What She Was Told
The man fitting the temporary support arrived with a flask, two younger men and no interest in my marriage. I could have kissed him for that.
They worked in the cleared end bay while Nina and I made table pieces for a company lunch. By midday the work had been checked, the restrictions explained and the ladder returned to a place where it could be used. The support stood where one of our tall display shelves had been. It was ugly, reassuring and in the way.
“We could put a ribbon round it,” Nina suggested.
“We could charge it rent.”
She carried a tray to the van. I was tying the last arrangement into its box when the supplier rang to confirm our standing order.
“Although I gather you won’t be needing it much longer,” he said.
“Why?”
“Heard you were retiring. Lovely for you. About time you had a rest.”
My scissors stopped halfway through a piece of twine.
“Who told you that?”
“Your husband. Saw him at the breakfast thing last week. Said you’d had enough.”
Outside, the men were sweeping the yard. One of them whistled three notes over and over, never quite reaching the tune.
“I haven’t retired.”
“No, no. I meant when you do.”
“I’m not going to.”
There was an uncomfortable silence.
“Right. Well. I must’ve misunderstood.”
I could have let him keep that explanation. He sounded so hopeful about it.
“The business is moving. The orders remain. I’ll send you the new address when it’s confirmed.”
“Excellent. That’s excellent.”
He rushed into a discussion of delivery charges. I let him, because shouting at the man who brought our flowers would not unsay anything Richard had said.
Afterwards I opened a blank email and addressed it to the suppliers and regular business contacts who needed to know. I wrote two paragraphs, deleted one and then took out half of what remained.
We were continuing to trade. We were arranging new premises. Existing bookings were unchanged. Questions should come to me.
I read it to Ruth before I sent it.
“Fine,” she said.
“Does it sound angry?”
“You are angry.”
“Yes, but does it sound it?”
She read it herself. “It sounds as if you know where the van’s going. Good enough.”
I sent it.
Then I wrote Richard a separate message. I had not retired. He was not to describe plans for my business to anybody as if they were settled facts. I asked him to correct what he’d already said.
His reply came while I was washing the scissors.
I was trying to spare you awkward questions.
I put the phone in the drawer and finished drying the blades.
Iris came to the workroom the following afternoon.
I saw her through the glass before she knocked. She wore trainers and a pale coat, and she stopped twice on the path as if deciding whether to go back. I had a moment to prepare an expression. In the end I chose none.
“Can I speak to you?” she asked.
Ruth was at the other end of the room. Nina had gone to collect containers. There was no customer to save me.
“What about?”
“What he told me.”
I looked at the clock. It was nearly four. I had a bouquet to finish and three emails to answer, and I wanted very much to use all of them as a reason to send her away.
But I also wanted to know.
“Outside,” I said.
The bench beyond the yard was damp on one side. I wiped it with my sleeve before thinking, then sat at the other end so she would have to choose where to put herself. She lowered herself carefully onto the dry part. I watched her hands settle over her stomach and looked away.
“He said you weren’t together anymore.”
“We lived in the same house.”
“I know. He said you were sorting things out. That you didn’t want people knowing yet.”
“And you believed him.”
She stared at her knees.
“Yes.”
I waited.
“I wanted to.”
The admission was quiet enough that I almost wished she hadn’t made it. I had prepared for excuses. I knew what to do with those.
“When did it start?”
She pressed her lips together.
“August.”
I looked out across the garden. In August, Richard and I had spent a weekend by the sea because he said I needed to stop working for a couple of days. We had eaten fish on a wall and gone back for more chips. He had put vinegar on mine even though he knew I didn’t like it, and I’d made him swap the trays.
“Last August.”
She nodded.
“He told me November.”
“November was when he said he’d told you about us.”
The garden became very sharp around its edges. I could see an ant making its way over a pale flake in the bench. A weed growing through the paving at my feet. A plastic tie I’d dropped by the fence and never picked up.
“He said he’d told me.”
“That you were upset. That he needed to give you time.”
“Did you ask to speak to me?”
“No.”
“Not once?”
“No.”
I could hear Ruth answering the workroom telephone. Her voice came through the open door, bright and professional, and I envied the person on the other end, who needed only to know whether we had any white roses.
“Did you know I was his wife when you started seeing him?”
“Yes.”
She had begun to cry. Not dramatically. Two tears, followed by a determined effort to stop them. I looked at them and thought of all the evenings I’d spent trying to conceal my own red eyes before Richard came home.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
I didn’t answer.
“I should have asked more. I know that.”
“You could have asked me.”
“Yes.”
There was nowhere for the conversation to go that would give either of us what we wanted.
I put my hands between my knees to stop myself picking at a loose thread in my trousers.
“He didn’t ask for a divorce until you were outside in the car. We hadn’t agreed to separate. We shared a bedroom. He came home to me.”
She closed her eyes.
I was glad she had to hear it. That was not a pleasant thing to know about myself, but it was true.
“And last year,” I said, then stopped.
She opened her eyes again.
The sentence had been waiting behind my teeth for days. I could bring it out now, put it between us and watch her understand the nursery. It would hurt her. It might make her understand him. Neither possibility was enough to make me want her inside that memory.
“Last year was difficult,” I said. “You don’t need the details from me.”
“I saw the room.”
My head turned.
“Which room?”
“The nursery. Richard opened it to show me.”
I stood up.
“He what?”
She tried to rise, then stopped with one hand on the bench.
“He said we wouldn’t need to buy everything new. I asked why it was there, and he said—”
“Don’t.”
I had heard enough versions of my life delivered in his convenient language.
I walked three paces away and stood looking at the hedge. The tips of the new leaves were almost translucent. My hands shook. I wanted to hit something, to go into the house and throw the little chest of drawers down the stairs, to make it impossible for anyone to use it as a bargain.
Behind me, Iris said, “I don’t want your things.”
I turned.
“Then don’t use them.”
“I won’t.”
“Tell him that yourself.”
She nodded.
I sat down again, farther away than before.
“I’m going to take what belongs to me out of that room,” I said. “You don’t need to help.”
“All right.”
The wind lifted the edge of her coat. She tucked it under her leg and looked towards the house.
“I rang my sister this morning. She lives about an hour away. She’s coming to see me tomorrow.”
I didn’t ask what the sister thought of any of it.
“I need someone here when the baby comes. Someone I can actually ask.”
“Then ask her.”
“I have. She’s said yes. We’re working out the rest.”
There was relief in her voice, and embarrassment, and something that looked like anger when she glanced at the house again.
“What’s her name?” I asked.
“Maya.”
I nodded. A name was useful. I could remember a name.
“I’m not asking you to forgive me,” Iris said.
“Good.”
She flinched, but she didn’t argue.
When she stood, the bench gave a small creak. She brushed the back of her coat with her hand.
“Thank you for telling me.”
I didn’t say she was welcome.
I watched her go until she disappeared through the kitchen door, then picked up the old plastic tie beside the fence. I carried it into the workroom and put it in the bin.
Ruth looked up from a bucket of foliage.
“Tea?”
“In a minute.”
I phoned Harriet and asked her to add the nursery contents to the list of personal belongings we needed to keep separate while I removed them. Then I sent Richard a message telling him I would be clearing my things from the room that weekend and that nothing was to be offered to anyone else before then.
He called immediately.
I let it ring. A written question came a few minutes later: Were we really making a problem out of furniture now?
I forwarded it to Harriet and finished the bouquet.
It was for a fortieth birthday. The customer had asked for orange, pink and purple, colours I would not ordinarily have put together in such quantities. I used the brightest stems we had. By the time I’d tied it, the thing looked as though it might make a noise.
Ruth took one look and said, “Someone’s going to wake up.”
“Apparently that’s the idea.”
She made tea. We drank it standing up, and she told me about a delivery man who had tried to leave six buckets at the wrong gate while insisting the right gate didn’t exist. I listened gratefully to a problem with no person named Richard in it.
Later, I went into the house to collect a warm coat. The kitchen was empty. Someone had wiped the dresser. Richard’s watch wasn’t there, and the invoice that had covered my phone had been put in a tray with other papers.
The Cornwall photograph was beneath it.
I picked it up.
For several seconds I could hear the wind from that day. He had been laughing at me because I’d bought a bag of fudge for the journey home and eaten most of it before we reached the car. I remembered the warmth of his hand through my coat. I remembered believing we could be tired and sad and still find our way back to each other.
Nothing in the photograph knew what would happen next.
I put it in my coat pocket.
In the annex, I took it out again and laid it face down on the shelf beside the cardigan. I wasn’t ready to throw it away. I also wasn’t willing to look at it while I brushed my teeth.
My phone lit up.
Adam had found the film programme. The comedy was from the nineteen-thirties. Neither of us had seen it.
There’s a warning about mild innuendo, he wrote.
I looked at the cardigan, the photograph, the brass bowl with its last apple. Then I sat on the edge of the bed and typed back.
I shall bring a responsible adult.
Do you know one?
Not locally.
His answer was a photograph of the cinema programme, with seven o’clock circled by hand. Below it he had written, I’ll risk it.
I opened the cupboard and looked at my clothes. Grey jumper. Work trousers. A dress folded in the bottom of a box because I had brought it over without remembering to bring a hanger.
For ten whole minutes, I worried about the dress.
No Useful Reason
At six twenty, I took the dress off.
At six twenty-four, I put it back on.
It was dark blue, with a neckline that behaved differently when I sat down, and I couldn’t remember whether I had always disliked that or had recently become a person who disliked everything she owned. I tried a necklace. The necklace made it worse. Without it, I looked unfinished.
There was a knock at the door.
Ruth stood outside with my clean work coat, which she’d taken home by mistake.
“You don’t need that tonight,” she said.
“I might.”
She looked at the dress, then at the four discarded alternatives on the bed.
“Where are you going?”
“The cinema.”
“With?”
“Adam.”
“Ah.”
“Don’t say ah like that.”
“I’ve only got the one.”
I took the coat from her and hung it on the cupboard door. Ruth stepped inside, put her handbag on the table and looked at me without smiling.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing. Give me the fastening.”
The back of the dress had a little hook I hadn’t managed. I turned round. Her fingers were cool against my neck, competent and quick.
“There.”
I looked at myself again.
“Too much?”
“For sitting in the dark? Probably.”
“Ruth.”
She grinned. “It’s a lovely dress. Are you eating?”
“Afterwards.”
“Have something now. You get sharp when you’re hungry.”
“I’m charming.”
“Have a biscuit, charming.”
When she left, I ate two standing at the sink so I wouldn’t get crumbs down the dress. I left the necklace in its box. At six forty-five, I picked up my keys before I could change anything else.
The old cinema had a single screen and a sign above the doors with two letters slightly out of line. I had walked past it for years, telling myself I would go when there was time. Now a queue stretched beneath the awning, mostly couples in sensible coats and two young women sharing a bag of sweets.
Adam stood near the entrance, reading the poster with exaggerated attention.
He wasn’t wearing his work jacket. His coat was dark, his shirt pale, and the slight disorder in his hair was apparently permanent. When he saw me, he stopped reading.
“Hello.”
“Hello.”
I had thought of three amusing things to say on the way there. None remained available.
“You found the responsible adult?” he asked.
“She wouldn’t come.”
“We’ll have to improvise.”
The queue moved. He held the door while a woman manoeuvred an umbrella closed with the expression of someone folding a difficult swan. I went inside and caught sight of us in the long mirror opposite the ticket desk: two people going out together. Not a customer and a man with a notebook. Not a wife looking over her shoulder to see whether her husband had remembered the tickets.
I looked away before I could spoil it.
Adam bought the tickets while I bought a programme. At the refreshments counter I ordered two small glasses of wine, then checked that he wanted one. He did.
Inside, the red seats were narrow and arranged with an optimism about knees that belonged to another age. Adam folded himself into the one beside mine and immediately hit the back of the row in front.
“You can put your legs under my seat,” I said.
“That seems complicated.”
“I was trying to be hospitable.”
He angled towards me. Our knees touched. Neither of us moved.
A man with white hair and a microphone introduced the film. It was a comedy about a woman inheriting a hotel, made when hotel guests apparently travelled with five trunks and very little underwear. The introduction included a great deal about a supporting actor who did not appear until nearly halfway through.
Adam leaned closer.
“There may be an examination.”
“Shh. I’m making notes.”
The lights went down.
For the first ten minutes I was acutely aware of the space between our elbows. I laughed too late at a joke because I was wondering whether my arm would touch his if I reached for the wine. Then the heroine dropped a vase out of a window while trying to hide a man behind a curtain, and I forgot about my elbow.
Adam laughed differently in the dark. Less contained. At one point he bent forward with a hand over his mouth, and I looked at him instead of the screen. The shifting light caught his cheek and the line of his nose. I wanted to know what he looked like when he had just woken up.
The thought made me hot beneath the dress.
On the screen, a butler wheeled a trolley into the wrong room. Someone two rows behind us shouted a warning as if it might help. The entire cinema laughed, including the person who had shouted.
Adam’s hand rested on the arm between us. His little finger was near mine. I let mine touch it.
He turned his hand slightly, palm open.
I put my fingers in his.
We stayed that way through the rest of the film. When the hotel caught fire in a spectacularly unconvincing sequence involving a curtain and an iron, he tightened his hand around mine as he laughed. I could feel the movement all the way up my arm.
Outside afterwards, people gathered beneath the awning to disagree about the ending. The rain had stopped. The pavement shone under the streetlights, and the air smelled of wet stone and somebody’s chips.
“She should have kept the hotel,” I said.
Adam turned towards me. “She did.”
“She married the man who had been trying to run it for her. That doesn’t count.”
“He was the only person who knew where the fire extinguishers were.”
“A qualification for employment, not matrimony.”
“I’m glad we’ve established your criteria.”
“They’re demanding.”
We began walking towards the square. I had withdrawn my hand when we stood up inside, to collect my bag and coat. Now he offered his again without comment. I took it.
“I liked the aunt,” he said.
“The one who stole the silver?”
“She had a plan.”
“It wasn’t a good plan.”
“It was more coherent than anybody else’s.”
I tried to picture him sitting through that film alone. I couldn’t. It had become something we’d seen together, and I felt an unreasonable affection for the ridiculous hotel, the stolen silver and the butler we’d been instructed to appreciate.