Chapter 25
TWENTY-FIVE
February became March without ceremony.
She did not, at any point in the changing of the month, register the changing of the month.
There were no large turns. There were a great many small ones, accumulated quietly across a fortnight of mornings in which she got up at eight, made herself coffee, and read at the kitchen table for an hour before doing anything else.
She replied to Theo on the third day after the visit.
She wrote: I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch. I’m all right. I hope you are too.
He replied within the hour. He was, by the sound of it, all right. He had been to his sister’s wedding. The colleague he had been thinking of asking out he was now seeing, mildly, on the weekends. He hoped Chloe was, also, all right.
She wrote: thank you. yes. take care.
She did not, on receipt of his reply, feel anything in particular about it.
She put the phone down.
She picked up freelance work.
It was the kind of work she would, in November, have considered beneath her.
She edited a small academic monograph for a regional press.
She copy-edited two articles for an online cultural magazine.
She did, around the third week, the kind of work she had done before she had taken the job at the townhouse — temporary admin shifts at the university, three days a week, in a department that had no idea who Eleanor Vale was and no occasion to find out.
The admin shifts paid badly.
They were, however, occupied by colleagues — a woman in her thirties called Sara who brought in her own tea bags; a man called Faisal who left at five exactly; an older woman called Penny who was, Chloe understood by the third day, kind.
None of them asked her about her writing.
None of them, in fact, had any reason to know that she was a person who would once have called herself a writer.
She was the temp. She answered the phone.
She filed the post. She drank instant coffee out of a thick blue mug that was kept in the office cupboard for whoever needed it that morning.
She found, after some days, that the work suited her.
She did not, for the first week and a half, write anything in her own notebook.
She did, on the Thursday of the second week, write one line.
She did not, in February or March, walk down Banbury Road.
She did not, also, deliberately avoid Banbury Road.
She found, on a Saturday in the middle of March, that she had walked from the city centre out past St Giles toward the Press without consciously planning to, and that, by the time she was at the lamppost on the corner of Bevington Road, she was within sight of the house.
The hedge in front of the house was darker than the houses around it. Two of the front windows were lit. The light in the upstairs study — the small high one Chloe had not, until the end, identified from the street — was on.
Chloe stood for perhaps thirty seconds on the opposite pavement.
She did not, after thirty seconds, feel the small unsteady pull she had felt in November when she had stood under the lamppost on Holywell with the photocopy still on her bedside table.
She felt, instead, the small flat curiosity of a person looking at a building she had once worked in.
She turned. She walked back into the city.
She did not, on the walk home, tell herself she had done a thing. She had not, in any visible sense, done a thing.
She had, however, noted — the small distant honest part of her was, more days than not now, the part that did the noting — that the building was, this March, only a building.
It was not, this March, the place where she had been the version of herself she had been there.
She slept better the second half of March than she had slept, on average, since the summer.
She did not, at first, attribute this to anything.
She attributed it eventually to a number of small structural facts.
She was, on most weeknights, in bed by half past ten.
She had, more or less by accident, given up the wine she had been drinking on weekday evenings.
She had — Mira had observed, around the third week, with a small careful neutrality — eaten three meals a day for the first time since perhaps last August.
The eating, in particular, surprised her.
She had not, while it was happening, registered that she had not been eating.
She registered, on the third week, that she had been forgetting lunch through the autumn and into the winter — through the period during which most of her lunches had, in any case, been eaten at someone else’s desk on plates someone else had put in front of her, without her ever having to decide what she wanted to eat.
She registered that she had been outsourcing, without noticing, a number of small decisions about her own body to a woman who had been, all along, attending to them.
She did not, in the recognition, feel particularly furious about it.
She felt, instead, the small steady warmth of being the one, now, who decided what was for lunch.
It was, she thought, not the kind of warmth that made one’s heart skip.
It was, she thought, the kind that made one’s heart steady.
Mira said, one evening, “Is it weird that I’ve missed you.”
“What do you mean.”
“I mean — I’ve seen you. You’ve been here. But I haven’t — you’ve come back to the kitchen.”
“Yes.”
“I missed that.”
“Yes.”
“I’m not trying to make a — ”
“No.”
“I just — I missed you.”
Chloe drank her tea.
“I missed me too.”
It came out quietly. It came out, also, without performance. It was a sentence Chloe had not been intending to give Mira and which she had given her, in the small ordinary kitchen of an ordinary Tuesday evening in March, because it was true.
Mira did not, in response, do anything large.
She tilted her head against the back of the chair. She closed her eyes for a second.
She said, “Good.”
On the Friday of the fourth week, she opened the new notebook properly.
She did not, before opening it, plan to write at any length. She had, in the previous fortnight, written one line — *I have been giving away my own decisions about lunch* — and had set the notebook down again. The line had embarrassed her. She had not, after writing it, gone back to it.
This evening, she sat down with it at her own desk in her own room in her own pyjamas at twenty past nine.
She uncapped the pen.
She wrote a paragraph.
It was a paragraph about being in someone else’s kitchen for the first time.
She did not, in the paragraph, name Eleanor.
She did not, also, name the kitchen. The paragraph was about the small specific shock of having the right amount of butter put on one’s toast by a woman who had been watching one eat for three months, and the small unfamiliar register of being addressed, by another woman, as a person whose preferences had been observed without being asked about.
She read the paragraph back.
She did not, on reading it, dislike it.
She read it a second time. She made, with the pen, two small revisions — a comma she did not need, a word she had used twice in three sentences.
She set the notebook down.
She did not, immediately, write any more.
She did, however, register — quietly, without making it into a sentence — that the paragraph she had written was the first piece of her own writing she had written for an audience of one which was, on this evening, herself.