The Landing Window

We did not say anything for the first two miles, and then the heater came on properly and Elias said, “Do you want chips?” and I laughed until I had to hold the door handle.

“It’s twenty past ten,” I said.

“Bea does chips till eleven for anybody who’s been working. I’m working. You’re working. That’s two of us.”

“You have just told me the worst thing about yourself in a field.”

“Yeah,” said Elias. “Hungry, though.”

So we had chips out of a bowl on the wall at the top of the slipway at twenty to eleven at night, and this is the part of the evening I would keep if I could only keep one part, which is not the part you would expect.

It had cleared. The low was coming but it had not got there yet, and the sky over the marsh had gone to that absolute black you only get with no town within nine miles, and the moon was a day off full and laid a path down the creek that moved when the water moved. The tide was two-thirds in. High water at twenty-six minutes past eleven, four metres eighty-two, the biggest of the week so far and not the biggest of the week.

The quay was wet where the last of the gulls had been. Somewhere out on the flats a curlew was doing the thing they do at night, that long rising unwinding call that people in three counties have described as haunting and which is in fact a bird telling other birds to go away.

“Curlew,” I said.

“Curlew,” he agreed.

“I got one.”

“You got one.”

We ate chips.

“Can I say a thing,” I said, “that is not about 2021.”

“Go on.”

“Today was the best day I’ve had in five years.”

He put a chip down.

“That’s not — I’m not building to anything,” I said. “I want to say it out loud because I’ve had about four days of learning what happens to me when I don’t. Today. The tree, the rope, Tomasz shouting at the chipper, Dev and his reindeer, your sister crying at a lopsided tree on a wall. My mother saying that’s better and getting back in the car. I have been doing this job since I was twenty-one and I love it and I am better at it than nearly anybody, and I have not had a day like that since I left.”

“No,” said Elias. “Me neither.”

“I’m not asking you for anything.”

“I know. You’ve had a run at asking today, though. Three, I counted.”

“You counted?”

“Course I counted,” he said, and ate another chip.

“Can I ask you something about today,” I said, “that isn’t about today.”

“Go on.”

“On that rope end. Did you know when I was about to cut? Because I didn’t tell you. I said cutting about four times out of nine and the rest of the time I just cut, and every single time the rope came tight about half a second before it needed to.”

“Yeah.”

“How?”

“You go quiet,” said Elias. “You talk to yourself up there. Not words. Little hum. And about two seconds before you put the saw in, you stop.” He shrugged. “Everybody’s got one. Tomasz breathes out. My old man used to say right.”

“You say right.”

“I know,” he said. “It’s the only thing of his I’ve kept on purpose.”

And that is when it happened, and the precision of it is the whole point.

I turned round so my back was against the wall and I looked at him — at his profile, and the grey at the side of his head, and the sleeves rolled past the elbow at that hour of the night in September, and the fact that there was a piece of woodchip in his hair from my tree, and the scar on the near forearm shaped like a comma, and the way he was frowning very slightly at a bowl of chips because he was thinking about something and had no intention of saying what.

And I did not have a single feeling that had not been available to me all week. That’s the thing. There was no lightning. There was no sudden anything. There was just a man on a wall, and a long, slow, extremely inconvenient accumulation of six days of watching him hand me things, and I discovered that the accumulation had reached the top of the glass some hours earlier and I had simply not been looking at the glass.

“Elias.”

“Mm.”

“Can I kiss you?”

He turned his head.

“I’d like an answer out loud,” I said, “because I’ve got a horrible feeling this is going to be the only sentence I actually get right this week and I’d like to hear one back.”

“Yes,” said Elias Tarrant.

So I did.

I am not going to make a production of it. It was a kiss on a quay wall at eleven o’clock at night, and my hands were cold and his were not, and there was a bowl of chips involved for the first three seconds until one of us put it down, and at some point my hand went to the back of his neck and found the woodchip and left it there.

What I will say is this. I had thought — five years, from Yorkshire, alone, at two in the morning, more often than is dignified — that if this ever happened it would be a kind of collision. Something loud and unwise. Something you do at the end of an argument.

It was not that at all.

It was slow, and it went on, and it was the most familiar thing that has ever happened to me, which is not a small word — he still does the thing of holding the side of my face with his thumb just under the ear, which nobody else has ever done to me, before or since, and which I had entirely forgotten and recognised in about a fifth of a second. And underneath the familiarity, and this is the part I did not expect, there was something completely new, which was that he was not being careful.

At thirty he was careful with me. Always. Every time. A man handling something borrowed.

He was not careful on that wall. He had one hand flat between my shoulder blades and he pulled me in against him like a man who had decided about it, and I made a noise into his mouth that I would not have made at twenty-five because at twenty-five I would have been worrying about whether I was allowed.

It went on quite a long time.

I had a very clear thought while it was happening, which I understand is not how this is meant to go. The thought was: nobody has touched my face in four years. Four years and one month, since a perfectly nice man in York who I ended it with in the April by being reasonable at him for six weeks until he gave up.

When we stopped we did not go anywhere. We stood on the quay with our foreheads together and his hand still on my face and both of us breathing like people who have carried something up a hill, and the water came up the slipway another two feet, and neither of us moved.

“Right,” I said, eventually.

“Mm.”

“I need to say the next bit fast, because if I don’t say it fast I will not say it.”

“Go on.”

“Nothing else. Not this week.” I had my eyes shut. “Not tonight, not tomorrow, not Saturday. Because your sister gets married in — “ I had to work it out “ — forty hours, and my room is four feet from your room, and this building has a corridor with a step in it and floorboards like a xylophone, and if we do this properly now then on Saturday morning I will be standing in a field lying to her about where I’ve been. Again. And I have done that. I did it for twenty-one months and I have spent five years finding out what it cost, and I am not doing it for one more day.”

He was quiet for a second.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Say it as well. Don’t just agree with me.”

“No — “ and he laughed, low, with his forehead still against mine “ — that’s fair. That’s very fair.” He straightened up a bit. “Nothing else. Not because you said it. Because I’d rather walk into that granary on Saturday with nothing on me that I’d have to be careful about.” He thought. “And because if we do it now, it’s the week. And I don’t want it to be the week.”

“What do you want it to be?”

“That’s Sunday’s conversation,” said Elias.

Which is the most maddening sentence a man has ever said to me and I will be hearing it, with real pleasure, for the rest of my life.

“This is worse,” I said. “You realise this is worse. We have made it enormously worse.”

“I know.”

“Two days.”

“I know.”

“I have to stand in a church—“

“Field.”

“—I have to stand in a field with you in a suit.”

“I’ve got the suit from the crematorium,” said Elias.

“That’s the least sexy sentence in the English language.”

“It’s a good suit.”

I picked the bowl of chips back up, because they were still there and I am not a wasteful person, and we ate the rest of them, which had gone cold, standing about a foot and a half apart.

And then I turned to go in, and looked up, and saw him.

The Herring House has a landing window on the half-floor between the first and second, an old sash with six panes and a deep sill, and it looks straight out over the quay to the moorings. Bea leaves the lamp on it all night for people coming back from the Hoy.

Roy Tarrant was standing at that window in a dressing gown, looking out at the water.

I do not know how long he had been there. He is seventy-one and his son says he sleeps about four hours a night now and is at his best between eleven and one, which is an appalling joke for a man to have played on him. He had one hand on the sash.

He saw me looking.

And his whole face opened up.

I have to tell you that I have never in my life been looked at like that. Not by anyone. Roy Tarrant looked down out of a lit window at a woman standing on a quay next to his son at ten to midnight and he was delighted — uncomplicatedly, entirely, the way you are when a thing you thought was lost turns out to be exactly where it should be — and he lifted his hand off the sash and waved at me.

Not a polite wave. A big one. Both the arm and the hand.

I waved back.

Of course I waved back. What is the alternative? You do not stand on a quay at midnight and refuse to wave at a man with vascular dementia who is pleased to see you.

“Dad’s up,” said Elias, behind me.

“He waved.”

“He does. He’s good at this time of night.” He was pulling the door key out of his pocket. “He’ll not remember it in the morning.”

I looked up one more time. Roy had turned back to the water, both hands on the sill now, watching the tide come the last of the way up the slipway like a man who had been doing exactly that at exactly this hour for fifty years.

“No,” I said. “I suppose not.”