The Chosen One (The First Book)

Chapter 32

I should have seen it.

Seen what?

I had it before my eyes were open. It had gone to bed with me and it was waiting.

The corridor started up outside. Doors, one after another, all the way down to the end.

Then the whole floor went downstairs without me. I lay still until it stopped.

Then I did not get up.

I have not missed breakfast since I came to this place. At home, you do not turn food down.

You eat it because it is there, and because it might not be there tomorrow. I brought that here with me the way you bring an accent.

I lay on my side with my face to the wall and worked on the sentence.

There are two ways to take it, and I went down both.

The first one starts with the word he used. It. Something that had been there to be seen. If a thing is there, somebody put it there, and the only people anywhere near me that night were the people I sat down with every morning of my life.

I got that far twice. I did not get to the end of it either time. It is a road that goes somewhere I cannot go. I came back up it and stood at the top of it. I have not put my foot on it since.

The second way is that he meant me. That he should have seen what I was going to do. That he blames himself for something I had done.

That one I could hold. It went in without any trouble at all, which should have told me something.

I got up when the light had moved off the end of the bed. If I missed the lesson as well, Eliza would come up, and she would bring company.

⸻

The literature master read to us for the first hour. He has a voice for it. He goes slower at the parts he likes, so you always know which ones those are.

It was a poem about a man who loved a woman he could not have. He watched her window for eleven years.

I kept waiting for somebody in it to have a job.

Nobody does.

There is no wood in it, no water, no animals, nobody in the whole eleven years so much as mends anything.

He stands under a window in all weather without once being cold, which tells you the man who wrote it had a fire.

You can stand under a window for eleven years if somebody else is bringing the wood in.

The woman never puts her head out. After eleven years, that is the only sensible thing anybody in it does.

"Miss Vale."

"Sir."

"What is the poem about?"

"A man with a great deal of time."

Clara made a noise into her sleeve.

The master looked at me over the top of the page for a moment, and then he said that was one reading of it, in the voice men use when they mean it is the wrong one.

The second piece was worse. A girl in it faints twice.

Both times somebody catches her. Both times, everybody in the room knows exactly why, and every one of them is right.

I sat with that for a while.

Then Rosalie asked whether the girl was meant to be beautiful, because if she was, it would explain a great deal. I let it take me with it.

I have never in my life wanted a thing without first working out what it would cost me by the end of the week.

I would like to try it once on a full stomach. To find out whether there is anything in me that could go that way, if I were ever put somewhere, I did not have to know what the next day was going to want.

⸻

I was the last one out, as always.

The cold had gone soft for the day. The light came all the way down the corridor and lay on the floor in squares. It does that perhaps four times in a season here.

Everybody had worked it out at the same moment.

They went past me two and three at a time, toward the doors and the garden, still arguing about the poem.

I stood in the doorway until the corridor was empty.

Then I went up.

There was a knock before I had my shoes off.

"Miss Vale. A letter came for you."

She held it out in both hands, the way you carry something that is not yours.

My name was on the outside of it.

I got the door shut. I stood in the middle of my room with it and did not open it.

Everything I had been carrying since the corridor went out of me at once. There was no room left for it.

The hand was the neighbor's daughter. She has been in our kitchen since I was six years old.

She learned her letters out of a book of her father's.

Small, level, careful with the paper, because there was never enough of it.

My mother cannot write her own name.

She could give you a woman's measurements from across a road.

She had never written a letter in her life, and she had never once been ashamed of it.

So she had gone and got the girl. She had sat down opposite somebody she had known since that girl was born and talked, out loud, in our kitchen, about me.

I know exactly where they sat. I know which side of the table has the short leg.

My mother wouldn't say anything. She would do them and let you work it out.

When my father died she did not tell me we were going to be all right.

She took in three more houses' worth of work and stopped sleeping.

The winter I was seventeen I came in soaked through. There was dry clothing over the back of the chair by the fire, warm already.

She did not look up from what she was doing.

I stood there with the letter in both hands and worked out that she couldn't have known.

Whatever it takes a letter to come down out of the north, she said all of that into a girl's hand long before I ever walked out of that hall.

It was already on the road while I was on those stairs.

It was still on the road the next morning, when I got the door open and left him asleep in a chair.

It had been coming toward me the whole time, and by the time it got here I was not the person she had written to.

I sat down on the floor with my back against the bed and opened it.