In February, we found a house with a narrow kitchen, a temperamental front gate and a room upstairs that caught the morning light.
Nick stood in the doorway while I looked at that room. There was old carpet, a crack in the plaster and a radiator that would need to be bled. I could see the cutting table beneath the window before I had decided where anything else would go.
“You like it,” he said.
“I haven’t seen the rest.”
“You like this part.”
I turned toward him. “Yes.”
He smiled. “Come and see the other small room. I think I can learn lines in it without frightening the neighbors.”
We had looked at seven places. One was beautiful and too expensive. One smelled of damp beneath an impressive amount of air freshener. In another, the agent kept calling a cupboard a study until Nick politely asked where a person was supposed to put their legs.
This house was ordinary enough that we could imagine living in it without continually trying to deserve it.
His tour had ended two weeks earlier. My Manchester residency had ended in the autumn and led to two more pieces of work, neither enormous, both things I wanted to do. We had spent the winter seeing each other when we could, missing each other when we couldn’t, and occasionally making a mess of a telephone conversation before finding our way back to what we actually meant.
We walked through the house again, separately this time. I opened cupboards. Nick tested the windows. In the kitchen, we met beside a drawer full of nothing.
“Knives,” I said.
He looked at the breadboard space beside it. “An unreasonable system.”
I laughed, and the house began to feel possible.
We took two days to decide. We talked about money, travel, space and what would happen when work became uncertain. Neither of us made promises about being easy to live with. When we finally said yes, I knew what the yes included.
On moving day, Mina arrived with Kit, who had become tall enough to carry boxes while still claiming most of them were unfairly heavy. Rhys brought a van and an opinion about every doorway. Mum came with sandwiches and asked where I wanted them rather than beginning to arrange the kitchen.
I noticed. I kissed her cheek before she could wonder why.
Sophie had sent a message wishing us luck. I answered thank you. Her daughter was eight weeks old, and I had met her once, quietly, without Daniel there. I could love the small sleeping person in my arms without pretending the adults had become simple. We were finding a shape for that, slowly. Nobody was allowed to call the shape forgiveness on my behalf.
By lunchtime, the house was full of boxes and the particular irritation of people who liked one another but had carried too much furniture.
“Where’s the kettle?” Mina asked.
Nick and I looked at each other.
“You packed it,” I said.
“You labeled the box.”
“I labeled several boxes.”
“Then it may be in several places.”
Mina closed her eyes. “Find it before I start unpacking at random.”
Kit discovered it in a box marked KITCHEN, which he found disappointing because it deprived him of a better story. We made tea in mismatched mugs and ate Mum’s sandwiches sitting on the floor.
Nick’s hand rested on my ankle while he talked to Rhys about the tour. I looked around at the people, the boxes, the sunlight falling across the bare boards. There were things still to do everywhere. For once, that didn’t feel like a list of reasons I should get up before anyone else.
I ate another sandwich.
After the others left, the house became quiet in a new way. Nick stood in the hall looking at a box too large for the cupboard beside it.
“We may have overestimated our organizational abilities.”
“You may have. I knew exactly how bad mine were.”
He looked up and smiled. There was paint on one cuff from a wall we had started the day before and not finished. My hair had escaped its knot. Neither of us looked remotely like the people in the photographs of desirable homes.
“Come here,” he said.
I went to him. He put his arms around me, and I let my weight settle against his chest.
For a while we stood without speaking. I could hear the house around us: a pipe ticking, traffic beyond the window, the faint creak of a floorboard upstairs where the heat was beginning to reach it.
“Happy?” he asked.
“Tired.”
“Also possible.”
I lifted my head. “Yes. Happy.”
He kissed me, then rested his forehead against mine.
“Me too.”
Upstairs, my worktable stood beneath the window. Nick had helped carry it, then left me to decide which way it should face. I went into the room and opened the box of tools: scissors, tape measures, chalk, the little cushion of pins that had spent so much of the summer on my wrist.
I set them out slowly. There was no need to finish everything before evening. The work would still be there tomorrow, and so would I.
Nick appeared in the doorway carrying a folded map.
“I was going to put this in my room,” he said. “But I thought it might belong somewhere we can both see it.”
It was the map he had bought in Manchester, the old railway lines spreading across the paper like veins.
“The hall?” I suggested.
He nodded. “The hall.”
We held it against the wall together, moving it up, then down, then slightly to the left. For a moment it became absurdly important to get it right, and then we looked at one another and laughed.
“We can move it,” I said.
“I know.”
We left it leaning against the wall because neither of us knew where the picture hooks were.
That evening we ate takeaway at the table, surrounded by boxes we had agreed not to open until morning. Nick poured wine into the only two glasses we could find. They did not match.
I looked at the room, at the door to the kitchen, at the hand he had left beside mine on the table.
Once, I had thought a shared life meant learning where everything belonged in somebody else’s house. I had become very good at that. I could anticipate a need before it became a request, make space before anyone noticed there wasn’t enough, turn my own wishes into something that could wait.
Across from me, Nick reached for the last piece of bread, then broke it and put half on my plate.
“What shall we do tomorrow?” he asked.
There were a hundred useful answers. The boxes, the wall, the cupboard that still needed a shelf.
I took his hand.
“Breakfast first,” I said. “Then we’ll decide.”
The End