The Quiet Room – Part 2: The Bell

He had no way to measure time. The lamp burned steadily. Her breathing did not change. Once, a car passed in the lane outside, and the sound seemed to belong to another universe. At some point, he realised that his shoulders had dropped, and his hands, which had been clenched on his thighs, lay open. At some further point, he realised that the voice in his head, the one that had been chattering since he was a boy, had gone quiet, and he did not know where it had gone.

It felt like standing in a very large room at the bottom of a very still lake.

At forty minutes she moved. She rose from the stool without a sound, crossed the rug and stood behind him, and rested one cool hand on the top of his head. She said nothing. She did not need to. He felt the weight of her palm and the warmth of it spread down through his spine like a slow river, and tears pricked in his eyes, and he did not wipe them.

"Are you content?" she whispered, so softly that it was nearly a thought.

He nodded, once.

"Good."

She sat again. The silence returned, and deepened. He thought, with an odd distant clarity, that he had spent his whole life listening, and had never, once, been listened to like this.

At sixty minutes, by her private clock, she stood.

"Raymond."

He lifted his head.

"Ring the bell."

He stared at her. He had not expected that.

"Ring it," said Ottoline, "to tell me it is finished. It is yours, not mine."

He reached up, slowly, and tugged the cord. The little brass bell chimed, clear and bright, in the stillness, and the sound was the most beautiful thing he had ever heard.

She was beside him on the rug in a moment, kneeling, the Mistress gone out of her face, her arms already round him.

"How are you?"

"Quiet," said Raymond, in a whisper. "I'm so quiet. I'd forgotten what it was like. Is that all right?"

"It is the most all right thing I have ever heard." She drew the grey blanket from the floor and wrapped it round them both. "You were magnificent."

"Did I do well?"

"You did exactly what you wanted to do. That's the whole of it." She kissed his forehead. "Would you like tea?"

"In a minute." He leaned against her. "Can we just sit here?"

"For as long as you like," said Ottoline. And they did, in the small bare room, with the lamp burning low and the bell still swaying faintly on its cord.

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