What the third chair held

Edith returned, in the spring, to the small room with the clock in it. She had not announced her return — there was no one to announce it to, and the room, in any case, had the sort of permanence that did not require advance warning. She arrived at twenty past two on a Wednesday, took her shoes off as she had done before, and sat in the same yellow chair. The clock was still ticking. The biscuits, mercifully, had been taken away.

There were, she now noticed, three chairs in the room and not — as she had remembered — two. The third sat slightly behind the door, in a corner she would not have looked at last time because she had been, then, the kind of person who only looked at the things she had come for. The third chair was a small armchair, upholstered in a dull, elderly green, with a faint, kind dent in the cushion where many people had, over many years, sat.

She moved to it.

She had brought, this time, a notebook and a pen, and she had brought them deliberately. She did not open them at first. She sat — for some time, in the green chair, with the clock making its accustomed remarks — and only when she had been sitting long enough that the room had stopped being aware of her, only then did she open the notebook and write.

She wrote, in her neat, small hand:

Some things I have learned, in the year between visits.

Then she stopped. She wrote four lines, crossed out two, and rewrote the second one. The result, when she was finished, was the following:¹

1. Most of what I waited for, last year, was already in the room when I arrived. I had not been looking at it.
2. Marta is not a project. I should stop trying to make her one.
3. The telephone is, as Lemmon claimed, undervalued. Use it more.
4. Write back to B. — even if B. is dead. Especially if B. is dead.
5. The third chair is the more comfortable one. It is also, evidently, the harder to find.

She closed the notebook.

She did not, this time, take her shoes off her feet to leave; she had not put them back on. She sat in the green chair, in her stockings, and looked at the room — the wooden table, the kettle (which had reappeared, but cool and unattended), the yellow chair where she had spent the better part of three hours a year ago — and she felt, very distinctly, the small private ceremony of returning to a place one has previously left without ceremony.

After perhaps an hour the door opened, very softly, and the young man — taller now, and with the slightly less unearned certainty of someone who had been embarrassed once or twice in the meanwhile — looked in.

“Edith,” he said.

“Yes.”

“You’re in the third chair.”

“Yes.”

He thought about this. He took a small step into the room.

“Are you — waiting?”

Edith looked up at him with an expression that she could not, herself, have named, but which Marta would have recognised in an instant. It was the expression of someone who has recently discovered that the difference between waiting and being present is not, in fact, very large; only that one of them is performed for an audience and the other is not.

“No,” she said. “I came for the chair.”

The young man nodded. He let himself out, very softly, leaving the door not quite closed.

The clock continued, with the small dignity of an instrument that has spent its working life saying yes and yes and yes. Outside, the spring afternoon was doing its slow gold business. A bird, somewhere, made a single declarative noise. It did not, of course, come back; that is not what birds do.

Footnotes

1. A version of this list, considerably extended and slightly less honest, was published two years later in a small literary review called The Quay. The original notebook entry — reproduced above — is still held in the archive of Edith’s papers, a collection of which there is presently no public catalogue. The author of this novel is reliably informed that the notebook itself is bound in green linen, faded at the corners, and that the relevant page is marked, very lightly, with a thumbprint in graphite. ↩