After You Left

Chapter 8

Ada was halfway across the garden with the laundry bag when she heard the back door open behind her.

She turned.

Oli came out pulling his coat on and crossed the garden quickly. He stopped in front of her and glanced back at the house once then looked at her.

“The library,” he said. Low and direct. “Three o’clock. The staff access door at the back.”

Ada looked at him. “Why?”

“Because it is the one room in this house where nobody goes in the afternoon,” he said. “My mother has her calls. My father does not leave his study before six. Camille sleeps after lunch.” He looked at her steadily. “I just want to talk to you. Properly. Without half a conversation and someone’s window above us.”

Ada looked at him for a moment. “Three o’clock,” she said.

He nodded and went back inside.

She came through the staff access door at three o’clock and stopped just inside it.

The library was warm and still — floor to ceiling shelves on three walls, a long reading table down the centre, two leather armchairs by the tall south facing windows. Afternoon light lay across the floor in long pale strips. She had never been in this room before. She stood inside it and looked around.

Oli was at the far end of the reading table. He turned when she came in and looked at her — then at her hands — then back at her face.

“You did not bring it,” he said.

“Bring what?”

“The sketchbook.”

“I did not know I was supposed to,” Ada said.

“You always have it,” he said.

“Not always,” she said.

He looked at her for a moment then pulled out a chair and sat down. Ada came further into the room and sat at the opposite end of the table. The full length of it between them. He looked at the distance and said nothing about it.

“So,” Ada said. “You wanted to talk.”

“I did,” he said.

“Talk then.”

He leaned back in his chair and looked at her. “Where did you grow up? Before here. Before your aunt’s.”

“A small apartment near Place Colette,” Ada said. “With my mother. Before she came here.”

“What was it like?”

“Small,” Ada said. “The walls were thin. You could hear everything the neighbours did. Everything.” She paused. “Our neighbour Monsieur Petit used to sing in his bathroom every morning at six. The same song. Every single morning for four years.”

“What song?”

“I do not know the name of it,” Ada said. “But I can still hear it. Every note.”

Oli looked at her. “Did he know he could be heard?”

“I think the whole street could hear him,” Ada said. “He did not care. He was very committed to that song.”

Oli laughed. Ada felt it land in the room and looked at the reading table.

“What about you?” she said. “Growing up here. In this house.”

“It is a big house to grow up in,” he said. “When you are small everything feels enormous. The staircase. The dining room. I used to think the ceiling in the entrance hall was the sky.”

“How old were you when you realised it was not?”

“Embarrassingly old,” he said.

Ada looked at him. “How old?”

“I am not telling you that.”

“You brought it up,” she said.

“I brought it up to make a point not to be interrogated,” he said.

He looked at her for a moment. “Seven,” he said. “I was seven years old.”

Ada pressed her lips together.

“Go ahead,” he said. “Say it.”

“I did not say anything,” Ada said.

“You were about to.”

“I was not.”

“Ada.”

She laughed. She could not help it — it came out before she could stop it and she pressed her hand over her mouth and Oli sat across the table watching her laugh with an expression on his face that she was not going to look at directly.

“Seven,” she said from behind her hand.

“The ceiling is very high,” he said. “In my defence.”

“It is a ceiling,” she said.

“It is a very convincing ceiling,” he said.

She laughed again and this time she did not try to stop it and it came out properly — warm and real — and the library held it in its quiet the way the library held everything, without judgement, without announcement.

When it settled Oli was still looking at her. She felt him looking and picked up a loose thread on her sleeve and examined it with great interest.

“What do you want?” he said. “When you leave here. When all of this is behind you. What do you actually want?”

Ada looked at the thread. “To make things,” she said. “With my hands. Things that last.”

“What kind of things?”

“Art,” she said simply. “Paintings. Things that are true.”

“Will you?” he said. “Actually do it.”

She looked up at him. “Yes,” she said. Without hesitation. “Will you do what you want?”

Something shifted in his face. “What makes you think I am not doing what I want?”

“The way you said it,” Ada said. “When you asked me. Like it was a question you wished someone would ask you.”

Oli looked at her for a long moment. He turned a pen over in his fingers that had been sitting on the table — once, twice, three times — then set it down.

“I want to build things,” he said. “Buildings. Spaces where people actually want to be.” He looked at the shelves around them. “Like this room. Somebody built this room and got it right. You can feel that it is right.”

“Then do that,” Ada said.

“It is not that simple.”

“I know,” she said. “But you should still do it.”

He looked at her. She looked back at him and did not drop her eyes and the library was very quiet around them and the afternoon light moved slowly across the floor between them.

“You are very certain,” he said. “For someone who has been here five weeks.”

“I am certain about some things,” Ada said.

“Like what?”

She looked at him. At his face across the reading table with the afternoon light behind him and that expression she had been trying not to catalogue since the first garden conversation.

“Like when a room is right,” she said. “You can feel it.”

Oli held her gaze. Neither of them said anything for a moment.

Then Ada stood up. “I should go,” she said. “The laundry.”

“Right,” he said. He stood too. “Ada.”

She looked at him.

“I like this,” he said. “Not today. But — I want to talk to you again.”

Ada looked at him standing at the reading table in the quiet library asking her like it was simple. Like the house was not the house and the distance between them was not the distance between them.

“We will see,” she said.

She went through the staff door.

Oli stood at the window and looked at the garden below.

He stayed there for a long time. Then he walked out of the library into the corridor.

Camille was coming from the sitting room. She looked up at her brother and stopped.

She had seen Oli in many moods. Bored. Focused. Irritated. She had never seen him look like this — like something had been quietly rearranged inside him and he had not yet noticed. Like someone walking out of a room they did not want to leave.

“Where were you?” she said.

“Reading,” he said. He kept walking toward the staircase.

Camille stood in the corridor and watched him go. Then she turned and looked at the library door.

Closed.

She looked at it for a long moment. Then she turned and went to find her mother.