On Saturday afternoon, Ruth needed help with a fastening she had managed perfectly well the night before. She apologized three times while I worked behind her back.
“You don’t have to apologize,” I said.
“I know. I just seem to be doing it.”
I recognized the feeling. I finished the hook, smoothed the fabric and stepped away.
The theater had not become impossible because I was unhappy in it. That seemed both unfair and useful. Clothes still needed checking. Actors still needed places to put their own clothes while wearing ours. At half past two, people who knew nothing about the night before would sit down and expect a play.
Nick came in for his jacket. I handed it to him without looking at his face for long enough to discover anything I couldn’t bear.
“The cuff’s secure,” I said. “If it pulls, tell Mina at the interval.”
“Thank you.”
He took it. Our hands did not touch.
I had wondered whether I would be able to watch him perform. In the end, work decided for me. I had to check a change from the wings, and there he was, doing the thing he knew how to do. He was good again. I found I could resent him and still see that.
During the interval, Helen asked me to come to her office.
I stood in the doorway, suddenly afraid I would have to explain why my personal life had entered her theater twice in a month.
“Sit down,” she said. “This isn’t a tribunal.”
I sat.
“Rhys told me what happened. Nick has told me too.”
“I’m sorry it interrupted the evening.”
Helen looked at me over the top of her glasses. “Did you invite them?”
“No.”
“Then you can stop there.”
I looked down at my hands. There was a little line of blue chalk across one thumb.
“I’ve told Nick that performer passes aren’t a way to arrange private settlements,” she continued. “Rhys will approve his guests personally for the rest of the run. Nobody comes into your department without you saying so.”
“Thank you.”
“Do you need any changes to how we work?”
I thought about it. It would have been easy to ask to avoid him entirely, harder to make that fair to everyone else.
“No. Not at the moment. I can do my job.”
“I didn’t doubt that.”
She leaned back. For a moment she looked less like a director and more like a woman who had watched many people try to bring their lives to work without spilling them.
“Doing it doesn’t mean you have to make it look effortless.”
I nodded, unable to answer immediately.
She picked up a drawing from the corner of her desk. “Now. Manchester. Have you arranged the visit?”
The abrupt change of subject made me blink.
“Monday.”
“Good. Take the whole day. Mina can manage the notes, and we’re dark that evening.”
“I can be back—”
“Claire.”
I stopped.
“Take the day.”
When I left, I realized she had managed to give me something I needed without making it sound like an escape.
The Sunday performances went smoothly. Between them, Mina and I ate soup in wardrobe and discussed Kit’s latest plan to become a professional footballer without developing any fondness for practice. I laughed at the right places. Sometimes I forgot to arrange my face before she looked at me.
Nick kept his distance. He asked necessary questions, answered mine and went where the work required. Once I saw him stop near the courtyard door, notice I was sitting outside and turn toward the stairs instead. The small withdrawal hurt even though I had asked for it.
On Monday, I caught the early train to Manchester.
I had packed drawings, fabric samples and the kind of lunch that suggested I expected public transport to strand me for several days. Mina had added a packet of biscuits when she came to collect a key for watering the plants.
“In case they ask you a difficult question,” she said.
“I eat a biscuit?”
“It gives you time.”
The train ran north through towns I knew only by their stations. I tried to read the project brief, then gave up and watched the landscape. Fields opened between industrial buildings. Washing moved in small back gardens. At one stop, a man on the platform kissed a woman’s forehead before she got on, then stood looking through the window until we moved.
I took out my phone, opened Nick’s name and closed it again.
I had wanted to tell him about the day. The wanting did not mean I was ready to do it.
Gwen met me outside the station wearing a yellow raincoat that could have guided aircraft.
“You look tired,” she said, hugging me.
“A charming welcome.”
“You’ll feel better after coffee. Or worse, but faster.”
I laughed. She took one end of my portfolio and led me through streets that were louder and broader than Westmere’s. I enjoyed being somewhere nobody knew the shape of my engagement ring.
The workshop occupied the upper floor of an old mill. It had high windows, uneven floorboards and a cutting table large enough to make me briefly envious. A woman named Louise showed me the rails, the machines, the little room I could use for fittings.
“It isn’t glamorous,” she said.
I looked at the windows. “It has light.”
“Too much, sometimes. You’ll learn which blind sticks.”
They treated me as if I might work there. Not as a woman being offered a fresh start, not as a story Gwen had brought from another town. They asked what I would do with the production’s difficult scene changes, how I would handle the small budget, what I needed from the actors before drawing the final designs.
I spread the sketches across the table and forgot, gradually, to be nervous.
The new play followed three travelers stranded together overnight. Each carried a different version of who they were supposed to be. I wanted the clothes to show the effort of those versions, then loosen as the night went on. Not dramatic transformations. A collar opened, shoes removed, a coat finally put down rather than worn as armor.
“What if the lead can’t move in that silhouette?” Louise asked, pointing to the drawing I liked best.
I looked at it. In my flat, it had seemed the strongest idea in the set.
“Then I change it.”
“How much?”
I took a pencil and turned over a sheet. “It depends what movement she needs.”
We talked for twenty minutes. By the end, the drawing had changed in ways I liked better. I felt the familiar pleasure of a problem becoming clearer because other people had touched it, not because I had defended it successfully.
At lunch, Gwen took me to a café beneath the railway arches. She waited until we had food before asking how things were at home.
I told her enough. The wedding, the sister, the new relationship I wasn’t sure I could still call a relationship. She listened without interrupting, then pushed the plate of chips between us.
“That is a lot.”
“It sounds worse when I put it together.”
“Does this visit feel like running away?”
I looked at her.
“A little,” I admitted. “I don’t want it to be.”
“It can feel like two things.”
I picked up a chip. Outside, a train moved overhead, the sound traveling through the brickwork.
“I wanted the work before Friday,” I said.
“I know. You sent the sketches before Friday.”
The plainness of that evidence steadied me. I had not invented an ambition to protect myself from being hurt. It had been there, waiting for time and attention.
In the afternoon, they showed me the room provided with the residency. It was small, with a bed, a desk and a window looking onto a courtyard where somebody had planted herbs in old sinks. The bathroom was down a short corridor, shared with one other resident who would be working in lighting.
I stood in the doorway and imagined my bag on the bed, my drawings on the desk, a kettle that wasn’t mine. Six weeks. Long enough to learn a different route to work. Short enough to know I would leave again.
“You don’t have to answer today,” Louise said when we returned to the workshop. “But we’d like you to do it. I’ll send the formal terms tomorrow.”
For a moment I could only look at her.
“Thank you.”
“You’ve done good work. We think it fits.”
I nodded, then asked a question about the first week because otherwise I might have sat there smiling indefinitely.
On the train home, I called Mina. She shouted loudly enough that I had to hold the phone away from my ear.
“It’s an offer, then?”
“Terms tomorrow.”
“Claire.”
“Yes. It’s an offer.”
“Good. Say that part again.”
I did. A woman across the aisle looked up and smiled at me, and I smiled back before remembering we were strangers.
After we hung up, I watched my reflection in the window as the light outside faded. I wanted to tell Dad. I wanted to tell Nick. One absence could not be changed. The other was more complicated, and I let it remain so for the length of the journey.
At home, I put the portfolio on the table and found an envelope beneath the door. My name was written on it in Nick’s hand.
I left it beside the kettle while I took off my coat.
Then I opened it.