The Two Others

Penn, in Person

Penn's flat was on the fourth floor of a narrow house on a street Iyla had not, before that Tuesday, had any reason to walk down, and it had — Iyla saw at once, from the landing, through the door Penn opened with the small unsurprised face of a woman who had expected, sooner or later, this particular knock — the long window Kettle had described on the soup-place Saturday, the one that took up most of the far wall and looked out, at this hour, onto a slate roof and a piece of sky the colour of an unwashed cup. The kettle was on the left of the stove. Iyla noted this as she came in, the way one notes a landmark one has been told about in advance and now finds, with a small flat shock, to be exactly as described; and she understood, noting it, that Kettle had been in this kitchen, and had stood at this stove, and had registered the kettle's position with the small instinctive attention of his trade, and that the kitchen she was now standing in was a kitchen he had, on the Saturday, given up.

"Tea," said Penn, who was already lifting the kettle, because Penn was a woman to whom the offering of tea on the arrival of a visitor was not a question but a sequence, and the sequence had begun the moment the bell rang downstairs.

"No," said Iyla. "Thank you. I'd rather we did this without."

Penn put the kettle down. She put it down on the right of the stove, which was not where it lived, and then, after a small considering pause, moved it back to the left, because Penn was also a woman who returned objects to their proper places before she sat down to a difficult conversation, on the grounds, Iyla suspected, that a kitchen out of order was a kitchen one could not think clearly in. She gestured to the table. Iyla sat. Penn sat across from her. Between them, on the wood, was a small stack of index cards held by a brass clip, and Iyla recognised, without looking closely, the upright hand on the top card as Penn's, and the words on it, partially visible, as a phrase she had written herself, at nineteen, into the margin of a book she could no longer remember the title of.

"I'd like you to stop," Iyla said.

She had, on the way over, considered a number of openings, and had rejected all of them in favour of this one, because the one thing she had learned, in the last fortnight, was that the sentence one had actually come to say was almost always the sentence one was tempted to arrive at by a longer route, and that the longer route was, almost always, a courtesy paid to oneself at the cost of the conversation.

"I'd like you to stop going into Lentar. I'd like you to stop filing the cards. I'd like you to take the green book out of the C room and give it to me, and I'd like you, after that, to do whatever else you do for the Society in whatever room you do it, but not the part that is about me, and not the part that is about the city, and not the part that is about the boy whose aunt had a song. I am not asking the Society. I am asking you. The Society can decide what it decides. You can decide separately."

Penn listened. She listened with the small precise stillness that was, Iyla had begun to understand, Penn's version of attention, the same stillness with which she had stood at the card-catalogue drawer on the Thursday morning, smoothing an entry with the side of her thumb. When Iyla had finished, Penn did not, for a moment, answer. She looked, instead, at the stack of cards under the brass clip, and adjusted the clip, very slightly, so that the cards aligned along their bottom edge rather than their top, and then she looked up.

"No," she said.

It was not a cruel no. It was, if anything, a kind no, in the small specific way Penn was kind, which was the kindness of a woman who had decided that the worst thing one could do to a person one respected was to make them wait for an answer one had already given oneself. She had given herself the answer, Iyla saw, some time ago. Possibly on the Thursday. Possibly years before the Thursday. The conversation they were now having was a conversation Penn had, in some private chamber of her own attention, had already and resolved already, and what was happening at the table was the courtesy of saying the resolved thing aloud to the person it concerned.

"I won't pretend I haven't thought about it," Penn said. "I have. I thought about it on the Monday when Saroya told me what had happened at Mr. Behr's, and I thought about it last night, and I thought about it this morning when I heard the bell and knew, before I opened the door, that it would be you. I would like, very much, to be the kind of person who, asked by you, in my own kitchen, on a Tuesday, to stop — stopped. I am not that kind of person. I have been doing this work for nineteen years. The room is older than I am and will be older than I am, and the cards in the room will outlast the hands that filed them, and what I do, every morning, when I come in at seven and turn on the lamp at the long table, is the small daily work of making sure that the room is, at the end of the day, slightly more itself than it was at the beginning. That is what I'm for. It is not, I know, what you came here to hear. But it is the true answer, and you asked me, you said, without the tea, and I am giving it to you without the tea."

"Penn," said Iyla, "they took a song from a boy."

"Yes," said Penn. "I filed it."

"Then unfile it."

"I can't."

"You can. You have hands. The book is in a room. You walk in, you take it out, you bring it here, we work out what we do with it."

"I can't," said Penn again, and Iyla heard, this time, in the small flatness of the second saying, that the can't was not the can't of a person who could not, physically, do the thing, but the can't of a person who had decided, long before this Tuesday, that there were categories of action she would not take, and that the taking of the green book out of the C room belonged, irrevocably, to one of those categories. "If I do it once, for you, because I like you, because I think you are right, then the next time someone I like, or someone I think is right, asks for a different book for a different reason, I have already, by the first taking, said yes to the asking. The room only works if the hands inside it do not, at any point, decide for themselves which entries are entries. I am one of the hands. I decided, when I was twenty-one, what kind of hand I was going to be. I am not, at forty, going to revise it because a woman I have come, in the last month, to care about, sat across from me at my own table and asked me to."

She said it without heat. Penn was not lying, and Penn was not, in any of the ways Saroya was, performing; she was, with the full weight of her nineteen patient years and her properly-placed kettle, choosing the room over the kitchen, and offering Iyla, by way of compensation, only the dignity of being told the truth about it.

"You'll lose me," Iyla said. It was not, she knew, a threat. It was a piece of accounting, of the kind she had decided, on the Saturday, to keep properly.

"Yes," said Penn. "I know. I am sorry about it. I would, if you would let me, still like to be the person who knows where your hand is on a card in a drawer in a room you have decided to be at war with. I do not expect you to let me. I am noting, for the record, that I would have liked it."

"For which record."

"Mine," said Penn, and touched, with one finger, the top card under the brass clip, very lightly, the way a person touches a thing they have decided they will go on touching whether or not it has given them permission to.

Iyla stood. She did not, she found, have anything further to say, and the staying to find something further would have been, she understood, a courtesy paid to herself at the cost of the leaving. At the door Penn said, "I won't tell Saroya you came," and Iyla said, "Tell her. Tell her I came, and tell her I asked, and tell her you said no. Put it on a card." Penn, after a small pause, said, "All right," and closed the door behind her with the small careful click of a woman who closed doors, as she did everything else, properly.

On the stairs going down Iyla allowed herself, for the length of one landing, to feel it: the specific cold grief of having watched a person she liked make, in front of her, in good faith, the wrong call — and to find that the wrongness of the call did not subtract from the liking. She had been prepared, walking over, to stop liking Penn. She found, on the third-floor landing, that she had not, and that the not-stopping was going to be a small steady cost she carried around alongside the others, in the same pocket, jingling.

Maro she found that afternoon at the small bench outside the Society building where Maro sometimes ate her lunch when the reading room had become, as Maro put it, loud in the way rooms get loud when nobody is talking. Iyla sat down beside her. She did not, this time, rehearse an opening. She said, "I went to Penn's. She said no."

Maro chewed, slowly, the last of a sandwich. She folded the paper. She put the paper in her pocket, because Maro was a woman who carried her own rubbish home rather than spend a stranger's bin on it. "I thought she would," she said.

"And you?"

Maro looked, for a moment, at the green door of number forty-one, which was, from this bench, visible at a slight angle through the railings, and then she looked down at her hands, which were, Iyla noticed, very slightly ink-stained at the side of the right thumb, in the way of a person who had spent the morning at a ledger.

"I'm not going to do the work anymore," Maro said. "The travelling-in work. I told Tomas this morning. I didn't make a speech of it. I said I'd stay on the anchoring rota, because the anchoring is a thing I believe in separately, and I said I'd keep teaching the practice to the new ones, because the practice is also a thing I believe in separately, and I said I would not, from today, be going into anybody's world on Society business, including yours, including any you make after this one. He asked if I was leaving. I said no. I said I was staying, and refusing. He wrote it down. That was all."

"Maro — "

"Don't thank me," said Maro, in the small firm voice of a woman who had thought about being thanked and decided against it in advance. "I am not doing it for you. I am doing it because I would like, when I am older than I am now, to be a person who, when she remembers this week, remembers the part where she stopped. That is a selfish reason. I am keeping it." She stood up. She brushed crumbs from her lap into her hand, and then put the hand in her pocket with the sandwich paper, and looked at Iyla, briefly, with the small grave look of a woman who had said her sentence and did not intend to expand on it. "Penn is wrong," she said. "I won't say it inside. I'll say it here. Tell Kettle I said so, if it helps him sleep on Mr. Behr's cot."

She walked back across the street, and up the steps, and through the green door, which closed behind her with the ordinary unhurried sound of a door closing behind a woman going back in to refuse, again, the thing she had refused that morning.