The Long Gallery

The long gallery door had not opened for Nell once in nine days.

She had put her shoulder to it on the first night and her boot on the jamb, and after the doors came off their latches on day five it had stood ajar for about an hour and then, some time between her going up the east stairs and coming down again, had shut.

On Wednesday at noon Héloïse put her hand on it and it opened, and she took her hand away and looked at it with an expression Nell was beginning to recognise, which was the face of a woman being told something about herself by a piece of joinery.

“After you,” she said.

The gallery ran the whole north side of the house, ninety feet of it, with eleven windows down one wall and the pictures down the other under holland sheets gone grey at the folds. It smelled of dust and cold plaster. There was a clock at the far end that had been going the entire time Nell had been in the house, and which she had never once heard from outside the room, and which was four minutes fast.

The floor took the light in long bars. And a third of the way down, propped on the boards with its face to the wall and a sheet slipped half off it, was a picture eight feet high in a gilt frame, with a coil of picture wire on the floor beside it and the two deep prints of a ladder’s feet still in the dust.

Nobody had swept this room since the nineteenth of August.

“He was thirty-one when it was painted,” Héloïse said. “The year before we married. It hung in the dining room over the sideboard, at the head of the table, which is not where I sit.”

“You had it taken down at the New Year.”

“I had it taken down at the New Year.” She stood with her hands at her sides. “That was the only thing I have done in eighteen months that was mine and nobody else’s, and I did it on the second of January at nine in the morning with the whole household watching, and I was sick afterwards in my own room for an hour. And in August Sibyl had it brought up here to be hung where the light is, because a man’s portrait ought to be somewhere, and a boy went off a ladder.”

“You said leave it.”

“I said leave it twice.” Her voice did not change. “Perrin has a wrist that aches in the wet and will ache in the wet when he is sixty, and I have paid for a doctor and for six weeks of his time and I ask him about it every Friday, which he hates, and none of that is the thing. The thing is that I stood six feet away and said leave it and then let myself be got past, and something in this room did not.”

Nell put her case down on the boards.

“Sit down, your grace.”

“I would rather stand.”

“You’ve been standing since Tuesday week.”

Héloïse looked at her, and then went and sat on the window seat in the third bay, where the light came in cold and white across her lap, and Nell sat on the sill of the fourth, six feet off, which was the distance she had decided on in the corridor and kept to.

· · ·Scene break

“Ask me,” Héloïse said.

“No.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I asked you on the fifth day at two in the morning and you gave me four hours and a denial and I wrote it down.” Nell had her hands on her knees. “I’m not asking you again. If it comes, it comes out of you or it doesn’t come, and if it doesn’t I’ll go and sit with the ledger and think of something else. I’ve asked women things in kitchens with a senior stood behind me and I know what my own voice does when it wants an answer. You’ll not get it off me.”

The clock at the end of the gallery went on being four minutes fast.

“That is a very hard kindness,” Héloïse said.

“It’s the only sort I do.”

She was quiet for a long while. Her hands were open on her knees, palm up, which Nell had not seen before, and the light lay on them, and outside the eleven windows the park went on dripping.

“The house is mine,” Héloïse said.

Nell did not move.

“It has always been mine. It is the only part of me that ever fought.”

· · ·Scene break

Afterwards, what Nell remembered about the next quarter of an hour was not the words. It was the temperature.

The long gallery was the coldest room in Wexhall. She had taken the wall figures on Sunday with Sibyl watching her do it and had got two degrees under the corridor and four under the hall. And while Héloïse talked, the room came up. Not the way a room comes up with a fire in it, from one end; the way a body comes up under a blanket, everywhere at once and slowly, until Nell realised that she had unfastened her top button in an unheated gallery in the last week of October and could not say when.

“I have known since the Tuesday of the funeral week,” Héloïse said. “I can give you the hour. They had gone by three and Sibyl had taken the women into the drawing room and I went up the east corridor because it was the only part of the house with nobody in it, and I stopped outside my husband’s study, and I thought — I did not say it, I was not saying anything that week, I thought it — I never want to go into that room again as long as I live.

“And the lock turned. With my hand nowhere near it. I stood in that corridor and listened to a lock turn over on a thought I had not finished having, and I knew. I did not suspect. There was nothing to suspect. I knew, the way one knows one’s own handwriting.”

“Eighteen months,” Nell said.

“Eighteen months.”

“And Sibyl going about the county with her wrists out, and the rector, and the guild wrote to, and a woman sent for to burn it out of your walls, and you knew on the first Tuesday.”

“Yes.”

“Why in God’s name did you not say?”

“Because saying it is not one sentence, Miss Hartigan. It is two.” Héloïse turned her head and looked straight at her. “The first is the house is mine. And the second is therefore for thirteen years I had something in me that could put a man off a ladder for overriding me, and I held it down so hard and so long that I forgot I had it, and I let everything happen that happened, and it was not because I could not stop it.”

The clock ticked.

“I have never once said the second one aloud,” she said. “I have said it to myself in the night perhaps four hundred times and it has never got any easier, and every one of those four hundred times I have preferred the ghost. A ghost is a thing that is done to you. It is so much cleaner.”

Nell asked the next question because it was a professional one and because it was the only thing she had to hand that was not comfort.

“When it goes off. What do you feel?”

“Nothing.” Héloïse said it immediately, the way a woman answers a question she has been asking herself for a year and a half. “That is not an evasion. I have paid a great deal of attention. There is no warmth, no pull, no prickling in the hands, nothing whatever that any novel has ever led me to expect. A door shuts somewhere and I hear it shut, the same as Bess hears it.”

“And afterwards?”

There was a pause.

“Afterwards I am relieved,” Héloïse said. “That is the part I should like you not to write down. Bess pulled at that linen-room door until her hands bled and I came up the passage and I was frightened for Sibyl, and I was, truly — and underneath it, somewhere I do not go, there was a thing in me that was glad, for four hours, that she could not get out and tell me what to do about my own dresses. And then the door opened. I have never been able to decide which of those two facts is the worse one.”

“They’re the same fact,” Nell said.

“Yes. I had worked that out.”

“And when you’re off the place? Ambry, church, the day you were out when the man came about the shooting — does anything go on here while you’re gone?”

“Not once,” Héloïse said. “The gun-room shut itself the night I came back.”

Nell sat with all of it.

“It’s not true, though,” she said at last. “The second one.”

“You are not qualified to —“

“I’m the only person in England who is qualified.” Nell heard her own voice come up and put it down again. “Your grace. I’ve been in this trade nine years. Suppressed work doesn’t take orders and it doesn’t take blame. It comes up when the person it belongs to isn’t safe, and it comes up instead of her, because she’s not let herself feel it directly in years, and it has no judgment in it at all. That’s the whole of why the guild is frightened of it. It’s not a servant that was waiting for you to snap your fingers. If it had been, Perrin would have kept his wrist and that ladder would have come down on the person who said get on.”

Héloïse’s hands closed.

“That is a technical answer.”

“It’s a true one. You can have it or not.” Nell shrugged. “I’ll tell you what else is true and you’ll like it less. You’ve had a thing in you your whole life that gets up when somebody walks over you, and you have never once in thirty-five years pointed it anywhere on purpose. Have you? Not at him. Not at Sibyl. Not at me, and I’ve given you cause.”

“No.”

“Have you ever wanted anything in this house on purpose?”

The silence went on long enough that Nell heard the gallery clock get to the hour and start, and it was a small light chime, and the four minutes it was fast meant the hall clock had not begun.

“I wanted the picture down,” Héloïse said. “And I was sick for an hour.”

· · ·Scene break

They walked back down the gallery together at half past twelve and neither of them touched the portrait, and it was Nell who stopped and pulled the slipped sheet back up over the frame, because it seemed indecent to leave a man’s face to the wall with his shoulder showing.

At the door Héloïse said, “What will you do?”

“I’ve been thinking about that since Hale got into his gig.”

“And?”

“I’m going to stop looking,” Nell said.

“Stop —“

“Looking for what’s in your house. I’ve found it. It took me four days and I’ve spent five more collecting corroboration like a woman putting jam in a cupboard, and I did that because as long as I was collecting I didn’t have to do anything with it.” She set her hand flat on the door frame. “Six days, your grace. From this afternoon I’m not working on what you are. I’m working on how you get out from under it with everything you came into it with.”

Héloïse stood in the bar of light from the eleventh window with the cold coming back into the room behind her as they got to the end of it.

“That is not what I engaged you to do.”

“No,” Nell said. “And you’d not have got it for sixty guineas.”