She did not touch the second cup. She stood in the kitchen doorway for a long time, looking at it, and then she went back upstairs and sat on the edge of the bed and put her hands in her lap and looked at her hands and tried to think.
She thought: someone is here.
She thought: I have been alone in this cottage for a day, and someone is here now.
She thought: no, that is not right. There is no one. I have walked every room. There are two of my footprints in the dust on the upstairs landing. There are no other footprints.
She thought: I have not looked at the dust on the upstairs landing.
She went to look. She went out onto the landing and knelt by the banister and looked at the dust on the boards. There was her footprint, from the night before, going into the bedroom. There was another footprint, going the other way. The footprint was not hers. It was smaller, narrower. It was the print of a bare foot, or a stockinged foot, and it went from the bedroom door to the top of the stairs.
She sat on the landing floor. She sat there for a long time. The dust on her knees was grey. The light through the landing window was still the colour of late afternoon, leaning gold. She did not call out. She did not get up to look under the bed. She sat on the landing floor and thought: I am in a place I have not been before, and I am not alone in it, and I do not know what to do, and so I will do nothing, and we will see.
She sat there for a long time. Nothing happened.
She got up. She brushed the dust from her knees. She went back downstairs. The second cup was still on the table. She touched it. It was warm. She went to the window and looked at the garden. The garden was empty. She went to the parlour. The parlour was empty. She went to the front door. The front door was still locked. She went back to the kitchen. She put the kettle on. She waited for it to boil. She made tea. She poured tea into her own cup. She looked at the second cup, and then she poured tea into the second cup as well. She put the kettle back on the stove. She sat at the table.
She said, to the empty kitchen: I have poured you tea. You can have it or not.
Nothing happened. She drank her own tea. The other cup steamed on the table. She drank her tea slowly. She looked at the steam from the second cup and thought about the steam from her own cup, and how, when she had been a child, she had believed that if you watched steam for long enough, you could see a face in it. She had tried, often, in the kitchen of the flat she had grown up in, while her mother sat at the table not drinking her own tea, and the steam had never made a face, and she had stopped believing it could, and she had stopped looking.
She looked at the steam now. The steam did not make a face. She watched it anyway.
She said, to the empty kitchen, after a long time: you do not have to come out. I would just like to know you are there.
Nothing happened. She finished her tea. She poured the second cup of tea into the sink and washed both cups and put them away. She did not feel foolish. She did not feel afraid. She felt the way one feels when one has done the thing one could do and it has not been enough and one must, then, simply go on.
She spent the second day learning the cottage more carefully. She went through the drawers. There was not much in the drawers — small things, domestic things, a thimble, a button, a length of cotton, a few receipts in a hand she did not recognise. There was a photograph in the drawer of the small desk in the office-room. The photograph was of a young woman standing at a gate, and behind her was a house, and the house was the house. The young woman was holding a basket of something. She was not looking at the camera. She was looking at something to the side of the camera, something out of frame, and her mouth was set in a way that meant either that she was about to speak or that she had just finished speaking. Maeve did not recognise her. She looked at the photograph for a long time. She did not recognise her, and yet the face was a face she had seen somewhere, and the place she had seen it was not a place she could name. She put the photograph back in the drawer and closed the drawer and went back to the kitchen.
She made lunch. She ate it. She went back to the parlour. She took a book down from the shelf. The House in the Field. She opened it. The first page was missing. The second page began mid-sentence: — and so the woman put her hand on the gate and the gate gave, and she went in, and the house within was the house she had left, but cleaner, and smaller, and with a different light. Maeve read the second page. She read the third page. She read until her eyes were tired, and then she closed the book and put it on the chair and went to the window and stood there.
The light had not changed. The clock still said three. She looked at the clock for a long time and decided that the clock was not a clock, and that this was a thing she would have to accept.
She went to the piano. She did not know how to play the piano. She had tried, when she was nine or ten, to learn from a woman in the next street, and the woman had been kind but Maeve had given it up after three lessons, because her mother had not been able to bear the sound of her practising. Her mother had not said so. She had simply gone out, every evening at six, when Maeve practised, and come back at seven, after Maeve had stopped. Maeve had understood. She had understood without her mother having to say. The piano had been put away. Maeve had not tried to learn again.
She lifted the lid of the piano. The keys were yellowed. She pressed one. The note came out, and was not the note she had expected. It was lower. She pressed another. It was higher. She pressed a third, and then stopped, because the note was the note of a piece her mother used to hum, in the kitchen, when Maeve was small. The piece was not a piece Maeve knew the name of. Her mother had never said the name. She had just hummed it, and Maeve had listened.
She sat at the piano for a long time without pressing any keys.
In the afternoon, she went out to the garden. She had not been out to the garden yet. She had looked at it from the window, and from the kitchen step, but she had not been into it.
The garden was not a tended garden. It was a garden that had once been tended and had since been allowed to forget itself. There were roses that had gone over, and there were long grasses, and there was a path of stepping stones that led to a seat under a tree, and the seat was green with moss. She sat on the seat. The moss was damp. She did not mind.
The tree above her was a kind she could not name. She did not know trees. The leaves were dark and small and the bark was pale. There were birds in it, or there were the sounds of birds, but she could not see them. She listened to them for a long time. She thought: if I were going to disappear, this would be the place I would choose.
She sat on the seat for a long time. She thought about her mother. She thought about the photograph of the young woman at the gate, and she thought about her mother at the kitchen table not drinking her tea, and she thought about the sound of her mother humming the piece without a name. She thought, my mother was once a young woman at a gate, and I do not know what was on the other side of her looking, and she has not told me, and I have not asked.
She thought, I am in a place made of things she has not told me.
She thought, I am in a place made of things no one has told me.
She got up from the seat. She went back into the cottage.
The second cup was on the table again. The kettle was on the stove, and the kettle was warm. The kitchen was empty.
She did not say anything this time. She poured herself tea. She sat at the table. She drank her tea. The second cup sat on the table, steaming, and she did not pour it out, and she did not pour it in. She left it.
In the evening, she went back up to the small bedroom. The pillow on the child’s bed still had its dent. She sat on the edge of the child’s bed. She put her hand on the pillow, lightly, the way one puts a hand on a sleeping animal. She did not press. She left her hand there for a long time.
She got up. She went into the master bedroom. She opened the wardrobe. The wardrobe contained a coat and two dresses and a man’s jacket and a pair of men’s shoes, none of which were hers. She closed the wardrobe. She opened the drawer of the bedside table. In the drawer there was a letter. The letter was addressed to her. The address was written in her own handwriting.
She sat on the bed with the letter in her hands for a long time before she opened it.
The letter was short. It had been written by her, and yet she did not remember writing it, and the date on it was a date she did not recognise — it was a date in a future that had not yet happened. The letter said:
Dear Maeve,
Don’t trust the man who finds you. He will be kind to you. He will be patient. He will not leave. These are the reasons not to trust him. I will not be here to explain this in person. I am sorry. The kettle is yours now. Don’t drink from the second cup. You will want to. Don’t.
Yours, M.
She folded the letter. She put it back in the drawer. She closed the drawer. She sat on the bed.
She thought: I have written myself a warning.
She thought: I have written myself a warning from a place I have not yet been.
She thought: the kettle is mine. The kettle has always been mine.
She got up. She went down to the kitchen. The second cup was still on the table. The second cup was still steaming. She looked at it for a long time.
She did not pick it up.
She thought: I will not drink from the second cup. I will leave it for whoever put it there. I will not be the one to break that. I will be the kind of person who leaves the second cup alone.
She went to the window. The light had not changed. The clock said three. She looked out at the garden, and the garden was empty, and the sea beyond it was slate-grey, and the sky above the sea was paler, and the band of gold at the horizon was still there, exactly where it had been the day before.
She laughed. She did not know why she laughed. She laughed again. She sat at the table and laughed, and the kitchen was empty, and the second cup steamed, and the light did not change, and somewhere, very far off, the sound of the sea went on, and somewhere, in a place she could not see, the machine went on, going beep.
