Chapter 146: Agnes

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 146: Agnes

The building was in Inwood and had a lift that worked and a hallway that smelled of somebody's cooking, and Agnes Duross opened the door at ten in the morning wearing a cardigan and a watch on her right wrist.

"You're the British boy."

"Yes."

"Walt said tall. He didn't say that tall." She stood back. "Come in. Wipe your feet, the super's particular."

She had made a cake.

That was the first thing and it undid all four of them. A ninety-one-year-old woman had been told on Tuesday that some people might come, and had made a lemon cake, and had put out five plates.

"Sit. Eat something. I'm not going to talk to people who aren't eating."

She was, as Walt had said, completely sound.

She asked Dana what she did and listened to the answer. She asked Vesper twice whether she was warm enough and was not fussing, she was correcting a draught. She told Cole a nine-minute story about a man who had lived in the flat below her until 2003 that had a beginning, a middle, and a genuinely funny end.

Then Dana asked her where she was born, and Agnes Duross opened her mouth.

Nothing came out.

It lasted about two seconds.

Her mouth was open and her expression did not change and no sound arrived, and then she closed her mouth and said, "More cake?" and reached for the knife.

Nobody in that room was ready for how ordinary it was.

"Mrs. Duross."

"Agnes."

"Agnes. Do you know what just happened?"

"Yes." She cut a slice nobody had asked for. "It's been doing that since 1985. I've had four doctors and two scans and a very nice young woman from a university in 1998 who wrote a paper about me without using my name, and the answer is that there's nothing wrong with me at all."

"That's not nothing."

"No." Agnes put the slice on Reeve's plate. "It's four things. I've counted. You'll find them if you sit here long enough and I'd rather save you the afternoon."

She listed them without any weight.

"Where I'm from. What the place was called. The word for the thing that happened. And one more."

"What's the fourth?"

"I don't know." She sat back down. "That's the honest answer and it's taken me forty years to be able to say it without sounding mad. I know there's a fourth because I've watched myself change the subject and not know I was doing it. Walt caught me at it in 2009 and I didn't believe him, so he wrote down what I'd said and showed me, and I'd gone from a sentence about a ferry to a sentence about his mother's roses and I could not tell you how I'd got there."

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"Can you write them?" Dana asked.

"Tried. Nineteen eighty-nine, ninety-one, and again in 2004 when I got it into my head that the problem was speech." Agnes shook her head. "Pen stops. Same as the mouth. There's nothing wrong with my hand and the pen stops."

"What about—"

"Typing, dictating into one of those machines, spelling it out loud letter by letter, writing the first letter and having somebody else guess." She counted them off on her fingers, briskly, a woman who had run out of patience with her own limitations forty years ago. "I did all of those in one fortnight in 1991 with a woman called Ruth who was very patient. None of them work and one of them made me cry in a diner, which I mention because it was the only time."

"Which one?"

"Spelling it," Agnes said. "I got the first letter out. Just the one. And then I sat in a diner on Dyckman Street and I couldn't get the second one and Ruth held my hand and I'm ninety-one and I have never been so angry in my life."

Vesper asked the question Cole had been avoiding.

"Does it hurt?"

Agnes looked at her properly for the first time.

"No," she said. "And I want to answer that better than no, because you've asked it like somebody who needs a better answer than no."

Vesper did not say anything.

"It doesn't hurt," Agnes said. "It's like reaching for a word. Everybody does that. You're mid-sentence and the word isn't there and you go round it and nobody notices and neither do you, most of the time." She turned her cup. "The only difference is that mine don't come back at four in the morning."

Cole asked about the wrist.

She pushed her sleeve up without being asked twice.

It was smaller than his and older and had gone the colour that old ink goes. A patch about the width of a thumbprint on the inside of the wrist, with an edge that wasn't quite a shape.

"Since 1985."

"Since the crossing."

Everybody stopped.

"You said 'the crossing,'" Dana said carefully.

"Did I." Agnes considered it. "I did. That's the first time I've had a word for it in forty years and it's not the right one, but it came out, and it's the first new word I've had since about 1990."

She looked at her own wrist.

"That's your doing," she said to Cole. "I don't know how and I don't want an explanation. But you've been in my flat for forty minutes and I've just said something I've never said."

That was the thing that made the morning turn.

Cole had not done anything. He had eaten cake and asked about a wrist. He had not reached for her once — had deliberately not, had decided in the lift not to, because of a woman in a maisonette with a bricked-up door.

And a word had come loose anyway.

He sat with that for about a minute while Agnes cut more cake nobody wanted.

It was the first time in his life he had been in a room where something moved in a person without him choosing it, and the honest reaction was not fear. It was something closer to being caught — the feeling of having left a tap running in somebody else's house.

"Agnes. How long have I been sitting here?"

"Forty minutes. Fifty."

"Has anybody else ever been in this flat for fifty minutes?"

"Walt. My niece. A man who came about the boiler in March and stayed two hours because it's a bad boiler." She looked up. "Nothing's ever moved before, if that's what you're asking. I'd have noticed. It's the only thing I've paid attention to since 1985."

"Try another one," Agnes said.

"Agnes—"

"I'm ninety-one. I have four things I can't say and I've had them for forty years and a boy has just walked into my kitchen and one of them moved." She put both hands flat on the table. "Ask me where I'm from."

"That's not how it—"

"Ask me."

Dana asked her.

Agnes opened her mouth, and this time something came out, and it was not a word in any language anybody in that room had heard before.

Four syllables. Flat and fast.

Then she said, in perfectly ordinary English: "Well, that's not it either," and laughed — a real laugh, delighted, a ninety-one-year-old woman in a kitchen in Inwood — and then stopped laughing, because Vesper had stood up.

"Say it again," Vesper said.

"Dear—"

"Please say it again."

Agnes said it again.

Vesper stood in a stranger's kitchen with both hands at her sides and said four syllables back to her, in the same language, without any idea what they meant.

"What did you say?" Dana asked.

"I don't know." Vesper had not moved. "I know what she said, though."

"What did she say?"

Vesper's voice came out level and very small.

"She said the name of the town."

[End of Chapter 146]