Chapter 2
TWO
She set three pencils on the kitchen table before she left the flat and chose the wrong one.
It was a small thing. Mira, half-dressed for her shift, watched her do it and said nothing about the pencils. Said instead, with her toothbrush in her mouth, “What are you wearing?”
“This.”
“It’s good. Don’t fidget with the cuffs.”
“I’m not.”
“You will.”
Chloe checked her phone. Eight oh seven. She had timed the bus, and now she had timed it again, and now she was going to leave seven minutes early because the alternative was standing in the hall and chewing the inside of her cheek.
“Tell me later how it goes,” Mira said. “Properly, this time. Not just ‘fine.’”
“It was fine.”
“That’s what I mean.”
Chloe pulled on her coat, picked up the wrong pencil, and went.
The bus dropped her in the same place. The rain had stopped overnight and the pavements were dark and slick.
The hedge in front of the house was darker than the houses around it.
The gate, she registered today, did not latch properly — it pushed open under her hand.
The same three stone steps. The same brass knocker she had not got to use on the previous visit and did not need to use now.
The door opened before she touched it.
Eleanor was dressed for the cold inside her own house. A grey wool jumper this morning, sleeves pushed to the elbows, dark trousers, no shoes — only thick socks. The unshod feet were the first slight wrongness, a domestic intimacy Chloe had not been invited to. She did not know where to look.
“Come through. The kettle’s on. I assume you take it with milk.”
“Yes. Thank you.”
“Yes is sufficient.”
She said it without unkindness. Chloe followed her into the kitchen, which she had not seen on the previous visit, and which was warmer than the rest of the house and smaller than she had expected.
A long pine table. A range cooker. A single mug, already used, drying upside down by the sink.
Eleanor poured tea into two mugs, handed one to Chloe without looking at her, and said, “The room is through there. I’ve put a chair in for you. I’ll let you settle.”
Through there was the study from yesterday, only larger somehow in the morning light — or perhaps less furnished, with one of the armchairs pushed back against the bookcase and a wooden kitchen chair brought up to the long desk under the window.
A reading lamp had been switched on although the day was not yet dark.
On the desk, nothing. The desk was bare.
Beside the desk, stacked on the carpet, were six archive boxes.
White cardboard. Lids closed. No labels.
“Sit, please.”
Chloe sat.
Eleanor put her own mug down on the corner of the desk, removed her reading glasses from her cardigan pocket, and did not yet put them on. She held them by one arm and tapped them gently against the back of her other hand while she spoke.
“I have not organised any of this. That is your first job, but it isn’t the work.
The work is later. You will start by understanding what is in these boxes, which means reading them, which means — ” She stopped.
Her hand was on the lid of the second box.
Her eyes had gone, briefly, past Chloe, to the window.
She brought them back. “ — reading them in whatever order they catch you. Not in chronological order. Chronological order is a lie about how I lived through any of it.” She paused.
“Do you mind that I’m telling you to disobey the obvious method? ”
“No.”
“Good. The temptation to be tidy will pass.”
She lifted the lid off the first box. Chloe leaned forward.
Inside, paper. Loose pages, folded pages, envelopes, a brown spiral notebook with one corner crushed, a clutch of postcards held together with a rubber band so old it had bonded to the topmost card.
The smell that came up was not unpleasant.
It was the smell, Chloe thought, of years of being put away and not thrown out.
“Read whatever you want,” Eleanor said. “I have no secrets you can find in here.”
She said it lightly. They both heard the lie.
Chloe was sensible enough not to remark on it. She nodded.
“What should I call you?” she asked.
“Whatever feels honest.”
That, Chloe found, did not give her a sufficient answer to anything.
Dr Vale felt absurd in a private house and a wool jumper.
Eleanor felt presumptuous on a first morning.
She solved the problem by not addressing the woman at all, which she would continue to do for the rest of the morning, and through lunch (which Eleanor would not eat with her), and into the early afternoon, before she found, around three, that you was working as a sufficient pronoun and she had stopped trying.
Eleanor left her to it.
For the first half hour, Chloe did not move.
She sat with the first box open in front of her and did not touch the contents.
She drank her tea slowly. She listened. From somewhere further inside the house — the kitchen, she thought, then a different room beyond that, a study perhaps, or a sitting room — she could hear Eleanor moving.
A door opening. A drawer pulled out and shut.
The murmur of a radio briefly, then off.
The sounds of another woman’s morning, audible enough to be aware of, distant enough to feel like she was being given privacy as a kind of test.
She picked up the first piece of paper.
A letter, handwritten, to someone called M.
Two pages. Eleanor’s handwriting, which Chloe had not yet seen, was smaller than she had expected — almost cramped, leaning slightly left, the letters formed quickly but with a discipline that did not allow them to become careless.
The letter was not dated. It was, as far as Chloe could tell from the second paragraph, about a book M had recommended and Eleanor had hated.
The hatred was articulate. The letter was funny.
By the bottom of the second page, Chloe was holding her hand to her mouth.
She read it again.
She put it down. Took up the next one — different paper, different ink. Read that.
By eleven, she had read fourteen letters, three of them to the same correspondent, none of them sent — at least, none she had found a stamped envelope for — and she had begun to understand something about the woman whose paper this was.
The understanding was not specific. It was tonal.
The letters had a way of becoming intimate without lowering their voice.
Chloe felt, reading them, that she was being addressed.
She knew this was not true. She knew she was reading mail to other people.
The feeling persisted anyway.
A name occurred several times. J. Sometimes Jess.
Sometimes only the initial. The letters to J — there were two she had found so far — were different from the others.
Shorter. More precise. They did not end with anything resembling a closing line; they cut off, mid-thought, as if Eleanor had stopped writing when she realised what she was writing.
Chloe held the second one for a long time. Put it back in the box. Did not move it from its place.
She lifted out the spiral notebook with the crushed corner.
Opened it. Eleanor’s handwriting again, in green ink, the colour startling on cheap lined paper.
Notes for a lecture, by the look of it. Underlinings.
Marginalia. A doodle of a hand in the corner of one page that Chloe stared at for thirty seconds before remembering she was being paid to read, not to look at drawings.
The house had gone quiet. She realised she did not know where Eleanor was.
She listened harder. The radio was off. There were no footsteps. The hush had a weight, as if the rest of the house had stepped back to give the study room.
“Are you all right in there?”
The voice was close — closer than she had expected. Chloe turned in her chair and saw Eleanor in the doorway, reading glasses on, two books in her hand, looking at her with an expression Chloe could not immediately name. Whatever it was, it was not amused.
“Yes,” Chloe said. “Sorry. I lost track.”
“That is the only acceptable answer.”
Eleanor put one of the books down on the desk beside the box, did not explain what it was, and turned to leave.
“Sorry,” Chloe said again, before she could stop herself. “Was — was there a particular order you wanted me to — ”
“Why are you apologising?”
“I — ”
“You apologise before every honest sentence.” Eleanor said it without heat. She was looking at the doorframe, not at Chloe. “Watch yourself for it. You’ll find it embarrassing.”
She left.
Chloe sat with that for a while. She did not know what to do with it. She felt seen, and irritated at being seen, and underneath both of those a small new alertness she did not want to put a name on. She looked at the second box. Did not open it. Returned to the spiral notebook.
She kept reading.
The light in the study failed gradually and then, around half past four, all at once.
She switched on the lamp. The room shrank around the desk.
Outside the window, the garden — she had not, until now, noticed there was a garden — was a black shape against a darker sky. Somewhere a cat moved across the lawn.
At ten to six, Eleanor came back.
Chloe did not hear her come in, only looked up because the light in the doorway had changed. Eleanor was leaning against the frame, arms folded, watching her. She had been there, Chloe suspected, for longer than a moment.
“That will be enough for today.”
“Oh.”
“You’re tired. You don’t know it yet.”
Chloe wanted to argue. Did not.
She put the lid back on the first box, slowly, in case there was a method she should use that she did not know. Eleanor did not correct her. Eleanor watched her put the lid on, and then watched her put on her coat in the hall, and then opened the front door, and stood holding it.
“Tomorrow,” Eleanor said. “Same time.”
“Yes.”
“And bring the right pencil.”
Chloe paused on the step. “What — ”
“You brought a Staedtler. They smudge in this house. You’ll see why.”
She closed the door before Chloe could answer.
Chloe stood on the path for a long moment, and then walked through the gate, and then down to the corner, and then on, toward the bus stop.
The cold went straight through her coat.
Her hands hurt from being held in one position all afternoon.
She found, getting on the bus, that she was thinking about the green ink, and the J that was sometimes Jess, and the hand drawn in a corner, and Eleanor leaning in the doorway with her arms crossed, watching, for who knew how long.
She put her head against the bus window.
She caught her own reflection in the glass and saw, with a small private surprise, that she was smiling.
She did not, when she looked for it, know why.