The manuscript lay between them on Catherine's empty desk, forty pages held down by a brass paperweight shaped like a heron. Outside the window, London's rain traced grey rivers down the glass, and somewhere in the building's bowels a radiator clanked its metallic complaint against the February chill.
Elena Marchetti had arrived eleven minutes early. Dominic Hale, apparently, had arrived twelve.
She could tell because he had not looked up when she entered. He had continued writing in a small black notebook with the focused disinterest of a man who considered punctuality the least of his virtues. His handwriting, from what she could see of the reverse of the page, was architectural, all sharp verticals and surprising loops.
She set her own notebook on the edge of the desk and did not sit. Not yet. The office was not hers to claim, and the chair behind Catherine's desk was the kind of leather throne that demanded a certain posture, a certain authority. She was twenty-six. She had neither.
"You're the editor," Dominic said, without looking up. "Catherine said you'd be bringing the brief."
"Catherine also said you'd be bringing an open mind," Elena replied, and was rewarded with the faintest twitch at the corner of his mouth. Progress, of a kind.
He closed the notebook. The sound of it was precise, almost ceremonial.
"I have brought a scalpel," he said. "An open mind is the tool of the indecisive."
She let that sit for a moment, the way one lets a hot cup sit before lifting it. He was watching her now, she realized. Grey eyes, the kind of grey that weather happens in, and a face that looked like it had been assembled from better-looking spare parts. His jumper was the colour of unsalted butter. She hated that she noticed the jumper.
"Catherine wants the anthology out by autumn," Elena said, lowering herself into the visitor's chair, which was less commanding and more forgiving. "She wants it to sell. She wants it to matter. Those three things rarely agree, and you and I are meant to argue them into submission."
"Catherine," Dominic said, "is an optimist."
"Catherine," Elena corrected, "is paying us both."
The radiator clanked again. Dominic reached for the manuscript. He did not lift it. He turned the heron paperweight with one long finger, considering the pages beneath.
"Yours," he said.
"Mine."
"The introduction."
"The introduction. Three thousand words on the recovery of nineteenth-century women's writing, why it matters, why now. Plus a biographical note on each contributor."
He nodded, once, as if she had confirmed something he had suspected. "And the contributors will be writing new essays. Or are we cannibalizing the back catalogue?"
"New essays," Elena said. "Catherine insisted. She wants the book to feel alive, not like an act of piety."
Dominic lifted the brass heron and set it on the windowsill, where it looked suddenly absurd, a bird out of its pond. He freed the manuscript and turned the first page. His eyes moved down the text with the unhurried precision of a man who did not skim because skimming was, to him, a kind of cheating.
Elena watched his hands. They were clean, careful, the hands of someone who had been taught to handle books before he had been taught to ride a bicycle. She thought, briefly and without permission, of her father's hands in the back room of the shop in Bologna, sliding damaged spines back into place with a glue pot at his elbow.
"You're staring," Dominic said, still reading.
"I'm waiting," she said. "There's a difference."
"Is there?"
"You tell me. You're the academic."
He turned another page. "I'm not a critic. Academics get to be wrong in print and tenure-protected. Critics get to be wrong in public."
"That sounds like something a critic would say."
A pause. Then he did look up, properly, and the corner of his mouth again. Not quite a smile. A sketch of one.
"All right, Miss Marchetti."
"Just Elena."
"Elena." He said it carefully, as if testing the weight of it. "Tell me what you want this book to be."
Elena opened her mouth to answer, and found that she did not have an answer. Not a real one. Not one she could give to a man she had met twice in her life, in a flat that smelled of paper and cold tea, with his careful eyes on her and the manuscript open between them like a question she had not been allowed to read.
"I need some air," she said.
It came out sharper than she intended. She was already on her feet, already reaching for her coat, which she had draped over the back of the chair because she had wanted, for a foolish moment, to be comfortable.
Dominic did not move. "Elena."
"The fire escape," she said. "I won't be long. The window in the sitting room."
He nodded, once, and she fled.
In the hallway, she buttoned her coat wrong. She could feel the top button sitting at an odd angle against her throat. She undid it, redid it, and then gave up and left the coat unbuttoned entirely. The stairwell smelled of damp plaster and someone else's curry, the turmeric note lingering in the carpet. She passed the second-floor landing without looking at the doors. She passed the first. She pushed through the heavy front door and stood on the pavement, breathing.
London in October smelled of wet leaves and diesel. A bus went past, dragging a sigh of exhaust behind it. Across the street, a woman was locking up a corner shop, and the bell on the door gave a small, apologetic jingle as she pulled it shut.
Elena turned left, away from the shop, and walked until she found the side alley that ran between Dominic's building and the next. There was a skip at the end of it, overflowing with plasterboard and the skeleton of what had once been a chest of drawers. She climbed three metal steps and found the fire escape, a precarious iron thing bolted to the brick, and she made her way up to the first landing, where a battered plastic chair sat beneath a window that had been painted shut.
She sat. She put her hands on her knees. They were shaking.
She did not smoke. She had not smoked since university, when she had shared a single packet of Silk Cut with a girl from her translation seminar, and they had taken turns coughing in the quad and pretending they were characters in a French film. She had not thought about that girl in years. She thought about her now, sitting on a fire escape in Bloomsbury with her hands trembling for no reason she could name.
She needed a cigarette.
She thought of Toni, the junior copyeditor who had come up to the office three days ago with a packet of Marlboro Lights and the particular bravado of someone who had recently decided that smoking made her look like a film noir protagonist. Toni had offered her one at the printer's, and Elena had refused, and Toni had put the packet back in her bag with a shrug that said, more or less, suit yourself.
Elena did not have a packet of cigarettes. She did not have a lighter. She sat on the plastic chair and listened to the traffic on the road below and tried to remember what it felt like to want something as simple as a cigarette.
Then she heard footsteps on the fire escape below.
"Looking for these?"
Toni was two landings down, holding up a crumpled packet of Marlboro Lights and a plastic lighter shaped like a frog. She had clearly followed Elena out of the building through some route that Elena had not noticed, or had been waiting in the stairwell when Elena had pushed past. Either way, she was here, and she was offering the packet with the solemnity of a doctor offering medicine.
"I saw you from the window," Toni said, climbing the last few steps. "You looked like you needed one. Or twelve."
"I don't smoke," Elena said.
"Neither do I," said Toni. "That's why I bought the frog lighter. It was three pounds at the market and it makes me happy. Have a cigarette, Elena."
Elena took one. Her fingers brushed Toni's, and Toni's fingers were cold. She had been standing in the stairwell for a while, then. Waiting. Elena put the cigarette between her lips, and Toni clicked the frog twice before the flame caught. The tobacco tasted of nothing in particular, a thin papery heat, and Elena inhaled too deeply and coughed, and Toni laughed, and the laugh was kind.
"You can sit down," Elena said, when she had her breath back. "If you want."
Toni sat on the arm of the plastic chair, one leg tucked beneath her, the lighter balanced on her knee like a small green idol. She did not ask why Elena had fled. She did not ask about the meeting. She smoked her own cigarette with the focused attention of someone who had decided to get good at it in a single afternoon.
For a while, neither of them spoke. A fox crossed the alley below, paused at the skip, and went on. The traffic moved. Someone in the building opposite was playing a cello, badly, the kind of practicing that happened at the end of a long day when the will had run out and only the fingers kept going.
"Elena," Toni said eventually, not turning her head.
"Mm."
"You know the book he's writing the introduction for. The love book."
"I know the book."
"You're not going to like this."
"Try me."
"You've spent your whole life hiding what you love." Toni took a drag. "That's not a question. It's just an observation. You've spent your whole life hiding what you love, and now Catherine has asked you to edit a book that says, out loud, in print, with a proper ISBN, that love is something worth defending. And you can't do it, because doing it would mean admitting that you know."
Elena's hands shook harder. She looked down at them. The cigarette between her fingers had burned down to the filter, and she hadn't noticed.
"How long have you known?" she said.
"Since the day you came back from Bologna," Toni said, "and told me about the girl in the translation seminar, and then didn't tell me about the girl in the translation seminar, and then told me again, in a different way, three coffees later. I'm an editor. I notice what people don't say."
Elena laughed, or made a sound that wanted to be a laugh and didn't quite make it. "That's not fair."
"No," Toni agreed. "It's not." She stood up, brushed ash from her coat, and tucked the frog lighter into her pocket. "I'm going back inside. You can have the rest of the packet. I don't actually like them. They make me feel like I'm betraying my lungs."
She paused on the step below.
"He's waiting for you, Elena. The academic. He's waiting for an answer to a question, and it's the right question, and you're going to have to answer it eventually, and you might as well do it while you're already out of breath."
"How do you know it's the right question?"
Toni looked at her for a long moment. "Because he asked it," she said, "and he asked it as if he already knew you didn't have an answer, and he asked it anyway."
She went down the iron stairs. Elena listened to her footsteps until they disappeared into the building. The cello had stopped. The fox was gone. The traffic moved on.
Elena sat with the half-smoked cigarette cooling between her fingers, and tried, for the first time in a long time, to think about what she actually wanted the book to be.
She thought about her father's shop in Bologna, and the back room where he kept the damaged books. She thought about how he had taught her to mend a spine before he had taught her to read a novel, and how she had grown up believing that books were things you repaired rather than things you wrote. She thought about her mother, who had taught English to Italian children and had learned, in the process, to love the language more than the country it came from. She thought about the girl in the translation seminar, whose name she could not now remember, whose face she could remember perfectly: the small mole beneath her left eye, the way she had laughed at Elena's bad French, the way she had leaned against Elena's shoulder in the quad and said, very quietly, in English, "I think I love you," and Elena had said, "I think you do," and neither of them had said anything else for the rest of the term.
She thought about Dominic Hale, sitting in his flat with a brass heron on the windowsill and a manuscript he had not yet finished reading, waiting for her to come back and answer a question.
She thought about the book. Catherine's book. The book about love.
She put out the cigarette on the arm of the plastic chair, carefully, the way her father had taught her to put out a cigarette when she was nine, in the back room of the shop, on a day she could not now place.
She stood up. Her legs were stiff from the cold. She buttoned her coat, this time correctly, and went back down the fire escape, and into the building, and up the stairs, and through the door that was still, mercifully, ajar.
Dominic was where she had left him. The manuscript was open. The heron was on the windowsill. He looked up when she came in, and he did not ask where she had been, and he did not ask why her hands smelled of smoke.
"All right," he said.
"All right," she said.
She sat down. She put her hands flat on the table, so he could see that they were still.
"I want the book," she said, "to be the thing I needed when I was twenty-two and didn't know how to say what I felt. I want it to be the book that someone hands to a girl in a translation seminar, or a boy in a corridor, or anyone at all who has ever been told that what they love is not the kind of thing you put in a book. I want it to be loud, Dominic. I want it to be so loud that no one can pretend they didn't hear it."
She paused. Her voice was thinner than she would have liked.
"I want it to defend the very thing I've spent my life hiding. And I want to be able to hold it in my hands without shaking."
She looked at him. He was looking at her, and he was not smiling, and he was not quite not smiling, and she thought, with a small detached clarity, that he had understood exactly what she had just said, and that he had perhaps understood it long before she had.
"Good," he said.
That was all. Just that. Just the one word, and the rustle of a page being turned.
Elena exhaled, and the flat smelled of paper and cold tea and, faintly, of someone else's cigarette.
The kettle clicked off in the kitchen, though neither of them had moved to fill it. The heron rearranged itself on the sill, one slow step to the left, and the evening light caught its breast feathers and turned them, for a moment, the color of weak tea. Somewhere below, on the street, a door opened and shut, and someone laughed, and the laugh rose up the stairwell and faded, and was gone.
Dominic closed the manuscript. He did not slide it across the table toward her. He did not push it away. He simply closed it, and placed his hand flat on the cover, and looked at her with an expression she could not quite read, and which she suspected, given the man, he had not entirely chosen.
"Elena," he said.
She looked up.
"Walk with me," he said. "I need to not be in this room."
She almost refused. There was a part of her, the practical part, the part that had been raised by an English mother who believed that important conversations happened across tables, that wanted to stay here, where the manuscript waited like a patient animal. But she had spent the last ten minutes on a pavement listening to a man shout at his wife, and she had smelled someone else's cigarette, and she had felt, very precisely, the exact weight of a key in her palm, and she understood, suddenly, that if they stayed in this flat, one or both of them would say something they could not unsay, and that the book would pay for it.
"All right," she said.
They took the stairs in silence, his footsteps heavier than hers, his hand brushing the banister where hers had brushed it earlier, as though they were leaving, in sequence, a single record of the evening. The front door of the building opened onto a street that smelled, improbably, of rosemary. Someone on the ground floor had a window box, and the plant had grown, against all reasonable expectation, to spill over the iron railing and into the path of passersby. Elena brushed her sleeve against it as she passed, and the scent clung to the wool, warm and sharp and entirely out of season.
Dominic turned left, away from the bus stop, away from the bookshop, toward the canal. Elena fell into step beside him. Their shoulders did not touch. Their footsteps fell, for several minutes, into a rhythm that was not quite synchronized, and then, without either of them deciding it, became so. The evening had cooled, but not unpleasantly. The light was the long, low, golden kind that made London look, for ten minutes, like somewhere a person might actually want to live.
"I should tell you something," he said, and his voice was different. The sardonic edge had been put away somewhere, like a knife one did not need at dinner. What was left was plainer, and younger, and rather more tired. "About why I took this assignment."
She waited.
"I told Margot I wanted to come. I told her the project interested me. I told her that Hartley deserved a proper critical edition, and that I had opinions about the introduction, and that I was the right person to wrestle with the footnotes. All of that was true. None of it was the reason."
He stopped walking. They were on the towpath now, beside the dark water, and a narrowboat was sliding past with a small light in its cabin and the sound of a kettle, faintly, singing.
"My divorce," he said. "The settlement. It was not equitable. It was the kind of equitable that lawyers mean when they are being paid by the hour. I am, as of January, not quite broke. I am not quite not broke. I am in the particular country that lies between the two, where one still has one's name and one's address and one's habits, but not, if one is honest, one's choices."
Elena did not say she was sorry. She had learned, from her mother, who had taught children for thirty-one years in a primary school in Hackney, that there are wounds for which sorry is the wrong word, because it makes the wounded person have to stand up and comfort the one who is apologizing, and that this was an unfairness she would not, if she could help it, add to.
"How much," she said, instead.
"Enough," he said, "that I cannot afford to write introductions to forgotten women writers for the rest of my life and eat. Enough that when Margot Pryce rang me in February and said the word Hartley and the word advance, I did not, for the first time in my career, allow my principles to be the thing that walked me out of the room."
He said it simply. He did not make it into a joke. He did not wrap it in irony, though she could see him wanting to, could see the muscle in his jaw tighten with the effort of not doing so. He stood on the towpath with his hands in his pockets and his collar turned up against a wind that was barely there, and he let the sentence be ugly.
"I did not come here to destroy your book," he said. "I came here because I am thirty-eight years old and I have a flat I cannot afford and a name I have not earned and a profession that does not, unless one is very lucky or very well-born, pay one to be right. I came here because I needed the money, Elena. I am sorry that I did not say so at the beginning. I am sorry that I let you think I was here for any nobler reason."
She stood for a moment and watched the narrowboat slide past, and the small light inside it moved slowly along the water like a sentence being written very carefully across a dark page. The smell of the diesel reached them, faint and oily, and mixed with the rosemary on her sleeve, and the evening, for a brief, ridiculous second, smelled like a market in Bologna in November.
"I did not tell you the whole of it either," she said.
He looked at her. His face in the failing light was stripped of its usual careful architecture, and what was underneath was not what she had expected. It was not harder. It was not softer. It was simply more tired, as though the man underneath the critic had been awake for a very long time.
"You think I am here because I love the manuscript," she said. "I do. You think I am here because I believe in the book. I do. You think I am here because Margot gave me a chance and I do not want to waste it. All of those are true. But there is something under them, and I have been standing on it for three days, and I think it is time to move."
The wind moved a strand of hair across her face, and she did not push it back.
"My father has a bookshop in Bologna. It is a small shop, beneath the portico, near the Due Torri. It has been in his family for four generations. When I was nineteen, I told him I was going to be an editor, and he said, in that way he has, which is so gentle that you do not realize until much later that it was also a verdict, that he hoped I understood that editing was not, in our family, what we did. We sold books, he said. We did not make them. We did not, certainly, make the kind of books that make a person visible."
She paused. A jogger passed them, earbuds in, breathing hard, not seeing them. A dog barked somewhere on the other side of the canal, sharp and surprised.
"I have spent eleven years being the invisible one," she said. "The one who finds the genius. The one who polishes the sentence. The one who makes the introduction just sharp enough, just generous enough, just quiet enough that no one remembers her name on the spine. I have done this on purpose. I have done it because I was afraid. And I took this job because I wanted to know if I could do it once, just once, where I was not hiding. I have something to prove, Dominic. To my father. To myself. To the long list of people who have been kind to me, which is a long list, and which is, somehow, the problem."
He was quiet for a long moment. The narrowboat had gone. The water settled back into its ordinary dark. Somewhere a church clock struck nine, which neither of them counted.
"Then we are both here for the wrong reasons," he said, at last.
"Yes," she said.
"And we are both, perhaps, also here for the right ones."
"Perhaps."
He turned to her fully. The collar of his coat was turned up, and a strand of his hair, which had been behaving itself all day, had come loose across his forehead, and he did not push it back, and she thought, irrelevantly, that he looked less like a critic and more like a man who had been walking for a long time.
"I will not ruin your book," he said. "I will not soften Hartley. I will not sand down her edges to make her palatable to a press launch. I will write an introduction that argues she is as good as I believe she is, and I will do it without making it about me, which is a thing I have not, in thirty-eight years, been particularly successful at. That is my promise, and it is the only one I know how to keep."
She looked at him.
"I will not ask you to be smaller," she said. "I will not ask you to make the edition duller so that I feel safer. I will read every word you give me, and I will argue with you when I think you are wrong, and I will not, I hope, pretend to agree with you when I do not."
"Agreed," he said.
"Agreed," she said.
They did not shake hands. It did not seem like the kind of moment for that. They stood for a minute more, and the canal water moved past them, and the rosemary on her sleeve gave one last small breath into the evening air, and somewhere, distantly, a train crossed a bridge.
Then Elena said, "We should go back. The heron will think we have abandoned it."
He almost smiled.
"The heron," he said, "is a better judge of character than either of us."
They walked back along the towpath, and up the street where the rosemary was still doing its improbable work, and up the stairs that creaked in the same places, and into the flat where the manuscript waited and the kettle had gone cold and the heron was, in fact, exactly where they had left it, as though it had never had any intention of going anywhere.
Dominic put the kettle on. Elena sat down and opened the manuscript to the place they had marked with a scrap of paper, and smoothed the page flat with her palm, and felt, beneath the paper, the faint impression of the words on the other side, the ghost of the sentences waiting to be released.
The flat smelled of paper and cold tea and, now, faintly, of rosemary from someone's window box, and of canal water, and of something that was neither agreement nor peace but was, perhaps, the first honest draft of both. They did not speak for a while. They did not need to. The work was there, and the night was long, and for the first time in three days, neither of them was pretending to be the person the other one had assumed, and the heron watched them both from the sill, and did not move, and was, in its wooden way, the only witness that mattered.