Chapter 21
TWENTY-ONE
She did not go in on Wednesday.
She did not go in on Thursday.
She did not, on either day, message Eleanor to explain.
Eleanor did not, on either day, message her.
The silence between them — the first silence of any length they had had since the email at midnight after the cold Monday — was, by Thursday night, doing something to Chloe’s chest she could not lie down with.
She told Mira she was going out for a walk on Friday morning.
Mira said, “All right.”
Mira did not ask where.
Chloe was, walking down to the bus stop, embarrassingly aware that she had also not asked herself.
She used the key.
She had known, when she put on her coat in the flat, that she would use the key. She had not, until she was inside the hall, allowed herself to register that she had known. She closed the door behind her quietly. She stood for a moment with her hand on the latch.
The house was empty.
She knew it was empty in the first three seconds — the small quality of stillness a house had when its principal inhabitant was elsewhere, the air not under any active attention.
The hall light was off. The kitchen door was open.
From the kitchen came the small low electric hum of the fridge and, somewhere further inside, the small steady tick of a radiator.
Eleanor was — Chloe had remembered, on the bus — at a meeting in London on Friday morning.
She had told Chloe about it the previous week.
The meeting had been organised by a publisher she had not been seeing in years and had finally agreed to.
She had said, when she mentioned it, that she would be home by four.
The clock above the kitchen door said eleven twenty.
Chloe did not, in the moment, have a plan.
She had come, she had told herself on the bus, to work.
She would, she had told herself, finish the box she had left open on Monday afternoon.
She would, she had told herself, leave a note.
She would, she had told herself, restore the small sense of professional order she had let go of in the previous fortnight, and on the strength of that order she would, in some form she had not yet imagined, decide what to do next.
She crossed the hall.
She went into the study.
The study was the study.
The boxes were as she had left them. The lid of the fifth box was off, on the floor by the chair.
Her own pencil — the right one, the one Eleanor had told her to bring back in Chapter Two of her life — was on the desk where she had set it on Monday.
The letter she had been reading was face-down on the blotter.
The mug she had used was still on the corner of the desk, washed, set out to dry, which meant Eleanor had been in the study at some point in the last three days, and had not, on the way out of it, taken the mug back to the kitchen.
She sat down at the desk.
She did not, immediately, pick up the letter.
She looked, for some time, at her own hands.
Then she got up. She went, not to the box she had been working on, but to the row of boxes on the far side of the room — the row Eleanor had pointed out, on her first day, as the work that would come later, and that Chloe had been told several times since not to begin yet.
She read the labels.
There were six. They were labelled by years. Most of them covered three or four years each. The fourth one, halfway along, was labelled differently from the others.
Not by years.
By a span. 2010–14.
Chloe lifted it off the shelf.
She did not, immediately, open it.
She set it on the desk. She looked at it. She put her hand against the lid.
She understood, with the small absolute clarity of a person who had been keeping a piece of knowledge in the back of her mind for nearly four months, what she was about to look at.
She did not, in the moment, have a sentence for why she was about to look at it.
She had several. She tried them on, with a fast cold accuracy.
She had come here to do the work. She had come here to confront Eleanor, and Eleanor was not here, and so she would confront, instead, the thing Eleanor had not yet told her about.
She had come here because Marian was not, she was now sure, the only old woman in Eleanor’s life she had not been told about.
She had come here because she wanted, finally, to know.
None of the sentences sat comfortably.
She lifted the lid.
Inside the box: letters.
Loose. Folded. A folder with a string tie, at the top of the box, marked in Eleanor’s green ink with a single capital letter.
J.
Chloe took the folder out.
She set it on the desk in front of her.
She did not, for nearly a minute, open it.
Then she did.
The folder contained perhaps thirty letters.
Maybe more. They were all written in the same hand — Eleanor’s, on the unlined yellow paper she used for drafts she did not intend to send.
Each was dated, in the green ink at the top right corner.
The earliest was October 2010. The latest was March 2014.
Chloe took the first one out.
She read it.
Jess —
You don’t have to lie to me. We have, at least, the rest of this term.
I have been watching you. I do not, by the way, mean that as the kind of compliment a man would mean it as.
I mean only that I have been doing the thing I do — which is to notice — and I have, over the last six weeks, noticed you doing several things that I would like, at some point, to ask you about.
You apologise before every honest sentence.
You have a way of reading aloud — when I have made you read aloud — as if you are not quite trusting that the words you have been given to read are going to behave when they leave your mouth.
You hold a book the way someone taught you to, and you have not yet, I think, told me who.
I would like to know who.
Read this letter and burn it. I am not, I should say, going to send it. I find I cannot. It is, in any case, written for me. — E.
Chloe read it.
She read it the way she had read the article on the bus the second day, which was to say she read it with the small distant accuracy of a person reading words she could not, in the moment, afford to take into her body.
She read it again.
The second reading was the one that did it.
The second reading was the one in which she heard, in the second paragraph, the sentence about the apologising — the apologising before every honest sentence, the sentence Eleanor had used on her on the first Tuesday, in the doorway of the study, with the absolute flat precision of a woman discovering a small specific quality in a person and naming it without ceremony.
The sentence about reading aloud.
The sentence about holding a book.
The sentence about wanting to know who had taught her to hold it.
Chloe set the letter down on the desk.
She took out the next one.
Jess —
You did not have to come on Saturday. I did not ask you to. The fact that you came is, however, doing something to me that I should not, at this distance from you, be putting in a letter I am not going to send.
Tell me what you want.
I do not mean to be cruel about this. I mean it literally.
I have, for some weeks, been letting you tell me a great many things while declining to ask you the only thing it has any point asking.
So tell me. Tell me, in your own time, and in your own language, what you actually want from your life, by which I mean: not the answer you give your supervisor; not the answer you give your boyfriend; not the answer your mother would be reassured by.
The other one. The one you do not, normally, give out loud because you don’t, on the whole, know how to.
Take a week. — E.
Chloe set that one down too.
She did not, for a moment, take out the third.
The room was very still around her.
She had a small unpleasant clarity — the kind a person had when the floor of a room she had been walking on for some time was discovered, finally, not to be a floor.
The clarity was that the sentences Eleanor had used on her, on the Wednesdays and the Saturdays and the long late afternoons of the previous three months, were not sentences Eleanor had thought of in response to Chloe.
They were sentences Eleanor had been saying — or trying to say, or trying not to say, or wishing she had said — for fourteen years.
She took out the third letter.
She read it.
It contained, in its second paragraph, the line: I do not, generally, allow myself to want things.
The line Eleanor had given her, by the fire, on the night of the small kiss.
Chloe put the letter down very carefully on the desk.
She took out the fourth.
It contained: You should not feel rushed in it.
She took out the fifth.
It contained: I would not have brought it up if Ines had not.
She did not take out the sixth.
She sat at the desk in her coat in an empty house with five letters in front of her and the lid of the box on her left and her hands very still on the desk and she did not, for some time, do anything at all.
She did not cry.
The crying — she registered, the small distant inventory she had been keeping of her own body since Monday night still going — was not, today, the body’s response.
The body had moved past it. The body was doing, instead, the cold clean work of a system shutting down sections of itself it could not currently keep open.
She did, after a while, take out the sixth letter.
She read it.
It was different from the others. It was shorter.
It was dated, by the green ink at the top right corner, March 2014 — the last month, the month of the formal complaint, the month of the resignation.
The hand was, even at the small scale of the page, a different hand from the other letters.
Less disciplined. The leftward lean was more pronounced. The lines had not been ruled.
Chloe read it twice.
Jess —
I am sorry. I am sorry. I am sorry. I am sorry.