Chapter 10 #2
She did not, between two-twenty and three-thirty, look at Chloe once.
Chloe registered this fact in increments.
The first fifteen minutes she registered with a vague, contented unease — Eleanor was simply working, the way Eleanor sometimes worked, head down, absorbed, not to be disturbed.
The next fifteen minutes she registered as the realisation that Eleanor was not, in fact, working in any way that was producing pages.
She wrote in short bursts. Stopped. Crossed things out. Did not, particularly, advance.
By three, Chloe was no longer pretending to read.
She was watching Eleanor not look at her.
By three-thirty, Eleanor had still not looked at her.
Chloe had a small, late thought, the sort of thought that arrived to a person whose composure was beginning to slip and who knew it: this is what it looks like when one is being shown the back of a hand.
She did not, in any visible way, allow herself to react to the thought.
She kept reading the letter she had not, in any meaningful way, been reading since eleven.
At four o’clock, the door from the corridor opened. Eleanor’s voice — Chloe had not seen Eleanor go out — said, into the room, “I’ll be making a phone call. Please ignore it.”
She closed the door.
Chloe heard, faintly, through the wall, Eleanor’s voice on the phone. The voice was low and professional. The conversation lasted twelve minutes. At the end of it, Chloe heard, more clearly, three words that were not, by their tone, professional: “I’m sorry. Yes.”
She did not hear what came after them.
The kitchen door opened. Closed. Did not, for the next half hour, open again.
At five, the door of the study opened, and Eleanor came in.
She came as far as the desk. She did not, this time, sit at her own table.
“That will be enough for today.”
Chloe registered, somewhere underneath the small flat statement that did not let her in, a faint familiar shock — the same shock she had felt the first morning at being told, gently, to be less.
She had thought, since then, that she had been gaining ground in this house.
She understood now, with the absolute clarity of a person who has just been corrected, that the ground had not been hers.
“Oh,” she said.
“You can come back in tomorrow at the usual time.”
“All right.”
She said, before she could stop herself, “Have I — is there — have I done something.”
Eleanor was looking, not at Chloe, but at the box on the desk.
“Why would you assume it was about you?”
The sentence was not — Chloe registered, hearing it land — said unkindly. It was said with the same flat precision Eleanor used for everything. The unkindness was in the meaning of the sentence rather than the delivery of it, and was therefore much harder to take issue with.
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re apologising again.”
“Yes.”
“Don’t.”
Eleanor turned. She went back out. The kitchen door clicked.
The corridor was quiet. Chloe sat at the desk for another minute, with the lid of the box not yet on, and felt the room reduce around her in the way it had reduced in candlelight, except that now the reduction was not warmth but the opposite of it.
She put the lid on the box.
She put on her coat in the hall by herself.
She let herself out.
The afternoon was not yet dark.
She had been leaving Eleanor’s house, for nearly three weeks, at six thirty.
The leaving at five came with a quality of light Chloe had not been encountering on her walk to the bus stop — a remaining grey daylight, low against the hedge, that ought to have been a small reprieve and was, instead, an exposure.
The hour and a half she had reclaimed felt to her, as she got on the bus, less like a gift and more like a piece of evidence.
The evidence was: she did not know, any longer, what to do with the hours that were not Eleanor.
She arrived home at twenty past five. The flat was empty.
Mira was on shift. There were no dishes in the sink.
There was no programme on the television.
There was a small pile of post on the doormat which Chloe picked up and set on the kitchen counter without opening.
She made a tea she did not, in the end, drink.
She sat on the sofa for thirty minutes with her phone in her hand.
She put her phone on the kitchen counter face-up.
She checked it three times in the first quarter of an hour.
She checked it twice in the half hour after that.
By seven o’clock she had stopped counting, which was its own kind of evidence about what she was doing.
The phone, on the counter, did not, between five-twenty and eight, light up at all.
The blank screen became, by some measure, a small physical fact in the kitchen — a piece of furniture which had developed, in the last hour, the capacity to humiliate her.
Mira was on shift.
There was no one in the flat to watch her behave this way, which was, Chloe registered with the small distant honest part of her that had not, by some measure, fully stopped working, possibly worse.
She did not — and registered, as the thirty minutes passed, that she had not — taken her phone out of her pocket to check whether Eleanor had messaged.
She had not.
She put it on the table.
She thought, sitting on the sofa in the bluish grey light of a winter early evening at twenty past six: I have made too much of this.
She thought: I have been visible. I have been needy. I have been transparent.
She thought: I will be less.
She did not, while having these thoughts, register that the resolution was the trap.
She thought she was making a sensible adjustment.
She thought she was, perhaps, becoming sensible about a thing she had nearly allowed herself to become unsensible about.
She thought she would walk into the house tomorrow morning a slightly different woman from the one who had walked out of it tonight — a quieter one, a less embarrassing one, a woman who did not ask whether she had done something.
She made herself toast, badly, on Mira’s bread.
She went to bed at nine.
She did, at ten past eleven, take out her phone.
She opened the browser. The autocomplete arrived four steps ahead of her, the way it had arrived four months ago on the bus from Headington — Eleanor Vale Oxford, Eleanor Vale scandal, Eleanor Vale Jess Carter.
She tapped the second. She read the article she had read on her first day in this job.
She read it through without rushing. She read it knowing things she had not known the first time — the smell of bergamot in the hall, the way Eleanor’s thumb moved a fraction of an inch on the cover of a green-cloth book, the particular weight of an exhale against the side of her own neck.
The article became, on a second reading, a different document.
It did not, she registered, become a more reassuring one.
She went to the forum thread. She found the post she had found the first time — the woman who had said she had been ruined by Eleanor’s looking, who had said she had had to drop the seminar to graduate.
She read it again. She did not, this time, register horror.
She registered, very precisely, the small specific recognition of one woman’s account of having been read by another.
She closed the phone.
She did not, this time, delete the search history.
She kept it as evidence — of what, she would not have been able to say, even to Mira.
She did not, in the dark, allow herself to take out the photocopy from the bedside drawer. She did not take out the notebook either. She lay on her back. She slept after some time.
She slept, oddly, well.