By Monday morning I had decided to behave normally, a plan immediately undermined by the fact that I no longer remembered how.
I said good morning to a rack of coats, put my keys in the button drawer and asked Mina whether she had seen my glasses. I did not wear glasses.
She looked up slowly.
“Would you like to start again?”
“I’d like the weekend back.”
“That sounds promising.”
I pulled my keys out of the drawer and put them in my bag.
Nick had texted on Sunday afternoon. Nothing elaborate. He had found Rhys’s preferred ginger biscuits and was replacing the entire packet to avoid an investigation. I had replied that this was wise. Then we had exchanged three messages about a dog he had seen stealing a child’s sandwich in the park.
It was impossible to work out how a kiss that occupied most of my thoughts could coexist with such ordinary messages. I kept expecting one of us to mention it. I kept being relieved when we didn’t.
At ten, Helen came to inspect the coat.
She looked at it from the front, then from the side. She touched the collar, stepped back and folded her arms.
“Yes.”
I waited.
“Much better.”
“It’s the same green.”
“I know what color it is, Claire.”
Mina turned away so quickly that I was afraid she might injure herself.
Helen left with the coat over her arm for a costume test in the rehearsal hall. I should have been pleased. I was pleased. It was simply that Nick was due there too, and the thought of seeing him made my attention behave like a loose thread in a sewing machine.
“Come on,” Mina said. “Let’s go and see whether they can sit down in any of it.”
The first costume test was not a performance. Half the cast wore rehearsal clothes beneath their jackets, and one man had a waistcoat over a T-shirt advertising a music festival. The purpose was to discover what looked good standing still and became disastrous in motion.
Nick stood beside a chair, speaking to Ruth. She played his older sister and had the kind of voice that made an ordinary request for a pencil sound as if it might contain a threat.
He looked up when I entered.
I felt the memory of his hand at my waist so suddenly that I almost stopped walking.
He smiled. Not broadly. Enough.
I nodded and became occupied with the back of Ruth’s coat.
For twenty minutes, work did what I had hoped it would do. There was a sleeve to release, a hat that obscured the wrong person’s face, a hem that caught on a chair leg. I could see the whole scene becoming clearer as the clothes began to belong to the people moving in them.
Then Julian sat down and lost a button.
It struck the floor with a cheerful little sound and rolled beneath Helen’s chair.
“That wasn’t in the script,” she said.
Nick looked down at the open waistcoat. “Julian’s fortunes have declined.”
Ruth did not miss a beat. “They were always overstated.”
The room laughed. I went forward with the small repair kit clipped to my belt.
“Stay there.”
“I’m becoming very good at that instruction.”
I knelt beside the chair and examined the fastening. The old button had cracked at the shank. It wasn’t a sewing failure, but I still felt the unreasonable need to explain that to everyone.
“The button broke,” I told Helen.
“Can we continue without it?”
“For the test, yes. Mina, the dark spare?”
Mina found it in the kit and passed it over. I made the temporary repair while Helen spoke to Ruth about the next entrance.
Nick looked down at me. “You don’t have to defend every button.”
“Somebody has to.”
“They’re lucky to have you.”
I glanced up. He was teasing, but gently. I looked back at the thread before my face could give me away.
“Don’t breathe extravagantly.”
“How extravagant is too extravagant?”
“You’ll know.”
He became very still. The silence between us felt different from the room’s silence. I could see the pulse move at the base of his throat, and I knew he was thinking about Saturday too.
I finished the stitch and cut the thread.
“There.”
“Thank you.”
The words were ordinary. His voice was not quite.
I stood and went back to Mina, who handed me the broken button without comment. I loved her for the restraint and suspected it would not last.
At lunch, Nick found me in the narrow courtyard behind the theater. I was eating the sandwich I had remembered to make that morning. The courtyard contained three chairs, two pots of herbs no one claimed to own, and a bicycle that had not moved since Easter.
“Can I sit?”
“If the chair survives.”
He tested it before putting his full weight down. “A venue with suspense.”
I smiled at my sandwich.
For a moment neither of us spoke. From inside came the sound of somebody playing the same four notes on a piano, stopping, then trying again.
“I’ve been trying to think of a graceful way to say this,” Nick began.
“That sounds worrying.”
“It hasn’t worked. So I’ll say it badly.”
I put the sandwich down.
“I’d like to take you out.”
There it was. No careful discussion of what Saturday had meant, no attempt to turn the kiss into an accident we could both escape.
I looked at him. “For dinner?”
“Ideally. Though I’m open to other meals.”
“You already bought me dinner.”
“That was wages. This would be a date.”
I laughed once, then stopped. He waited.
“Nick.”
“I know.”
“You don’t know what I’m going to say.”
“No. You’re right.”
That made it harder to hide behind the speech I had been assembling all weekend.
I looked at the herbs. One of them might have been mint. It had the look of a plant preparing to conquer something.
“I’m not ready to be somebody’s proof that I’m fine.”
Nick leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “Is that what you think I’d be doing?”
“I don’t know. Everyone’s going to have a version of it.”
“Probably.”
“Daniel’s best friend takes out Daniel’s ex. It’s a story before either of us opens our mouths.”
His expression tightened a little. “I’m aware.”
“Are you?”
He looked at me then, and I heard the unfairness in my own question.
“Yes,” he said. “I’ve had three messages asking whether I’m making a point.”
I went still. “From him?”
“One from him. Two from people who think they can help.”
“What did you say?”
“That if I wanted to make a point, I’d use fewer words than a dinner invitation.”
I almost smiled. Then I saw that he was angry, and not with me exactly, but tired of being assigned motives by everybody who knew him.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
He rubbed his thumb along the edge of the chair. “It’s all right.”
“No. I asked as if I was the only person this could be awkward for.”
He looked up. Something eased between us.
“It can be awkward,” he said. “We don’t have to pretend it won’t be.”
I thought about his mouth against mine, the brief surprise before he kissed me back. I thought about how much I had enjoyed listening to him talk about his work. Neither memory became less real because Daniel would dislike it.
“Wednesday,” I said.
Nick blinked. “Wednesday?”
“I’m free Wednesday.”
“So am I.”
“Somewhere without anyone we know.”
He considered. “That rules out most of Westmere and three people in London.”
“Then we’ll have to be inventive.”
He smiled, properly this time, and my stomach did something so familiar and so unexpected that I had to look away.
The pianist inside finally found the right note. It rang through the open door and was followed by a small, triumphant swear.
Nick laughed. “A good sign.”
“Don’t get superstitious.”
“I’m an actor. It’s in the contract.”
We went back inside separately because his lunch break had ended before mine. I sat for another minute, finishing the sandwich. It tasted better than it had before.
That afternoon, I made a list of alterations and worked through them until the theater emptied around me. When I reached the bottom, I realized I had gone almost an hour without thinking about the wedding.
I didn’t celebrate it. I simply noticed.
At home, I opened my wardrobe and discovered that owning clothes for other people did not make dressing myself any easier. Everything seemed to belong to a version of me who had somewhere different to go.
I tried a black dress, took it off, tried a shirt and trousers, took those off too. Then I sat on the bed in my underwear and rang Mina.
“I have a question,” I said.
“Does it involve a person whose waistcoat we’ve repaired?”
“Possibly.”
“At last.”
I closed my eyes. “Please don’t make that noise.”
“What noise?”
“The one in your face.”
She laughed. I found myself laughing too, and for a little while the evening became uncomplicated: my friend on the phone, clothes across the bed, a date I wanted to look nice for.
When we hung up, I chose the dark red dress at the back of the wardrobe. I had bought it before Daniel, on a day when I had not needed anyone else’s opinion.
I hung it on the outside of the door.