On Monday morning, Nick rang to ask whether I could come to lunch instead of supper.
I stood in the studio with a length of fabric over one arm, listening while he explained that a recording job had come up in Bristol. The original actor was ill. They needed someone that evening, and the fee was good enough that he wanted to take it.
“I know we said supper,” he finished. “I didn’t want to leave telling you until the day had disappeared.”
“It’s fine.”
The answer came automatically. I heard it after I said it and hated how familiar it sounded.
Nick was quiet for a moment.
“Is it?”
I put the fabric down.
“I’m disappointed.”
“I am too.”
“I was looking forward to an evening.”
“I know.”
I leaned against the table. The childish part of me wanted him to turn down the job, to make the choice so simple that I would not have to discover how much I could tolerate wanting something I couldn’t have immediately.
The rest of me knew what work like his was like. I had taken enough last-minute commissions myself.
“Lunch would be good,” I said. “I just didn’t want to say fine when I meant something else.”
“Thank you for telling me.”
“Don’t sound too relieved. I may still complain about the timing.”
“That seems fair.”
We settled on one o’clock. After we hung up, I stood for a moment with the phone in my hand. Nothing disastrous had happened. Nobody had guessed what I would accept and arranged it behind me. I was disappointed, and I still wanted to go.
Nick’s flat occupied the top floor of a small building near the old swimming baths. I had passed it dozens of times without knowing he lived there. The stairwell smelled of furniture polish and somebody’s lunch. On the second landing, a child’s bicycle leaned against the wall with a helmet hooked over one handlebar.
He opened the door before I knocked twice.
“Something’s burning,” I said.
“Only slightly.”
“A promising welcome.”
He stepped back, and I entered a room full of light, books and the ordinary disorder of a person who had intended to tidy more thoroughly than time allowed. A jacket hung over the back of a chair. Three scripts lay on the table. There were maps on the wall, actual folded maps mounted flat, their creases visible beneath the glass.
“I can explain the smell,” he said, going toward the kitchen.
“You don’t have to. It has introduced itself.”
I followed him. A roasting tin sat on the counter, its potatoes darker at one end than the other.
“The oven has a preference,” he said.
“For charcoal?”
“For teaching humility.”
The chicken looked good. So did the salad. I told him so, and he looked disproportionately grateful.
“I had planned something that could look after itself while we talked.”
“It seems to have made independent decisions.”
He laughed, handed me two plates and asked whether I would put them on the table. I moved the scripts aside carefully. One had notes in three colors, some confident, some so heavily crossed out that the paper had begun to wear.
The room was not what I had expected. I wasn’t sure what I had expected, perhaps a version of the public Nick: handsome, easy, arranged to make company comfortable. Instead there was a chipped bowl full of loose change, a plant attempting to escape its pot, and a stack of unopened post beside a photograph of him with a woman I assumed was his mother.
He came out carrying the food.
“You’re looking worried.”
“I was trying to decide what I’d imagined.”
“More velvet?”
“Possibly.”
“I keep the velvet in storage for difficult guests.”
We ate at the table by the window. The potatoes were better than they looked. Nick watched me try one, then relaxed enough to begin eating himself.
“You cook,” I said.
“Occasionally. With mixed results.”
“I had you down as a man who knew which takeaway stayed open latest.”
“I am also that man.”
“A broad range.”
He smiled. “What about you?”
“I can feed people. I get cross if they comment while I’m doing it.”
“I noticed.”
I looked at him.
“The onions,” he said.
“They were enormous.”
“They survived the experience.”
I laughed. It felt good to be teased about something small enough to bear teasing, something that did not need a careful explanation attached to it.
After lunch, he showed me the maps. They marked places he had worked, not places he had been on holiday. There were pencil dots beside some towns and tiny notes beneath others.
“Why that one?” I asked, pointing to a coastal town in Scotland.
“Best soup of my life. Worst mattress.”
“And this?”
“Three weeks of rain. An excellent audience. A woman in the front row who fell asleep every night and still came back.”
“Perhaps she liked the sleep.”
“We all offer different services.”
I moved closer to read another note. His handwriting was less untidy when he had time to be careful. I recognized it from the letter and felt a small shift inside myself, not pain exactly, but the awareness that a person could leave more than one kind of mark.
“Do you get lonely?” I asked.
Nick stood beside me, looking at the map rather than my face.
“Sometimes. It took me a long time to admit it because I liked the work and thought that ought to be enough.”
“Does being with people all day make it worse?”
He looked at me then. “Sometimes.”
I nodded. I knew the feeling of a room full of people needing something from you and an evening in which nobody knew you had come home.
“I’d like someone to tell the bad bits to,” he said. “Without feeling I’m ruining the story.”
“I can manage bad bits.”
His mouth moved, then he caught the answer before it became an easy joke.
“I know you can. I don’t want that to be all I bring you.”
I looked around the room, at the food still on the table, the maps, the afternoon light. “It isn’t.”
He took my hand. We stood there for a while without adding anything.
Later, on the sofa, I told him about the Manchester room and the person I would be sharing the corridor with. He told me about the recording job, which involved making a small motor sound more exciting than either of us believed a small motor could be.
“Use the voice you do when you want Helen to give you another rehearsal.”
“That voice is exhausted.”
I laughed and leaned against him. His arm came around me slowly, giving the gesture room to be new again.
For a moment I thought about Friday. Not this Friday, the one before, the doorway and the passes. The memory did not disappear because I was comfortable now. I shifted a little, and Nick looked down.
“All right?”
“Yes. Just thinking.”
He waited.
“I don’t want to spend every good minute checking whether I’m foolish to enjoy it.”
“No.”
“But I probably will for a while.”
His hand rested against my shoulder. “Then tell me when you need to.”
I turned toward him. “And you tell me things before they become a surprise.”
“Yes.”
I kissed him. It was tentative at first, not because I didn’t want him but because wanting no longer felt like the only question. He held me without trying to turn the kiss into an answer to everything.
When we drew apart, I rested my forehead against his.
“I still want you,” I said.
His eyes closed briefly. “I’m glad.”
We had half an hour before he needed to leave. We spent most of it together on the sofa, talking a little, kissing, letting the afternoon be shorter than we wanted without making that a failure.
At the door, he picked up his bag and checked for keys, wallet and script. I watched him, amused by the little inventory.
“You forgot your watch last time.”
“I remember.”
“Deliberately?”
He smiled. “No. But I enjoyed the consequences.”
He locked the flat and walked me downstairs. At the street we went in different directions, him toward the station, me toward the hill and home.
I did not feel abandoned. I felt a little bereft, which was different, and capable of walking the rest of the way by myself.
That evening, I signed the Manchester agreement and sent it back. Then I ate the piece of cake Nick had wrapped for me, standing at the kitchen counter because I was too impatient to find a plate.
His message arrived just after ten.
The motor is apparently very exciting. I may have oversold it.
I laughed, then wrote back that I hoped it could live up to him.
For the first time in days, I went to bed without rereading either his apology or my own doubts.