I woke to an unfamiliar ceiling and the indignity of needing the bathroom very badly.
Adam was asleep, one hand open on the pillow between us. In daylight he looked less composed, younger in some ways and exactly his age in others. I wanted to stay and examine him. My body had other priorities.
I got out of bed quietly, caught my toe on the leg of the chair and swore.
“Good morning,” he murmured.
“Nothing to see.”
“You’re hopping.”
“An exercise.”
When I came back, he was sitting against the pillows smiling at me.
“I’d imagined a more elegant entrance,” I said.
“Come here.”
I did. We spent long enough ignoring the time that my stomach made its position known. He kissed it through the sheet with a ridiculous courtesy, then went downstairs to make breakfast.
I stayed another minute, alone in his bed, looking at the curtains. There was pleasure in that too. In not immediately following to help. In letting a good thing continue while I wasn’t working to maintain it.
Downstairs I found him holding a loaf and a knife.
“Thin or thick?”
“Yes.”
He cut thick slices. We ate at the kitchen table in a stripe of pale morning sun. His hair stuck up at the back. I resisted smoothing it down because I liked knowing it did that.
“What time do you need to leave?” he asked.
“Half past eight.”
“Then we’ve got twenty minutes.”
I checked my phone. Ruth had sent a photograph of a bucket with a label reading NOT FOR ELENA TO BORROW. Nina had added a crown above the words.
“Your staff?”
“My government.”
He smiled and put another slice in the toaster.
I told him I was making Ruth an offer that week. A real one, once the accountant had helped me distinguish generosity from insolvency. I had spent Sunday with figures spread over the annex floor. There was room for fewer unprofitable favours, fewer opening hours during which we did nothing but wait for a person who might arrive. There was not room for pretending my own endless unpaid time was a renewable resource.
“Does she want a share?” he asked.
“I haven’t asked properly.”
“Then perhaps do that first.”
I threw a crumb at him.
He caught my hand before I could throw another and kissed the inside of my wrist.
“Useful advice is very unattractive,” I told him.
“I’ll recover.”
At half past eight he walked me to the car with my bag. I wanted to leave a scarf, a book, some small indisputable evidence of having been there. Instead I put everything on the seat because I was going to work and objects were not reliable messengers.
“Thursday?” he said.
“For the theatre?”
“I’ve booked it. I checked the title this time.”
“Very professional.”
He took two tickets out of his pocket. A comedy with a house on the poster and several doors. I laughed.
“We seem to have a type.”
“There are no hotel fires, according to the woman at the box office.”
He handed me one. I put it in my purse where I would see it whenever I paid for something boring.
At work, Nina looked at my bag, then at me.
“Morning.”
“Morning.”
She waited.
“Not a word,” I said.
“I haven’t got any. I’m very busy.”
She turned back to the bench with a grin visible from behind. Ruth handed me a cup of tea. Neither asked a question. I was grateful, and a little disappointed, which was ridiculous of me.
I made flowers until lunch. Real flowers for real customers, with wet leaves sticking to my wrists and a rose thorn catching the cuff of my shirt. The day did not glow continuously because I had spent the night with someone I wanted. A courier arrived at the wrong time. The printer jammed. I was cross about both, then caught myself smiling into a bucket while looking for a lost stem.
That afternoon I asked Ruth to sit with me.
“Before Saturday,” I said. “I don’t want you choosing under the clock.”
She pulled out a chair.
I had two sheets, not a folder. The first showed hours we could pay for and the jobs we’d have to stop accepting to keep them. The second was an outline the accountant had helped me make: a profit share, protected wages, a defined say in staffing and bookings. I had called it a partnership on my first draft. He had circled that word and told me we needed to be more exact before anybody signed anything.
Ruth read the hours first.
“No late Thursdays?”
“Collections by appointment. Two set windows, with somebody paid to be here. Not an open-ended evening.”
“What if they’re late?”
“We tell them when we close.”
She looked at me over the paper.
“Yes,” I said. “Including the ones I like.”
She turned to the second page.
I watched her read it and found that I wanted her to be moved. I had imagined tears, perhaps a hand over mine. Some proof that the thing I’d found difficult was recognisably generous.
Instead she asked, “What counts as profit?”
I stared at her.
“That’s what we need to agree.”
“And a say means what? You listen, then decide?”
“No. I mean actual decisions.”
“Which ones?”
The accountant had asked that too. I’d thought I had answered him.
Ruth laid down the paper.
“I want to look at it tonight. Properly. And I want someone who isn’t your accountant to look at it with me.”
“Of course.”
The words tasted less gracious than I intended. She heard it.
“Elena, this is my job.”
“I know.”
“Then let me treat it like one.”
I nodded. She took the sheets home. The offer had not won her. It had given her something to negotiate.
On Wednesday morning Celia sent the final opening schedule. I worked out a limited proposal: two low groups beside the platform, one arrangement at the entrance, preparation and installation, collection afterwards. No floral route through the main garden. No hanging work. Nina and I would test the shape before we promised a design that couldn’t stand on its own.
I sent the scope and price. Adam was copied because he was coordinating the building, but the answer came from Celia: accepted, within the agreed budget. She returned the signed page that afternoon.
Three pieces. One room. A job we could actually do.
Then I spoke to the station agent. The owner would consider the sign and bell work. I asked for draft terms, subject to the entrance arrangement and proper advice. It was not a lease yet. It was enough of a direction to stop saying we might be somewhere else someday.
I wrote a notice for our customers: the estate workroom would close on the twenty-seventh of May; orders and booked deliveries would continue; the intended new studio opening was the thirty-first, with the address to follow when the agreement was complete. If that timetable changed, I would tell them.
Ruth read it before I sent it. This time she did not say it was fine.
“That’s a lot to do.”
“Yes.”
“We’ll need the twenty-eighth clear.”
I opened the diary and blocked it, then the next two days. No new installations. No favours hidden beneath a different colour of ink.
I sent the notice.
On my phone, Adam asked what time to collect me for the play. I told him seven, and added that there would be no consultation afterwards.
His reply came a minute later.
I was hoping for a very unprofessional evening.
I put the phone face down before Nina could see me smile.
A Share of It
The woman selling programmes knew Adam and gave him a bad seat on purpose.
“You’re tall,” she said. “You’ll manage.”
“That seems backwards, Marion.”
“You should have booked earlier.”
He took the programmes with an injured expression. She turned to me and smiled.
“Have a lovely evening.”
“I intend to.”
The little theatre smelled of warm dust, coffee and paint. Its foyer was barely large enough for the audience, who had nevertheless decided to stop in all the narrow places. We edged past a man balancing three drinks on a programme and found a wall to stand beside.
“How do you know her?” I asked.
“Her husband used to work with me. She takes any opportunity to correct my expectations.”
“Someone should.”
“I brought you out to enjoy yourself.”
“I am.”
He bent towards me, but a woman carrying a tray of empty glasses walked directly between us. We drew apart to let her through, and by the time she’d passed we were laughing too much to recover the moment.
Our seats were indeed bad. One stood beside a pillar, the other behind a man with magnificent hair. Adam offered me the pillar. I chose the hair. We exchanged halfway through the first scene, silently and with more interference to our neighbours than either arrangement justified.
The play concerned a family selling a house nobody wanted to leave. I had not known that when we booked it. For a moment, as an actor described the marks left by pictures on a wall, my stomach tightened.
Then another actor entered carrying a stuffed fish and the whole thing became ridiculous.
There were doors opening at the wrong times, a telephone that rang whenever somebody told a lie, and a grandmother who hid the keys inside the fish. By the interval I was invested in whether the younger daughter would get away with selling the dining table to pay for a train ticket.
Adam had been watching the set.
“That staircase isn’t supported properly,” he whispered as the lights came up.
“It’s a staircase in a play.”
“People are standing on it.”
“They’re actors. They do dangerous things for applause.”
“It’s moving.”
“So is the plot, if you’d attend to it.”
In the foyer, he encountered Marion’s husband, a broad man called Peter with silver hair and a hearing aid he tapped whenever the room grew loud. Peter asked him about the winter garden, received a short answer and immediately asked a second question that could not possibly be answered briefly.
I was halfway to resigning myself to a conversation about glazing when Marion appeared and hooked her arm through Peter’s.
“Leave the man alone. He’s on a date.”
Peter looked at me with sudden recognition. “So he is. Sorry.”
Adam said, “Thank you,” with such feeling that Marion laughed.
“Come through after. The set designer’s a friend of yours, isn’t she, Peter?”
“She is.”
“Elena used to want to do that,” Adam said.
I turned to him. I hadn’t expected him to repeat something I’d told him over pasta.
Marion examined me with renewed interest. “Then you should see what she’s done with almost no money and a door from my bathroom.”
“Which door?”
“The one that keeps sticking. It did that in the bathroom too.”
The second half was improved immeasurably by knowing the door’s history. Every time an actor had to kick it, Adam’s shoulders shook beside me. The grandmother left in a taxi with the stuffed fish. The young daughter missed her train but bought a ticket for the next one, and the table departed before the family could change their minds.
It was not profound. It was funny, and generous about people being ridiculous, and I clapped until my palms stung.
Afterwards Marion took us round the side of the stage. Without its front, the house became strips of wood, flats on braces and door handles screwed into nothing. A young actor stood smoking an unlit cigarette while looking for his phone. Someone in a beautiful dress was dragging a bin across the floor.
The set designer, Val, wore black trousers covered in pale paint and had a pencil in her hair rather like Nina’s. She looked tired and pleased.
“Don’t examine it too closely,” she told me. “It’ll feel judged.”
“It looks wonderful from the seats.”
“That’s the arrangement.”
I touched the edge of a painted panel. From the audience it had looked like carved wood. Here I could see three colours and a shadow painted where a groove ought to be.
“How did you get that depth?”
Val showed me. She took a scrap from a pile, found a brush and laid down a dark line, then a lighter one beside it. The apparently solid edge appeared as she turned the board towards the stage lights.
“Oh,” I said.
She smiled at the pleasure in my voice.
I asked another question, then another. Adam stood behind me, patient at first, then wandering away to inspect the staircase. I forgot to watch where he went. Val told me about making a wallpaper pattern larger so it could be read from the back row, about the bits she had painted badly on purpose because perfect symmetry would make the room look dead.
“I do flowers,” I said.
“Then you know about looking at something from the wrong end of a room.”
“Yes.” I thought of Jo’s photograph and the urn in our window. “Occasionally I remember too late.”
She laughed and handed me the brush.
“Try the next edge.”
My first line was too neat. She told me so. I dragged the dry brush through it, leaving a broken shadow, and the little panel altered beneath my hand.
I had not done anything I was bad at in front of a stranger for a very long time. I enjoyed it so much that when Adam returned I was annoyed by the interruption.
“Ready?” he asked.
“In a minute.”
He leaned against a flat. It moved. Val said, “Not there,” and he stepped away with remarkable speed for a building expert.
I laughed. He bowed to acknowledge the fairness of it.
Val invited me to come one afternoon when they began the next set. Not to commit to six months of unpaid work. Just to try painting a larger piece, if I liked. I told her I was moving a business and could not promise before June.
“June’s fine. We won’t vanish.”
She gave me her number. I put it in my phone while there was still wet paint on one finger.
Outside, the night smelled of rain on warm pavement. I slipped my arm through Adam’s, then looked up at him.
“You were bored.”
“A little.”
“You could pretend.”
“I was fascinated by the first painted groove.”
“Only the first?”
“By the seventh I was beginning to imagine bed.”
The look he gave me made the pavement seem less public than it was.
“We can go,” I said.
“We are going.”
“I mean—”
“I know what you mean.”
He kissed me beneath the theatre poster, one hand at my jaw. I tasted coffee and the cold night air. A door opened behind us and Peter came out carrying the stuffed fish.
“Oh,” he said. “Sorry again.”
I hid my face against Adam’s coat until I could breathe.
We went to his house. In the morning I discovered a streak of stage paint on his pillow and refused to apologise for it.