Tell Me What You Want (Women Who Read In The Dark #1)

Chapter 1

ONE

The bus from Cowley dropped her on Banbury Road in driving rain. Chloe walked the last quarter mile because she had been early, and now, because of the weather, she would be exactly on time, which was worse.

She found the house by the number on a slate plaque set into the gatepost. A Georgian terrace, three storeys, the colour of bone where the rain hadn’t darkened it.

The hedge was old. The path was wet. The CV folded inside her bag had begun to soften at the corners against the spine of a paperback she should not have brought to an interview.

She climbed the three stone steps and lifted her hand to the knocker.

The door opened.

“You’re punctual,” the woman said. “Come in before you ruin your shoes.”

Chloe came in.

The smell hit her first. Old paper. Woodsmoke from somewhere further back in the house.

And underneath both, citrus and tea, which turned out, in the next room, to be the bergamot rising off a pot already poured.

The hall was dim and tall. A staircase ran up into shadow.

A coatstand held one black wool coat and nothing else.

“Let me take that.”

The woman — Eleanor Vale, who was therefore Dr Vale, and who, in the photograph on her old faculty page, had been thirty-eight and severe, and who now was not severe at all but something quieter and stranger — held out her hand for Chloe’s coat.

Her fingers were dry and cool. The cashmere of her jumper was the same colour as her hair, which was the same colour as her eyes.

Her eyes were on Chloe’s face and stayed there a beat too long.

“Sorry,” Chloe said. “It’s wet.”

“I expected it to be.” Eleanor hung the coat on the empty stand and turned. “Through here.”

She led Chloe down the hall and into a room on the right.

Books on three sides. The fourth wall given over to a tall window streaked with rain.

A reading lamp had been switched on against the grey.

Two armchairs faced each other across a low table.

On the table, a tray. Two cups. The pot already poured.

“Sit, please.”

Chloe sat.

Eleanor settled herself opposite, smoothed the front of her cardigan, and took up her cup. She held it by the bowl, not the handle. Her hands were steady. Chloe had been about to apologise for being damp and was not given the opportunity, because Eleanor was already speaking.

“You wrote a thesis on minor female correspondence in nineteenth-century literary households. Letters between sisters, mostly. Unpublished servants’ diaries. Not the figures one would usually have chosen.”

“No.”

“Why?”

Chloe had answered this question, in different forms, for two years. She knew where her sentences went.

“I — I suppose I was interested in the women who weren’t being written about. The ones whose work was in keeping a household standing while a husband or a brother got the leisure to think. I wanted to see what their thinking looked like, when they had any.”

Eleanor said nothing. Drank.

Chloe heard her own answer land in the room and felt the rehearsed quality of it as a small private humiliation. She had given that paragraph to four different interviewers in the last year.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’ve said that out loud a lot.”

“I can hear that you have.” Eleanor set the cup down. “Why did you really apply for this?”

It came at her at an angle she hadn’t prepared for. She opened her mouth and found, embarrassingly, that the rehearsed answer was still in it.

“I needed the work. I’d been doing temporary admin at the university, and a friend forwarded the listing, and you — your name — I knew the name. From undergrad. So I thought — ”

She stopped. Eleanor had not looked away from her. The watching itself had become the question.

Chloe tried again. “I didn’t have anything better to do.”

“I don’t believe that either.”

There was no smile, exactly. The corner of Eleanor’s mouth moved as if it might have, in a different woman, in a different room. Chloe felt her face go hot.

“You don’t have to lie to me, Chloe.” Eleanor’s voice dropped, slightly, on the name. “We have months for that.”

We have months. As if she had already been hired. Chloe heard it. Eleanor heard her hearing it, and let the line stand.

Rain hit the window in a fresh burst. The reading lamp threw a small warm circle on the carpet at their feet and didn’t reach the corners of the room.

“Tell me about your reading,” Eleanor said, more quietly. “Not the thesis. What you read when no one is going to ask you about it.”

It was not a question she had been prepared for. Her training, designed for university interviews and the polite exchanges of professional women, gave her nothing for this one. There was a beat. She took a breath. She told the truth, and was startled to hear that the truth had its own rhythm.

“I read du Maurier on the bus. Old Penguin paperbacks with the spines cracked. I underline too much. Sometimes the same passages, in different books, even when I know what’s coming. I read poems before I sleep. Carson, mostly. I don’t always finish books. I lie about that to people who ask.”

“Why do you lie?”

“Because — ” She thought about it. “Because being the kind of woman who finishes things matters to them.”

“And to you?”

“Less than it should.”

Eleanor took up her cup again. She had held Chloe’s answer in her face — not nodding, not smiling, only watching — and Chloe understood, with a small unfamiliar lurch, that the watching itself was a kind of listening she was not, generally, on the receiving end of.

Eleanor drew the cup all the way to her mouth, and then did not drink from it.

She set it back down on the saucer at a slightly different angle than the one she had taken it up from.

A sentence she had been about to say did not, in the end, arrive.

Whatever it had been, she did not seem to be going to recover it.

“The work,” Eleanor said. “I should describe it.”

She did. A great quantity of paper — letters, drafts, notebooks, lecture transcripts going back to her early career — and a great resistance to the kind of person who would handle it as data.

She required someone who could read, in the proper sense of the word, and who would be unafraid to spend a long winter alone in this room doing slow work for what was, she admitted, not a generous wage.

Six months. No university involvement. No academic credit.

No expectation of publication. The hours were Chloe’s to set, within reason.

The discretion required, she said, was not a formality.

“I should say.” She drew the cup toward herself. “I am aware that some of you will have looked me up.”

“Some of us?”

“You, principally.”

Chloe felt the heat rise into her throat. “I — ”

“It would have been irresponsible of you not to. I expect it.” Eleanor’s mouth moved again, in that not-smile. “But it does affect how this works. If you take the position, I will at some point talk to you about it. I would prefer to do so on my own timing. I would prefer that you do not raise it.”

“All right.”

“You don’t want to know now?”

“I — I’d rather hear it from you when you want to say it.”

The not-smile became something briefly closer to a real one, and then disappeared.

“Good,” Eleanor said. “That is a useful sentence about you.”

The room was quiet for a moment. Somewhere upstairs, a pipe contracted, ticking.

Chloe became aware that she had finished her tea and did not remember drinking it.

She set the cup down too carefully. Eleanor was looking at the book on the table beside her — a hardback with a green cloth cover, no jacket — and resting her hand on it.

Her fingers were long. Chloe looked at the hand, and then deliberately looked away, and Eleanor saw her look away, and Chloe knew that she had.

“Can you start Monday?”

“Yes.”

“Eight thirty. There’s a kettle and there’s coffee. Don’t bring me biscuits. I won’t eat them, and I’ll resent the kindness. Bring whatever you read on the bus. We may talk about it. We may not. That is up to you.”

She stood. The interview was over. Chloe stood too, and discovered, looking up, that Eleanor was very slightly taller than she had thought.

In the hall, Eleanor took her coat from the stand and held it open. Chloe slid her arms in. Eleanor’s hand brushed the back of her shoulder for half a second as she settled the collar, and then was gone, and Chloe did not turn around because turning around would have made it a thing.

At the door, Eleanor said, “Chloe.”

She turned.

“Why did you really apply for this?”

The same question.

“I — ” Chloe started. Stopped. Did not have an answer she would have accepted from anyone else. Said the one she had. “I think I was bored of pretending to want my old life back.”

Eleanor looked at her. Removed her reading glasses, which Chloe had not noticed her putting on, and looked at her again — properly, without the small distance the lenses had provided.

“Better,” she said. “Go home.”

Chloe went.

She walked down the path and out through the gate before she put up her hood, and only when she was at the corner of the road, waiting for a break in the traffic that wasn’t there, did she realise she did not remember saying yes.

She had said yes to Monday. She had said yes to the hours.

She did not remember saying yes to the woman.

Her phone buzzed in her coat pocket. Mira, probably.

how did it go. She would answer later. She crossed the road, and her shoes were ruined, and somewhere behind her, three doors back, a woman she did not yet know how to call by her first name was, she suspected, watching her go from the upstairs window.

She did not look up to check.

That, she understood, was what made her interesting.