Chapter 3: The Sound a Knee Makes
The left knee went first, because I always led with the right coming up, which loads the left.
It made a single dry click.
Not loud. About the volume of a knuckle cracking, or a light switch in a room two doors away.
In a dining room with nine people in it and no music, it carried.
I know it carried, because the cook heard it.
Mrs Bell was at the sideboard with the vegetable dishes, four metres behind me, and her shoulders came up half an inch.
That is what a person does when they hear a body make a noise it should not make.
Nobody at the table moved.
I have gone over this more times than is healthy, and I am confident of the count, because I looked.
Nine people. Not one head came up.
Celia was still on the marquee.
Margot was folding her napkin into a rectangle, which she did before pudding, every time, the same three folds.
Julian was looking at the water jug.
Damon was looking at me, but Damon was always looking at me, and it was not the kind of looking that requires the head to move.
So I stood the rest of the way up on the quadriceps, kept my chin level, and walked six steps back to my chair.
The trick with the knee is not to test it.
If you flex it to see whether it still works, everyone finds out that you wondered.
I sat down. I put my napkin back across my lap.
I ate three more pieces of lamb that I did not want.
There was a lemon tart. It was extremely good.
I said so, and Margot said the pastry was Mrs Bell's mother's recipe, and for four minutes the room was warm and ordinary and you would have paid money to be in it.
That is the part nobody believes.
They want it to be cold all the way through. It was not.
It was a nice house with good food and people who were funny about their neighbours.
The cold was rationed. That is what made it work.
At half past nine I carried the coffee tray, because I always carried the coffee tray.
Twelve steps from the dining room door to the drawing room door, across the black and white stone of the hall, past a barometer older than anyone in the room.
The tray was silver and it weighed about four kilos loaded.
I carried it on the left forearm and steadied it with the right hand, never the reverse.
Anyone who has torn something in a shoulder will tell you the same.
You spend the rest of your life quietly re-routing.
In the drawing room I set it down, poured six cups, and did not sit.
I went back for the second tray, and that was when Damon came into the kitchen passage behind me.
He is twenty-nine. He is Julian's brother.
He runs the family's care homes, four of them, and he says the word portfolio in a way that suggests he built them with his hands.
He stood in the doorway with a glass in his left hand.
Doorways are the only place he was ever dangerous, because a doorway is a corridor, and in a corridor a person has to choose a side.
“Long one tonight,” he said.
I said the coffee was going cold.
“Twenty-six minutes,” he said. “I timed it.”
That is the sentence I would like people to sit with.
Not that they made me kneel.
That he timed it, and told me the figure, in a kitchen passage, in the tone of a man reading out a cricket score.
I said nothing, and I went past him with the tray, and he moved about ten centimetres to let me, which is not enough and was not meant to be.
My right hand was on the tray handle. It stayed on the tray handle.
Upstairs, later, the house did what old houses do, which is tick and settle and complain about the cold.
Our room was on the east side.
Julian was already in bed with a folder of drawings on his knees, because he was an architect, and he was good at it, and the drawings were of a school extension in a town I never saw.
He said, Fine evening.
I said, Yes.
He said, Mother's fond of you, you know. She wouldn't bother otherwise.
I have heard that sentence, or a version of it, from the relatives of every controlled person I have ever met since.
I went into the bathroom and shut the door and sat on the edge of the bath for a while with the tap running so the pipes would make some noise.
Then I rolled down my stockings to see what the floor had done.
On the seventh stair, coming up, the left knee had clicked again.
I counted that one too.