Chapter 1: The Eleventh Time
The floor of the Ashford dining room was quarter-sawn white oak, laid in 1911, and it gave nothing anywhere.
I knew that the way you know a mat.
Every surface has a number in it. Tatami gives an inch and takes the shock into itself. Sprung gymnasium floor gives a quarter of that. Oak over joist over stone gives nothing, and the nothing goes up through the kneecap and settles in the hip.
I had been down on that floor ten times in three years.
The Thursday I am describing was the eleventh.
The soup was watercress.
Margot's cook made it every October. Every October somebody said it was better than last year. It was the same soup.
What I had done was mention that the Trescott house had sold.
I am exact about that, because for years afterwards people asked what I had done, as though there had to be a proportion.
Margot had been in the middle of a sentence. I had not noticed she was still speaking.
“Nadia.”
She used my name the way other people use a full stop.
“We wait.”
“I'm sorry.”
“We don't apologise at this table. We wait, and then there is nothing to apologise for.”
Then she finished her sentence. It was about curtain fabric, and whether the grey had too much blue in it.
The rule had a name in that house. Margot called it composure.
It worked like this. You left your chair. You went to the bare strip between the sideboard and the window, where the rug stopped. You knelt. You stayed until she said you could get up.
Back straight. Hands flat on the thighs.
Nobody ever instructed me about the hands. I did that the first time out of an old habit from a room with mats in it.
There were nine people at the table.
I can still give you the seating, because I never once sat down in that house without knowing where everybody's weight was.
It is not vigilance. It is filing, and it does not switch off because you married a man with a wine cellar.
Julian at my left, half a metre, forward on his elbows.
Margot at the head, four metres away, upright, both feet flat on the floor.
Damon opposite, tipped back, one arm hooked over the chair rail, which is a position a man cannot generate anything from.
Julian's aunt Celia and her husband at the far end. Three others I will not need to name.
I stood up.
The chair scraped. I lifted it clear and set it down again quietly, because Margot disliked the sound.
Six steps to the bare floor.
I went down the way you are taught. Right knee, then left, controlled all the way, no drop at the end.
You do not drop onto a hard floor. Not because it hurts more, although it does.
Because dropping is a loss of control, and control was the only property in that house that was actually mine.
Then I put my hands on my thighs and I waited.
The conversation closed over the gap without a ripple.
That was the part that took me longest to understand. It was not staged for an audience. There was no audience.
There was only procedure.
The window behind me was single-glazed and the radiator did not reach the corner, so the cold came in low across the boards.
I breathed into the bottom of the ribs. It costs nothing and it keeps the hands still.
I counted.
Not in seconds. Seconds go soft when you are cold. I counted the boiler.
The boiler in that cellar ran a hundred and ten seconds and rested four minutes twenty, all three years I lived there.
If you know a machine's rhythm, you own a clock that nobody can take off you.
Six cycles, and most of a seventh.
Twenty-six minutes.
Above me Damon asked whether there was more bread. Celia said the fabric sounded lovely. A spoon touched a bowl.
“You can get up now, Nadia.”
“Thank you,” I said, because that was the form, and the form was cheaper than the alternative.
Getting up is harder than going down when the legs have been still that long. The blood comes back like sand under the skin.
I put my right hand on the sideboard and took it off again. The right shoulder dislikes load at an angle, and I did not want to be seen favouring it.
So I stood on the quadriceps alone, slowly, the way you stand up out of a sprawl.
I sat down. I ate the rest of the lamb. It was very good lamb.
Julian passed me the water jug without looking up from his plate, which in that house counted as tenderness.
Upstairs I wrote a date in pencil on the inside back cover of a paperback I had bought in a station.
12 October.
Under it, the figure eleven.