The Woman in the Corner

The letter arrived on a Tuesday in October, typed on heavy cream paper with edges so sharp they seemed to cut the envelope they lived inside.

Evelyn Hart held it between two fingers as though it might be contaminated, which was precisely the point. The letter was brief. Three sentences. It offered her a position as a typist at Blackwood Holdings, a holding company whose business she could not determine from its name alone. The salary was generous. The address was in the City, near Threadneedle Street. The hour was nine.

She had not applied for the job. She had been recommended by a distant cousin who lived in Streatham and who, when Evelyn had called to ask who Blackwood Holdings was and what they did, had replied: "Don't ask questions, love. Just type."

So she went.

The building was on a street that Evelyn had never heard of and would not have found on a map without assistance. It was tall, dark, and had the kind of presence that made the buildings on either side of it seem apologetic. The door was brass and heavy and opened to a lobby so quiet that Evelyn could hear her own heartbeat, which was louder than she thought it would be.

A man in a dark suit took her name and her letter and led her up four flights of stairs to a floor that was entirely given over to Blackwood Holdings. There were perhaps twenty desks, each occupied by a person who looked up when she passed and looked down again with the mechanical indifference of someone who had learned long ago that looking was not the same as seeing.

At the end of the floor was a door with a nameplate: S. Blackwood, Proprietor.

The man knocked. "Miss Evelyn Hart, sir."

A voice from inside: "Enter."

She pushed the door open and found a man standing by the window, his back to her, looking out over a London that was grey and wet and indifferent. He turned when she entered and she saw a face that was both attractive and unattractive in equal measure—handsome in the way that a storm is handsome, with sharp features and dark hair and eyes the colour of wet slate.

"Miss Hart." He gestured to a chair. "Sit."

She sat. He did not.

"You type?"

"Forty words per minute, sir."

"Good." He walked around his desk and sat down with a fluidity that was almost unsettling. "You will type letters, accounts, memoranda. You will not read them. You will not ask about them. You will not speak to the other staff. Do you understand?"

"Yes, sir."

"Good." He opened a drawer and produced a small ledger. "Your salary is twenty shillings a week, payable on Saturday. You will begin Monday."

"Thank you, sir."

She stood to leave. He looked up.

"Miss Hart."

She paused at the door.

"Welcome."

The word was not warm. It was not cold. It was something in between that made her skin prickle in a way she could not explain.

Her desk was in the corner of the floor—the southeast corner, she would later note—a place where the light was decent and the passage of people around the edge of the room created a small wall of motion that felt almost like privacy. She set down her typewriter, her small ink pot, her spare ribbons, and began to work.

The first week passed without incident. She typed letters about shipping routes and memoranda about investments and accounts that she could not read because the ledger was closed in front of her and she was only allowed to type what was shown to her. The other staff were polite and distant. A woman named Mrs. Pembroke, who had been there perhaps five years, nodded to her once and never spoke to her again.

On the eighth day, Mr. Blackwood did something unexpected.

He came to her desk at four o'clock in the afternoon—a time when he rarely appeared on the floor—and stood beside her for approximately thirty seconds while she typed a letter about coal exports to Buenos Aires. Then he said: "You take sugar in your tea?"

She stopped typing. "No, sir."

"Neither do I." He paused. "Mrs. Pembroke takes two spoons. The young man at the next desk takes none. You take none."

He walked away, and Evelyn stood at her typewriter with her fingers hovering over the keys and a feeling in her chest that she could not name and did not want to examine too closely.

On the twelfth day, she found the first letter.

It was behind the filing cabinet in the corner, partially hidden by dust and the kind of clutter that accumulates in offices where no one has thought to look for twelve years. The envelope was addressed to a woman whose name Evelyn did not recognise, and it was postmarked three years earlier, and it was written in a hand that was elegant and hurried and unmistakably female.

Evelyn opened it. She told herself she opened it because it was behind a filing cabinet and therefore misplaced and therefore someone's responsibility to find it. She told herself many things. The letter said:

I have been thinking about you every day since I left. The flat is quiet without you. The garden has gone to seed. I planted lavender, because you loved lavender, and I know you would laugh at me for thinking that something as simple as lavender could bring you back.

I am not writing to ask you to return. I am writing to say that I remember everything. The way you took your coffee. The way you laughed at bad jokes. The way you looked at the sea on the day we went to Brighton and I could not stop watching you instead of the water.

Do not read this letter twice. I am asking you, for the last time, not to read it twice.

Yours, E.

Evelyn folded the letter and put it back behind the filing cabinet and went back to her typewriter and typed a letter about coal exports to Buenos Aires that she would never show to anyone, and her hands were shaking so badly that she made six errors in a single paragraph.

She mentioned it to no one.

On the twentieth day, she found the second letter. This one was in the drawer of her own desk—a desk that she had kept locked and checked regularly since she began working there. The drawer was slightly open when she arrived in the morning, and inside was an envelope with her name on it in a handwriting that was not the handwriting of the first letter. This one was masculine, precise, and unmistakably Mr. Blackwood's.

Evelyn.

The letter inside was shorter. One sentence.

You are the best typist I have ever employed. Do not let anyone tell you otherwise.

She read it once. She did not read it twice.

But that night, in her rooming house on the other side of the river, she read it twice. And then, against her own instructions to herself, a third time.

She began to watch the other staff more carefully. Mrs. Pembroke, who sat at the desk nearest the window and who had a habit of pressing her lips together until they turned white when someone spoke too loudly. The young man at the next desk, who was always smiling and never stopped smiling, even when Mr. Blackwood was in the room. A woman named Miss Whitfield who arrived each morning at nine and left each evening at five and never, ever spoke to anyone.

Evelyn asked Mrs. Pembroke, on the twenty-fifth day, what she did in her spare time.

"Nothing," Mrs. Pembroke said, and did not look up from her typewriter.

"I mean, outside work."

Mrs. Pembroke's hands stopped. For exactly three seconds, they were perfectly still on the keys. Then they resumed.

"I have my own affairs," she said.

Evelyn let it go. But she noticed that Mrs. Pembroke's desk was different from the others. It was cleaner. More organised. And there was a photograph on the corner of it—a photograph of a woman and a man and a child, and the woman looked like Mrs. Pembroke but younger and happier and, Evelyn thought with a chill that had nothing to do with the draft from the window, more alive.

On the thirtieth day, Mr. Blackwood did something that changed everything.

He asked her to come to his office after hours.

"Friday," he said, standing at the edge of her desk with the same unsettling fluidity. "Seven o'clock. My house in Chelsea. There is something I would like you to see."

It was not a request. It was not quite an order. It was something in between that Evelyn had learned, in twenty-six years of living, to recognise as the thing that people say when they have already decided what they want to happen and are simply informing you of the decision.

She should have said no. She should have walked out of the office and never come back and gone back to typing advertisements for hair tonic and remedies that were not remedies.

She said yes.

Chelsea at night was a different city from the City. The streets were wider, the buildings grander, the gas lamps casting pools of amber light on wet cobblestones that smelled of river and time and things that had been hidden for a long time and were only now, slowly, being dug up.

Mr. Blackwood's house was at the end of a short street that Evelyn had never walked on and would never walk on again with anyone else. It was tall and dark and had the same kind of presence as the building on Threadneedle Street, only amplified by the darkness and the narrowness of the street and the way the gas lamps flickered as though the wind knew something it was afraid to say.

He opened the door himself. He was wearing a dark coat and a dark tie and a face that was expressionless in the way that a mask is expressionless—not because there is nothing behind it but because there is too much.

"Come in," he said.

The house was warm and smelled of wax and old books and something else that Evelyn could not identify—something that was not unpleasant but was close enough to make her think of hospitals and places where things were kept clean because they were too important to be left to the natural order of things.

He led her up the stairs and down a corridor that was lined with photographs. Not many—perhaps a dozen—and all of them of women. Young women. Women who looked like they had been photographed on their best days, when the light was right and the dress was new and the smile was genuine.

"These are," Mr. Blackwood said, stopping at the end of the corridor and opening a door, "former employees."

Evelyn looked at the photographs. She looked at the women. And she saw something that she had not expected: they all looked happy. They all looked, in that specific way that people look when they are being photographed by someone who is looking at them not as an object but as a person.

"Their work is excellent," Mr. Blackwood said, and his voice was flat and factual and entirely without irony. "They are remembered."

He led her into a room that was entirely given over to paper. It was a study, or a library, or perhaps both, and the walls were lined with files, and the files were labelled with names. Evelyn read the names aloud without meaning to: "Mrs. Pembroke... Miss Whitfield... Eleanor... Clara..."

She stopped. She had read a name from a letter. The first letter. The one behind the filing cabinet.

Eleanor.

She turned to Mr. Blackwood, and his face was exactly as it had been when she had first entered it: expressionless, controlled, unreadable.

"You have found letters," he said. It was not a question.

"Yes."

"Good." He closed a file and set it aside. "Then you understand that I do not employ people to type. I employ them to be seen. To be seen properly, by someone who has the patience and the attention and the time to look at a person and understand what they are."

"And when they leave?"

"When they leave, they take their letters with them. And I keep their photographs. And their files. And I remember."

She felt the floor shift beneath her feet the way the floor shifts in a dream, subtly and imperceptibly and then all at once with sufficient force to make you fall.

"Why me?" she said.

He looked at her. And in that look, for the first time since she had met him, she saw something that was not controlled. Something raw and hungry and terrified, like a man standing at the edge of something very deep and very dark and asking someone to join him without knowing whether he wants to be saved or to pull them in.

"Because you are the first person in ten years who looked at me and did not look away."

Evelyn Hart stood in a room full of paper and photographs and files and a man whose attention was the most dangerous thing she had ever encountered, and she did not look away.

Author Note & Copyright:

Author Note & Copyright: