Chapter 5
FIVE
She wore the cream jumper.
She had stood in front of her wardrobe at half past seven, having woken at six, having checked her phone three times in the dark for no reason she would have admitted.
The cream jumper was the answer to the question she was pretending she had not been asking, which was the question of what a person wore to a job in which they would, in some sense she did not yet have a word for, audition again.
She also, on the way out, transferred the photocopy from her bedside drawer to her bag, and then took it out of her bag and put it back in the drawer, and then sat on the bed for thirty seconds with her face in her hands before she put on her shoes.
At Banbury Road she walked the seven minutes more slowly than usual. By the time she lifted her hand to the knocker it was eight thirty-one.
The door opened.
“You’re late.”
“Sorry.”
“By a minute.”
“Sorry.”
“Why are you apologising.”
She did not have an answer she would have read aloud. She came in.
For most of the morning she behaved like a person who had not spent a week reading a paragraph aloud in her bedroom.
She made the tea. She went into the study.
She opened the fourth box. She read the top three documents — a Cambridge invitation Eleanor had declined in 2011 with the marginal note declined, mercifully; the carbon of a letter to a publisher; a postcard from Berlin with no message — and sorted them into their tentative categories.
She heard Eleanor twice in the kitchen and did not turn round.
She was succeeding.
The succeeding ended at eleven-forty, when Eleanor put a fresh mug of coffee at her elbow and sat down on the corner of the desk with the three pages from last Friday in her hand.
“Ready.”
“Yes.”
“Come.”
The sofa. The same cushion. The same inch.
This time, Chloe read it the way she had been reading it.
Slowly. Lower than her speaking voice. The way she had been rehearsing all week — although she would not have used that word — at the edge of her own bed with the lamp turned down.
The paragraph was no longer something she was reading for the first time. It was something she had practised.
Eleanor did not, this time, watch her mouth.
Eleanor looked at the page over Chloe’s shoulder, glasses on, expression unreadable, listening rather than watching.
The change of register cost Chloe nothing she had been prepared for and a great deal she had not.
The watching had been a kind of pressure that had also been a kind of permission.
The listening was something else — narrower, more demanding, with no comfortable place for her to put her own self-consciousness while she worked.
She finished.
For a beat Eleanor did not speak.
“Better,” she said. “Thank you.”
She took the pages back. Set them on the cushion between them, face-down.
“There is something else I would like your eye on, if you have the patience. It is from a different draft. More recent. I have been trying to put two passages next to each other for some time, and the question of whether they belong on the same page is one I have stopped being able to answer alone.”
She produced a folder from beside the sofa — Chloe had not noticed it there — and opened it on her lap. Inside, two loose pages in different hands. The first typed and corrected. The second handwritten, in green ink, on the lined back of what appeared to be a takeaway menu.
“You may want to see this one first.”
She slid the typed page across the cushion. Chloe took it. Read the first paragraph. Read the second.
The text was a different one, but the climate of it was not unfamiliar.
Once again Eleanor had been writing about looking.
Once again the looking had a great deal to do with a hand.
The hand in this passage was a younger woman’s hand on the spine of a book she was reaching to take from a shelf, in a library in Brittany, in nineteen-eighty-something, while another woman watched her from a desk on the opposite side of the room.
The watching woman did nothing. The reaching woman did not turn round.
The paragraph ended with the watching woman saying she had stopped, then, breathing — and had only registered the stoppage three full minutes later, when she had realised the room had become unbearable.
Chloe turned the page over to see if there was more on the back.
Eleanor leaned across to point at the second paragraph on the front.
Their hands met on the upper edge of the page.
Not on the page itself. On the small hardback book Eleanor had set down between them as a writing surface — the green-clothed book Chloe had not, since the interview, stopped being aware of.
Eleanor’s hand was reaching for the paragraph.
Chloe’s was holding the page steady. Their fingers crossed on the cover of the book, the way two people’s hands crossed when they were about to apologise and step back.
Neither moved.
The contact was — Chloe could not, even in the moment, have said which she felt first — warm at the back of her own hand, and cool, on Eleanor’s thumb, where it had been resting on the green cloth.
The combination was very specific. She became aware of every individual point at which their skin was touching.
There were three. The pad of Eleanor’s index finger against the knuckle of Chloe’s.
The side of Eleanor’s thumb against the side of Chloe’s.
The base of Eleanor’s hand, where the wrist met the palm, against the back of Chloe’s, the lightest of the three contacts, almost imagined except that Chloe could feel a pulse there, not her own.
Two seconds. Three.
Eleanor spoke without moving.
“That line.” Her hand did not lift. Her voice was the same voice she had used for read this. “About the room becoming unbearable. I have been trying to decide if it’s too much.”
“It isn’t.”
“You’re sure.”
“Yes.”
“Why.”
Chloe felt, with absolute clarity, that this was a question she should answer with her hand removed. She did not remove her hand. The decision to leave her hand where it was was, by some distance, the most deliberate thing she had done all week.
“Because it isn’t about a room.”
Eleanor’s thumb moved a fraction of an inch against the cloth of the book.
It was not, by any measure, a movement toward Chloe.
It was not a movement at all in any direction one could have pointed to.
It was, perhaps, an adjustment, the sort of involuntary settling a hand did when it had been held in one position too long.
But it was the only movement in the room, and Chloe felt it land in her stomach as though Eleanor had spoken.
“No,” Eleanor said quietly. “It isn’t.”
She lifted her hand.
She did not do it abruptly. She did it the way she did most things — at her own pace, on her own decision, leaving the air she had been holding to settle without her in it.
Her fingers came up off the book. Chloe’s stayed where they were, on the page, for another half-second, before she understood that she would need to move them.
“You hold a book the way someone taught you to.”
Chloe found, when she went to answer, that her voice was further away than she had expected. She brought it back.
“My grandmother.”
“Good.”
She had said it half a second too quickly.
The half-second was not, by any external measure, a thing.
It was the small fractional acceleration of a woman who had registered a piece of information about another woman’s body — who had taught Chloe’s hands to hold things, who was therefore physically present in the way Chloe handled a book in this house — and who had not, in advance, decided how to feel about being given the information.
She set her own mug down. She did not, immediately, follow with anything else.
Eleanor closed the folder. Got up. Took her own coffee mug from the desk on the way past, and did not look at Chloe as she went out.
Chloe sat for a long time with the two pages in her lap and the green book between them on the cushion.
She did not read either of the pages again.
She looked at the small piece of cushion her hand had been resting on.
She looked at the corresponding piece where Eleanor’s hand had been.
She did not, at any point, look at her own hand.
She did, eventually, get up.
She put the second box back in its row. She put on her coat in the hall. Eleanor did not come to the door. From the kitchen, as Chloe was opening the latch, came Eleanor’s voice — level, ordinary, with the same lack of the upward inflection she had used in the morning: “Monday.”
“Yes.”
The door clicked shut.
Chloe walked.
She counted the streets to make her brain stop replaying it.
North Parade. Bevington Road. Norham Gardens.
Park Town. The bus stop. She counted lampposts on the bus, which was childish, and she did it anyway.
By the time she reached her flat she had counted twenty-seven lampposts and replayed the moment forty-one times and could not, when she sat down on her bed without removing her coat, have told anyone — not Mira, not Theo, not herself — what either of them had said before or after.
She could only remember that Eleanor’s thumb had moved a fraction of an inch on the cover of a green-clothed book.
And that her own hand had stayed.