What She Did on the Tuesday

Roy Tarrant arrived at the Herring House at half past six, in a car driven by a woman called Priti who had brought her own kettle, and Elias went down the hill to meet him and I did not, because I had a tree to tie off and because I am a coward about certain kinds of front door. By the time I came down, the Curlew room had a cardigan over the back of a chair in it and the whole building smelled of somebody else’s supper, and I went up the back stairs like a burglar.

My mother came and sat on the end of my bed at half past seven with a cup of tea she had made in Bea’s kitchen without asking anybody, which is the single most Susannah thing available.

“Right,” she said. “Boat.”

“Mum, I’ve had a day.”

“You’ve had a lovely day, I watched most of it through a hedge. Boat.” She put the cup on the windowsill. “I’m going to tell you one thing about your father and then I’m going to go and eat a pie.”

“Go on.”

“He bought that boat in the April of 2009 and he asked me to go out in her once.” She looked out of the window at the creek, which was going out. “Once. The second of May. I said no, because I’d done a twelve-hour and the tide was at half six in the morning and I’d have rather been shot. And he said, righto, and he went on his own, and he was back at one, and he was perfectly cheerful about it.”

“And?”

“And he never asked me again,” said my mother. “Fourteen years. Fourteen years, that boat was in the water from April to October, and he went out in her about thirty times a summer, and he never once asked me again.”

I did not say anything.

“Now, I want to be fair to him, because he was a lovely man and I’d have him back tomorrow. He wasn’t sulking. He genuinely wasn’t. He’d have been delighted if I’d have said shall we go out in the boat, and about four times I nearly did and didn’t, because I couldn’t work out whether he’d want me there or whether I’d be — “ she made a small gesture “—in the way of it. And he could not ask, because he’d been told no once.”

“That’s horrible.”

“It’s very common,” said my mother. “It’s the commonest thing in the world. Two perfectly nice people going quiet in different rooms.” She picked the cup up again. “You’re his. You’ve got it off him like a nose. You’ve got his exact way of not wanting anything out loud in case someone catches you at it. He did it with the boat. You did it with Rotterdam.”

“I didn’t—“

“You rang me in the March of 2021 and told me there was a job going in Holland and somebody would have to take it, and you said it in the voice, Greer. The football results voice.” She stood up and smoothed the bed where she had been sitting, which I do as well and cannot stop. “And I said, oh, that sounds exciting. And what I should have said was: who are you hoping will stop you?”

She went to the door.

“Mum.”

“I’m not doing the rest of it,” she said, not unkindly. “That’s not mine. I’ve told you about the boat because you’re thirty-two and I’ve watched you be extremely capable at a funeral and it frightened the life out of me.”

Elias knocked at half eight with the truck keys in his hand.

“Deepdale,” he said. “Half an hour. It’s dark, there’s nothing to see and you won’t get your boots wet. I’d like to do the thing we didn’t do on the quay, and I’d rather not do it in a building where Cleo can hear it through a floor.”

“All right.”

“You can say no.”

“I know,” I said. “That’s why I’m saying yes.”

Deepdale is four miles west and it is not a place, it is a gap.

Roy Tarrant built that wall in 1979 — four hundred and twenty metres of clay bank with a rock toe, and he maintained it for thirty-one years, and the Agency maintained it for eight more, and in 2024 his son brought a long-reach excavator out along the old farm track and took a sixty-metre hole out of the middle of it in nine days.

We stood at the end of the standing bit with the truck lights off. There was a moon a day off full, and cloud coming in off the sea ahead of the low, and below us the water was going out through the breach at about four knots, black and folded and absolutely silent except where it went over the rock.

“Go on, then,” I said.

“June the seventeenth,” said Elias.

“Yes.”

“You left my kitchen at about twenty past eleven and I sat on the floor until half twelve, and then I got in the van and I drove to Lynn.”

I turned my head.

“To Cleo’s,” he said. “To do it. I had it in my head the whole way — what I was going to say, how I was going to start, the lot. I got there at ten past two in the morning and I sat outside with the engine off and every light in that flat was out, and I rang her, and it went to voicemail, and I sat there for forty minutes before I remembered she was on nights that week. She’d told me on the Sunday. She was at work. She was three miles away in a delivery suite.”

“You could have gone to the hospital.”

“I could have gone to the hospital.” He said it evenly. “I could have gone and stood in a car park at three in the morning and had it out with my sister between two women in labour, and I’d like to tell you the reason I didn’t was that it would have been an insane thing to do, and that is true, and it is not why.”

“Then what?”

“I drove to yours.”

The water went on going out.

“Twenty past three. Your car was there and your light was off. And I sat outside your house for an hour, Greer. An hour and about ten minutes. And at some point in that hour I stopped rehearsing and I noticed what I was actually feeling, underneath all of it.”

“Which was?”

“Relief,” said Elias.

I did not say anything, because there was nothing to say to it.

“I’d spent twenty-one months waiting to be found out,” he said. “Not about the secret. About me. I kept thinking — she’s twenty-seven, she’s got a career going somewhere, her dad reads books, she’s the cleverest person in any room she’s in, and one of these days she is going to look up and work out that I’m a bloke on a marsh with his father’s business and his father’s temper, and when she does she’ll go. And I could not stop thinking it. It was in the room the entire time, every day, like a noise.

“And that night, sitting outside your house at four in the morning, it went quiet. Because it had happened. The thing I’d been waiting for had happened, and it was over, and I didn’t have to wait for it any more. And that was such a — “ his voice did something “— such an enormous relief that I sat in a van and I cried about it, and then I drove home, and I did not knock on your door.

“So that’s the answer to the question you asked me on Sunday afternoon, near enough. That’s why I stood at the back at your dad’s funeral, too. I’m a man who’d rather have a thing finished than have to ask for it. I’ve been that since I was about nine and I’d like to tell you I’ve fixed it and I haven’t. I’ve just got old enough to see it happening.”

The cloud came over the moon and took the water out of sight and left only the noise of it.

“Now you,” he said.

“Yes.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Elias, if I don’t say it tonight I will never say it,” I said, “and I have been three days working out that this is what the whole of my life is, so give me a minute and don’t be kind to me while I do it, because if you’re kind to me I’ll stop.”

He put his hands in his pockets and looked at the sea.

“On the fifteenth of June 2021,” I said, “which was the Tuesday, at about ten past nine in the morning, I sent an email to a woman called Ineke Hoekstra at the programme in Rotterdam and I turned the job down.”

There was no sound at all from beside me.

“I’d deferred the interview twice. I’d had the offer since the end of May. And on that Tuesday morning I sat in my car outside a Co-op in Hunstanton and I wrote four lines saying thank you very much, I’m very grateful, I’ve decided to stay in the UK for personal reasons, and I pressed send, and then I sat there for about twenty minutes feeling like somebody had taken a rucksack off me.”

“Greer.”

“Let me do it.” I had my arms wrapped round myself. “I wanted to stay. That’s the fact. On the fifteenth of June 2021 I wanted to stay here and build a life with you and I had already done something about it, and there was nothing left to arrange, and all I had to do was drive to Saltmere and knock on your door and say: I’ve turned it down. I want to stay. Please want that too.

“And I couldn’t.

“I could not make my mouth do it. I sat in that car for two days. And what I did instead, on the Thursday night, was drive to your kitchen and tell you I had an offer I had to answer by the morning — which was a lie, it was four days dead by then — and say: tell Cleo tonight and I’ll turn it down.

“I built it to fail, Elias. That’s the part. I knew you. I knew exactly what a four-hour ultimatum at eleven at night would do to you, I knew you’d go quiet and then you’d say something noble, and I chose it — because a demand you refuse is survivable and a request you refuse isn’t. If I’d asked you plainly and you’d said no, I’d have had to know that you didn’t want me. This way I got to be the one with a job in Holland.”

“And when I said—“

“When you said I’m not going to be the reason you stayed,” I said, “I could not take it back. Because taking it back meant telling you I’d already turned it down, which meant telling you I’d built the whole evening, which meant telling you what I am.”

“So what did you do?”

“I went home,” I said, “and at four in the morning I wrote to Ineke Hoekstra and I asked her whether the post was still open, and I dressed it up as a change in my personal circumstances, which was accurate. And she said yes. They hadn’t advertised it again.

“And I went to Rotterdam in the September and I did three years there, and it was a good job and I was good at it and I have a paper with my name on it about beech and it is quoted, and every single day of those three years I knew that I was there because I had been too much of a coward to say one sentence in a kitchen.”

The tide had gone down far enough that the breach had started to make a different noise, lower, a sort of gulping.

“Does anybody know that?” he said.

“No.”

“Not your mum.”

“Nobody. You’re the first person I have ever said it to out loud, and I’d like to tell you I chose you and the truth is I have had three days of watching you say hard things standing up and I appear to have caught it.”

He didn’t answer for a long time.

“I’d like to be angry about it,” he said, at last. “I’ve had a go on the way over, actually, because I worked out on Wednesday night that there was something. And I can’t get it going.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s the same thing,” said Elias. “It’s the exact same thing. You built an evening so you couldn’t be refused. I’ve built a life so I can’t be. We did it to each other for twenty-one months and we were both so pleased with how easy we were to be with.”

I laughed. It came out of me horribly and I put my hand over my mouth.

“God,” I said. “We were, though. Weren’t we. Separately. People used to tell each of us, separately, that we were the most reasonable person they’d ever—“

“—met,” he said. “Yeah. My old man said it about you at a barbecue.”

We stood on his father’s wall.

“I don’t know what to do with that,” I said.

“Nothing,” said Elias. “Not tonight.”