Chapter 26
TWENTY-SIX
“Saturday,” Mira said. “Come with me.”
“Where.”
“Penny’s friend. Penny from work. She does these — these things, in her flat, on Saturdays. A — kind of salon, I think she calls it, although the word is — ”
“Yes.”
“People bring something. Writing. A bit of a — ”
“No.”
“Chloe — ”
“No, Mira.”
“I’m going. I would like you to come.”
“I don’t want to read anything aloud to a roomful of — ”
“No one is going to ask you to read anything. There are eight people. You can drink white wine and listen to other people read for two hours and then we will, both of us, walk home through the city. The end. That is the offer.”
Chloe looked at her.
“I’m going,” Mira said. “I would like, today, to not go on my own.”
“All right.”
“Yes?”
“Yes.”
It was, Chloe registered, the first time in five months that she had said yes to a plan she had not, in the moment of saying yes, also been trying to find a reason to say no to.
Mira got up. She put her mug in the sink. She kissed the top of Chloe’s head on the way past.
Chloe did not, when she had left, get up immediately.
She sat at the table for a minute.
The flat was on Iffley Road.
Penny’s friend was called Beatrix. She was perhaps fifty, very small, with reading glasses pushed into her hair the way Eleanor had used to push them, and a wide, easy mouth that had nothing to do with Eleanor.
The flat was the upper floor of a Victorian house — three large rooms, books on every wall, a kitchen with a chequered floor, a sitting room with two sofas and a long low coffee table set out with white wine and tumblers and small plates of olives and bread.
There were eight people, as Mira had said.
They were a mix Chloe had not, in five months, been in a room of.
Two graduate students in their late twenties.
A woman in her sixties who had retired from a teaching job and was now writing memoir.
A man called Joseph who had brought in something he had translated from the Greek.
Penny, in a green dress, with her shoes off.
Beatrix. Mira. And, sitting on the arm of the second sofa with a glass of white in her hand, a woman Chloe had not before seen.
She was perhaps Chloe’s age, perhaps a year younger.
She was dark-haired, slightly tall, dressed in jeans and a jumper that was not, Chloe registered, performed.
Beatrix introduced her as Anna.
“She lives in the basement,” Beatrix said. “She comes up for these. She is, very technically, a poet.”
“Very technically,” Anna said.
She smiled at Chloe across the room.
Her smile was nothing in particular — it was not Eleanor’s smile, it was not the not-smile, it was not Ines’s diagonal performance. It was the smile of a person who had not, in this room, taken anything yet.
Chloe smiled back.
She had not been intending to enjoy the evening.
She enjoyed the evening.
She did not, in any of the readings, find the recursive small horror she had been half-braced for.
The Greek translation was good. The memoir extract was, in its way, brave.
One of the graduate students read a short story Chloe thought slightly overworked and then, immediately after, a small poem of her own that Chloe thought was extraordinary, and she said so — out loud, quietly, in the small silence after the poem — and the student turned and looked at her with the small ordinary pleasure of having been heard correctly by a stranger.
Chloe drank one and a half glasses of white wine.
She did not, in the room, talk about her own writing.
She did, however, listen.
She was — she registered, around the third reading — a person in a room of women listening to other women, which was a kind of room she had not, in the four months at the townhouse, been in.
The room at the townhouse had been a room of two.
The room at the wine bar with Theo had been a room of one woman and one man.
The kitchen on Saturday mornings with Mira had been a room of two.
This was, she registered, the first room she had been in for a long time in which she was one woman in a room of several.
It was, she discovered, restful.
Anna read last.
She read three short poems. They were quiet, observational, not performed.
They were about, by Chloe’s estimate as they were going past, ordinary things — a kitchen, a fox in a garden, a phone call to a mother.
The third poem ended on a line Chloe found herself wanting to repeat to herself silently to confirm she had heard correctly.
There was a small pause when she had finished.
Then Beatrix said, “All right. White wine. Olives. We are done with the formal portion.”
Anna got off the arm of the sofa. She came across the room. She came, Chloe registered, in Chloe’s direction, although the direction could also have been the direction of the kitchen, which was on the same side of the room as Chloe.
She paused at the small table beside the sofa where Chloe was sitting.
“I’m getting another glass,” she said. “Can I get you one.”
“Yes, please.”
“White.”
“Please.”
Anna went.
Anna came back two minutes later with two glasses. She sat down on the sofa beside Chloe — not close, with a comfortable foot of cushion between them.
She handed across the glass.
“Thank you.”
“You’re — ”
“Chloe. Yes.”
“Anna. Yes.”
She drank.
“Your last line,” Chloe said. “About the — the phone call. The part where she — ”
“Did it land.”
“It did.”
“Good. I was nervous about that one.”
“It earned it.”
Anna looked at her properly for the first time since they had sat down.
“Thank you. That’s — that’s actually quite a useful thing to hear.”
“Yes.”
“Penny said — Penny mentioned that you write.”
“I — I have. I — yes. I haven’t been — recently — ”
“No.”
“I’m starting again, I think.”
“Good.”
Anna did not, after that, press her.
She drank her wine. She asked, instead, about Chloe’s work.
Chloe told her, briefly, about the freelance editing and the admin job.
Anna did not perform interest. She listened.
She asked one follow-up question. She talked, in turn, about her own work — she was a freelance copywriter, she lived in the basement to keep her rent low, she was very technically a poet because, as she said, she had had three poems published in two small magazines and was therefore obliged, by law, to call herself a poet.
Chloe laughed.
It was, she registered, the first easy laugh she had had with a stranger in five months.
She did not, when Anna laughed too, register the laugh as a verdict. She registered it as a laugh.
They talked for nearly an hour.
Mira drifted in and out of the conversation — Chloe registered, on the periphery, that Mira was deliberately not sitting down beside them. The kindness was unannounced. She came past, twice, with refilled drinks. She set Chloe’s glass down. She did not look at Anna pointedly.
Around ten, people began to leave.
Penny was at the door, putting on her coat. Beatrix was offering people the last of a second bottle no one needed. Anna looked at her watch.
“I should — ”
“Yes.”
“It was nice to meet you.”
“Yes.”
She paused.
“Would it — would you give me your number.”
Chloe did not, for a beat, answer.
She heard the question land in the small distant honest part of her that had been keeping inventory for nine weeks now. The part was, Chloe registered, the part that had been waiting all evening to see what she would do with this exact moment.
“Yes,” she said.
Anna took out her phone.
Chloe gave the number.
Anna typed it in. She read it back. She got it right. She typed Chloe’s name beside it. She locked the phone and put it back in her pocket.
“I’ll text you.”
“Yes.”
“Maybe — coffee. Or something. If you’d — ”
“Yes.”
“All right.”
She did not, on her way out, do anything dramatic. She put on her coat. She said goodnight to Beatrix. She said goodnight to Mira. She nodded at Chloe across the room.
Chloe nodded back.
They walked home through the city.
It was not late. The streets were busy. Students were coming out of pubs. The lights along Cowley Road were the small warm yellow lights of a Saturday in March, the first warmth that did not, this year, feel like a performance.
Mira did not, for the first ten minutes, ask anything.
Then she said, “She seemed nice.”
“She did.”
“Did you — ”
“I gave her my number.”
Mira looked at her sideways.
“Good.”
“I haven’t — I’m not — ”
“I’m not asking you to be.”
“Right.”
They walked.
“Mira.”
“Yes.”
“I’m glad I came.”
Mira put her arm through Chloe’s. It was, Chloe registered, the first time they had walked arm in arm since perhaps the summer.
“I know,” Mira said.
They walked the rest of the way home like that.
Chloe went to bed at midnight.
She did not, when she got into bed, immediately think about Anna.
She thought about Anna intermittently across the next twenty minutes, the way one thought about a small interesting fact one was not yet sure what to do with.
She did not, in particular, hope that Anna would text.
She did not, also, hope she wouldn’t. The exchange of the number had been, she registered, the largest thing that had happened in five months and also, by some other measure, nothing — a small ordinary fact between two adults who had liked each other for an hour in a flat with white wine.
She closed her eyes.
She did, around five past midnight, realise something.
She had not, all evening, thought about Eleanor.
She had not — when she had walked into the flat, when she had been introduced to Beatrix, when she had listened to the readings, when Anna had read, when Anna had sat down beside her, when Anna had asked for her number — thought about Eleanor.
She had thought about Eleanor on the walk home for a few seconds, briefly, around Magdalen Bridge. The thought had arrived, without warmth and without anger, as a small flat informational fact: this evening, she had registered, would have been an evening Eleanor would have liked very much.
The thought had not, on registration, hurt.
It had been only itself.
Chloe opened her eyes. She looked at her own ceiling for a long beat in the small grey light from the streetlamp outside.
She closed her eyes again.
She slept.