Chapter 12
TWELVE
“Stay for dinner on Friday.”
Eleanor said it on the Thursday afternoon, in the same tone she had used for stay, on the night of the storm, three weeks earlier. The kettle had just clicked. They were in the kitchen. Chloe had been about to wash her own mug.
“Yes.”
“There will be someone else here. I should have said. I don’t want you to think this is — ” She paused, as though choosing her version. “I don’t want you to think it is anything other than dinner with a colleague. An old colleague. She is visiting from Edinburgh.”
“All right.”
“Her name is Ines Marchetti. She talks too much. She is, mostly, harmless.”
“Mostly.”
“Mostly.”
Eleanor turned to take the milk from the fridge.
Her back was to Chloe. From this angle, the small grey jumper she had taken to wearing on cold days made her shoulders look narrower than they ordinarily looked, the kind of narrowness Chloe had not previously noticed and now could not, in the moment, stop having noticed.
“What does mostly mean.”
“She likes pretty things.” Eleanor closed the fridge. Did not, in turning, look at Chloe directly. “Be careful.”
Chloe felt the line land in her chest with a small heat she did not, at the time, know what to do with. She did not know if she had just been called a pretty thing. She did not know if she had just been warned. She did not know if the warning was about Ines or about something else.
She drank from her mug.
Eleanor did not look at her on the way out of the kitchen.
Chloe did not, on the way home, allow herself to take the conversation apart sentence by sentence on the bus.
She did, after she had got home, take it apart sentence by sentence in her room.
She did not, in the end, know which sentence had been the loudest.
Ines arrived at half past seven on the Friday in a long red coat that she did not, on the threshold, take off.
She handed it to Chloe.
“You must be the new one.”
“I’m — yes. Chloe.”
“Ines. She has spoken about you twice already. Which is twice more than she usually speaks about anyone.”
Chloe felt the flush rise to her throat before her mind had finished processing what Ines had said.
The flush was not, she registered, embarrassment.
It was — the small honest part of her keeping the records had stopped, in recent weeks, even pretending to euphemise — possessiveness.
She was being told, by a woman she had just met, that Eleanor had spoken about her.
The information landed as a small physical pleasure she did not, in the moment, want anyone in the hall to register on her face.
She turned, slightly, so that her face would not, for the next three seconds, be seen by either of them.
Eleanor — who was in the hall behind Chloe, somehow, although Chloe had not heard her come down the stairs — said, “I have spoken about her in passing.”
“Passing twice,” Ines said. “Counted.”
Eleanor said, without expression, “Hello, Ines.”
“Hello, darling.”
Ines came in. She was, Chloe registered, doing the looking around she had presumably done at this house many times before — at the coat hooks, at the small console table, at the framed print on the wall above it, the way one looked at a room to confirm that none of its furniture had moved since the last visit.
She turned. She looked Chloe up and down with an open frankness Chloe had not been looked at with for several years.
It was not unfriendly. It was the looking of a woman who had decided not to bother with the pretence that she was not looking.
“Cream jumper,” Ines said.
“Sorry?”
“Cream jumper. Nice. Slightly braver than I would have predicted from her description. Eleanor, you didn’t tell me she was brave.”
“I didn’t say she wasn’t.”
Ines laughed. The laugh, Chloe registered, was warm.
It was not Eleanor’s laugh. Eleanor’s laugh, when it had finally happened, had been an event.
Ines’s laugh was a small steady accompaniment to most things she said, the laugh of a woman who had spent twenty years in a profession that did not laugh and had decided, in compensation, to do all her laughing in private rooms.
“Come on,” Ines said. “Show me what she’s feeding us. I have travelled for this.”
Eleanor had cooked.
She had cooked, by the look of it, for some time before Chloe had arrived.
The dining room — the room behind the kitchen, the small one with the green-leaf wallpaper, the one Chloe had only previously been in twice, both on Saturdays — had been laid for three with the small precision Chloe was starting to recognise as Eleanor’s effort.
White napkins. A pair of long candles, already lit.
A bottle of red, decanted. A second bottle on the side, white, in an ice bucket Chloe had not previously seen exist in this house.
“She’s made an effort,” Ines said, to nobody in particular.
“Sit.”
“Where.”
“There.”
Eleanor pointed to the chair opposite the one she would take. Ines sat in it without complaint. Chloe was therefore placed at the third side of the small round table — to Eleanor’s right, to Ines’s left, in the only seat the seating had left her.
Eleanor poured.
“Red,” Ines said. “Of course. You used to be quite vicious about white.”
“I am still quite vicious about white.”
“Why is there white in the bucket, then.”
“In case the girl wanted white.”
The girl.
Chloe felt the noun land in the room. It had not been used unkindly.
Eleanor had said it the way she said most things, without inflection.
But it sat between them — between Chloe and Eleanor, specifically — for a beat longer than it should have, because it was, Chloe registered, the first thing she had been called in this house that was not Chloe and was not the way Eleanor said you.
The girl was the noun the Times Higher Education article had used in 2014.
Eleanor looked at her.
“Sorry,” she said, quietly. “I should not have said it like that.”
Chloe shook her head. Did not, in the moment, trust her voice.
Ines glanced between them. Took a slow sip of the red.
“Right,” she said. “Tell me about the work.”
Ines talked.
Ines, as Eleanor had warned, talked a great deal — about her own daughter in her first year at Edinburgh, about a feud in her department, about a book she was finishing too slowly, about a former student who had recently published a debut Ines had not yet read.
She asked questions, sometimes, and answered them herself in the next sentence.
The way she spoke was warm and continuous and slightly performative, and underneath the performance was, Chloe registered after about fifteen minutes, a much sharper attention than the talking was being used to disguise.
Ines was watching her.
Not the way Eleanor watched her. Ines’s watching was busier, more diagonal — eyes flicking across the table during a sentence about her daughter, taking in Chloe’s wine glass, Chloe’s cuffs, the place where Chloe’s hand was resting on the table near her napkin.
The watching was the watching of a woman doing several things at once and looking, principally, for one thing.
Eleanor, opposite, said little.
Eleanor, opposite, was — Chloe registered, sometime during the main course — watching Ines watch her.
The watching was not the same watching Eleanor used in the study.
It had something faintly proprietary in it, a quality of attention that did not, this evening, only belong in the direction of Chloe’s mouth.
It was a noticing that included a small adjustment underneath it, the kind of adjustment a woman made when she discovered another woman taking a closer interest in something she had begun, without admitting it to herself, to consider hers.
Chloe drank.
She listened. She laughed where she was supposed to laugh.
She answered Ines’s questions when they were put to her — about her degree, about her work in the archive, about Oxford.
She answered them in the version of her voice she had used at her interview twelve weeks ago, which was, she registered, almost embarrassingly familiar to the version she had used on the bus to her mother three months before that.
She had not used it in this house in some time.
Eleanor heard her using it.
Eleanor — Chloe registered, the small honest part of her keeping continuous record — did not, for the next ten seconds, drink.
Eleanor set her wine glass down on the table.
She picked it up again. She set it down again, and the second setting-down was slightly off, and the glass clinked once against the rim of her own plate before she steadied it.
The small mechanical sound was not, by any measure outside the table, audible.
It was audible to Chloe, who was at her right hand, and to Ines, who was at her left.
Ines’s eyes flicked to the glass.
Then to Eleanor’s face.
Then to Chloe.
She did not, for the rest of the dinner, ask Chloe another direct question.
Eleanor heard her using it.
Eleanor refilled her glass without being asked.
She did it with a small precision Chloe felt in her wrist as Eleanor’s hand moved past it.
Eleanor’s hand, briefly, was beside Chloe’s.
Eleanor’s arm, briefly, brushed Chloe’s sleeve.
The motion was not unusual — it was, by any external measure, the motion of a host topping up a guest. The placement of the contact was, perhaps, not strictly necessary.
The contact was held for less than half a second.
Ines, mid-sentence about her daughter, watched the contact happen.
Ines did not, after that, say anything for almost a minute.
She drank.
She smiled, vaguely, at the table.
The conversation moved on.
By the time the plates were cleared, Ines had moved on to a story about a colleague’s misbehaviour at a conference in Madrid, which neither Eleanor nor Chloe encouraged, and which Ines told anyway.
She told it with a kind of practised malice that was — Chloe could feel it — not, principally, about Madrid.