Chapter 20
TWENTY
She went home that morning.
Eleanor made breakfast. Chloe ate it. Eleanor was, by the second cup of coffee, herself again — not exactly the woman of the previous fortnight, but a version of her composed enough to pour coffee and to ask, with apparent attentiveness, about Chloe’s afternoon.
Chloe answered. The foot under the table did not, this morning, touch hers.
Eleanor’s did not, also, withdraw. Their feet were ordinary feet at an ordinary distance.
Chloe walked back to Cowley in last night’s clothes.
Mira was at work. The flat was empty. She had a long shower. She put her clothes in the wash. She slept for three hours in her own bed. She woke at three in the afternoon to the sound of a notification on her phone.
Eleanor.
Tomorrow, six. I’d like to make you dinner properly.
She read it.
She read it again.
She typed: yes.
She did not, immediately, send it.
She did, eventually, send it.
She found out at four o’clock the next afternoon.
It was on her phone first. It was on her phone because she had — in a habit she had thought she had broken in the early autumn — refreshed her search alert for Eleanor’s name.
She had set it up, on the second night, in the dark, in her bed, in the bus from Headington.
She had not, in the weeks since, looked at it.
The alert had been sitting in her inbox accumulating articles she had not, after the first few days, registered.
She had opened it at four because the woman she had been on the phone to about a freelance editing job had cancelled their call, and she had been left with an empty afternoon.
The article was from a small American academic blog. The post was three days old. The title was a question.
Whatever Happened to Eleanor Vale?
She read it.
The piece was — the part of her that had been a literature postgraduate registered, with a small distant approval — competently written.
It was by a doctoral student at a college Chloe had not heard of.
It was framed as an essay about institutional silence.
It was, in particular, about the long quiet aftermath of the 2014 scandal.
It mentioned Jess Carter by name. It mentioned, with a particular kind of careful sourcing, two other postgraduates who had — the piece said — complained anonymously about Eleanor in the years before the formal investigation.
It mentioned Eleanor’s 2010 essay collection.
It mentioned, also, the fact that Eleanor was, according to a former colleague who had requested not to be named, “quietly working again, in a private capacity, with the assistance of younger women.”
Chloe sat at her kitchen table and read the piece twice.
She did not, the second time, register most of it.
She registered the phrase younger women.
She registered her own face in a quiet kitchen.
She closed the laptop.
She did not, immediately, get up.
After a while, she opened her phone. She typed: are you all right?
She did not send it.
She deleted it.
She typed: have you seen.
She did not send it.
She deleted it.
She picked up her bag. She put on her coat. She went.
She used the key.
Eleanor was in the study on the first floor.
Chloe did not call out. She climbed the stairs in her coat. She knocked on the open door.
Eleanor turned.
She had a tumbler on the desk. It had been on the desk, by the look of the ring on the wood, for some time.
She did not, when Chloe came in, get up.
She was — Chloe registered, in the small uncomplicated way one registered a thing that has been waiting to be registered for an hour — visibly already a glass into something.
“Are you all right.”
“I’m fine.”
“Have you seen — ”
“I’ve seen.”
“Eleanor — ”
“I don’t want to talk. I want you.”
It was the sentence from two evenings ago. It was the sentence from two evenings ago in the same voice it had been said in then, except that this time the woman saying it was looking directly at Chloe, and the directness was the part that Chloe could not, in the moment, find a response to.
She stood in the doorway in her coat for a long second.
Eleanor got up.
She crossed the room.
She did not, this time, ask. She put her hand on the front of Chloe’s coat and walked her, two steps, backward — until Chloe’s back was against the wall of bookshelves at the side of the study door.
The shelves were old. The corner of a hardback came against Chloe’s shoulder blade.
A book moved a fraction of an inch and did not, in the end, fall.
Eleanor’s mouth was on hers before Chloe had finished registering that her back was against the shelf.
It was not the kiss from the sitting room. It was not the kiss from the hallway. It was harder. Her hand was at the side of Chloe’s neck, fingers up into her hair, the grip in the hair sharper than it had been on the rug. Her teeth, briefly, against Chloe’s lower lip.
“Eleanor — ”
“Here.”
Her hand under the cream jumper.
Her hand under the bra.
The buttons of Chloe’s jeans went under Eleanor’s thumb. The zip went. Her fingers were inside the waistband before the waistband had fully opened. There was no pause this time. There was no held second. There was no looking at her face.
Chloe’s head went back against the shelf.
A second book moved.
Eleanor’s fingers were inside her against the side of a bookcase with Chloe’s jeans around her thighs and her bra pushed up and her hand on Eleanor’s shoulder, and Eleanor was bringing her — fast, hard, the precision Chloe now knew by heart turned in a different direction — to the kind of climax Chloe had not, before this evening, known how to receive standing up.
Chloe came against the shelf.
Her hand fisted in the front of Eleanor’s shirt.
Her face went into Eleanor’s shoulder.
She did not, in the moment, cry. She made one small sound she did not, afterwards, have a word for.
Eleanor’s hand stayed against her until the small involuntary tightening had finished.
Then she withdrew it.
Eleanor stepped back.
She did not, in the stepping back, give Chloe’s body time to come back to its own balance. Chloe stayed against the shelf with her jeans against her thighs and the heat in her face that had nowhere now to go.
Eleanor crossed to the desk.
She cleared it with one arm. Two folders went. A pen went. The tumbler — Chloe registered, the small clear corner of her mind that was still keeping a record — stayed.
She came back.
She lifted Chloe — by the hip, by the waist — onto the edge of the desk.
She knelt.
“Eleanor — ”
“Be quiet.”
It was not, Chloe registered, said unkindly.
It was said the way Eleanor said most instructions.
Without inflection. The voice was, however — Chloe could hear it now, the distance between Eleanor’s voice tonight and Eleanor’s voice three weeks ago — the voice of a woman who was using sex to stop a sentence Chloe had not yet said.
The word *quiet* — Chloe registered, in the half-second before she made the decision not to obey — was the smallest cruelty she had been on the receiving end of in this house.
She made the decision not to obey.
She did not, however, make the decision in time to act on it. The sentence she had been about to say went down inside her, where it would sit, for nearly four hours, until she could let it back out on the floor of her own bathroom with the shower running.
She let Eleanor’s mouth proceed.
She used her mouth.
She used the precision Chloe had been on the receiving end of in candlelight, in firelight, in the lamp light of the bedroom on the night of the dam. The mouth was the same mouth. The precision was the same precision. The thing it was being used for, this evening, was not the same.
Chloe came a second time.
She came with her hand fisted in Eleanor’s hair and the corner of the desk under her thigh and her own cry in the back of her throat. She did not, this time, look down at Eleanor’s face. She kept her own eyes on the ceiling.
Eleanor stood up.
She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
Chloe slid off the desk.
She pulled her jeans up. She pulled her bra back down. She pulled the cream jumper back into the shape it was meant to be in. Her hand, she registered, was shaking.
Eleanor was at the corner of the desk with her back to Chloe.
She picked up the tumbler. She drank what was left in it. She set it down.
“Eleanor.”
“Yes.”
“Let me — let me — ”
“No.”
“I want to — ”
“No. I’m fine.”
The word fine — Chloe registered, hearing it land in the room — was the loudest thing that had been said in this house since the night of the storm.
She had not, before this evening, allowed herself to wonder how Eleanor had spoken to Jess.
She allowed it now. The thought arrived without her summoning it, the way thoughts arrived when one had been suppressing them for some weeks — fully formed, with a small specific shape.
*She would not have said “I’m fine” to her.
* The Jess of the articles was a postgraduate.
The Jess of the articles had been, by Eleanor’s account during the conversation by the fire on the night of the small kiss, a woman Eleanor had loved without knowing what loving was.
The Jess of the articles had not been left, by Eleanor, in a study with her hand against her own face on a Wednesday evening in February with the word *fine* hanging in the air.
Chloe did not, in the moment, have a way of knowing whether the thought was true.
She suspected it was.
She suspected, also, that the suspecting was itself the smallest currency Eleanor was paying her — the inferiority of being treated worse than the woman who had broken Eleanor’s life.
She stood in the middle of the study with her jumper not yet straight and her hair half-down and her body, the small distant honest part of her body, finally telling her what the rest of the evening had been about.
She said, “You used me to not feel something.”
Eleanor did not, immediately, answer.
She did not turn round.
She stood at the desk with her hand on the wood and her shoulders very still. After a long beat, she said, “I know.”
“Eleanor.”
“I know.”
“Look at me.”
“I can’t.”
“Eleanor.”
She turned.
Her face — Chloe was not, on later occasions, able to describe Eleanor’s face from this moment.
She could describe Eleanor’s face from the night of the storm.
She could describe Eleanor’s face on the morning after the dam, and at the door of the dinner, and across the wine glass on the night of the kiss.
Eleanor’s face from this moment she could not, afterwards, retrieve.
Whatever it had been, it had been the face of a woman who had spent the last hour using her body as a wall.
“I’m sorry,” Eleanor said.
“I know.”
“I am.”
“I know.”
She did not, this time, say it to Chloe.
She said it to the wall behind Chloe’s left shoulder.
She said it to the bookshelf where, half an hour ago, Chloe’s shoulder blade had been against the corner of the hardback that had not, in the end, fallen.
Chloe nodded.
She picked her bag up off the floor where it had fallen at some point in the last half hour that she did not remember falling. She turned. She went down the stairs. She did not, at any point on the way down, allow herself to stop and consider going back.
She let herself out.
She locked the door behind her with the key.
She walked to Banbury Road in last night’s coat and her own clothes and the small clear distant knowledge that what had been done to her in the last hour had been done to her by a woman she was — and would, perhaps, remain — in love with.
She caught the bus.
She did not, on the bus, take her phone out. She did not, on the bus, look up. She got off the bus a stop before her own, because she could not, in the moment, face her own front door, and walked the long way through Cowley with her hands in her pockets and her face inside the collar of her coat.
She let herself into the flat at twenty past nine.
Mira was on the sofa.
Mira looked up.
Mira did not, this evening, ask.
Chloe went into the bathroom. She locked the door. She turned on the shower. She did not, immediately, undress. She sat on the floor of the bathroom in her coat with the shower running for some time.
She did not cry.
She had — she would have said, if she had been asked to describe her own state — moved past the point at which crying was the response a body had to a thing like this. The crying, she suspected, would come later. The crying was not, this evening, available to her.
She sat on the floor.
She listened to the shower.
She did not, for nearly an hour, get up.
When she finally did, she undressed slowly, and got into the shower with the water still running, and stood under it with her face turned up to it and her own hand — for the first time in seven weeks — not against her cheek but against the back of her neck, where Eleanor’s hand had been when she had kissed her, both times, in the small private kindness of the candlelit room and the larger more honest cruelty of the bookshelf.