On Thursday, Nick brought a tripod, two shirts and a loaf of bread.
“The bread is unrelated,” he said when I opened the rehearsal-room door.
“I was afraid the audition had become experimental.”
“I keep forgetting to eat lunch. If I don’t take it home tonight, tomorrow I’ll buy another one.”
He put the bag beneath a chair. The room had emptied twenty minutes earlier, leaving warm air, abandoned water bottles and a single shoe somebody would eventually come back for. Through the high windows, evening light lay in pale bars across the floor.
I had chosen the room because its walls were cream rather than the wardrobe department’s particular shade of institutional despair. I had also stayed an hour later than necessary, checking measurements I already knew, rather than go home and return. It annoyed me that I knew why.
Nick unfolded the tripod. One leg slid down and struck the floor.
“Professional equipment,” I said.
“Borrowed from Rhys.”
“Then we should treat it better.”
“I’m trying.”
He crouched over the little fastening with the same expression I wore when a zip caught an expensive lining. I took pity on him and held the leg while he tightened it.
The audition was two scenes from a new play. He handed me the pages and explained that I would read the other character’s lines from beside the camera.
“You didn’t mention acting.”
“Reading. I won’t make you join a union.”
“I require a dressing room.”
“You already have one.”
“With fruit.”
“There’s a banana in the car.”
I looked at him.
“A different banana,” he said quickly.
We set the camera at his eye level. He put on the first shirt, then took it off and changed into the second while I turned away to adjust the window blind. There was nothing to be embarrassed about; I had fitted him yesterday. Nevertheless, I developed an intense interest in the blind cord.
“Is this better?”
I turned. The dark blue shirt made his eyes look lighter.
“Yes.”
“That was very decisive.”
“It’s my job.”
He sat on the chair we had placed against the wall, then stood again.
“The first scene is supposed to be after a funeral.”
“Do you need a black tie?”
“No. I just thought I should tell you, before you start enjoying yourself too much.”
He smiled. It was the smile I knew from parties, the one that invited everybody else to relax. I watched him turn it off when I pressed record.
The first take was good. I knew enough about acting to recognize that much. He remembered the words, listened when I spoke, gave the scene a little movement without wandering out of frame. At the end he looked up at me.
“Well?”
“You sound very reasonable.”
“Is that bad?”
I looked at the page. The character had spent the scene arguing with his brother about the sale of their childhood home. I was reading the brother. Halfway through, Nick’s character learned the house had already been sold.
“I don’t think he’s reasonable.”
Nick held out his hand for the pages. I gave them to him.
“No,” he said after a moment. “Probably not.”
“But you keep making him sound like someone we’d want to have dinner with.”
He stared at the page. I wondered if I’d gone too far. He had asked me to hold a camera, not tell him how to do the thing he had spent twenty years doing.
“Sorry,” I said. “That isn’t useful.”
“It is.”
He sat down again, the paper loose between his hands. I waited while he read the scene to himself. Outside, a gull landed on the windowsill with a thump and began inspecting us through the glass.
“I don’t want to be the man who shouts,” Nick said.
“You don’t have to shout to be angry.”
His eyes came up to mine. I wished, immediately, that I hadn’t given him a sentence that sounded so much like an invitation to discuss my week.
He looked down at the page instead.
“All right. Again?”
The second take was worse. He stopped smiling and became solemn, which wasn’t the same thing. In the third he lost a line and swore so inventively that the gull flew away. By the fourth, he was tired enough to stop arranging himself.
He listened while I read the brother’s explanation. His jaw moved once. When he answered, there was no raised voice, no grand show of injury. He said the line as though it cost him to admit that he had expected better.
I missed my cue.
Nick waited, still inside the scene, and I found the words on the page with a finger that had gone oddly clumsy.
We finished. I did not stop the recording straight away. He remained in the chair, looking at the place beside the camera where his brother had been. Then he rubbed his palms over his thighs and glanced up.
“Was that less suitable for dinner?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
I pressed stop.
We watched it together on the little screen. He stood close enough that I could smell clean cotton and something faintly sharp, perhaps the soap he used. I kept my eyes on the recording.
“You hesitate there,” I said. “Before you answer.”
“I thought you had another line.”
“It works.”
“An excellent technique. Not knowing what comes next.”
He sounded lighter now. When the scene ended, he watched the dark screen for a moment before stepping away.
“Thank you.”
“We still have the other scene.”
“I know. I’m being grateful in installments.”
The second scene went faster. It was almost funny, in the uncomfortable way a family could become funny when everybody knew where the weak places were. By the final take, I had stopped worrying about reading well and started listening to him. That seemed to help.
When we finished, the room was dim. Nick folded the tripod while I shut the windows.
“Do you want to watch them once more?” I asked.
“If I do, I’ll find a reason not to send them.”
He took his phone, attached the files to an email and stood with his thumb above the screen.
“Go on,” I said.
“You make it sound easy.”
“It isn’t my face in them.”
He laughed and pressed send.
Then he put the phone away with an almost violent decisiveness and picked up his bread.
“Dinner.”
The harbor chip shop had three tables, all occupied. A family with two small children had spread across one as if preparing for a siege; at another, two elderly men were eating in a silence that looked companionable rather than hostile. Nick offered to find somewhere else, but I was hungry enough that a menu would have felt like an obstacle.
We took our food to the sea wall. The rain had stopped. There was still water on the benches, so Nick laid his folded jacket on one end and I sat on a newspaper left inside my shopping bag.
“I can move over,” he said.
“Your jacket isn’t that large.”
“You wound me.”
“I measured you yesterday.”
He passed me the salt. Below us, the tide nudged against the harbor steps with the soft, persistent sound of someone trying a locked door.
For a while we ate. I hadn’t realized how tired I was until nobody expected me to explain anything. A fishing boat came in, its engine rattling. Nick watched the man at the wheel guide it between two others with barely a foot to spare.
“I couldn’t do that,” he said.
“You could pretend to.”
“With expensive consequences.”
“Probably best to stick to the chair.”
He grinned and reached for another chip. There was a small white scar across one knuckle. I found myself noticing the details of him that had somehow escaped me for years.
“Why costumes?” he asked.
“I like clothes.”
“You don’t like most of mine.”
“That’s different.”
“Tell me how.”
I considered the question. Usually people asked what I did and then told me about a fancy-dress party they had once attended. Nick was waiting as if the answer might matter to him.
“I like the moment someone puts something on and stops thinking about it,” I said. “When it belongs to them. You can see it happen.”
“Like today.”
“Yes.”
He looked out over the harbor, chewing. “I liked that jacket before you liked me in it.”
“I didn’t say I liked you in it.”
“You said ‘oh.’”
Heat reached my face with humiliating speed.
“That was a professional assessment.”
“Of course.”
He didn’t pursue it. That was worse, somehow. I could hear the amusement he was leaving alone.
I asked him about the tour. He told me the practical shape of it: three months, a demanding role, a director who could make a familiar scene feel dangerous. He had done steady work for years, good work sometimes, but he was tired of being the reliable man called in when somebody more exciting broke an ankle.
“That’s ungrateful,” he said. “I’ve been lucky.”
“You can be lucky and still want something.”
“Can you?”
He looked at me when he asked. I tore a little corner from the paper around my fish.
“I think so.”
“What do you want?”
I could have answered a dozen ways. I wanted Monday not to have happened. I wanted to stop checking my phone with a sick little movement in my stomach. I wanted my sister to be eight again, standing on a chair beside me while we washed up, singing the wrong words to every song on the radio.
Those were not things I could ask him for.
“A coat Helen agrees is green.”
Nick smiled, but he knew I had sidestepped him.
“Ambitious.”
“You haven’t met Helen.”
We finished our food while the sky lost its remaining color. The wind lifted the empty paper from Nick’s knee, and we both reached for it. His fingers closed over mine for a second before he let the paper go.
I caught it against the wall.
“Saved,” I said.
My voice sounded ordinary. I was relieved.
He folded his jacket over his arm and walked me to the bottom of the hill. We stopped beneath the streetlamp where his route turned toward the theater car park.
“Thank you for dinner.”
“Thank you for not letting me be reasonable.”
I smiled. He looked at me for a moment longer than the exchange required, and something in my body became abruptly attentive.
Then a car passed through a puddle at the curb and sprayed both our shoes.
I jumped back. Nick looked down at his trousers, then at me.
“A very good evening,” he said gravely. “Until the sea came inland.”
I laughed properly then. He laughed with me, and by the time we stopped, the moment had changed into something less frightening.
At home, I hung my damp coat beside the wedding dress. I could have moved the dress into the cupboard. I had thought about doing it twice already. Instead I went into the kitchen and found an unopened message from Mum.
I left it unopened.
Nick’s message arrived while I was making tea.
Priya says take four. She’s asked who read with me.
I typed: Tell her I’m very expensive.
His reply came almost at once.
I have the receipt for the chips.
I stood by the kettle, smiling at my phone. Then I caught sight of my reflection in the dark window and felt a pang so sharp it took the smile away.
It seemed unfair that I could enjoy anything already. It seemed even more unfair that I should have to feel guilty for it.
I put the phone beside my cup, where I would see it if it lit up again.