Chapter 13: The Twelfth Time
I knelt.
I want that sentence on its own, because everybody who hears the story wants the chapter before it and nobody wants this one.
Thirty-five minutes.
The floor was the same floor. Quarter-sawn oak, no give, two metres ten from the sideboard to the window.
It was November, so the cold came in harder along the boards, and by the second boiler cycle I could not feel the outside edge of either foot.
Five people at the table this time, which is worse than nine.
With nine there is a conversation to hide inside.
With five there are gaps.
In one of the gaps I heard Damon's chair take his weight backwards, and then forwards again, and I did not turn my head.
Julian did not leave the room. I would like to be able to say he left the room.
He did not; he stayed and had a second helping.
Once, at about twenty minutes, he said, “Is the pie all right for you, Mother,” and Margot said the pastry was heavy, and that was the only thing anybody said about anything for four minutes.
Here is the technical account, because it is the only kind I can still give without embarrassment.
Kneeling for thirty-five minutes on hardwood does three things.
It compresses the tissue over the kneecap, which is what makes the bruise, and the bruise is nothing.
It shuts down the circulation below mid-calf, which is what makes standing up difficult and is also nothing.
And it holds the hip flexors at end range under load for longer than they were built for, and that is the one that lasts.
That is why I took the stairs sideways for three days afterwards.
None of it is an injury.
I want to be precise, because precision is the only dignity available in a paragraph like this.
Nothing that happened to me in that dining room in three years would have shown up on any examination anybody could have given me.
That is not a failure of the examination. It is the specification.
“Nadia. You can get up now.”
“Thank you.”
I got up on the quadriceps, kept my chin level, and did not touch the sideboard.
Then I cleared the plates, because the plates do not clear themselves and because there is a kind of ferocity available in doing the next ordinary thing with your hands steady.
In the kitchen I ran the hot tap and stood with my forearms under it, which brings the blood back faster than anything.
Mrs Bell had gone.
The window over the sink was black and I could see myself in it, standing very straight, an outline with the light behind.
I thought: that woman looks completely fine.
Later I went out into the hall and picked my phone up off the mahogany table.
Coffee Weds? L.
I stood there with it in my hand for a long time.
Long enough that the screen went dark twice.
A text message takes eleven seconds to write.
I have spent longer on that hall floor than on anything else I have ever composed.
I could hear them in the drawing room. Somebody laughed.
The barometer ticked, which it did not do, so that must be the hall clock, but in my memory it is the barometer.
I typed: Sorry, can't at the moment. Bit tied up. Hope you're well.
I read it four times.
Then I took out the words at the moment, because they promise a later, and I did not have a later to give her.
Sorry, can't. Bit tied up. Hope you're well.
I sent it and put the phone face down.
That is the single worst thing I did in three years, and I did it to a widow who liked swimming.
The eleven times I knelt were done to me. That one I did.
I have apologised to her since, in person, in a café, and she said something so decent about it that I am not going to put it in a book.
Upstairs I got the paperback out of the drawer and sat on the edge of the bath with the light on and the tap running.
9 November.
Twelve.
Then I did the arithmetic again, because I could not stop myself, and the third-year average went from thirty-one minutes to thirty-two.
And underneath the column, without any decision that I was aware of, I wrote three more words in the same small pencil.
I have the book.
It is in evidence now, photographed at high resolution, and those three words are on page two hundred and nine of a bundle that four strangers read carefully.
What I wrote was: this is policy.
Then I put the book away, and I brushed my teeth, and I lay in the dark next to a sleeping man and did not sleep.
At one in the morning I went downstairs to the kitchen.