Chapter Five

Four The coat on his chair was not mine, and I was already through the door. Pale grey wool. Good buttons. Folded over the back of the chair by the fire the way you fold a thing you intend to come back for. "Whose is that." He was at the desk with his sleeves up and a lamp on and about nine documents in front of him, and he looked up like a man interrupted at work, which he was. "What?" "The coat. Whose is it." "Sunna's." "Right." "She left it at the relief store on Tuesday and it came back with the ledgers." He put his pen down. "It's been on that chair for two days." "It's midnight." "Yes." "It's midnight and there's a woman's coat in your room." "There's a coat in my room," he said. "It came in a box with nine hundred pages of accounts, which are also in my room, on that table, where you can see them." I looked at the table. The accounts were on it. Of course they were on it. I want to put down exactly what I did next, because I have had a long time to be ashamed of it. "Eight years," I said. "What?" "She's been in this house eight years and you ended it and never told her why, and she still runs your relief and she taught me your accounts and she was kind to me about it, and now her coat is on your chair at midnight." He came round the desk. "Ilka." "Don't say my name like that." "Why do you care." And there it was. Four words, and no heat in them, and he was not being cruel, he was asking, and I stood in the middle of that room in a nightdress and somebody else's dressing gown with my mouth open and nothing in it. Because I could have said: because I signed a contract that runs on wanting and I need to know where yours is pointing. That was available. That was even true, technically, and it was a full and complete answer, and I did not say it. I did not say anything. The not-saying went on too long. He was close enough by then that I had to look up. His sleeves were up and there was ink on the side of his hand, and I remember that clearly, a smudge of it along the outside edge where he had dragged his hand over a wet line, and I remember looking at it because looking at his face had become impossible. "Say it," he said. "No." "Say it and it's said and then we know." "No," I said, "because if I say it out loud in this room then that's what it is, and it doesn't get to be an accident anymore, and I would like it to be an accident for slightly longer." Something happened in his face. I have gone over this and I cannot tell you which of us moved. I have wanted to be able to tell you. It has mattered to me a great deal, over everything that came after, to be able to say that he did it, or that I did, and the truth is that the distance closed and neither of us can be given the credit or the blame. It was not gentle. His hand was in my hair at the back where the mark is and mine was in his shirt and I had him against the edge of the desk and something went over on it, papers, a cup, I heard it go and I did not care. I had said no flattery and no pretending and no lying, and this was none of those things, this was the truest thing that had happened to me in seventeen years and it was happening at midnight with ink on his hand. And it went through me. Not a feeling. I want to be precise. Underneath the feeling, running against it, there was a movement in my chest like a weight shifting in a hold, like something heavy sliding across a deck and settling, and I made a sound against his mouth that was not about him at all. He felt it. I know he felt it, because he stopped. He put both hands on my shoulders and held me at arm's length and stood there breathing, and his hair was wrecked, and I have never in my life wanted to hit somebody so much. "No," he said. "You cannot be serious." "Ilka." "You just, that was, you were the one who." I could not assemble it. "Why." "Because it worked." "That's the entire point of it working." "No." He let go of my shoulders and stepped back and put a hand on the desk. "You felt it move. So did I. And if we go on now, then what happened in this room becomes the first instalment on a contract, and every time I touch you after tonight there'll be a Reader in the corridor doing sums." He looked at me. "I won't take payment for something I wanted anyway." I stood there. "That," I said, "is the most arrogant sentence I have ever heard a man say out loud." "Probably." "You've decided what tonight was. On your own. In your own head. And you've decided it in a way where you get to be the honourable one and I get to go and stand in a corridor and think about it." "Yes." "Say something that isn't yes." "I'm not going to argue with you at midnight about whether I should have kept kissing you," he said, "because I will lose, and I should have kept kissing you." And there was nothing to do with that. Nothing at all. I said something unforgivable about his brother and went out and slammed the door, which is a thing I have done perhaps three times in my adult life, and I stood in the corridor with my hands over my face. Then I went and woke Marek. It was three in the morning. He came to the door of the gatehouse in a coat over his nightshirt with his hair on end and he looked at my face and said nothing at all, which is what he does, and he pulled a chair out. Fingers under the jaw. He breathed in. He stopped. He did it again, and I did not tell him not to this time, and he sat back very slowly and put both hands flat on his knees. "Four," he said. "What?" "Four winters, girl." I heard the word and I did not have anywhere to put it. "Say it again." "Four." His voice had gone. "It's four." I got up out of the chair and I put my hands on top of my head like a woman at the scene of an accident and I walked to the door of that gatehouse and back twice, and then I started laughing, and it was nothing like the laughing in the yard. Four. A year. A whole year, off the back of nine minutes and a coat that was not even hers. I would have gone to school with that year. I would have driven the west route with it. I stood in Marek's gatehouse at three in the morning in a borrowed dressing gown and understood, for the first time since I was nine years old, that the number under my jaw was a thing that could go the other way. "I have to tell him," I said. "He knows. He'll have felt it same as you." "I have to tell him anyway." I went out into the yard and it had stopped snowing and everything had that flattened silence, and I was laughing out loud on my own in the dark like a lunatic, and I did not care, and I have not been that happy before or since. Behind me the gatehouse door was still open. Ivar was in it. He had followed me down. He was standing just inside with his coat over his shirt and he had been there long enough to have heard the number. And Marek said, "Now you. Hand." I stopped in the yard with my back to them. "It's late," Ivar said. "It's four in the morning and I'm awake and you're standing in my doorway. Give me your hand." "Marek." "You've had me count that girl three times in eight days," Marek said. "Sit down and give me your hand." There was a pause with snow in it. I turned round. He had put both hands behind his back. A man of thirty-two, an Alpha, standing in a gatehouse door with his hands behind his back like a boy who has broken something and has not decided yet whether he is going to lie about it. "No," he said. And he went out past me into the yard without looking at me at all.