Beyond the last gardens, we sat on the low wall beside the water. Adam rested his elbows on his knees. I watched two ducks conduct a disagreement that seemed mostly performative.
“Did that make you sad?” he asked.
“The wedding?”
“Yes.”
I thought about it.
“No. A little. Not the way you mean, perhaps.”
“What way do I mean?”
“I don’t know.”
He smiled, conceding the point.
“I liked them,” I said. “They weren’t pretending to have been delivered to each other without any previous damage.”
“No.”
“And they didn’t look relieved it was all over.”
“The wedding?”
“The choosing.”
He turned towards me.
I picked a small flake of dried mud from my boot.
“I think I treated being married as the point at which the question was answered. You chose once, and then you worked hard enough to make it remain true.”
“Isn’t some of it that?”
“Yes. I don’t want to pretend every difficult year means you chose badly. We had good years. Even the bad one had good days.”
The water moved below us, carrying a leaf past the wall.
“I’d want to ask again,” Adam said.
I looked at him.
“Not formally every morning. That would be exhausting. But before I assumed the life we had still fitted both of us.”
“Would you remember?”
He considered that for longer than a charming answer required.
“Not always. I’d probably decide a bigger version would be better and find myself outside a van being told why it wasn’t.”
I laughed, then became serious again.
“I don’t want to do that all the time.”
“Neither do I.”
We sat with that. He did not tell me I would never have to be angry with him again. I would not have believed it.
“Would you want to marry?” I asked. “Ever.”
“Yes.”
The answer came without the careful delay I had expected.
“Even after all these years of not doing it?”
“Possibly because of them.”
I watched his profile. He looked embarrassed, which I found unexpectedly tender.
“I used to think there would be a point when my life was ready for someone to fit into it,” he said. “A finished house. A project handed over. A quieter month. I kept making the room and not opening the door.”
“You have quite a nice door.”
He smiled. “A woman has been rude about the wallpaper.”
“She’s right.”
“I know.”
He took my hand and turned it in his. The pale ring mark was fading, although I could still see it if I looked.
“I would want a home with someone,” he said. “Not just evenings when neither of us is busy.”
I wanted that so sharply it frightened me.
“What about children?”
He looked at me then. No escape into the river or the ducks.
“I don’t know how to make that a small answer.”
“It doesn’t have to be.”
“I thought I’d be a father. I still sometimes picture it. That hasn’t disappeared because I know you.”
I nodded. It hurt, but not because he had done anything wrong.
He squeezed my hand, then loosened it as if he had realised holding tightly could feel like an instruction.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Some days I still want the life I was expecting. Some days I can’t bear the thought of making my whole body a calendar again.”
I looked at the water.
“And I don’t want to be loved while someone waits to find out if I’m going to be enough.”
“Elena.”
I made myself look back.
“I’m not waiting for a result.”
“I know you aren’t now.”
He breathed out. “I can’t tell you what either of us will feel in five years.”
“No.”
“But I don’t want a different woman because she might give me a particular future. I want to find out what life with you is like.”
The words were imperfectly sized for the fear. Nothing could have filled it completely. They still mattered.
“I need that to be something we keep telling the truth about,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Even if the truth isn’t flattering.”
“Especially then, I suspect.”
I leaned against him. His arm came around my shoulders, and for a while we watched the water without trying to finish the conversation forever.
There was no proposal on that wall. I was still married. I had just signed for a flat of my own. He had work to do on the habit of deciding too much, and I had a tendency to make every uncertain thing into a private test of endurance.
But when we got up, he took my hand as if it belonged in his, and I let myself imagine asking him into a room with two chairs.
What He Misses
Richard had made coffee.
I could smell it before I reached the kitchen. Good coffee, the kind he used to make on mornings when neither of us was leaving early. For a moment my body responded before the rest of me did: a small loosening, the expectation of a cup already waiting where I liked to sit.
Then I saw the two cups on the table and stopped in the doorway.
“We said ten,” he said.
“It is ten.”
“I meant I wasn’t sure you’d want coffee.”
I put the inventory sheet on the table.
“I’m here for the things.”
“I know.”
He looked tired. He had lost a little weight, or perhaps his shirt was simply looser than the ones he usually wore. His father’s watch was on his wrist. I noticed that and wished I hadn’t. There were still parts of him my eyes found automatically.
The kitchen had changed in small ways. A different jar beside the cooker. A packet of biscuits I never bought. A notice about an appointment pinned where the Cornwall photograph had once been.
I looked away from it.
“Where’s Iris?”
“At her sister’s for the morning.”
“All right.”
He reached for the coffee pot.
“Milk?”
“You know.”
“Yes.”
He poured. I took the cup because refusing it would not make me less affected by its existence.
We began with the list. Books, a lamp, the small chest I’d brought from my old flat, a set of kitchen knives Mum had given me that Richard had never liked because their handles didn’t match. Some furniture would remain until the agreed collection day. Other things were already packed in the hall, labels facing out.
He had done the labels himself. His handwriting was familiar enough to hurt.
“The blue box has the photographs,” he said.
“Which photographs?”
“Yours. Your family. I’ve left ours separate.”
I nodded.
The household list was smaller than the life we’d lived together. That was the first strange thing. Eleven years, and the immediate question was whether I wanted the green lamp or the brass one. There were other legal and financial matters still being handled, but no document could contain the way a person knew the sound of someone else’s key in the door.
We went into the sitting room. Richard lifted the lamp I’d chosen from the side table and unplugged it.
“You always hated that shade.”
“I liked the lamp.”
“I remember.”
He handed it to me. I remembered too: a second-hand shop, rain, him holding it up at a ridiculous angle while I tried to decide whether it was ugly or wonderful. We’d carried it to the car under his coat. There had been days when we were very good at being two people together.
I set the lamp beside the boxes.
“The chest can wait until the mover comes.”
“I can bring it across to the annex.”
“It won’t fit. It’s going to the flat.”
He looked at me.
“You’ve found somewhere.”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“Mill Street.”
He knew which building when I described it. I watched him imagine the stairs, the shop, the little rooms above it.
“That’s rather small.”
“It’s enough.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“I know what you meant.”
He put his hands in his pockets.
For a while we worked without talking. I checked the kitchen knives, found one of Mum’s old serving spoons in a drawer and asked him to add it to the list. He did. There was nothing left to argue about there.
When I closed the last box, he said, “Elena, can we sit down?”
My hand stayed on the lid.
“About what?”
“Us.”
The word had once been a whole country. Now it sounded like a place he wanted directions back to.
I looked at the kitchen table, then at him. I could have left. I had my car, my signed arrangements, a room whose rent I had paid. I sat because I wanted to hear what he could possibly mean.
Richard took the chair opposite.
“I’ve made a terrible mess.”
“Yes.”
He rubbed his forehead.
“I know that isn’t enough.”
“Then why are we talking?”
“Because I miss you.”
I had imagined him saying it. In bed at Ruth’s, in the annex, during the weeks when I could still be ambushed by the sight of his coat in a hallway. In some versions I had been merciless. In others, worse versions, I’d begun to cry and let him hold me.
Now I felt the words land and did not know what to do with the small, stubborn part of me that wanted to keep them.
“What do you miss?” I asked.
He stared at the table.
“Talking to you. Knowing what you’d say before you said it. You laughing at things nobody else thought were funny.”
I looked at his hands. He had not prepared all of that. I could tell by the way the last sentence caught.
“I miss you in the house,” he said. “It’s unbearable sometimes, knowing you’re just beyond the hedge and I can’t come and tell you something.”
“You could have thought about that before you brought her here.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
He looked up.
“I don’t know what answer you want.”
“I don’t have one for you.”
The silence held. From somewhere upstairs came the faint tick of a pipe, the house making one of its old noises. I had once known which ones needed attention.
“Iris is going to stay with Maya for a little while after the baby,” he said. “We’ve talked about it. She needs support.”
“Then support her.”
“I will. I’m not walking away from the baby.”
“Good.”
He pressed his palms against the table.
“But you and I don’t have to decide that everything’s finished. Not while we’re still—”
“Still what?”
“Married.”
I sat back.
He heard the mistake. I watched him try to step round it.
“I mean there’s still a chance to work out whether we can find something again.”
“While Iris is at her sister’s.”
“That isn’t what I said.”
“It is where you’d put the time.”
His mouth tightened. For a moment there was the familiar Richard who disliked having his arrangements described without their polite wrapping.
“I could stop the terrace work,” he said. “You could keep the business here. We could take some pressure off, not make every decision at once.”
I looked past him towards the garden door. Beyond the wall, Nina and Ruth would be preparing the final wedding. There were deposits paid elsewhere, changed hours, people who had believed me when I said the work was continuing.
“I’ve signed a lease.”
“I know you’d lose something on it. We could deal with that.”
“We.”
“Don’t make the word ugly.”
“I didn’t.”
He looked away first.
There had been years when his certainty comforted me. When I was tired, when Mum died, when the business felt too large for the money in its account, he had been able to say there was a way through and mean it. I had not invented that man because I wanted to excuse this one.
But his offer still began with stopping the life I’d chosen so we could examine what he wanted next.
“Do you remember the first time I brought you to Mum’s shop?” I asked.
He looked surprised.
“Yes.”
“You knocked over the bucket by the door.”
“It was in a ridiculous place.”
“She said that was why she’d put it there. To identify people who didn’t look.”
He laughed, unwillingly. I did too. It hurt, hearing the old sound between us.
“You spent the rest of the afternoon carrying things wherever she pointed,” I said.
“I wanted her to like me.”
“She did.”
He lowered his eyes.
“I did too,” I said. “I loved you. I don’t need to make all of it false to leave.”
His face changed. Not softened. Changed in the way a face does when it hears the part of a sentence it has been trying to avoid.
“Then why can’t—”
“Because you asked me to train the woman you’d brought into our home. You stood in the nursery and told me to make room. That wasn’t a bad afternoon we can tidy up with a cancelled terrace.”
He opened his mouth, then closed it.
“I was cruel,” he said.
“Yes.”
“I didn’t think of it that way.”
“I know.”
There was the terrible thing. I believed him. He had been so occupied with making his chosen future manageable that he had treated the person who would suffer it as another part of the arrangement.
I put my hands flat on the table.
“I’m not coming back.”
He watched me for a long time.
“Is it Reeves?”
I had expected the question and still felt anger rise when he asked it.
“No.”
“You’re seeing him.”
“Yes. But I left before that. I said no to what you wanted before he arrived with his notebook. Don’t give him credit for it.”
Richard leaned back. For a moment he looked almost offended by the loss of that explanation.
Then he nodded, once.
“All right.”
It wasn’t acceptance of everything. It was enough to let the conversation end.
I stood up. My legs felt unreliable for the first few steps. He did not follow me into the hall.
At the boxes, I checked the labels and photographed the list. The remaining chest and larger books would be collected on the agreed date. I took the lamp, the knives and the blue box in two journeys to my car. Richard came out for the second journey and offered to carry the books.
“Yes,” I said.
He carried them. There was no lesson in refusing the weight of a box merely because I had refused the rest.
At the car, he set it down carefully.
“I am sorry,” he said.
“I heard you.”
He stepped back. I drove the short distance round to the annex without looking at the house in the mirror.
Inside, I put the lamp on the table. The shade really was awful. I took it off, exposing the small dull bulb, and laughed once with a sound perilously close to crying.
Then I cried.
Not because I wanted to go back. Because there had been something to go back to once, and I had just sat opposite its remains while both of us remembered it.
I let myself miss the man who carried a lamp through the rain. I did not telephone the man who had carried a box to my car.
Later I washed my face and went to work.
Ruth looked up as I entered. I shook my head slightly. She nodded and passed me a length of twine.
“Hold that.”
We tied the bundle together. Nina was checking the measurements for Sophie and Finn’s three staircase groups against the venue photographs, with every container open in front of her this time. On the desk lay the paid return sheet from Penny’s wedding: the bread bowls cleaned and returned to the kitchen, the wrong vases sent back to the hire company, the extra charge recorded where it belonged.
Ordinary work had continued while I was in the house. I was grateful for every inch of it.
At five I called Adam.
“Can I come over?”
“Yes. Everything all right?”
“Not exactly. Nothing you need to fix.”
“I’ll be here.”
I drove to his house after closing. He met me at the gate, looked at my face and put his arms round me without asking the first question until we were inside.
“Richard asked me to come back,” I said.
Adam went still. Only for a moment. I felt it because I was holding him.
“I said no.”
He breathed out.
“I wasn’t leaving you in suspense,” I said. “I just hadn’t got to the end.”
“I know.”
He stepped back far enough to look at me.
“Are you all right?”
“I’ve had a horrible day. I don’t regret it.”
“All right.”
He took my coat. I followed him into the kitchen and sat at the table while he made tea. I told him the conversation, the parts that mattered, without performing my refusal as a declaration he had won.
He listened. Once he frowned at something Richard had offered. Once he looked down at his hands. He was not delighted by the existence of another man who knew the earlier versions of me. He also did not ask me to erase them.
When I finished, he said, “Thank you for telling me.”
I held the warm cup between my palms.
“I thought saying it would feel better.”
“Did it?”
“A little. Mostly it feels finished.”
He sat beside me. We stayed there while the tea cooled, and then he asked whether I wanted company or distraction.
“Distraction.”
He brought out a half-finished jigsaw from a cupboard.
I stared at it.
“You’ve been hiding this from me.”
“I’m a complicated man.”
It showed a harbour with far too much blue sky. He claimed to have completed most of the difficult part. I pointed out that all the sky remained, and he said the boats were equally demanding if one respected boats.
We spread it across the table. For half an hour I thought about the curve of a sail, the edge of a roof and whether two almost identical pieces were in fact identical. Adam moved one I had already placed. I moved it back. He was right, which I acknowledged with poor grace.
Eventually I found a piece that completed a little red door.
“There,” I said.
He looked over.
“Yes.”
The picture was still unfinished. I leaned against his shoulder and stayed.
Last Order Under Glass
Mrs Pike handed me the flat keys in the bookshop, between a display of crime novels and a woman asking whether a book with a blue cover had come in.
“Which blue cover?” the bookseller asked.
“The one I told you about.”
I stood holding two ordinary keys on a plastic tag and tried not to smile too broadly at the beginning of my new address.
Mrs Pike took me upstairs to check the meter readings and the inventory. The window in the bedroom had been eased, as she’d promised. The cupboard remained as satisfactory as I remembered. In the sitting room the empty space looked smaller now that it had to contain my actual life.
The mover arrived with the chest and the boxes we’d agreed to collect from the house. Richard had let him in; I did not need to go back for another handover. I watched the chest come up the stairs one careful corner at a time and understood why the previous tenant had warned me about sofas.
There wasn’t a sofa. There were two second-hand chairs I had bought from a local dealer, one comfortable and one more optimistic than comfortable. I put the good one beside the window. The other faced it at a slight angle, as if someone had just got up in the middle of a conversation.
I’d brought the lamp from the annex. I unpacked it and fitted its new plain shade. The old one went into a bag for the recycling centre.
Then I made tea.
The kettle stood beside a wall I had not chosen and could easily live with. I had brought milk, two mugs and a teaspoon. I had forgotten tea towels, washing-up liquid and every form of food. None of these omissions frightened me. There were shops downstairs and nobody expecting dinner because I had happened to notice the time.
I drank standing by the sitting-room window. Below me, someone came out of the bookshop carrying a stack tied with string. A bus stopped at the corner. From here I could not see the estate at all.
My phone rang. Ruth.
“Are you coming back before lunch?”
“Yes.”
“Good. We’ve got the sweet peas, and Nina wants you to stop looking at them in photographs and make a decision.”
“I’ll be twenty minutes.”
I put the mug in the sink, left the chairs waiting and locked my own front door.