Chapter 21 #2
I never know where admiration ends and love begins.
I never have. I should not have been allowed near you.
I should not be allowed near anyone. I have spent thirty years finding new languages in which to do the same thing, and none of them have, in the end, been a language.
They have been a way of telling myself that the thing was a different thing.
You will not, I hope, read this. I will not, I think, ever send it.
I do not know how to write the next sentence.
— E.
Chloe set down the sixth letter.
She heard, from somewhere outside the house, a car door close. Then a second one. Then the small distant sound of a cab pulling away.
She did not move.
She heard the gate open. She heard the gate close. She heard the small uneven sound of a key in the front door.
Eleanor was home early.
Chloe sat at the desk with the folder open and the five letters in front of her and the sixth one in her right hand and she did not, when Eleanor’s footsteps came down the hall and stopped at the doorway of the study, look up.
Eleanor stood in the doorway.
She did not, for a long beat, say anything.
She had on her dark coat. She had her bag — the leather one she used for meetings — in her left hand. Her cheeks were cold from the train. Her hair was disarranged at the side from the wind that had come up that morning at Paddington.
She set the bag down on the floor at her feet.
She did not, also, take off her coat.
“Chloe.”
Chloe did not look up.
“How many of us have there been.”
It came out very quietly. It came out, also, without the upward inflection at the end. Chloe registered, somewhere very far away in her mind, that she had borrowed Eleanor’s syntax.
Eleanor did not, immediately, answer.
She came into the room. She did not come close to the desk. She stopped, in the end, at a small distance — perhaps four feet — and stayed standing.
“Chloe.”
“How many.”
“It isn’t — ”
“How many.”
Eleanor took a breath. She let it out. She did not, this time, dress the answer up.
“I do not have a number that would be useful.”
“Try.”
“There are — there have been — three, perhaps four, in a way you would mean by it.”
“In a way I would mean by it.”
“Yes.”
“And in a way you would mean.”
Eleanor looked at her.
“More.”
Chloe nodded.
She did not, at that, cry.
She felt something at the back of her throat that was not, this afternoon, going to be released as crying. She let it sit there.
She set down the sixth letter on the desk beside the others, in the small clean line she had been building.
She said, “She wrote you the same letter you’ve been writing me.”
“Yes.”
“Eleanor — ”
“Yes. I know. I — Chloe. I — ”
“Don’t.”
Eleanor stopped.
She looked at the desk. She did not, in the next moment, look at Chloe’s face.
She came forward two steps. She sat down — slowly, in the way she sat down when she had decided that her legs were no longer reliably going to keep her upright — on the floor of the study in her coat. Her back against the side of her own desk. Her hands on her knees.
Chloe watched her sit.
She did not, in the moment, know how to feel about Eleanor sitting on the floor.
She turned, in the chair, so that she was facing her. Their knees were perhaps a foot apart.
“Eleanor.”
“Yes.”
“Why did you give me the same sentences.”
Eleanor looked at the wallpaper to the left of Chloe’s ear. Her mouth moved. She did not, for some time, speak.
Then she said, “Because I never know where admiration ends and love begins.”
It was the line from the sixth letter.
She said it without quoting it. She said it as a sentence she had been saying, in some form, to herself for fourteen years.
Chloe took it.
She took it and she carried it in the back of her throat with the unreleased crying and she sat in the chair in the study of an empty house with a woman she was in love with on the floor at her feet and a folder of letters between them, and she nodded — once, slowly, the way she had nodded on the threshold of the dinner — and she stood up.
She put the letters back in the folder.
She put the folder back in the box. She put the lid back on the box. She put the box back on the shelf where it had come from. She did not, in any of this, hurry.
Eleanor watched her do it.
Eleanor did not, while Chloe was doing it, get up off the floor.
When Chloe had finished, she turned. She walked past Eleanor, on the floor against the desk, and out of the study. She went down the hall. She took her coat from where she had hung it on the second hook from the left an hour and a half earlier. She put it on. She buttoned it.
She took the key out of her pocket.
She set it on the small console table in the hall.
She opened the door.
She did not, on the threshold, turn around.
She closed the door behind her quietly.
She walked to the gate. She went through it.
She walked past the lamppost where, on the night of the dinner, she had stood for two minutes deciding not to go back.
She walked the rest of the way down Banbury Road in the small grey afternoon light of an Oxford in winter, and her face was, this afternoon, dry, and her hands were steady inside her pockets, and the small clear distant thought she had — the only sentence she allowed herself, all the way down to the bus stop — was that she had finally answered the question Eleanor had asked her, three months ago, by the fire.
She had told her what she wanted.
What she wanted, this afternoon, was to leave.