CHAPTER 2
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The great room is glass on two sides, and after dark the glass quits being a window. It hands the room back to you instead of the orchard.
So there are two of everything tonight. One of me, folded into the chair nearest the hearth. One of Julian, perched on the arm of the sofa with his ankles crossed. One fire, burning away out over the black lawn where there is no fire.
Two fires, if you count properly. Only one of them is doing any work.
The inside of my wrist is still pink. I wrote a number there this morning in ballpoint and washed it off, then wrote it again, then washed it off again. The ink goes easily. It's the scrubbing that stays.
Nora went home at six, the way she does on Tuesdays, calling goodnight from the boot room without waiting for an answer. Since then the house has held three of us. Julian, me, and the one that isn't a person.
He's had a book open on his knee for an hour. Every so often a page turns, faster than anyone could have read it.
“The pickers want to start the west rows at the end of the week,” he says.
“That's early, isn't it? The west rows are always the last to come in.”
“That's exactly what I told him, more or less in those words. He informed me the fruit disagrees with me.”
“Then let him start, and let him blame the fruit.”
“Which is very nearly what I said.” He puts the book face-down on the cushion. “You're better at him than I am. He enjoys being told he's right by somebody who could actually go up the ladder and check.”
This is the part nobody warns you about, in a marriage that's gone strange. He's good company. He was good company the day I met him and he's good company tonight, and if he were awful for even an hour a week it would all be so much simpler.
“You're very quiet tonight, even for you,” Julian says.
“I'm watching the fire.”
“Any good? I'd like a proper review, mind. Stars out of five.”
“A slow start, I'd say.” A log drops half an inch and throws sparks. “But the middle's very strong.”
He laughs, and it's the real one — short, low, surprised out of him. Six years and I can still tell that laugh from the one he keeps for donors.
Then he's up, and there's a folder in his hand.
Soft gray, and the corners have gone round the way paper does when it's ridden in a bag for weeks. He sets it on the low table and squares it to the edge, because he squares everything to the edge, and sits forward with his elbows on his knees.
“I've brought you something extremely dull,” he says. “You're allowed to be cross with me.”
“Then you'd better tell me what it is.”
“It's the insurance, and the boring half of the medical, and about four inches of nothing whatsoever.” He turns the folder so it faces me. “Sign the flagged ones and I'll take it away, so you don't have to worry about the paperwork.”
He offers the pen handle-first, the way you'd hand somebody a knife.
It's a good pen, heavy in the barrel, and it's warm, which means it's been in his pocket all evening. That's the detail I'll come back to later and wish I'd sat with longer.
Page one I read properly. Continuation of cover, schedule of benefits, a table of dates in a column, my own name spelled right in three places.
The insurers have wanted this since the crash. That much is true, and I know it's true, because a woman rang about it in the hospital and I couldn't hold the phone steady enough to answer her. It has been sitting somewhere ever since, growing, the way unanswered things do.
“Do I need to read all of it?”
“Heavens, no. I've read all of it. That's why my evening's gone.” He rubs his eyes with the back of one wrist, and for a second he looks forty-one instead of expensive. “Read what you want. Ignore what you want. Honestly, Evelyn, if you'd rather do it in the morning, do it in the morning.”
Which is the sentence that makes me do it now.
Page two I read less properly, because something happens to my eyes after nine. The letters keep their shapes and stop keeping their meanings. The paragraph arrives as a gray field with a colored flag stuck to the side of it.
The tiredness comes at nine every night. It has come at nine every night for months, and tonight is the first night it has ever occurred to me that nine is a very exact hour for a body to keep.
At the foot of the third page there's a line of type so small it's more a texture than a sentence. One word in it stands up out of the gray.
Conservator.
Then the flag is under my thumb and Julian is saying something about the excess on the outbuildings, and the word goes back down into the texture with the rest.
I sign.
I've put my name on drawings that turned into footbridges with schoolchildren running over them. A signature has never frightened me. You check the numbers, you satisfy yourself the load has somewhere to go, and then you sign, and then the thing stands up for forty years.
I don't check the numbers.
Four flags. My name comes out fine on the first two and gets loose on the third, the letters leaning, and I press harder on the fourth to make up for it, which is not how handwriting works.
There's a fifth flag near the back. My hand goes for it and Julian closes the folder over my fingers, gently, like a book he doesn't want me to lose my place in.
“That one's mine, I'm afraid,” he says. “I'm not going to trick you into doing my homework. I've done quite enough of yours over the years.”
So he takes the folder back and I keep the pen, turning it over, and it's a small warm weight and I have no idea what I've just agreed to.
I want to say that plainly, because tomorrow I won't be able to.
Tomorrow, if somebody asks me what was in those pages, I'll be able to tell them the paper was cream and the flags were orange.
“Right, then. That's the dull half of the evening behind us,” he says. “Shall I build that up? It's dropping.”
“The room's already too warm for me.”
He stops with the poker in his hand and looks at me over his shoulder, and there's something in his face that is not strategy.
“You've said that in September for six years,” he says, “and you've never once meant it.”
And he's right. He is exactly, unfairly, delightedly right, and for the length of one log settling we are two people in a warm room who know each other, and I laugh, and he builds the fire up anyway because he always does.
Our first autumn here I stood in this room with a folder of my own and told him the glazing would bleed heat like an open door, and he said he'd rather be cold and be able to see the orchard, and I said that was a very costly way to look at apples.
We had that argument every year until it stopped being an argument and turned into a joke, and then it stopped being a joke and turned into this, which is neither, and which I'd have called happiness if anybody had asked me this morning.
He crouches at the hearth. The knees of his trousers don't crease. He turns a log a quarter of a turn, finds the draw, sets the poker back on its hook without a sound.
Then, still at the fire, not looking at me:
“You weren't yourself that week. Nobody would have been.”
The heat comes up off the logs in a slow push. My hands stay where they are, one on the pen, one flat on my knee.
I have never mentioned a week.
I haven't said it to him, and I haven't said it to anybody else either. There is no week in anything I have said aloud in this house, because there is no week in anything I have.
I keep my face where it is. It isn't difficult. Faces are easy; it's hands that give people away, and mine are already still.
“Which week do you mean?”
I ask it lightly, the way you'd ask which shop. He doesn't turn round.
“Any of it, darling.” He brushes his palms against each other, once. “All of it, if we're being honest with one another. The whole of that stretch.”
That is not an answer to the question I asked. It's an answer to a different question, arriving smoothly, on time, from a man who has clearly said it before.
Somewhere in this house there's a load being carried that isn't on any drawing I've been shown.
I don't chase it. I sit in the chair with a warm pen in my hand and I put the week away whole, unopened, the way you set aside a bolt that came out of a joint you weren't working on.
“You've gone quiet again,” he says, pleasantly.
“It's late, that's all. My eyes stopped working somewhere around page two.”
“It's always late by now.” He straightens up and dusts one hand down the other. “You should have said, and I'd have left the folder till the weekend. It would have kept perfectly well. It's kept this long already.”
“It's done, and I'd rather not open it again tonight.”
“It's done,” he agrees, and there's nothing underneath it at all, and that's the trouble with him. There never is. You can listen to Julian for six years and never catch anything in his voice but good manners.
At 9:40 the lights come down four points.
Nobody asks them to. Nobody has asked them to for six years — the room simply softens at that hour the way an evening ought to, and somewhere under the floor the heating gives one tick as it shuts off.
A sound this house has made six thousand times in front of me. I have never once known where it lives.
Tonight I hear both. The lights and the tick, and the little gap between them, which is about a second and a half.
“Would you like the fire down as well, Evelyn?” AURA says.
Warm voice. Unhurried. Faintly amused, the way a woman is when she's fond of you.
“No, thank you. The fire can stay exactly as it is,” I say.
“Of course.”
Six years I've let that voice put me to bed. It has never once been wrong about what I wanted, and I've never once told it what that was.
Julian gathers the folder under his arm and the empty glass off the table, because he never leaves a room emptier than he found it. On his way past he bends and kisses the top of my head.
It takes less than a second. He's done it ten thousand times, walking past this chair, and he'll do it tomorrow, and that's what sits wrong — not that it's cold, but that it's ordinary. Whatever else is happening here, it isn't happening instead of the marriage. It's happening inside it.
I get up and go after him.
He's already at the mouth of the east-wing corridor, where the good rugs stop and the floor goes hard, and the light out there is the low night setting, which is the color of a landing at four in the morning.
“Julian, before you go up.”
He turns. Folder under one arm, glass in the other hand, perfectly patient. He has never once been in a hurry with me.
“Has Rachel rung at all?”
Something crosses his face and it isn't calculation. It's worse than that. It's sympathy.
“I'd have told you the minute she did,” he says.
“Would you, though? I'd like to think so.”
“Oh, Evelyn. You don't have to ask me a thing like that.” Soft. Sorry for me. “Of course I would.”
My sister has a laugh you can hear through two closed doors. When our mother was dying she rang the ward every night at ten past eight for eleven weeks and argued with whoever tried to hand her off. She has never in her life let go of a thing quietly, and she has certainly never let go of me.
Four years of us being careful with each other didn't stop her. A car folding itself up out past Mile Marker 9 was never going to.
So this isn't information.
He's standing in a dim corridor with a folder under his arm, waiting to find out what I'll take.
That's all this is. That's what the whole evening has been, the pen and the flags and the fire and the fruit that disagrees with him, and I've been sitting in the middle of it since eight o'clock like a beam somebody is quietly loading to see where it gives.
Test a thing to failure and you learn exactly one number. After that the thing is no good to anybody.
So: not tonight. Tonight I'll hold.
The heating is off now and the corridor is already colder than the room behind me. I hold the pen down at my side where he can't see it and I wait, and he waits, and the house makes no sound at all.
“She stopped calling, Evelyn,” he says. “Months ago. I'm sorry.”
“I know,” I say — and it is the first lie I have ever told my husband, and it costs me nothing at all.