Chapter 9
NINE
It was now an arrangement.
It had not, in any sense Chloe could have located in writing, become one — there had been no email, no announcement, no second contract.
There had been only a particular Saturday, three weeks ago, when Eleanor had said, in the late afternoon of the second one Chloe had been at the house outside of weekdays, “I’ll see you again next Saturday.
” She had said it the way she said most things.
Without an upward inflection. Without offering Chloe the chance to disagree.
Chloe had not disagreed.
She had come the next Saturday. And the one after that. And the one after that.
By the fifth Saturday — the late-autumn one, the one that was colder than the previous four put together, the one on which the trees on Banbury Road had finally given up the last of their leaves and left their black branches against a stripped white sky — it had stopped being an arrangement Chloe needed a reason for.
The reason was that on Saturday afternoons Chloe was, increasingly, in Eleanor’s house.
The fact had become its own justification.
She arrived at one.
Eleanor was in the kitchen. The kitchen, which Chloe had not previously been let further into than the threshold, was warm and slightly chaotic.
A pan was on the hob. Something was burning.
There was flour on the counter, in a small disorganised pile, as though someone had decanted it without measuring and then forgotten she had not yet measured it.
Eleanor was holding a wooden spoon at an angle that suggested she had been holding it in one position for some time, without quite remembering why.
“Christ,” she said, when Chloe came in.
She turned the hob down.
“Hi.”
“You’re early.”
“I’m on time.”
“That’s worse.”
She took the toast out of the toaster. The toast was black on one side. Eleanor regarded it briefly, then placed it, with some dignity, into the bin.
She laughed.
It was, Chloe registered, the second time she had heard Eleanor laugh properly.
The first had been the small quick exhale on the Wednesday before the storm, behind a closed door, on a phone call Chloe had not been included in.
This laugh was a different thing. This laugh was a real one — short, slightly embarrassed, the laugh of a woman who had not realised, until the toast went into the bin, that she had given Chloe an unguarded view of her kitchen and an unguarded view of herself in it.
The laugh did something to Chloe’s chest she did not, immediately, want to examine.
“I’m making soup,” Eleanor said. “I was making toast to go with it. I will make further toast in a minute. The soup is the simple part. The toast appears to be the harder one.”
“Do you want me to do it.”
“The toast?”
“The toast.”
“Yes,” Eleanor said. “I would like you to do the toast.”
Chloe took off her coat. She rolled her sleeves to her elbows in the way she did when she was about to do something with her hands.
She crossed to the bread bin — which was a wooden one, oddly small, the kind of object Chloe associated with women’s magazines from twenty years ago and not with Eleanor — and produced the loaf.
She cut four slices. She put two in the toaster.
She set the other two on the board ready for the next round.
She did all of this with a small private pleasure that she did not, while she was doing it, let her face register.
Eleanor watched her.
Not the way Eleanor watched her in the study.
Eleanor watched her in the study with the particular concentrated attention that was, Chloe had now identified, Eleanor’s principal mode of seduction.
This watching was different. This watching was — Chloe could not, even afterwards, find a better word for it — companionable.
The kitchen, while they worked, was the warmest room in the house Chloe had yet been in.
The radiator under the window was on full.
The hob was on. The smell was a mixture of vegetables softening in butter, slightly burned bread, and faintly the bergamot Eleanor had drunk earlier, the cup still on the side.
The window above the sink was steamed half-up.
The garden beyond it, which Chloe still rarely looked at, had gone a deeper grey than the sky.
Eleanor was — Chloe registered, after about twenty minutes — humming.
She had not realised, until then, that Eleanor knew how to hum.
The tune was not one Chloe could place. It was old.
The sort of thing one’s mother had hummed without knowing she was humming.
Eleanor was doing it under her breath, while she stirred, and the moment Chloe became conscious of the humming, Eleanor became conscious of it too, and stopped.
She did not, however, look embarrassed.
She only said, “We should eat at the table. The table is through there. Lay it for two.”
They ate at a small round table by the window, in the room behind the kitchen — a room Chloe had only previously seen by glimpse, the door usually closed.
The room was old. The wallpaper was a faded pattern of small green leaves.
There was a fireplace, unlit. Two armchairs by the window.
A low bookcase that contained, Chloe noticed without seeking, only novels.
The soup was good. The toast — the second batch, the one Chloe had managed — was correct.
Eleanor said, at one point, “You make better toast than I do.”
“It’s a low bar.”
“It is not as low as you think.”
They did not, during the meal, discuss the work.
They discussed novels neither of them had read in some time.
They discussed a film Eleanor had seen on iPlayer two weeks ago, which she had hated.
They discussed, briefly, Chloe’s flatmate — Eleanor asking the question with the kind of small curiosity that was, Chloe registered, not entirely casual — and Chloe described Mira with a fondness she did not realise she had been suppressing until she heard herself describe her.
After the meal, Chloe got up to clear the plates.
“You don’t have to.”
“I want to.”
She did. She took the plates through to the kitchen. She set them down by the sink. She ran the hot tap. She put dish soap into the bowl, watched the water foam, lowered the plates one by one. The water was almost too hot for her hands. She did not turn it down.
Behind her, she heard Eleanor come in.
Eleanor said, “Let me dry.”
She did not say it the way one offered. She said it the way one decided.
She came to stand beside Chloe at the sink.
The kitchen sink was, Chloe registered for the first time, an old one — a deep porcelain basin set into a wooden surround, the sort of sink built for the kitchen of a woman who had time and did not have very much else.
The wooden draining board was narrow. The space beside the sink — the space, specifically, where Eleanor was now standing with a folded tea towel in her hands — was narrower still.
Eleanor was standing inside of where Chloe could feel her.
Their shoulders did not touch. Their hips did not touch. Their forearms — Chloe’s were exposed to the elbow, Eleanor’s pushed up the same way — were an inch apart, or less than an inch, in the small still air between the basin and the draining board.
Chloe washed.
She handed the first plate across.
Eleanor took it. As Eleanor took it, her forearm brushed Chloe’s. Not the wrist, not the hand. The forearm. The soft underside of it, the part of the arm a woman did not, in ordinary social life, register the existence of.
Two seconds.
Neither of them said anything.
Eleanor dried the plate. Set it on the rack.
Chloe washed the second plate. Handed it across.
As Eleanor took it, the same thing happened. The same forearm. The same two seconds. The same silence.
Neither of them said.
By the third plate, Chloe had become aware that she had begun handing each plate across slightly more slowly than the plate before. She was — she registered with a sharp small humiliation — making it happen. She was making the contact happen.
She made it happen again with the fourth plate.
She registered, the small honest part of her keeping inventory now in active uninterrupted session, that the heat in her own throat was no longer ambient and had become specific.
She registered her own pulse in the side of her own neck.
She registered the dampness at the back of her own knees.
She registered that her breathing — which she had been controlling, since the moment Eleanor had stepped up to the sink, by the deliberate small expedient of taking shorter breaths — was, despite her, audible.
She did not, in the moment, look down at her own hands in the water.
She did not, also, look at Eleanor.
She made it happen, with the fifth plate, deliberately.
Eleanor did not move away.
They were almost finished — the soup pan was on the draining board, the wooden spoon was in Chloe’s hand, the water had gone grey — when Eleanor’s phone began to buzz on the kitchen table behind them.
Chloe did not, immediately, register the sound.
Eleanor did. Eleanor’s whole body did — Chloe felt the small fractional stiffening of the air beside her, the kind of involuntary tightening one woman registered in another only because they were standing close enough for the air between them to be shared.
Chloe felt the buzz before she heard it.
Not in her ear. In her own stomach — the small physical lurch one felt when one’s phone went off in a quiet room and one’s body recognised, ahead of one’s mind, that one had been waiting all evening for a message.
Except, Chloe registered with the small clear cold of a woman who had just discovered something about herself she did not particularly want to know, the message was not coming to her.
The message was coming to the woman an inch away from her at the sink.
And Chloe’s body had, despite her, lurched anyway.
The phone buzzed three times.
Eleanor did not turn round.