Growing Closer

“The linen room,” Héloïse said at breakfast on the eleventh day. “Today. You and I, and nobody else, and we are going to put it right.”

Nell had been awake since four with forty pages of guild engagement terms on the bed and no fourth way out of them, and she looked up over her tea with her eyes full of grit.

“Why today?”

“Because it has been shut since November and the linen is rotting in it, and neither Bess nor Joan will go in alone, and I have been letting them not go in alone for eleven months rather than go in myself.” Héloïse put her cup down. “And because you said on Wednesday that you were going to stop looking for what was in my house, and I have been thinking since about what I have been doing instead of looking, and the answer is a great deal of nothing in a series of warm rooms.”

“You’ll want an apron.”

“I have an apron. It is a very good apron and it has never been used and I am aware of how that sounds.”

· · ·Scene break

The linen room was at the end of the back landing, eight feet by fourteen, with presses down both walls and a slate shelf and a window the size of a tea tray.

Nell propped the door with a flat iron off the ironing table before either of them went in, and then stood and looked at it for a second and put a second flat iron on top of the first.

“It does not need two,” Héloïse said behind her.

“It needs two.”

Eleven months of a shut room came out at them: damp linen, and under it the sweetish edge of mildew, and under that the ghost of lavender from bags that had gone to dust and string.

They took everything out. That was the only way to do it and they both knew it within four minutes, and they carried the whole contents of both presses out onto the landing in armfuls and made three heaps on a sheet: sound, darning, rags. Sheets, bolsters, damask cloths for a table laid for twelve. Towels with a monogram. Nineteen pillow-slips in a stack that had been damp at one corner since last winter and were foxed brown right through the stack like a book left in a field.

“Rags,” Nell said.

“They were my wedding linen.”

“Then they’re wedding rags. Feel the corner.”

Héloïse felt the corner, and looked at it, and put the whole stack on the rag heap with a decisiveness Nell found almost indecent.

The slate shelf got vinegar and water and the back of a knife where the mould had got a footing. The presses got washed and left open to dry with the window up, the cold coming in honest off the park. Nell did the high shelves because she had the shoulders for it; Héloïse did the low ones on her knees on a folded towel, with her sleeves turned back over her forearms and a smear of vinegar up one cheekbone, and by eleven o’clock the pair of them had wet hands and the room smelled of nothing but cold water.

Sibyl’s inventory was on the middle shelf, propped against the wall — a second copy in her own hand, the dates and the weather — where she had plainly stood it, at some point in eleven months, as a sort of headstone.

Héloïse looked at it for a moment and put it in her apron pocket.

Mrs Pardoe sent tea up at half past eleven with Bess, and Bess came as far as the doorway with the tray and stopped there, on the landing, with her arms straight.

“Put it on the ironing table, Bess, thank you,” Héloïse said. And then, in an entirely different voice: “Bess. Your hands, in November. I have never said anything to you about your hands, and I ought to have, on the day, and I have had eleven months to do it in. I am sorry.”

Bess went red from the collar up and said something about it being nothing, ma’am, and got out.

Nell, standing in a press with a cloth in her hand, did not count that one.

· · ·Scene break

They stopped at noon with the sound linen back on clean shelves and the rags in a sack and the damp pile going down to the wash-house, and sat on the two flat irons’ worth of doorway, backs against the jambs, facing each other with their boots not quite touching, and drank the tea, which was stewed.

“You have been carrying something up here all morning,” Héloïse said, “in your left pocket, and you have twice put your hand on it and taken your hand off it.”

Nell took the resonance glass out of her pocket.

“You’ll say no again.”

“I said no on Friday.”

“You said no on Friday with a lie on the top of it about your husband’s physician, and I let it go by, and it took me fifteen hours to hear it.” Nell turned the tube over in her fingers. “I’ll not push it. But I’ll tell you why I want you to, because you’ve a right to the reason before you refuse. That thing has been running round this house for eleven days telling me what you are, and you’re the only person in it who’s never once been allowed to look at what it says.”

Héloïse held her hand out.

Nell put the glass into it, and then, because it was the only way to take a reading and because there was no version of doing it that was not what it was, she turned Héloïse’s wrist over with two fingers and laid the base of the tube along the inside of her forearm against the bone, the way she had laid it along her own in the morning room on the fourth day with the duchess watching from three feet away.

“Hold it still. Watch the needle, not me.”

“You said that on Friday too.”

“It’s what we say.”

The needle came off the middle of the scale.

It went over, and back, and over, and back. Small. Regular. Unhurried.

Nell had her watch open on her knee before she had decided to take it out.

“Count with me,” she said. “Sixty seconds. Go when I say. Now.”

And they counted it, both of them, in a cold linen cupboard at the end of a back landing with the smell of vinegar still in the air, one woman with an instrument along her arm and the other with a watch on her knee, and at the end of it Nell said, “What did you get?”

“Sixty-two.”

“Sixty-two. That’s you, and that’s your east stairs at one in the morning on the fourth day, and that’s the reading in my ledger that a guild inspector read on Tuesday and wrote a minute about.” Nell’s voice was not steady and she did not trouble to fix it. “Look at it. Go on. Dead residue hums, low and level, the same note for as long as you sit with it; that’s a drag, and there’s no life anywhere in it. This keeps time. It keeps time with you. It’s not a visitation and it’s not a fault and it isn’t a thing that’s been done to you. It’s a rhythm, and it’s yours, and it’s been going every minute of the thirty-five years you’ve been telling it to be quiet.”

Héloïse did not speak for a while. She had gone very white and she was looking at the needle the way a person looks at their own face in a glass in a room they did not expect one in.

“It is very ordinary,” she said at last.

“It’s the most ordinary thing in the world. Every living soul in this house has one. Mine’s seventy-two and yours is sixty-two, and yours is slower because you’re calmer than me, which is the one fact about you that nobody in this county would believe.”

“I have been listening to that in my walls for eighteen months and calling it my husband.”

“Aye,” Nell said. “You have.”

The needle gathered itself and climbed.

They both saw it. It came up the scale over four or five beats, the way it had on the landing on the fourth day when a woman with a candle stopped to think about something, and it went past seventy and settled somewhere near eighty and stayed there, and the room was silent, and neither of them said a word about what had been happening in the four seconds before it moved.

And the linen room was warm.

Nell noticed it the way she noticed everything, late and all at once and professionally: that she had been sitting on a bare board in an unheated cupboard at the cold end of a back landing for twenty minutes with wet hands and had not felt the cold since about a quarter past eleven; that the window was up; that there was no fire within forty feet and no fire in the house at that hour by the rules of it.

“Your grace.”

“Héloïse.”

“Héloïse.” Nell put the watch away. “I’m going to say the professional thing once and then I’ll not say it again today. Until Monday I hold the pen. There’s a classification in your file in my hand and a man coming back on the fourteenth day, and whatever’s in this room now, none of it changes that, and I’d not have you think for one second that being — like this — with me buys you anything at all in that report.”

“I know exactly what you hold.” Héloïse set the glass down on the slate step between them, very carefully, so that it did not roll. “I have had thirteen years of being warm to men who held things of mine, Nell, and I can assure you that it does not feel remotely like this.”

“No.”

“No.”

She leaned in.

Nell met her halfway, which was the part she had decided about somewhere on Wednesday in a gallery and had not admitted to herself since: she put her hand flat on the boards and moved, and she was close enough to see that the smear of vinegar was on the left cheekbone and not the right, close enough to feel the warmth come off her, and neither of them shut their eyes.

“Héloïse.”

Sibyl was at the end of the landing.

She had come the length of it in her house shoes over drying boards, and she was standing perfectly still by the airing cupboard with her hands at her sides, and she was looking at the flat irons, and at the open door, and at the two of them on the step of the room she had been shut inside for four hours in November.

“That door has not been open since the twentieth of November,” she said.

Neither of them moved.

“Dinner is at half past seven, as it has always been, and the Harrogate letter is answered and wants signing.” Sibyl’s voice did not rise and did not shake and was, in its way, the most frightening thing in the house. “Come down, Héloïse, and put your hair up.”

Héloïse got up off the step.

She did it without hurry, and she picked the glass up off the slate and put it into Nell’s hand and closed Nell’s fingers over it, which took three seconds and was done in full view of the landing, and then she untied the apron and went down.

Nell sat where she was in a warm cupboard with an instrument in her fist and both flat irons still holding the door, and did the arithmetic she had been avoiding since four o’clock that morning.

Friday. Three days.