Chapter 27
TWENTY-SEVEN
The event was at a small press in Bloomsbury.
She had been going because the writer on the second panel was a woman called Petra Halász whose first novel Chloe had read four times in the autumn of her second year at university and whose second novel had been her quiet companion through the winter just past. The first novel she had reread, in February, slowly, at the kitchen table in the mornings, in the new shape of her life.
The second novel was on her bedside table now.
She had read it twice. She would, she suspected, read it a third time.
She had bought the ticket in early April.
She had not, at the time of buying, looked at the rest of the programme.
The first panel was on women’s gothic — Chloe had registered the title only, not the speakers — and she had decided, on the morning of the journey, that she would arrive early and listen to both.
She had not, at any point in the previous fortnight, run the programme of speakers through her head.
She would, on the train down, have a small involuntary thought about whether Eleanor would have liked Halász’s second novel.
The thought would arrive in the same flat informational register it had arrived in on the night of the salon.
It would not, on registration, hurt. She would set it down beside her tea and go back to her book.
She arrived at the venue at twenty past two.
The first panel was in the larger of the press’s two rooms — the kind of long upstairs space lined with chairs and books on every wall, the kind of room small literary events were held in across London by the dozen on any given Saturday afternoon.
She did not, in the foyer, take a programme.
She handed her ticket to a young man at the door with red hair and gave her name. He ticked her off a list.
She went in.
There were perhaps fifty seats. About thirty of them, by twenty-five past, were taken.
The panel — three women, a chair, a small bottle of water in front of each — had not yet started.
Chloe took a seat halfway down the room on the right-hand side, the side nearest the wall.
She set her coat on the chair beside her.
She took her book out. She did not, in the next five minutes, look up from her own page.
The room filled up.
At half past two, the chair — Chloe did not catch her name; she had been a poet at one of the smaller colleges, she was now an editor — tapped a small microphone and said the usual things into it. Welcome. Phones to silent. Please remain seated through the panel.
She introduced the speakers.
Two of the names Chloe knew vaguely.
The third name was Eleanor Vale.
Chloe did not, immediately, look up.
She did not, immediately, lift her eyes from the page she had been pretending to read in the small intervening five minutes. She felt the name land in her chest with the small flat finality of a thing that, by some part of her, had been expected since the moment she had bought the ticket.
She had not been expecting it.
She had not, also, been entirely surprised that it had been on the bill.
Both could be, she registered, true at once.
She lifted her eyes.
Eleanor was in the middle chair on the panel, between the other two speakers, with her hands folded on the table and her reading glasses on.
She was wearing a charcoal jumper Chloe had not previously seen on her.
Her hair was pulled back. Her face, from this distance, was not entirely the face Chloe had been carrying around in her head for ten weeks.
It was, by some measure, older. By some measure, less composed. By some measure, simply — itself.
Eleanor had not, when the chair had said her name, lifted her own eyes from the table in front of her.
She did not, in the next ten seconds, lift them.
Then she did.
Their eyes met across the room.
It was not a long meeting. Chloe afterwards would estimate two seconds, perhaps three.
It was not also a short one. Eleanor’s face, from the panel, did the smallest fractional thing — the same fractional thing it had done in her own hall on the afternoon of the visit, when she had received, accurately, the sentence Chloe had given her about the precision of the apology being itself the next move of the pattern.
The fractional adjustment. The small involuntary closing.
She did not, in any visible way, react further.
She did not stop looking at Chloe for the duration of the two seconds.
Then the chair began to speak again. Eleanor turned, fractionally, toward the chair. The eye contact ended, on her side, with the small formal courtesy of a panellist about to take a question.
Chloe, in the chair, lowered her own eyes to her hands.
She did not, in the moment, register what she was feeling.
She registered, when she made herself check, that she was not crying.
She registered that her breathing had not, in any visible sense, changed.
She registered that the small steady fact of being a woman in a chair in a small upstairs room in Bloomsbury at twenty-eight minutes past two on a Saturday in April was the largest fact in her possession, and that the fact of having just made eye contact with the woman she had spent five months being in love with was, by some other measure she could not have explained, a smaller one.
The panel happened.
Chloe afterwards would not, with any precision, be able to describe most of it.
She would remember, vaguely, that Eleanor spoke twice — that her voice was the voice from the upstairs study on the morning Chloe had registered the news from the academic blog, the slightly thinner version of itself, the one with the small fractional flattening on the consonants.
She would remember that the woman on Eleanor’s left talked too long and that the chair had to interrupt her gently.
She would remember that the woman on Eleanor’s right was very funny, in a way Chloe had not been expecting from a panel on women’s gothic, and that several people in the room laughed.
She would remember that, during one of Eleanor’s answers — Eleanor was talking about the way certain nineteenth-century novelists used windows as a kind of structural argument about who was permitted to look out of a room and who was not — Chloe registered that the sentence Eleanor was building was the sentence she had heard Eleanor begin to build, on a Wednesday afternoon in October, in the small upstairs study, while Chloe had been reading aloud from the second draft of the touch chapter.
The sentence had not, in October, made it to the page.
It had, today, made it to the panel.
Eleanor had finished the sentence.
She had, Chloe registered, finished other things too in the intervening ten weeks.
The work was, after all, the work.
Chloe did not, when she made herself notice it, feel particularly aggrieved that the sentence had finally arrived.
She felt — the small distant honest part of her registering it — the small flat informational fact that the work was, in some measure, the part of Eleanor that had always been going to outlast both of them.
She let the thought go.
She listened to the rest of the panel.
There was applause at four past four.
Chloe did not, immediately, get up. She let the row in front of her empty first. She put her book away.
She put her coat on. She did not, in the next two minutes, look up at the panel table at the front of the room, where Eleanor was — Chloe could see, peripherally — gathering her water bottle and her bag and exchanging a few words with the woman who had been on her right.
She moved with the small slow tail of people drifting out of the room toward the foyer.
The second panel, with Halász, was at five.
The foyer was already filling up with the in-between crowd, the people who had come for both, the people who were heading out for a smoke or a glass of wine in the small bar opposite.
Chloe registered, as she stepped out into the foyer, the small change in air temperature and the small low sound of perhaps a hundred people talking quietly all at once.
She had not, when she had bought the ticket, given much thought to the question of how long she was going to stay between the two panels.
She gave it some thought now.
She stood for a moment by the small fold-out table where the press was selling its books.
She picked up Halász’s second novel — she did not own a copy, since the one on her bedside table at home was Mira’s — and turned it over and read the back.
She put it down. She picked up a slim collection of essays she had not heard of by a writer she also had not heard of.
She read the first page. She liked it. She tucked it under her arm.
“It’s a good one.”
She turned.
A woman she did not know — perhaps Chloe’s age, perhaps a little older, wearing a green coat — smiled at her.
“I’ve been recommending it to everyone.”
“Yes?”
“Yes. The third essay is — well. I won’t say. Read it.”
“All right.”
“Are you in for the second panel.”
“I think so.”
“I’m next to you. I checked the seating before I came up.” She laughed. “Sorry. That sounded — ”
“It’s fine.”
“I’m Saoirse.”
“Chloe.”
They shook hands.
It was — Chloe registered, the small steady part of her keeping records — the second exchange of contact, in the loose sense, that she had had with a friendly stranger in two months.
Saoirse went off to find a glass of wine. Chloe went to the small queue at the till and paid for the book of essays. She put it in her bag with the novel she had brought down from Oxford.
She turned to find her way back to the room.
Eleanor was at the far side of the foyer.
She had her coat on. She was alone. She was — Chloe registered, before she had decided whether to look — making her way toward the door of the building, not the door of the second panel’s room. She was, in other words, leaving. She had spoken on the first panel, and she was now going.
She had not, Chloe registered, stayed for Halász.
She looked tired.
She looked, by some small measure Chloe could see across thirty feet of foyer, the way she had looked sitting on the floor of the upstairs study on the afternoon of the Jess letters — a woman who had said the thing she had come to say and was, now, taking herself home.
Chloe did not, on her side, walk toward the door.
She did not, also, deliberately turn away.
She did, however, look up.
Eleanor, halfway across the foyer, paused.
She had felt the looking the way she had always felt the looking. She turned. Her eyes found Chloe across the foyer in less than a second.
They held.
For perhaps four seconds, neither of them did anything.
Chloe did not smile. She did not, also, frown.
She did not move. Eleanor, on her side, did not raise a hand.
She did not, also, lower her eyes. The two of them held a piece of eye contact across a foyer of perhaps a hundred people who did not know either of them, and the piece of eye contact was, Chloe registered with a small unhurried clarity, the entire conversation.
It said: I see you. I am still in the room. You are still in the room.
It did not say anything else.
Eleanor did, after the four seconds, do one small thing. She tilted her head a fraction of an inch — the smallest possible acknowledgment, a movement Chloe had only ever seen her do, before, when she had registered a thing she did not have a complete sentence for.
Chloe, on her side, did not return the tilt.
She did not, also, refuse it.
She held the eye contact for another half-second.
She let it go.
Eleanor turned. She walked toward the door. She did not, on the way, look back.
Chloe watched her go.
She did not, in any visible way, feel anything in particular.
She felt — the small distant honest part of her, the part that had been keeping records for ten weeks and was, by some measure, now most of her — the small steady absolute clarity that she was going to be all right.
She had been suspecting it. She had been allowing the suspicion. She had not, until this moment, in this foyer, on this Saturday afternoon, been certain.
She was, now.
She was going to be all right.
The chair at the door of the second panel was, by ten to five, calling people in.
Chloe went back into the room.
Saoirse was already in the seat beside hers. She nodded at Chloe. Chloe sat down beside her. She set her bag on her lap. She opened her bag. She took out her phone for a second.
She put it back without unlocking it.
She would, later, text Mira a single short sentence. saw her. I’m fine.
She did not do it now.
Halász came out at five.
Chloe listened.
She did not, for the rest of the afternoon, look back at the door.