Chapter 10
TEN
On the Saturday before the cool Monday, they went to a bookshop.
They had gone at three.
The shop was the small upstairs room above the larger ground-floor commercial space — the part of the shop where the secondhand books lived, with the low ceilings and the smell of old paper and the small uneven floorboards that had been there longer than either of them.
There was one other customer in the room when they came up the stairs.
A woman, perhaps Eleanor’s age, perhaps a little older, in a navy coat and reading glasses pushed into her hair, with a book already open in her hands.
Eleanor went to the literature shelf.
Chloe stayed near the door for a moment, taking off her coat, and then drifted to the poetry section on the opposite wall.
The room was narrow enough that, from the poetry section, she could see Eleanor’s back — Eleanor in her dark grey coat, with the soft fall of hair against her collar — and could hear, very faintly, the small sound of Eleanor pulling a hardback from a shelf and turning the pages.
Chloe registered, watching her, that she was no longer pretending to herself that the watching was casual.
She also registered, after perhaps thirty seconds, that the woman in the navy coat had stopped reading.
The woman was looking at Eleanor’s back.
She was doing it the way Chloe sometimes caught herself doing it — without realising she was doing it, the body of her attention focused entirely on the woman on the other side of the room.
The book in the navy-coat woman’s hands was held at a slight angle that suggested she had stopped engaging with it some seconds ago.
Chloe registered this without registering, at first, that she had registered it.
Then the woman’s eyes moved.
They went, in the small unhurried way one’s eyes moved when one was doing a piece of confirmation, from Eleanor’s back to Chloe’s face. They stayed on Chloe’s face for perhaps two seconds. They returned to Eleanor’s back.
Chloe held still on the other side of the room with a Carson in her left hand and a small clear unpleasant heat at the base of her throat that she had not, before that moment, ever had.
She was, she registered, being looked at by a stranger who knew Eleanor.
She was, she also registered, being looked at by a stranger who had just put two specific facts together — the woman she had known once, in another professional life, and the woman next to her who was not, by twenty-one years, the colleague of the first woman, and who was browsing the poetry section of a small upstairs room while waiting for her to finish at the literature shelves.
The woman in the navy coat did not, in the next several seconds, do anything.
She did not approach Eleanor. She did not speak. She did not smile at Chloe across the room.
She closed the book in her hands. She put it back on the shelf she had taken it from. She turned, slowly, toward the stairs.
She paused once, near the top of the stairs, and looked back.
Not at Eleanor.
At Chloe.
The look — Chloe would carry it, on and off, for several months after the afternoon was over — was not unkind.
It was not, in any specific way, hostile.
It was the look of a woman who had recognised something.
It contained, by Chloe’s reading of it in the moment, a single piece of information that she was not, at the time, going to make available to herself in language.
Then the woman went down the stairs.
Chloe heard the small bell on the door of the shop chime, once, downstairs.
Eleanor had not, in any visible way, registered any of it.
She finished at the literature shelf. She came over to the poetry section with two books under her left arm — neither of them, Chloe registered, the Bowen — and stopped behind Chloe and said, against the side of her neck, very quietly, “I’m going to be ten more minutes. Are you all right?”
Chloe said, “Yes.”
Eleanor stayed where she was for half a second.
Then she said, “Who was the woman.”
Chloe turned her head.
“In the navy coat,” Eleanor said. “She went past me at the stairs. I — I caught her face out of the corner of my eye. I didn’t see her come in.”
“She’d been here when we came up.”
“Yes.”
“She didn’t — she didn’t speak to you.”
“No.”
Eleanor’s body did the smallest thing. It was the same small thing it had done on the night of the dinner with Ines, before the wine-glass had clinked against the rim of her plate — the small fractional adjustment of a woman registering that a piece of information had arrived which she would have preferred had not.
“Did she look at you,” Eleanor said.
It came out flat. It came out, also, without the upward inflection at the end.
“Yes,” Chloe said.
Eleanor took a breath.
She did not, however, ask the next question. She did not turn her head, also, to look back toward the stairs.
She said, after a beat, “Let’s go.”
“Did you find — ”
“No. Let’s go.”
She steered Chloe, with one hand at the small of her back, out of the poetry section and toward the stairs.
The hand at the small of her back was — Chloe registered, with the small honest part of her now operating without interruption — not, this afternoon, the hand that had touched her there in October at the door.
It was a hand that was getting Chloe out of a room.
The hand was protective. The hand was, by some measure Chloe could feel through her jumper, slightly afraid.
Eleanor paid for the two books at the till downstairs without speaking.
She did not, at the till, look at the door.
They walked back to the house through the small grey afternoon light of an Oxford in late January.
Eleanor did not, on the walk, take her hand.
She did not, also, take Chloe’s arm. She walked, instead, half a pace ahead — close enough that Chloe could keep up without having to make any visible adjustment to her stride, far enough that, to a passing stranger, the two of them might have been a tutor and a student walking back from the secondhand shop on a Saturday afternoon, and not anything else.
Chloe registered the half-pace.
She did not, on the walk, ask Eleanor who the woman had been.
She did not, also, mention the look.
She thought — somewhere on the corner of Broad Street and Cornmarket, with the small unpleasant heat at the base of her throat now beginning, finally, to subside — that she would, on Monday, find out by some other route that the woman had been a colleague.
A specific kind of colleague. The kind whose face Eleanor would have rather not have been seen by, this afternoon, in a small upstairs room in a secondhand bookshop on Turl Street with a twenty-six-year-old archivist in a cream jumper at her elbow.
She was not, on Monday, going to find out.
She was, on Monday, going to find out something else.
She did not, however, know this yet.
Monday.
She knew it before she had the door fully open.
Eleanor had opened the door, the way Eleanor opened the door every weekday morning.
She had said good morning, the way Eleanor said good morning.
She had taken Chloe’s coat and hung it on the second hook from the left, the way she had been hanging Chloe’s coat for nearly nine weeks.
Nothing about the procedure was different from the procedure of any other Monday since the morning Chloe had first crossed the threshold.
And yet.
The temperature of the air, Chloe registered — moving past Eleanor into the hall, feeling the small adjustment in the way her own coat had been taken — had gone down a degree.
Not noticeably. Not in any way she could have pointed to.
Only in the way Eleanor’s hand had not lingered for a fraction of a second on the collar, as it had been lingering, in increments she had not been keeping track of, for the last six.
She did not, immediately, allow herself to notice it.
She made tea. She went into the study. She opened the box she had been working on. She set out the pencil.
The mug Eleanor had handed her this morning had not been the small chipped white one.
It had been the larger plain blue one. The one Chloe had been given in her first three weeks at the house, before the smaller mug had become hers without negotiation.
She drank from it.
She continued not to notice.
By half past ten she had read four letters and could have summarised one of them.
By eleven, she had stopped pretending to read and was, instead, sitting with the same letter in front of her, performing a posture of work for an audience of one woman in the next room who was, by the sound of it, deliberately not entering the study.
Eleanor did not, this morning, come in to bring her anything.
Eleanor did not, this morning, come in.
The door between the kitchen and the study, which had been open the last three working days, was — Chloe did not remember anyone closing it — now closed.
She had not heard the click. She did not know at what point in the morning it had moved.
But it was closed, and she could not, sitting at the desk, hear the sounds of another woman’s morning the way she had been able to hear them for the last week.
At twelve, she went to the kitchen for water.
Eleanor was at the kitchen table. The phone was face-up on the table beside her hand.
The phone was, Chloe noted before she could stop herself, the same phone.
Eleanor was writing. She did not, when Chloe came in, look up.
She lifted her left hand very slightly in a small acknowledgment that was not, by any measure, the same acknowledgment Eleanor had been giving her since the morning of the storm.
Chloe filled her glass.
She said, “Did you eat.”
Eleanor said, without lifting her eyes, “I ate.”
“All right.”
Chloe took her water.
She left.
In the afternoon, Eleanor came into the study at twenty past two. She did not say good afternoon. She crossed to her own small table by the bookcase, sat down, opened her own notebook, picked up the green pen, and began to write.