology. In some version. After.”
Eleanor’s face did the smallest thing it had done all afternoon. A fractional adjustment. A small involuntary closing.
“Yes,” she said.
“I’m not — Eleanor — I’m not telling you any of this so that you will — so that you will do something with it. I’m telling you because I — because I think someone should, finally, have said it to you out loud.”
“Yes.”
“And — I am the one — I am the one who is in a position to say it, this year.”
She did not finish that sentence the way she had been afraid she might. She did not say because I am the one you did it to. She did not need to. The sentence was, in Eleanor’s face, already received.
Eleanor did not, for a long moment, speak.
She did not, also, look at the floor. She kept her eyes on Chloe.
There was no performance in the looking.
There was no plea in it. There was only — Chloe registered, the small private observational part of her that was now permanently sharpened — the steady face of a woman receiving, accurately, a thing that had been said to her.
“Thank you,” Eleanor said.
Chloe nodded.
Eleanor said, after a beat, “I would do it differently if I knew how.”
Chloe heard it.
She heard, also, that the sentence was true.
She heard, also, that the truth of the sentence was no longer her problem.
She said, quietly, “That is the saddest sentence you have ever said to me.”
Eleanor’s face did the smallest fractional adjustment again. The same one.
She did not, however, contradict her.
“Yes,” she said.
Chloe shifted the scarves on her arm.
She did not, in the moment, know whether to do anything else.
Eleanor said, after a second, “Chloe.”
“Yes.”
“Will you — ” She stopped. She did not finish. She tried again. “Will you be all right.”
Chloe took a long beat.
She did not, immediately, answer.
She had, on the bus, considered — without admitting that she was considering — what she might say at this exact point, if Eleanor were to ask her this exact question.
She had considered no. She had considered yes. She had considered eventually. She had considered I don’t know yet. She had considered the small clean accurate sentence that, sitting in the chair on the morning after the storm, she had been incapable of giving Theo without performing it.
She gave Eleanor — Chloe registered, deciding it as she opened her mouth — the same word she had given Theo.
“Eventually,” she said.
Eleanor nodded.
“Yes,” she said. “All right.”
Eleanor did not, this time, help her with her coat.
There was no coat to help her with. Chloe had not taken it off. Eleanor opened the door. She held it open. Chloe stepped past her, onto the threshold.
She did not kiss her.
Eleanor did not kiss her.
They did not, also, touch.
Chloe paused on the top step. She did not turn.
“Eleanor.”
“Yes.”
“Don’t — ” She found, when she went looking for the next part of the sentence, that the next part of the sentence was a sentence she did not, in the end, need to give. She altered it.
“Take care of yourself.”
Eleanor said, quietly, “Yes.”
Chloe went down the steps.
She walked.
She did not, this time, walk through the gate and stand at the lamppost on the other side of the road. She did not, this time, look back at the upstairs window. She did not, this time, count the streets.
She walked down Banbury Road in the early dark of a Friday in February with the Carson and the notebook inside her coat and the two scarves over her arm and the small clear distant honest knowledge — sitting now behind her sternum, where the question had been at midnight nearly five months ago — that the conversation she had just had had been the largest of her life.
She did not, on the walk, allow herself to cry.
She did not, on the bus, allow herself to cry.
She got home at twenty past six.
Mira was in the kitchen.
Mira looked at her.
Mira said, “All right?”
Chloe said, “Eventually.”
She set the scarves on the table.
She went into her room.
She closed the door behind her quietly.
She got into her bed in her coat and her boots and lay on her side and she did, then, finally, cry.
She cried for some time.
When she had finished she did not, for some minutes, get up.
She lay in the small grey light from the streetlamp outside the window with her face wet and her hands still in her coat pockets and she felt — for the first time in five months — the small unfamiliar fact of being, in her own body, alone.
It was not, she discovered, the worst thing in the world.
It was, in fact, only itself.