Chapter 18
EIGHTEEN
The week after the morning of the eggs was, by some measure, the best week Chloe had had in some years.
She would not, while she was inside it, have used the word best. She would have used, if pressed, the word easy, in the small private register one used for things one did not yet want to congratulate oneself for.
The work resumed on Monday. The work resumed at the desk in the upstairs study, with the chipped white mug at her elbow and the box she had not finished on Friday open in front of her, and at twelve-thirty Eleanor came into the room with a tray bearing two bowls of soup and sat down on the second chair beside her without asking if Chloe wanted lunch in the room or in the kitchen.
They ate at the desk.
Eleanor’s foot, at some point during the lunch, found Chloe’s ankle under the desk and stayed there.
The work continued for another four hours.
Chloe got up to leave at half past five.
Eleanor said, “Stay.”
Chloe stayed.
By Wednesday, the staying had become a question Chloe was no longer required to answer.
She did not, on either Tuesday or Wednesday evening, go home.
Mira knew where she was. Chloe had texted on Monday — at the kitchen table, with her foot still against Eleanor’s instep — to say she would not, for a couple of days, be at the flat.
Mira had replied: ok. Mira had not, in the message, added anything else.
Chloe had read the absence of the further word and registered, with a small inward turn she had not quite been ready for, that Mira was — by some measure — letting her have this.
She would, by Thursday, register the other thing in Mira’s message also. The thing that was not in the message. The brevity itself, in the small careful syntax of a woman who, on the morning after the dam, had asked across the kitchen table whether Chloe was in love and had been told yes.
On Wednesday afternoon, Eleanor brought her a key.
She did it without ceremony. She set the key on the corner of the desk beside the chipped white mug while Chloe was reading.
She did not, at the moment of setting it down, look at Chloe.
She had the look on her face of a woman who had decided, sometime in the previous two hours, that the gesture was easier executed than discussed.
“There,” Eleanor said. “So you don’t have to wait.”
Chloe lifted her eyes.
Eleanor was already crossing the room toward the second small table.
“Eleanor.”
“Yes.”
“This is — ”
“It is a key. I have a spare. I would like you to have the spare. I would like, in particular, not to have to be downstairs to open the door to you in the evenings when I am, as I will sometimes be, in the upstairs study with the door closed.”
Chloe looked at the key.
It was a small ordinary brass key. There was nothing in particular to indicate it was a key to a Georgian townhouse in North Oxford. It was, by any external measure, a key.
“All right,” she said.
“Yes?”
“Yes.”
Eleanor sat down at her table.
She did not, in any visible way, register that she had just done a thing.
Chloe put the key in her coat pocket. She did not put it on her own keyring.
She did not, also, leave it in the small dish in the hall where her own keys had begun to live, on the evenings when she had stayed.
She put it in the inner pocket of her coat, which was a pocket she rarely used, and which she would, all of Thursday and Friday, find herself touching through the wool to check that the key was still there.
She did not sleep in Eleanor’s bed every night.
Eleanor had a rule about this, although the rule was not, at any point, articulated.
Chloe registered the rule on Tuesday, when she had said, around eleven, that she would stay, and Eleanor had said, very gently — *not tonight* — and had walked Chloe to the door and called her a cab and kissed her on the doorstep and watched her go.
Chloe had registered, in the cab, the small flat fact of the rule.
She had also registered, behind it, the fact that the rule was not — by any measure she could itemise — a refusal.
It was, instead, a small disciplined act of Eleanor’s about the architecture of intimacy, the kind of act one might expect from a woman who had spent fourteen years not allowing herself to want things.
The rule was: not every night. The rule was, more precisely: I will let you have me, in the bed, on Wednesday, because I let you have me on Monday, but I will not let you have me on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday in a row, because I am — Eleanor’s face had said, gently, on the threshold — not, at this stage, able to be safely had four nights in a row.
Chloe had not, in the moment, taken it badly.
She had taken, instead, the cab home. She had let herself into the flat at twenty to twelve. Mira had been in the sitting room. Mira had looked up. Mira had not, that evening, asked anything.
She had, on Wednesday morning, gone back.
Wednesday afternoon: the key.
By Thursday they had begun to cook together.
It was, Chloe registered, the most absurd thing they had done so far.
Eleanor — who had ruined the toast on the first Saturday in October, and who had been honest about her relationship with the toaster ever since — was in the kitchen with her sleeves pushed back and a wooden spoon in her hand, deferring to Chloe on the question of whether the onions needed another two minutes.
Chloe had said two minutes. The onions had needed, in the end, three minutes.
Eleanor had been gracious about it. They had eaten at the small round table by the window in the dining room with the green-leaf wallpaper.
Eleanor had said, somewhere between the onions and the dessert, “You make this house feel — ”
She had not, in the end, finished the sentence.
Chloe had let her not finish it.
She had — the small distant honest part of her was, even inside the easy week, still keeping a record — heard the unfinished sentence as a thing she had not, before now, heard from Eleanor at all.
Eleanor finished her sentences. Eleanor was, in some respects, a person who had built her professional life on finishing sentences other people had been afraid to begin.
The not-finishing was, by some measure, the most exposed thing Eleanor had said to her, even by comparison with the long fireside paragraph on the night of the small kiss.
Chloe had reached across the small table.
She had put her hand on the back of Eleanor’s.
Eleanor’s hand had turned, slowly, under hers.
Their palms had met. Eleanor had looked at her with the expression Chloe had not, before this week, allowed herself to interpret straightforwardly.
It was the expression of a woman who had decided something.
Chloe had not, on Thursday night, asked what.
She had stayed.
On Friday morning, she went home.
She had told Eleanor — on Thursday evening, in the kitchen — that she was going to spend Friday at the flat.
She had said it the way she had said most things lately, without justification, and Eleanor had said *good* and not asked her why.
Chloe had not, in the moment of saying it, been entirely sure why.
She had thought, vaguely, that she needed a day with Mira.
She had thought, less vaguely, that she needed a day with her own kitchen.
She arrived at the flat at twenty to ten in last night’s clothes and Friday’s coat.
Mira was at the kitchen table in pyjamas with a cafetière and the laptop. She did not, when Chloe came in, get up. She looked up.
“Hi,” Chloe said.
“Hi.”
Chloe put her bag down. She took off her coat. She hung it on the hook in the hall. She came back into the kitchen and reached for a mug.
“Coffee’s mostly cold.”
“It’s fine.”
“There’s more in the pot.”
“I’ll do another.”
She made another. She did not, while she was making it, look across the table at Mira.
She could feel — the small distant honest part of her was, this morning, fully active — that Mira was, this morning, going to ask her a question.
She could also feel that Mira was, today, going to wait until Chloe had her own mug in her own hand before asking it.
Chloe sat down opposite her.
Mira closed the laptop.
“Chloe.”
“Yes.”
“Can I — can I do the thing I’ve been not doing.”
Chloe drank her coffee.
“Yes,” she said.
“All right.” Mira drew a breath. “I’m not — I want to say first — I’m not trying to talk you out of anything.
I’m not trying to — I just — I haven’t seen you for four days and you’ve been here, intermittently, like a guest. And I don’t — I don’t mind the staying.
That isn’t the thing. The thing is that I’ve been watching you — for four months — become a person whose centre of gravity has moved into someone else’s kitchen.
And I’d like, briefly, to mention it. Out loud. Before it becomes the only kitchen.”
Chloe looked at her hands.
“Mira — ”
“I’m not finished.”
“No.”
“She gave you a key.”
Chloe lifted her eyes.
“How did you — ”
“You touched your coat pocket nine times in the last three minutes. Three more times since you sat down. You did it on Wednesday night in the sitting room too, before you went back over there on Thursday morning. You don’t do that to check a — a kerb crossing. You do that to check a key.”
Chloe took her hand out of her coat pocket.
She had not, until that moment, registered that she had been doing it.
Mira drank her coffee.
She set the mug down.
“She isn’t — ” Chloe said.
She stopped.
“I know,” Mira said. “I know she isn’t what I was imagining. I know she has been — I know, from what you told me on the morning after, that she has told you, before sleeping with you, that she would be bad at this. I know that. I am not — I am not in the kitchen of October. I am in this kitchen.”
“Yes.”
“Chloe. I love you. Please don’t — please don’t disappear into a woman who used to be famous for disappearing women.”
It came out quietly.
It came out, also, with the small clean accuracy Mira used for the sentences she had been holding the longest.
Chloe felt the line land in her chest with a small flat finality.
She did not, immediately, answer.
She did not, also, defend Eleanor the way she had defended Eleanor across the bar to Theo on the night of the storm. The instinct to defend was — she registered, the small honest part of her in active session — still there. The instinct was now, however, no longer the only thing in the room.
She said, after a beat, “She isn’t — disappearing me.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Are you sure.”
“Mira.”
“I’m asking.”
Chloe took a long beat.
“I think — ” she said. “I think she is, in some ways, doing the opposite. I think she is — she is, on most days, the first person who has — has paid attention to me as a person rather than as a — a candidate for a thing. And I think — ” She stopped.
Started again. “And I think you are right that I should — that I should not — not become someone whose life is only in her house.”
“Yes.”
“I’m going to — I’m going to come home more.”
“Yes.”
“I’m going to keep my own kitchen.”
“Yes.”
Mira nodded.
She did not say anything else.
Chloe felt — sitting at the small kitchen table in the morning light of a January Friday with her flatmate in pyjamas opposite her and the coffee pot on the side and the key in her coat pocket on the hook in the hall — the small warm fact of being held in three places at once.
The kitchen at the townhouse. The bed upstairs.
This kitchen, here, this morning, with Mira.
She spent the day at the flat.
She did not, all day, message Eleanor. Eleanor did not, all day, message her. She had told Eleanor she would be home on Friday. Eleanor had said good. The arrangement was the arrangement.
Mira left for a late shift at four.
Chloe had the kitchen to herself for the afternoon.
She did her own laundry. She ate her own lunch.
She read on her own sofa with her feet on her own coffee table and the small ordinary fact of being in her own flat alone sat in her chest as a thing she had — she registered, with a small clear surprise — missed in the previous four months without registering that she was missing it.
She did not, at any point in the afternoon, take the key out of her coat pocket.
She did not, also, give the key back.
She had thought about giving it back, briefly, during Mira’s sentence at the kitchen table.
The thought had arrived as a small theatrical possibility — the gesture of returning the key as a sign of having heard the warning.
She had let the thought go. The gesture would have been a performance.
Mira had not asked her to do it. Mira had not, in fact, asked her to do anything except not disappear.
She would not disappear.
She would, also, keep the key.
The two facts were not, she registered, in conflict.
At twenty to seven on Friday evening, she put on her coat.
She had told Eleanor she would be home Friday.
She had not said she would be home Friday night.
The distinction had been deliberate, on Thursday in the kitchen, although she had not at the time admitted to herself that the distinction was being constructed.
She had assumed she would, by some hour of Friday evening, find herself getting back on the bus.
She found, at twenty to seven, that the hour had arrived.
She took the key out of her coat pocket. She looked at it. She put it back.
She let herself out of the flat.
She did not, on the bus to Banbury Road, message Eleanor that she was coming.
She had a key.
She would, she registered as the bus crossed Magdalen Bridge, use it.