The east window held gray by half past seven, and by then Mark had been awake an hour. He had listened to the pipes tick down through the cold and to nothing from the room two doors down, which was Natalie's, and which was either empty or held a woman who was very good at being awake in silence.
He got up. He pulled on the jeans and the sweater he had worn the day before, because his bag was still half-packed and the room was too cold for selection. The bed was high and old, the mattress had taken his shape only along the edge where he had sat down once last night and again this morning, and he had slept at that edge.
The hall outside his door was lighter than the room. The east-facing window at the head of the stairs let a long gray rectangle onto the landing carpet. He went down. The study door was closed. Her door was closed. He eased his own latch shut behind him because the house carried sound as old houses did, in long lines, predictable as plumbing.
The south kitchen was warm before he reached it. The Aga had been lit, or had been left lit overnight, and the warmth reached the corridor before he did. He pushed the door open.
She was at the table.
She had a mug in one hand and the long printed inventory from Cargill's office spread on the boards in front of her, weighted at the corners by a tea tin and a salt cellar. A pencil rested in her right hand. She wore a thick gray sweater over a darker one beneath it, and a scarf, and the kind of stillness that lifted her head only when she was ready to.
"Morning," he said.
"There's water hot in the pot."
"Thank you."
The kettle was the new electric kind, which surprised him; he had expected the room to have stayed in 1962 like the rest of the house. The cafetière she had used held grounds gone cold. He scraped them out, rinsed the glass at the sink, found a tin labeled COFFEE in a hand that was probably Cargill's, and made his own.
She let him work in silence. The pencil tapped once against the inventory and stopped.
"East wing is yours," she said. "The study, the large library. I'll be at the desk first."
"All right."
"Small library is at this end on the ground floor. There's a desk under the window that holds a laptop without complaining. I haven't been in there."
"I'll set up there."
"West wing for the archive rooms. Two are usable. The other two are damp."
"Noted."
"South kitchen as it is. Dinner as it comes."
"Right."
She made a mark on the inventory and rolled the corner of the page back where it had wanted to curl.
He carried the coffee to the table and sat across from her, leaving an arm's length of board between them. She turned the page. The pencil paused on a line that read occasional table, walnut, west drawing-room, see plan IV.
"Three weeks," she said.
"Three weeks."
"It's four if you're honest about the desk alone."
"Then four."
She gave him a look that was not quite a look. It carried a small professional dryness he remembered, and it was directed at the page. "Cargill says three."
"Cargill says a lot of things."
"He stocks a kitchen well, in his favor."
She turned another page. He drank the coffee and watched the kitchen window brighten by a slow margin. The pane had a long bead of condensation along its lower edge. The wind had held north-easterly all night and he could hear it where it pressed at the corner of the south wall.
"Boxes you want are in west room B," she said. "Cargill flagged them. The light works. The window won't close all the way."
"I'll move them closer to the door."
"It's how I'd do it."
He pushed back from the table. He took the mug, washed it at the sink because his mother had taught him to leave a kitchen the way he found it, and went out through the south corridor to the west wing.
The west wing was colder. The corridor smelled of old paper and damp stone and the mineral note of a place that had held no fire in any room for six months. Room B's overhead light worked. The window let a draft in at the corner Mark felt at his neck before he had crossed the floor. The three boxes were stacked in the center on a pallet of two-by-four to keep them off the slate. Drummond's pencil hand across the lids: POLITICAL CORRESPONDENCE, XX C., volumes I, II, III.
He carried them through one at a time. Each box weighed less than he expected, which meant the paper inside was lighter than he expected, which meant Drummond had pruned the correspondence himself over the years and what was here was a curated thing rather than a raw one. He took the long way back, through the south corridor and up through the east wing first floor, because the direct route would have passed Natalie's kitchen, and he had agreed without saying so to a quantity of distance that he meant to keep through the second hour at least.
The small library at the east end of the ground floor had the desk under the window as she had said, a Persian rug worn through to its canvas at one edge, two armchairs facing a cold fireplace, and three walls of books on shelves built into the panelling. The fourth wall held a glass-fronted cabinet with maps. He set the boxes on the floor by the desk, opened the laptop, opened the notebook to a clean page, dated it, and wrote at the top of the page: Drummond, political correspondence, preliminary.
His thumb found the inside of his left wrist while he read the first page of Drummond's index, which Drummond had typed himself and which began with Volume I: Sir Henry —— , the surname blacked out at some point and replaced in ink with a single letter. Mark turned the page.
He went through Box I.
Drummond had filed by date. The earliest letter was from 1958 and the latest from 1991. The first correspondent had been a Labor MP for a Glasgow constituency through the sixties; Mark recognized the name on the second letter and chose not to think about the recognition. The letters were typed, on House of Commons paper for the early ones and on plain bond for the later, and Drummond's carbons of his own replies were on the cream laid paper Mark had recognized already in the letter to Élise. Same supplier. Same hand. A man who had bought his paper in bulk in 1962 and stayed with it for fifty years.
Mid-morning he stood up to stretch. He took the mug into the kitchen and washed it. Natalie was no longer at the table. The inventory had been rolled and stood propped against the salt cellar. The Aga had been fed; he could feel the heat at his face when he passed it. He kept his eyes on the floor on the way back, because the study door was at the head of the stairs and he had agreed with himself, in the silent contract he had made with himself, to walk the east wing without lifting his head until he was back through the door of the small library.
In Box II he found one letter that held him longer than the others.
It was dated July 1966, from the same MP, three lines on plain paper. Hector — I have been thinking about what you said about the friend you mentioned. There is no good answer to it. I would only say that the time for saying it is not later, in my experience, but earlier than one believes. Yrs, P.
He read it twice. He set it in an acid-free sleeve and made a note on his page: Box II, July 1966, three lines, language registers personal not political. Cross-ref with Drummond letters to P, same period.
Sitting back, he looked at the sleeve. The phrase the time for saying it is not later belonged in a different filing than this one, and Drummond had filed it here all the same. Mark set the sleeve down and chose, for the moment, to leave the question of it standing.
He listened to the house without meaning to. He could place her by the sounds that traveled along the line of the east wing corridor: the kettle in the kitchen at twenty past ten; the latch of the study door at eleven; the soft drag of a wooden drawer at twenty past eleven, which would be the second of the twelve in Drummond's desk. He set Box II aside and opened the third, the one labeled III on the lid in pencil, and at the same moment heard her cross the corridor outside his door.
She walked past the open library on the way from somewhere to somewhere. She had a folder in her hand. She did not look in. He saw the line of her shoulder under the thick gray sweater and the place at her throat where the scarf had loosened and the small repeated gesture of a person carrying something they meant to hold onto. She passed.
His hand moved to the notebook before he had decided anything.
The pen touched the page when he caught the hand. He pulled it back. There was a small dark dot at the start of an unwritten line that would have begun, he knew, with one of two words about how she had carried the folder — her shoulder under the sweater, the small adjustment at her throat. He looked at the dot. He closed the notebook over it and sat with his hand on the cover.
He let the breath out.
He opened the notebook again, lined out the dot with two careful strokes of the pen, and wrote underneath: Box III not yet opened. Resume p.m.
He worked through the afternoon. He photographed the July 1966 letter in case the original lost itself between him and London, and he set the camera on the box lid because the desk was now covered with his notes. The study door opened and closed twice. A radiator somewhere on the east wing cracked once and ticked.
By four the light through the window was gone. He stood and lit the lamp on the desk. He put a sleeve around the July 1966 letter and a sleeve around two others that had held him less but which he wanted, in his own slow way, to come back to.
He made himself a sandwich in the kitchen toward seven. She had eaten earlier; he saw it by the breadboard wiped clean and a single plate upended in the rack. He ate at the counter standing up because the table held her rolled inventory again, and he saw no reason to displace it. He drank a glass of water. He washed the plate.
By eight he was back at the small library to finish marking the day's work.
At ten he saw her in the corridor again.
She was at the far end, near the door that gave onto the back stairs, and she had a cardboard archive box braced against her hip. She was carrying it from the west wing to the study upstairs. She would have packed it herself. She moved the box from her hip to both arms and went on without slowing. He stood in the open door of the small library with the lamplight behind him.
He could have crossed the corridor in five steps and taken the box from her. The professional argument for it was thin; she had carried boxes of that weight a thousand times in her working life. The personal argument was that she would have to walk forty feet less, and that two arms made eighty seconds of work into thirty.
He stayed where he was.
Professional border, he thought. The phrase arrived already shaped, ready for someone else to read. He left it there, knowing it covered only part of what kept him in the doorway.
She turned the corner toward the back stairs. The box went out of sight. He heard her step on the second tread and on the third, and the small adjustment of weight at the landing. Then quiet.
He went back to the desk.
He read the day's notes through. They were what they were: three pages of careful journalism, a note about the blacked-out surname in Drummond's index, a note about the July 1966 letter and its language, a note about Drummond and his stationer of fifty years, a note about Box III which he would open in the morning. There was nothing in any of them about her. He had kept the side of the agreement that they had both held without speaking it.
He closed the notebook.
He sat with his hand on the cover.
After a while his right hand slid forward across the cover to the place where his fingers would have opened it. He brought it back. He left the cover closed. What wanted to be written had to do with her step on the second tread — low at the heel, a fraction slower at the rise than her left, the same step he had known once, recognizable in a house too new to her to have a sound of its own.
He let the thought stand without writing it.
He turned the lamp off.