29. Iris
IRIS
Somebody knocks on my door at half past ten at night, and I know precisely who it is, because there are only two of us in this house and I have spent three days listening to her not come.
I don't move.
The knock comes again. Then, muffled through the wood: "It's me."
"I know."
"Can I come in?"
I look at the ceiling of the bedroom I slept in for my first three nights in this country. The bad mattress. The good view. I've been in here seventy-one hours and I've spent about sixty of them constructing the speech I intend to give her — in order, with subheadings.
"Yes," I say.
She looks appalling.
That's the first thing. Cat Aldridge, who once produced a four-course dinner after twelve hours in a professional kitchen and still looked like she'd been for a pleasant walk, is grey and hollow and wearing yesterday's shirt, and she has plainly not slept, and she is gripping a piece of paper in her fist like it's the only thing holding her upright.
She stops in the middle of the room and opens her mouth.
Nothing comes out.
She tries again. Nothing.
And every line of my speech goes straight out of my head — because in three months I have never once seen this woman unable to speak.
"I can't—" she manages. Stops. Presses the heel of her hand hard against one eye. "I had a whole— I've been practising it in the kitchen for an hour and it's gone. It's just gone."
"Cat."
"Read this." She holds the paper out. Her hand isn't steady. "Please. Bottom of the second page."
I take it.
It's her letter. Marguerite's letter — the one she has never shown me, the one she came out of her room holding two weeks ago with her whole face rearranged.
"Bottom of the second page," she says again.
So I read it.
I read all of it, because I can't not — you were never a guest in this house, you were mine, you were the easiest thing I ever did — and my throat closes, and Cat stands there in the middle of the room and lets me.
And then, at the bottom of the second page, in that hard upright hand:
So cook in my kitchen. Sleep in my house. And stop leaving before people can leave you.
I read it three times.
"She knew," Cat says. Her voice has gone to pieces.
"She knew I'd do it. She was dying, Iris — she had a farm to arrange and two granddaughters to gamble on and a solicitor to threaten, and she still sat down and wrote me a sentence for a night she wouldn't live to see.
" She laughs. It's a horrible sound. "And I've had it in a drawer. For three days. While I—"
She stops.
"While you what," I say.
"Say it."
"While I left." Her face folds. "I didn't say a cruel thing to you and then stay. I left. I've been gone a week. I was standing right there in our kitchen and I was already in the car."
And there it is — the thing I have been waiting seventy-one hours to hear.
It fixes nothing at all.
"You told me to go back to Chicago," I say.
"I know."
"You told me to find someone easier to love."
"I know—"
"You told me it was a phase." My voice comes out of me like something tearing.
"Do you have the faintest— Cat, I have spent my entire life being told that what I want isn't real.
My mother stood on our terrace and said the word perversion, and I looked her in the face and told her no.
And then I came inside and washed the wine glasses and got into bed with you.
" I'm on my feet without having decided to be.
"And four days later you said the same thing she did. In our kitchen. In nicer words."
Cat makes a small wrecked noise.
"I know."
"Don't just—"
"I know, Iris." She's crying now, which she does not do.
"I know exactly what I did. I took the worst thing anyone has ever said to you and I put it in my own mouth, because I wanted you gone before you could go — and it worked.
And I have stood at the end of that hallway every night for three nights and not been able to make myself knock, because I knew what I'd have to look at when I did.
" She scrubs her sleeve across her face, roughly, like she's furious with it.
"And here it is. Here you are. Looking at me like that. "
The silence goes on a long time.
"I've been doing it since I was twelve," she says at last. Quietly.
"Leaving. I've done it to jobs. I did it to two head chefs who wanted to promote me.
I did it to a woman in London who genuinely loved me, and I have never once allowed myself to think about her name.
" She looks at me. "I got very good at it.
It's the thing I'm best at, after cooking.
You get out first, and then it doesn't count as being left. "
"So I'm just another—"
"No." Fast. Fierce. "No. That's what I'm trying to tell you.
That's why it's so bad. Because with everybody else, it worked.
And with you it didn't work at all — I said the worst thing I could think of, the very worst thing I had, and you went to your room and rang Sophie to find out whether I was eating. "
I look away.
"Don't," I say.
"You rang Sophie to find out whether I'd had my dinner, Iris."
"Shut up."
"You deserve—" she starts.
"Stop." I'm across the room before I know I've moved. "Stop telling me what I deserve and ask me what I want."
Cat's mouth closes.
"Ask me," I say.
"What do you want?"
And the answer is so obvious it's nearly funny. It has been obvious since the night I got out of a car in the dark and found a woman on a terrace in an apron, looking at me like a problem she fully intended to solve.
"You," I say. "This. The bad mattress and the good view and that appalling goat.
I want to argue with you about the distillery schedule and lose.
I want to get old here. I want to be buried out in that field beside Marguerite and Hélène with my name on the same stone as yours.
" My voice goes. "I want every single thing you're too frightened to let yourself have.
That's what I want. That's what I've wanted since roughly week two — and it wasn't a phase then, either. "
Cat kisses me.
It is not a good kiss. It's desperate and messy and we're both crying and at one point I get an elbow somewhere, and it is, without any competition whatsoever, the best kiss of my life.
She holds on like I might be taken off her.
I hold on just as hard. And we stand in the middle of a spare bedroom sobbing into each other's mouths like the pair of disaster gay clichés we have apparently become.
"I'm sorry," she gasps when we finally break apart. "I'm so sorry. I love you."
"I know. I love you too." I rest my forehead against hers. "I'm still angry."
"You should be."
"I'm going to be angry for a while, Cat. You don't get to say a thing like that and be forgiven in an evening."
"No."
"And you're going to have to actually stay. Not tonight — tonight's easy. I mean when it's boring. When it's a wet Tuesday and nothing's happening and there's nobody watching." I open my eyes. "That's the part you have to do."
"I know."
"Can you?"
"I don't know," she says.
It's the most honest thing she's said all night, and it's the only answer I would have believed.
"But I'm not leaving," she says. "And I'll tell you when I want to."
I think that might be better than a promise.
Later, in the kitchen, with the kettle on and both of us wrung out and neither of us willing to be more than an arm's length from the other:
"My mother emailed me," I say.
Cat's hand stops on the cupboard door.
"When?"
"Tuesday. Day two." I get the mugs down. "She's had my things put in storage. She's spoken to Richard Chen. My old job's being held for me. All I have to do is get on a plane and leave you here."
Cat has gone very white.
"What did you tell her?"
"Nothing." I turn around. "I read two lines and deleted it. And then I sat on that bed and cried — and do you want to know what I cried about?"
She shakes her head.
"Not the job," I say. "Not the flat. Not my mother." I put the mug into her hands. "I cried because you weren't outside that door."
Cat sets it on the counter very carefully, the way you do when you can't trust your hands.
"On the worst day," I say. "With an actual exit on the table. With my heart in pieces because of you. And I didn't want to leave. I wanted you to knock." I shrug, and it comes out crooked. "That isn't a phase, Cat. That's the least confused I have ever been about anything in my life."
It's nearly two in the morning when I find her in the sitting room, standing at the mantelpiece with the photograph in her hands.
Marguerite and Hélène. A village hall. Six people and a very poor cake.
"You moved this," I say.
"Four times."
"Why?"
Cat doesn't answer for a while. She just looks at it — at those two women, at their absurd triumphant faces, at thirty-three years finally getting its paperwork.
"Because I want it," she says.
I go very still.
"That's what set me off. Not the letter.
Not the ninety days." Her voice is barely there.
"That. Two women who got to keep it. And I looked at it and I wanted it so badly I couldn't breathe — and the last time I wanted something that much I was twelve years old and I lost it.
So I—" She stops. Swallows. "So I started packing. "
"Cat."
"I'm not asking you," she says quickly. "I've got no right to ask you anything tonight.
I only wanted you to know what it was. That it was never that I didn't want you.
" She sets the photograph back on the mantel, square in the middle, exactly where it's been all along.
"It's that I want you so much it frightens the life out of me. "
I come and stand beside her. I look at my grandmother, who waited thirty-three years for a village hall and a bad cake.
Then I take Cat's hand.
"Then we'd better get on with it," I say. "We haven't got thirty-three years to waste."
Cat lets out a breath that's half a laugh.
We stand there in the dark for a long while, the two of us, in front of a photograph of two women who managed it.
Nothing is fixed. She'll be frightened again. So will I.
But she knocked.
That's where you start.