A telephone, briefly

The telephone rang at twenty past three on a Tuesday — an hour and a day Edith would, ever after, associate with a peculiar quality of light, the kind that gives ordinary objects the look of being slightly more important than they are. She picked it up on the third ring, which she always made a small point of, having read somewhere as a girl that the third ring was the most respectful.

“Hello?”

“It’s Marta.”

“Yes.”

There was a pause. The pause had the texture of someone gathering courage, but also — Edith heard it distinctly — the texture of someone who has gathered all the courage she means to gather, and is now using it for the simpler task of being on the phone.

“I wasn’t sure,” Marta said, “if I would call. I have been not-calling you for several weeks.”

“Yes,” said Edith. “I noticed.”

“You noticed?”

“I noticed the not-calling. I didn’t mind it. I want to be clear that I didn’t mind it. I would have minded if you had called the wrong way.”

There was a small intake of breath at the other end which might have been a laugh and which might have been Marta lighting a cigarette. Edith had never asked whether Marta smoked. It seemed, somehow, a question of the wrong size.

“What is the wrong way?”

“To say something formal. I felt I should ring, and so on. The kind of thing you say to a great-aunt.”

“I’m not your great-aunt.”

“No,” said Edith. “I am no one’s great-aunt. I have a niece I have not met, but it doesn’t count, because she has not yet decided to need a great-aunt.”

This did make Marta laugh — properly this time, and for longer than the joke deserved. Edith waited it out. There was no sound on the line for a while, except the very faint hum of two old houses being old together, somewhere in the wires.

“I called,” Marta said, eventually, “because I wanted to ask if you remembered the kettle.”

“The kettle in the small room?”

“Yes.”

“With the three biscuits.”

“Yes.”

“I remember the kettle,” said Edith. “I refused it. You sat down anyway. The kettle went cool. I have thought about the kettle perhaps twice a week since then, which seems a lot of thinking, for a kettle.”

“It does seem a lot,” said Marta.

“What did you want to ask about it?”

There was the longest pause yet. It was not awkward; it was the kind of pause Edith had learned, over the years, to leave room for. She had also learned that the worst thing one could do, in such a pause, was to fill it.

“I wanted to ask,” Marta said, slowly, “whether I should, in the future, when faced with a person who has refused a kettle, sit down anyway.”

Edith thought about this. She thought about it with the attention she had given the letters in the drawer, which was to say, the attention of someone who has been asked a real question and recognises it as such. The clock on the kitchen wall ticked through perhaps eleven seconds.

“Yes,” she said. “I think you should.”

“All right,” said Marta. “I will.”

After they had hung up — neither of them said goodbye in any particular way; they simply allowed the conversation to end the way a piece of music ends, with the natural cessation of pressure — Edith stood in the kitchen for some minutes, holding the receiver in her hand without putting it down. Then she put it down. Then she went and made a cup of tea, which she drank.