What They Choose

The blue bedroom had a fire in it that had been lit by a maid with a match at half past four in the afternoon on nobody’s timetable, and by eleven at night the room was the temperature a room ought to be, which was the first time Nell had been warm above stairs at Wexhall in a fortnight.

There was a candlestick on the mantelpiece. She stood and looked at it for a while, because it was plainly the candlestick, the one that had come off this mantel on the eleventh of September while a woman two rooms away wrote a letter accepting a visit on somebody else’s behalf, and somebody in the last twenty-four hours had put it back.

She took the resonance glass out of her coat pocket, pushed the stopper home, and set it on the mantel beside the candlestick with the needle dead in the middle of the scale.

Then she sat on the end of a bed she had no business in, in a house she had no business in, and did the arithmetic she had been putting off since two o’clock.

Two hundred pounds, of which nine years were served and four were not. The guild computed a broken bond by the unserved part and it did it with a table, and the table would give them four-thirteenths of two hundred, which was sixty-one pounds, ten shillings and ninepence.

Sixty-one. She sat in the warm and laughed at that, once, with nobody in the room.

Eleven pounds and some shillings in her case, less ten and ninepence to a boy with a cold. No licence. No ledger. A trade she could not name herself in. A printed form coming to wherever she was, that would say nothing at all about Kettleby. A woman downstairs with a magistrate’s list in November and a county to get through first, and no more claim on her than a stranger in a lane.

Somebody knocked on the door.

That was the second time in fourteen days that anybody in that house had knocked on a door instead of finding out whether it would let them, and it struck Nell, getting up, that both of them had been this week.

· · ·Scene break

Héloïse was in the corridor with a candle and her hair down her back and a shawl over her nightgown, which was exactly how Nell had first seen her at twenty past one in the morning on the first night, standing in a library doorway looking at a fire that had lit itself.

“I have been standing out here for four minutes,” she said.

“I’d have opened it sooner if I’d known.”

“That is precisely what I was afraid of, so I did not knock for four minutes.” She came in, and put the candle down, and stood with her hands folded, which was not the arrangement of a woman at ease. “I am going to say several things badly. I have been composing them since half past nine and none of the drafts has survived the corridor.”

“Sit down and say them badly, then.”

“I would rather stand.”

“You’ve been standing since a fortnight ago Tuesday.”

“Yes,” Héloïse said, “and I have got rather good at it, and tonight it is all I have.” But she came and sat on the end of the bed, a foot and a half off, with her feet on the boards, and looked at the fire and not at Nell. “First. I am not going to be obliging.”

“Go on.”

“You must let me get it out. I was married thirteen years. I am not an innocent and I am not what anybody would call experienced; I am the third thing, which is worse than either, and it is practised. I know precisely how to be pleasant in a room. I know how to seem to want a thing that is already being done, and how to be glad about it afterwards in a voice that carries, and I did it well enough that in thirteen years nobody in this house ever once had to ask me anything.” Her hands were flat on her knees. “And it is the only competence I have that I am ashamed of, and I could do it tonight, with you, without meaning to. It would come up out of me like the doors do. That is the thing I have been standing in the corridor about.”

Nell thought about it properly before she answered, because it deserved that and because a fast answer would have been a kindness of the wrong sort.

“Right,” she said. “Then here’s the rule for tonight and it’s the only one I’ll make, and it isn’t a gentle one.

“You don’t do a single thing in any room in this house because you think I’d like it. Not one. Not to be nice, not to be quick, not to get the awkward bit over with. And if you catch yourself at it — if you notice yourself being obliging, even halfway through — you stop, and you say so out loud, in that precise voice you have, and I’ll stop with you and we’ll sit down and it’ll be nothing. Not a disappointment, not a scene, not a thing you have to make up for. Nothing.” She put her hands on her knees. “That’s not me being fine about it. It’s selfishness. I’ve had a fortnight of holding a pen over you and I’d sooner go back to that mill town with sixty-one pounds on my name than find out in six months that you were managing me in the dark because you’d learned how off a man.”

“You are not remotely like him.”

“I know I’m not. I’ve read the rules in that kitchen drawer.” Nell’s voice did not soften and did not need to. “It isn’t about him. It’s about what’s in your hands after thirteen years, and I’d rather name it now, out loud, in the light, than have either of us wondering.”

Héloïse let out a breath she had evidently been holding for some time.

“Thank you,” she said. “That is the worst thing anybody has ever said to me and I am extremely glad of it.” Then, after a moment: “It goes the other way.”

“Does it.”

“It does, and you will find I am not going to let you be clever about it. You have spent fourteen days being the professional in every room, and this afternoon you gave away your bond, your licence and sixty guineas in the space of four hours, and you have not sat down since.” She turned her head. “So. What do you want, Nell? Not what you are willing to allow. What you want. In words, since you made me use them.”

Nell had been asked a good many hard questions in that house.

“You,” she said. “That’s the answer, and there’s nothing in front of it. I want to come down that corridor with you and I want the door shut and I want the rest of tonight, and I’ve wanted it since a cold cupboard on Friday morning when you had vinegar on your face and I put my hand flat on the boards instead. I want to take the pins out of your hair, which I have been thinking about since about the fifth day and have been no kind of professional about at all. I want to be warm somewhere with you and not have to write anything down about it in the morning.

“And I’d like the lamp on,” she said. “Not the candle. The lamp, and a decent wick on it. I’ve spent nine years looking at things in bad light and I’ll not do it tonight.”

Héloïse’s mouth did something at the corner.

“That,” she said, “is the most Hartigan sentence I have ever heard.”

“Aye. Well.”

“Then come down the corridor.”

· · ·Scene break

The passage from the blue bedroom ran past the head of the east stairs, and the fourth step creaked below them as they went by it, with nobody on it at all, and neither of them said one word about it.

The boards were cold. Nell had her boots off and carried in one hand out of some instinct about servants that was fourteen days old and would take longer than that to shift, and the cold came up through her stockings, and the candle went along the wall beside them and made the corridor look like every corridor she had walked in that house at night with an instrument in her hand, except that it was not.

At her own door Héloïse put her hand on the handle and stopped.

“Wait.”

Nell stopped where she was. She took her hand off Héloïse’s arm and stepped back a clear pace and put both hands in her pockets, which was what she had done in front of a grate on the Thursday while a woman broke two matches, and she did not say anything at all, because there was nothing to say that would not have been pressure wearing a kind face.

They stood in the passage for the better part of half a minute.

“I am not changing my mind,” Héloïse said at last. “I want to be exact. I am not frightened of you and I am not frightened of this and I have not changed my mind by any amount whatever. I stopped because you told me I could, and I have never in my life stopped anything halfway and found out what happens next, and I wanted to know.”

“And?”

“Nothing happened,” Héloïse said. “You are standing in a cold passage with your hands in your pockets and your boots in your fist looking like a woman waiting for a train.”

“That’s what happens.”

“Yes.” Her voice went unsteady and she let it. “It is a very great deal, from where I am standing. I should like to do it again at some point tonight, without warning, simply to watch it work.”

“Do it as often as you like. I’ll be here in my stockings.”

“Then one more thing, and it is the last.” Héloïse turned round with her back against her own door and looked at her, straight, the way she had in a gallery with the light coming in cold and white. “On the Thursday night in the library I asked you whether you would look at me, and I meant a copper bowl and a salt line and forty minutes, and you answered it this morning before seven o’clock, and it was the kindest and most dreadful thing anybody has ever said to me. I should like to retire that question. I should like to ask you the same words and have them mean something I can live inside. Will you look at me?”

“I’d not be able to stop,” said Nell. “I’ve tried it for nine days and I’m no good at it.”

“That is an answer.”

“It’s the one I’ve got. And I’ll ask mine now and then we’re done with asking.” She took one hand out of her pocket, and did not reach with it, and let it hang. “Last time. Do you want me in that room?”

“Yes.”

“Say it the long way. You’re better at the long way.”

“I want you in that room,” Héloïse said, “with the lamp lit and the door shut, tonight, of my own choosing, owing you nothing and owed nothing, in a house that is mine, and I should like it very much, and I have wanted it since a Friday morning in a linen cupboard when you put your hand flat on the boards, and I have been furious with you about it for three days.”

“That’ll do,” Nell said.

Héloïse opened the door herself.

It opened the way that house’s doors opened for her, which Nell had watched it do on the first morning in a drawing room, standing in a cold that was not weather with her case on the carpet and no idea in the world what she had walked into: no catch and no give in it, wide, at once, like a thing that had been waiting for somebody it knew.

They went in, and Nell turned and put her hand on the door and shut it, because it was hers to shut and she wanted it to be.

And Nell Hartigan, who had been paid for nine years to walk into other people’s rooms and tell them the temperature, the light and what everybody’s hands were doing, could not afterwards have told a living soul one single thing about that one.