‘Eloise, Forever’ by Mary McGill

I moved to Copenhagen in the first week of October that year. The university providing my research assistantship made a mistake with my accommodation. They had intended putting me up in the postgraduate dorms on campus, but as no one confirmed with the building’s administration, my spot was allocated elsewhere a week before my arrival. A secretary named Ilse phoned to explain what had happened. I was in the middle of packing up my room in Dublin, surrounded by a jumble of boxes and bubble wrap. Ilse spoke in that aggrieved way people do when they feel they are being made to apologize for something that is not their fault.

‘It is unfortunate,’ she sighed, her tongue clicking, ‘but the good news is we have found you alternative accommodation.’

I was to stay in the vacant apartment of a lecturer who was out of the country for the semester. Her name was Eloise.

*

On the afternoon of my arrival, Ilse met me off the metro. Her hand was cold when I shook it. She wore her ash-blonde hair cropped short, adding sharpness to her already severe features. I struggled to keep up with her long strides, my wheelie case battling over the cobblestones, the newness of the city overloading my senses. In a lane adjacent to the footpath, cyclists flew alongside us, close-enough-to-touch streaks of colour and sound, their bells pinging deep in my ears. As we waited at a set of traffic lights, a bus thundered by perilously close, its brakes squealing. The force of it drowned out Ilse’s voice, lifted my hair. She mouthed wordlessly at me. I nodded as if I had understood. When we turned down a quiet side street, I felt relief.

I was about to ask how far we would be walking when Ilse announced, ‘here we are’, pulling a set of old-fashioned brass keys out of her coat pocket. We had stopped by a wooden door in a tall sandstone wall. After a brief battle with the lock, it squeaked open. Ducking our heads, we stepped into the paved courtyard of what had once been a grand three-storey residence, now converted into small, sweetly shabby apartments. I could hear the low murmur of a television, the tinkling of a wind chime.

The ornate glass door into the building was so heavy I had to force my way through, yanking my case after me. In the lobby, the acidic tinge of cleaning products stung the back of my nostrils. An old chandelier cast buttery light on the faded carpet and the scuffed walls. Beside the letterboxes was a large noticeboard, a mess of flyers for takeaways and taxis pinned to it, along with laminated rules for the building printed in Danish and English: Hold døren lukket! Please keep the door shut! Hold styr på dine gæster! Control your guests!

‘No elevator,’ Ilse said, taking the stairs briskly. I stalled, realizing my case was too heavy to carry without effort, but she didn’t seem to notice. Gritting my teeth, the muscles in my arms burning, I began to haul it upwards, plastic wheels bashing off each stair, a film of sweat forming on my upper lip. By the time I caught up with Ilse, she was standing outside a door on the second floor landing looking faintly irritated.

What struck me first about Eloise’s apartment was the light – there was so much of it, streaming through the wide bay window overlooking the courtyard, shining on the surfaces of the living room, spreading across the corniced ceiling. The window had no drapes or blinds, nothing to impede its flow. The light turned the space ethereal, making it feel more expansive than it was. I stood by the fireplace, a potted fern sitting in its unused grate, wondering what happened when night fell – couldn’t people see inside? In the apartment directly opposite, a stooped man with sunken eyes pulled his curtains shut.

Off to the side of the living room was a small kitchen. Down the hall from it lay the bathroom and two bedrooms, one of which would be mine. The apartment’s walls were plaster-white, rough to the touch; the lighting fixtures silver steel, the furniture sparse and vintage. A ‘minimalist aesthetic’ is how we would describe it now, with pops of colour; purple silk cushions on the Bermondsey sofa, a vase the hue of sunflowers on the kitchen bench, a sinew-red candle on the edge of the porcelain bath. As I wandered over the parquet floor, my esteem growing, I imagined that each item had been carefully chosen, with a photographer’s eye for composition and contrast.

‘Eloise is delighted you are staying,’ Ilse said, stepping into the kitchen behind me. I shut my eyes. Her clipped accent felt like an intrusion. ‘She didn’t like to have the place empty for months but didn’t have time to find a tenant before she left – it was all so rushed. Anyway, all she asks is that you are careful to lock up whenever you leave, that you open a window in the bathroom when you shower and that you water the plants – is that OK?’

Tearing my eyes from the framed black and white prints of a ‘60s seaside promenade that Eloise had hung in a perfect line over the countertop, I turned to her, nodding.

It was OK; more than, in fact.

*

I was the youngest researcher in my new office, a dubious honour. The other scholars were friendly in a distant kind of way, showing me around our corner of the campus, advising where had the best coffee, explaining the odd machinations of the printer. But every evening on the stroke of five, they rose from their screens to drift off to their other lives. I looked after them with pathetic longing before going back to refreshing my emails. This was before the advent of social media. I couldn’t assuage my loneliness with likes won by a pithy post or a sarcastic tweet. I sat at my desk as the campus darkened, white screen light boring into my eyeballs, feeling the dead weight of emptiness all around me like a judgement.

During those first few weeks, I did what anyone struggling to survive a less-than-ideal situation must: I developed a routine. Each evening on my way home, thinking it wasteful to cook for only me, I’d pick up a takeaway pizza for dinner. Back in the apartment, I lit the orange blossom candles Eloise had placed on the sill of the bay window. Breathing deep, I watched their flames dancing in the dark glass; they made the air smell of summer. Then I turned on one of the reading lamps before opening the record player, rifling through the discs she kept in a box beneath it. It was a novelty; playing records was something I hadn’t done since childhood. The soft click-crackle of the needle on vinyl reminded me of my father, who used to listen to blues records and drink malt whiskey on a Sunday afternoon. Eloise had a thing for yé-yé singers: Françoise Hardy, France Gall, Sylvie Vartan. I played them quietly, so they sounded like a melodic, girlish whisper in the almost-silence of the apartment, music from a distant party.

In the tawny half-light, I sat at the kitchen bench sipping wine, picking at melted cheese, at slimy pieces of pepperoni, listening to the records and the rumble and groan of the old pipes until my eyelids grew heavy and I felt like I was drifting.

*

One night, after falling asleep in a pique of concern that all this pizza-eating and wine-drinking was giving me a dough belly, I woke with a fevered start. There was a terrible banging on the apartment door, a male voice shouting in Danish, a language I understood only a little. I pulled a hoodie over my underwear and crept into the hall, keeping the lights off. Pulse beating in my throat, I squinted into the peephole. A large, bloodshot eye glared back. I sprang away from the door, horrified, waiting a moment before looking again.

A man in his fifties was across the hall, slumped against the wall, wailing. He wore tortoiseshell glasses. His tie was askew. A battered leather satchel lay like a puddle at his feet.

‘I know I said I would stay away,’ he said, speaking in English now, rolling his head back like a gorilla preparing to beat its chest. ‘But I can’t, Eloise. I simply can’t.’

He sounded hopeless, overwrought. Possibly drunk.

‘Eloise isn’t here,’ I said in my most threatening voice.

He looked around, bewildered.

‘She isn’t here so you’d better go right now – otherwise I’ll call the police.’

I waited, my body pinned against the door, braced for him to begin howling again, or worse. He stayed slumped, a blank glaze in his eyes as if the world had suddenly become incomprehensible. Then he seemed to gather himself, rubbing his face vigorously like he was washing it before swiping up his satchel and leaving.

In the shadow of the bay window, blood roaring in my ears, I watched him skulk through the courtyard and disappear into the dark.

*

After the man-in-the-night incident, I put my own sign on the noticeboard in the lobby of the apartment building, requesting that people keep the external doors locked to ensure strangers couldn’t sneak in. I also found an excuse to drop into Ilse’s office. Ostensibly I wanted to tell her that the heating in the apartment was being contrary. In truth, I wanted to learn more about Eloise. Ilse was at her desk, delicately slicing a banana for her tea break. She expressed her commiserations about the heating and promised to let Eloise know.

‘Where is Eloise?’ I asked in what I hoped was my most benign-sounding voice.

‘Prague, I believe, on sabbatical. I understand she needed a break.’

I paused, thinking that an odd thing to say. Ilse’s expression was inscrutable. She popped a piece of banana into her mouth, offering me some. I declined.

‘Was she unwell?’ I asked, fearing all these questions would reflect badly on me.

Ilse shrugged, a thin smile twitching into life along her mouth. ‘Aren’t we all a little unwell? Academia is not for the faint of heart.’

I gave a hollow laugh, hoping she would say more but she didn’t. The art of gossip was not her forte.

*

I found excuses to bring up Eloise with my colleagues but as she was in a different department, they were of little use. One of them mentioned that her parents were French but that Eloise herself was English, another called her ‘pretty, in a quirky kind of way’. She was on track to become an assistant professor the following year, which was impressive for someone so young.

‘She keeps to herself,’ said Geoff, the man who sat across from me, with a vagueness I found loaded.

‘What do you mean by that?’ I inquired, cheerfully. ‘Is she a loner?’

‘No more than anyone else around here,’ he replied, his face closing up as he turned back to his screen, bored, as he always seemed to be, by any interaction with me.

I kept digging. There were no pictures of Eloise in the apartment, or at least, none that I could find. Did this strike me as odd? Perhaps. But what I recall more vividly is feeling that this absence, this unknowableness, was a riddle I was charged with solving. On the many nights I spent pottering around the apartment, ruminating, I told myself that Eloise must keep all her pictures in her bedroom, which was locked. In a moment of intense prurience, I’d tried the handle, sidling away in shame when it wouldn’t budge. The only picture I had managed to discover of her was on the university website. It was frustratingly grainy, greyish. She was wearing a sun hat and smiling, unafraid of the camera or perhaps the photographer. Alone in the office one evening, I printed it out, folding it into my notebook.

*

In late November, winter closed in. Snow fluttered in the wind. Pavements glittered with ice. In work my colleagues produced a small, lopsided plastic Christmas tree and wrapped tinsel around it. ‘We do this every year,’ one of them told me, as if it was a point of pride.

I was taking my boots off outside the apartment door one evening when I noticed that someone had shoved a letter under it, addressed to Eloise. I thought immediately of the howling man. Inside, I set the envelope on the kitchen window, too preoccupied with getting something warm into my freezing body. As the kettle boiled, I picked it up again, absently turning it over. Whoever left it hadn’t sealed it, only tucked in the flap. Trying to ignore the siren call of curiosity, I scooped Eloise’s rose tea leaves into a mug, topped with steaming water. Taking a sip, I let my resolve buckle.

Convincing myself she would never know, I took the letter and my tea to the sofa.

Dearest Eloise, it began in a stocky hand, I don’t know when you will return, but I pray you will find this when you do. I have no other way to contact you that would not arouse suspicion or cause you upset. You say that we are over, but it can’t be. These past few weeks without you have been hell. I know now what I need to do for myself, for you. For us. Please, when you get this, call me. It’s not too late. My heart, my love, Edmund.

I reread it, over and over, realizing in a jealous hump that no one had ever addressed me in such an ardent way. I had many questions, some of them bitter, but what I remember most was a surplus of feeling that seemed almost unmanageable, a fierce yearning for all the things I’d never known that Eloise had. Sometimes at night, sitting by the bay window looking at the neighbouring apartments, literal windows into the worlds of nameless others, it felt like I had slipped into her life. It was, of course, an illusion, a cruel one. I balled up the letter and flung it in the bin, followed by the dregs of my rose tea.

*

During the last week of teaching, we had an office party. I got foolishly drunk on homemade gløgg, leaving early after Geoff remarked within my earshot, ‘wow – I’d never have taken her for a lush.’ I arrived back to the apartment snow-speckled and seething, opening one of Eloise’s reds, drinking it in gulps as I paced from room to room. I regretted ever taking the assistantship, regretted leaving my life in Dublin, small though it had been. As I passed by her bedroom door, something forgotten but now resurfacing shone at the edge of my memory. I tore into the bathroom, pulling open the cupboard beneath the sink. Weeks before, I’d rifled through it looking for antiseptic. The box of keys beside the U-bend held little interest for me then but that night, with my coat and gloves still on, I grabbed for them.

The first three didn’t work but the fourth key clicked, drawing something like a squeal from my throat. Heart surging, I gripped the handle, felt it give way, the hinges creaking. Groping for a light switch, I took my first step inside Eloise’s bedroom.

The glare from the bare bulb stung my eyes, stopping me in the doorway. A putrid fug of stale sweat and incense bunged my nostrils, clogged my throat. The blackout curtains were tightly drawn. The bed sheets were tossed, the mattress creased with the yellowing outline of a vanished body. Wine glasses stained deep red sat along the shelves, their remnants souring the air. Irregular pools of clothes, underwear, and scraps of paper lay strewn across a threadbare Persian rug. Contrasted with the rest of the apartment, the ambience was one of chaos.

On the dresser, waiting for their owner, were a china dish overflowing with hairpins and jewellery and a velveteen make-up bag stuffed with lipsticks. Stuck to the dresser mirror were dozens of Polaroids. Adrift in my own nosiness, I stepped closer to better see them. A hallucinogenic flash of images detonated in my eyes – Eloise, wearing only a pair of sheer black tights, defiantly bare-chested with her back arched, cross-legged on a stool in front of the bay window, daylight suspended around her like a smoky halo; Eloise, naked on the bed, her hand in her dark hair drawing it back from her face, the curve of her stomach pressing against the sheets, her kohled eyes staring down the camera; Eloise and the howling man, wrapped around each other in rapture, his grizzled face buried in her smooth neck, her arm outstretched toward the camera, as if cupping its face.

The images blurred in my vision, the musty air jerking my stomach. I clamped a hand on my mouth, terrified I would vomit. Over the bed was an oil painting of a paled-faced Edwardian woman in a black lace mourning dress and wide-brimmed hat. Her gaze was as hard and dark as coal. It followed me as I backed out, flicking off the light.

*

The week before I was due to fly home for Christmas, I received an email offering me a room in the postgraduate dorms from January. I wrote back immediately, accepting it. When I informed Ilse, she seemed to think this had been the plan all along.

‘Eloise is back in the New Year, as far as I know,’ she said. We were in her office. A lone Christmas card stood beside her computer. ‘We were under the impression that you would only stay in her apartment while she was away. It was never meant to be longer than one semester.’

Something in her stiff tone suggested I was silly for not understanding this, although it had never been clearly expressed.

I packed up my things in one afternoon, as snowflakes drifted by the bay window and the flames of the orange blossom candles, blanketing the courtyard below. On the mantlepiece, I left a copy of a novel, Astragal, wrapped in brown paper and a thank you note.

Dear Eloise, I wrote, blinking back thoughts of the howling man’s love letter I’d dumped in the trash. Thank you so much for letting me stay in your apartment! I am so grateful to you. It’s such a wonderful space. Please accept this gift as a token of my thanks.

I paused, unsure how to sign off. In the end I settled for ‘warm wishes’, which seemed the best of a hopelessly inadequate lot.

*

Christmas and New Year’s were uneventful that year. My memories of that time come into focus in January, when I received an email from Ilse. I had been back in Copenhagen for a little over three weeks by then but already, living in the postgraduate dorms had transformed my life. I had fallen into a loose, easy friendship with some of the others on my floor. Instead of spending my evenings eating takeaways, drinking too much and listening to old records, we rode the metro into the city centre or cooked together in our communal kitchen. At the weekends, we used our meagre stipends to go to galleries and occasionally bars. It was such fun, so unexpected; I could scarcely believe it.

One morning I opened my emails, surprised to see Ilse’s name in my inbox. Eloise wants to thank you in person for your gift, she wrote. She says to stop by her office some evening this week. It’s Room 214 on the Second Floor of the Haugen Building. Out of politeness I wrote back, confirming that I would stop by, thanking Ilse for relaying the message. But as my fingers tapped out the words, I felt the first tug of resistance.

I waited until Thursday, the point at which I could no longer put it off. In the elevator, I rested my temple against the panelling, staring at the fluorescent strip light overhead. A dull dread wormed in the pit of my stomach. My time in Eloise’s apartment felt like a dream. Or maybe that’s how I wanted it to feel. If it was a dream, then the things I did there, felt there, couldn’t have the hard edges of reality. This made them easier to dismiss.

With a ding the elevator stuttered to a stop, its doors clunking open. I stood, hesitating before stepping onto the corridor, my hands gripping the strap of my bag. Eloise’s office wasn’t hard to find. It was the only one with a light still on, spilling through a wall of plexiglass into the dark corridor. Just out of sight, I watched her.

Her back was to me, her long hair twisted into a bun, revealing the nape of her neck. She was crouched at her computer, her fingers deftly flying over the keys, lost to the world. I knew if I cleared my throat or stepped closer, she’d sense it and turn. In a rush of colour and movement, I imagined her smile, a wave of greeting, how she’d usher me to sit, maybe even give me a hug, my face in her hair.

I turned away just as she sat up.

‘Hello?’ she called, the question in her voice trailing down the corridor as I slipped into the stairwell, too panicked to return to the elevator.

I flew blindly down the steps like someone running from a fire, bursting into the brittle night air. A silhouette in her office window, Eloise looked down at the snowy pavement where I stood, breathless beneath the streetlamp. With a burn of recognition, our gazes met. Everything stopped still as the stars overhead, until I remembered myself. Burying my face in the rough wool of my scarf, I made my getaway, half-running, half-walking, every step reverberating in my ears, as loud and as fierce as my thundering heart.

From issue #7: autumn/winter 2018

About the Author
Mary McGill is a researcher and writer. Her fiction has been shortlisted for the Irish Times Short Story Prize, the Francis MacManus Award and the RTÉ/Penguin Short Story Competition. She was a featured reader at the Cúirt Festival’s New Writing Showcase in 2015. She tweets at @missmarymcgill.