The Quiet Room – Part 1: No Sound

The room was almost empty. A rug, a low stool, a lamp turned down to a glow, a thick grey blanket folded on the floor, and, on the wall, a small brass bell on a cord that he could reach from where he knelt.

Ottoline stood in the doorway and watched her husband look at it. She was fifty-three, a retired headmistress, tall and spare, with a long grey plait and a voice that had once silenced an assembly of eight hundred. Raymond was forty-seven, a sound engineer, a man who had spent twenty-five years surrounded by noise, and who had told her, on a very long night, that the thing he most craved was an hour in which nobody expected anything of him and nothing made a sound.

"The terms," said Ottoline.

"I kneel on the rug. I do not speak, move or look at you unless you tell me. I can end it at any time by ringing the bell."

"And what happens if you ring it?"

"You come immediately. We sit in the kitchen with tea. There is no penalty."

"And what do I promise?"

"That you will not leave the room for more than a minute. That you will watch me. That you will check I am all right."

"And?"

"That you will tell me, at the end, how I did."

"Exactly." She closed the door softly behind her, and the world shrank to the lamp and the rug. "Are you content?"

"Content, Mistress."

"Then kneel."

He knelt. She took her place on the low stool, a few feet in front of him, folded her hands and said nothing. The house outside seemed to withdraw. The refrigerator, the clocks, the faint traffic, all faded. There was only the sound of her breathing and his own.

The first ten minutes were the hardest. His mind scrabbled, panicked, ran through lists. He wanted to speak, to move, to fidget, to make a joke. He kept very still, and kept his eyes on the rug, and felt the urge slowly climb to a peak and, as she sat there, patient as stone, begin to ebb.

At fifteen minutes she shifted her weight, very slightly. He felt it, though he did not look.

"Good," said Ottoline, in the softest of murmurs.

It was the only word she said for half an hour.

Continue the story: Part 2 – The Bell.