Chapter 12 #3
It was not, Chloe registered, said in the voice Eleanor had used on Monday two weeks ago.
It was not a dismissal. It was almost the opposite — the voice of a woman who was protecting Chloe from a question Chloe had not yet thought through, and who would not, this evening, in this house, with the candle still burning on the dining table behind her, allow Chloe to ask it.
Chloe nodded. Once.
She got her coat from the hall.
She did not, this time, let Eleanor help her into it. She put it on by herself. She opened the door by herself. She crossed the threshold by herself.
On the step, she turned.
“Wednesday,” she said.
It was the first time, in three months of working in this house, that she had been the one to set the next day.
Eleanor looked at her.
“Wednesday,” she said.
Chloe closed the door behind her.
She walked the long way home with Ines’s sentence sitting underneath her sternum and the small thing she had done at the threshold sitting beside it, the two facts not yet ready to be read in the same paragraph.
Theo called her on Friday night.
He had not called her in nearly two months.
He had texted, once, in November — a small flat *hope you’re well* on a Tuesday afternoon, the kind of message that arrived from an ex-boyfriend at a particular point in a particular kind of healing and that Chloe had registered and not replied to.
The call came at twenty past ten on a Friday night.
She was in her own bed, in her own pyjamas, in her own flat, with the slim Carson on the bedside table and the lamp on and Mira already asleep in the next room.
She picked up at the third ring.
“Theo.”
“Hi.”
There was a beat.
“Are you all right,” he said.
“Yes. Why.”
“No reason.”
She did not, immediately, answer that.
“Theo — ”
“I — look. I’m not — Chloe, I’m not ringing to — to do a thing.
I’m not. I am ringing because — I had a drink with Sam this evening.
Sam had a drink last week with a woman whose name I won’t say.
The woman’s a — she’s a friend of someone who is a friend of someone else, and the conversation was about — it was about a name. Not yours.”
Chloe held the phone very still against her ear.
The lamp on the bedside table was making the small steady electric hum it made on cold nights.
The Carson was on the table beside the lamp.
The lamp and the book were, by some measure she would only later be able to articulate, the small steady objects of her own bedroom — the objects that belonged to her, that nobody else had touched today, that were, by this measure, the last objects in the world she would have allowed Theo’s sentence to be received in front of.
“Go on,” she said.
“The conversation was about — the name was Eleanor Vale.”
“Yes.”
“They said — the woman said — there had been some talk. Recently. In — I think the word was a quiet corner. A quiet corner of — somewhere academic. About — about her being seen, in town, with — with someone.”
“Someone.”
“With a young woman, Chloe.”
Chloe did not, for a second, speak.
“The name wasn’t mentioned,” Theo said. “I want to be clear. The name was not mentioned. I’m not — I am not ringing to tell you you’ve been named. You haven’t.”
“All right.”
“But I’m — I am ringing because — ”
“I know why you’re ringing.”
“Are you being careful, Chloe.”
There it was.
It was the question Mira had not, since the morning after the storm, formally asked.
It was the question Eleanor herself had implied, in her own way, on the night of the small kiss by the fire.
It was the question Chloe had been doing the small daily work of not answering for nearly four months.
It arrived, this evening, in her own bedroom, at twenty past ten on a Friday in late January, in the voice of a man she had once been engaged to for fourteen months.
She did not, immediately, answer.
She did not, also, take it badly. The taking-it-badly had been used up, she registered, on the night of the storm in the wine bar two and a half months ago, when she had defended Eleanor across the table to him because she had not yet known what was happening to her and had only known that she was about to be told.
She was not, this evening, going to defend Eleanor.
She was not, also, going to lie to Theo.
She said, “No. Not, in the way you mean.”
“All right.”
“I know what I am doing.”
“Yes.”
There was another beat.
“Chloe — ”
“Don’t.”
“I’m not going to.”
There was a smaller beat.
“Goodnight, Chloe.”
“Goodnight.”
She set the phone face-down on the bedside table.
She did not, in the moment, do anything with the information.
She did not, also, allow herself to consider not doing anything with the information.
She turned the lamp off.
She lay in the dark and registered, with the small honest part of her that had taken up permanent residence in the back of her chest in the previous weeks, that what Theo had told her was the first piece of evidence she had been given by the outside world that the cocoon was no longer entirely private.
Somewhere — a flat in Jericho, a kitchen in Summertown, a corridor in a college library — a woman she had never met was saying Eleanor’s name to another woman she had never met, and the other woman was saying *with someone*, and that *someone* had begun, despite Theo’s small careful work, to acquire dimensions.
She did not, that night, sleep.