Chapter 4
FOUR
A week.
The work had a shape now. Three boxes through.
The first sorted into provisional categories — letters in, letters out, drafts, lecture notes — and the categories already weakening under the weight of things that did not fit them.
She had stopped putting questions to herself in writing. She had not stopped having them.
She had also, by Friday, not replied to Theo’s text from Tuesday.
She had read it. She had drafted three responses.
The drafts were, by turns, friendly, false, and the third one — the one she would have sent if she’d been a slightly different person — would have ended things in two lines.
She had saved it as a note. She had not opened the note again.
Eleanor, all week, had been a sound in another room.
The sound of the kettle in the kitchen, twice a day.
The sound of a phone call answered briefly and ended without the ordinary pleasantries.
The sound of a chair scraped back from a desk, footsteps on the corridor floor, a door closing somewhere upstairs.
The sound, once, on Wednesday afternoon, of laughter — a single quick exhale, more than a chuckle, less than a laugh — coming from the room behind the kitchen.
Chloe had not heard a phone ring before it.
Whatever Eleanor was doing in the rest of the house was something Chloe was not part of, which was, she understood, the arrangement. She had been put in the study with the boxes. The study was where she belonged.
On Friday, mid-morning, Eleanor came into the study with her glasses pushed up into her hair and a sheaf of paper in her hand.
“Will you do something for me.”
It was not a question. The lack of the upward inflection at the end was itself a small intimacy, a tone Eleanor used for things she had decided.
“Yes.”
“Come and sit on the sofa.”
Chloe pushed her chair back.
The sofa, which she had not used since her first day, was the small two-seater under the window, upholstered in something dark green and threadbare.
Eleanor was already sitting on the left side.
Chloe sat on the right. There was, between them, the breadth of a hand of cushion.
Eleanor’s knee did not touch Chloe’s. Eleanor’s knee was approximately an inch from where her own knee would have been if she had sat slightly closer than was necessary, which she had.
Eleanor held out the paper.
“This is something I drafted a long time ago. I’ve come back to it this week. I’d like to hear it read aloud by someone who is not me. Will you do that.”
“Yes.”
“Don’t interpret. Don’t perform. Just read. As if you’d found it in a book.”
“All right.”
Chloe took the paper. Three pages. Eleanor’s handwriting at the top in the green ink Chloe had now seen often enough to recognise — a date crossed out, twice, and a title that wasn’t a title, more a note: for the touch chapter.
The body of the text was typed, double-spaced, with a pen correction in the margin of the first page.
She cleared her throat. She heard herself clear her throat. The sound of it in the room — she had been alone in this room for most of the week — was suddenly loud.
She started.
The paragraph, when she heard her own voice take hold of it, was about a particular kind of attention.
About what it meant, in nineteenth-century domestic fiction, to be looked at.
About the way women in those novels noticed each other across rooms, noticed the small adjustments — a glove pulled off finger by finger, a hand lifted to a temple, a turning of a head toward a window — and built, out of that noticing, an entire emotional life that they did not have language for and that the novels themselves did not name.
The paragraph did not use the word desire.
The paragraph used the word attention four times in the first half-page.
She read it.
She had read aloud in school, in seminars, in a literature module she had taken in her first year.
She had a good voice for it. People had told her so, on and off, since she was sixteen.
She had always been slightly embarrassed by that fact and had compensated by reading flatly, without colour, the way she had been reading now for two sentences and was therefore, she realised, doing exactly as she had been asked to do.
Halfway down the second page, she looked up.
Eleanor was not looking at the page.
Eleanor was looking at her. Glasses still pushed up into her hair, the fingers of one hand resting loose along the line of her jaw, eyes — Chloe had not, until this moment, made eye contact with her at anything closer than three feet — calm and entirely on Chloe’s mouth.
Chloe lost her place.
She found it again. She did not, when she resumed, sound like she had two sentences ago.
The flat reading had gone. Something quieter and more careful had replaced it, a register her voice arrived at without consulting her, in which each word came out a fraction slower and a fraction lower and the act of speaking became, for the next half-page, the act of being listened to.
She felt the dryness at the back of her throat.
She heard, embarrassingly, her own pulse in the small of her ear.
She kept reading.
She read the part about the gloves. She read the part about the temple.
She read the part — three sentences, the centre of the paragraph — about the way a woman in a certain kind of room could be brought, by attention alone, to the edge of an emotional event she had not previously been preparing for.
The paragraph ended on a half-line that, as a piece of prose, was unfinished. It was a draft, after all.
She came to the end. Lifted her eyes again.
Eleanor had not moved. Her hand had not moved. Her gaze had not moved.
For a beat, neither of them said anything. The room was so quiet Chloe could hear the radiator on the far wall click as it cooled.
“Yes,” Eleanor said. “Thank you.”
Chloe nodded. Did not trust her voice.
“Put that back in the box where you found it. Or somewhere you’ll find it again.” Eleanor uncrossed her legs and stood up. The cushion lifted where her weight had been. “Read that to me again on Friday.”
“It is Friday.”
Eleanor stopped at the doorway. The hand that had been on the doorframe paused.
“Next Friday.” She said it without turning round. “Yes. Next.”
She went out.
Chloe sat with the three pages in her lap for a while.
She did not put them down. She read the paragraph again, silently, to see if it was the paragraph that had done it, or her, or the woman who had been watching her read.
She could not, in the end, decide. She suspected the answer was a combination of the three, which was — she registered — a more dangerous answer than any one of them on its own.
She put the pages on the desk. She did not put them in the box.
That night, in her room, in her pyjamas, with the door closed, she did a thing she would not, the next morning, have wanted Mira to know she had done.
She took out the photocopy.
She had photocopied the paragraph on the way home, at a Rymans on Cornmarket, telling herself it was a sensible work decision and not, at all, what it actually was. She unfolded it on the bed. She turned the bedside lamp lower.
She read it out loud.
She read it the way she had read it in the study, the second time, after she had looked up.
Slow. Lower than her speaking voice. The words she had not been able to take in while she was reading them under that gaze were available to her now, alone, and she found, as she gave them to the empty room, that the paragraph was even more directly about the thing it pretended not to be about than she had been able to register in the moment.
She finished. She held the page.
She did not, immediately, do it again.
She did, after a minute, do it again.
She lay awake for a long time afterwards, the photocopy face-down on the bedside table beside the wine glass from earlier in the week she had not, yet, returned to the kitchen. She did not allow herself the word for what she was doing. She allowed herself only the fact of it.
She thought: I am rehearsing.
She thought: I do not know, exactly, who for.
Both lies. She turned out the lamp.