A Ticket

On the last Friday before I left, the blue plate broke.

I had been carrying it from the sink to the table with a dishcloth under it. The cloth caught the door handle. Half the plate stayed in my hand; the rest landed at my feet with a sound that brought Rafi up from the shop.

“Are you hurt?”

“Only extravagantly.”

She took the pieces from me and set them on the table. The painted lemon had split down the middle.

“I’ll get the brush,” she said.

“I can do that. You have the invoice for Mrs Pike.”

Rafi stopped at the stairs. “You leave on Tuesday. You can let me sweep your floor on a Friday.”

I let her. The shop downstairs was no longer arranged entirely to suit my hands. She had moved the press toward the window and set a row of sample hems below her own name on the glass. My name stayed there too, a smaller line beneath. We had agreed it would until we knew what happened when I returned. I had expected the sight to make me territorial. Instead I liked watching a customer ask for Rafi and find her.

Felix came at six with a paper parcel and a shoulder stiff from the library installation. All four tables were in place. The children had found the low one before he had finished removing his tools.

“One of them traced the groove round the edge,” he told Rafi, who had come down with us. “The librarian said it would encourage them to fiddle. They were reading while they did it.”

“You might survive the accusation,” I said.

He put the parcel on the cutting table. Inside was a roll of plain paper large enough to wrap my tools without their catching on one another. He had measured my longest shears and cut a stiff sleeve for them. There was nothing romantic about the sleeve until I thought of him at his bench after the tables were installed, using his tired hands on a thing I would take away.

“You didn’t have to work again tonight,” I said.

“I know. I wanted to make it.”

Rafi took one look at us and announced that she was going upstairs to finish sweeping a floor that had not required twenty minutes. We were alone beside two presses, hers by the window and mine near the old mirror.

“I broke our plate,” I said.

“Did it insult you?”

“The lemon came apart. I’m keeping it.”

“Then you’ll need two shelves.”

I took his hand. He smelled of cut wood and the rain he had walked through. We had been so careful about dates and routes that I had forgotten the departure would also be the loss of this: reaching across my own table and finding him.

“I am excited,” I said. “I don’t want you to see me crying at the airport and think I was wrong to go.”

“I won’t. I want you to tell me about the work when you get there. Even if you tell me crying.”

I pulled him close. The kiss began with my hands against his coat and ended with them under it, warm against his back. He made a small sound when I found a place where his shirt had lifted. I wanted the sound again. He rested his forehead against mine instead.

“Rafi is upstairs,” he said.

“With a broom. She’ll make a great deal of noise coming down.”

“That’s a terrible use of her generosity.”

He was right, and he was smiling when he said it. We went through the back door and walked to his flat. I had an entire suitcase to finish and two appointments on Monday. I gave him this Friday because I wanted it, not because it was our last chance.

At his flat he made the supper he had intended to make before I arrived. I was impatient with the onions, with the slow browning of them and the careful way he tasted the sauce twice. He gave me a piece of bread to keep me occupied. I ate it standing beside him and watched his hand move over the pan. There had been evenings when I called him away from his own supper for a seam, a hinge, a fear I would not name. I had imagined his kitchen in those hours as a place he could leave without loss. Now I knew the plant at the window and the chipped blue-lined bowl, and wanted to stay while the onions took their time.

“Tell me something you won’t put in a message,” I said.

“I’ll miss making too much supper because I think you may come over.”

“You could still make it.”

“I could. I don’t want to eat it while I pretend you’re on your way.”

I set down the bread. He had given me a more useful answer than a promise to wait. I told him I would miss seeing the light under his workshop door when I passed it on my way home. I had always looked, even on nights I did not intend to go in.

We ate, then he showed me the cuff he had been practising on. I sat across his knees with the coat pooled around us and put the needle in his hand. His first stitch held. His second caught the wrong layer, and I helped him take it out. My cheek brushed his when I leaned forward. He turned his head but did not kiss me until I looked up and did it first.

“What do you want?” he asked after a while.

“I want to be here until morning.”

“You can.”

“I want you to know I am still glad about Tuesday.”

“I know that too.”

He put the needle safely into the cloth and drew me back to him. The coat slid to the floor. I could feel his unhurried attention in every place he touched me, and in the places he waited for me to close the distance. We took our time going to bed. On Saturday morning I found the coat folded over a chair with the cuff still unfinished. It made me smile to see a thing we had left for another day.

· · ·Scene break

At the airport on Tuesday, Felix carried the suitcase until the point beyond which he couldn’t. I had my Irish passport in the pocket of my bag; my mother had checked twice that I had renewed it before I accepted the placement. Felix did not bring flowers. He had brought a sandwich because he knew I would claim I wasn’t hungry and then buy something expensive after security.

“The second weekend,” I said, “has a library in it for you.”

“It does. The fourth has you coming back for three days.”

“Rafi has a fitting booked on the Thursday. I said I’d stay out of her way.”

“That’s a sound plan.”

We had agreed on a call on Thursday, after my first day in the conservation room. We had not agreed to fill every intervening hour with messages. The restraint had seemed sensible in my flat. At the barrier it felt like trying to fold a coat while someone was still wearing it.

“I could ring when I land,” I said.

“I’d like that. I may be at Dad’s for supper. If I miss it, I’ll call back.”

“Yes.”

I wanted to ask him for a promise larger than either of us could keep. I kissed him instead. He held my face in both hands. When we separated, he did not tell me to be brave or say six months would pass quickly. He watched until I went through.

On the plane I ate the sandwich. It was cheese and tomato, with too much mustard. I finished every part of it.

· · ·Scene break

The room I rented in Copenhagen had a broad windowsill, a narrow bed and a desk set against a wall painted the colour of weak tea. The studio was a tram ride away. I walked there on Wednesday to learn the route and stood outside its doors looking at the light on the upper windows. Inside, there would be damaged garments whose owners needed someone to decide how little could be done safely. I had wanted to learn that judgment in another room, with people who would see my work before they saw my name.

I sent Rafi a photograph of the studio entrance. She sent back her newly arranged mirror, with a customer visible only as the hem of a blue skirt. Felix sent a picture of the low library table under a heap of children’s books.

On Thursday my supervisor, Mette, gave me a plain cotton jacket to examine before we discussed any treatment. A pale line ran across its back. I thought at first that someone had let down a seam; close to the light I found a row of older stitches that had been taken out and put back by a hand less steady than the first. Mette asked what I would record. I said the line was a repair that belonged to the object’s history, and that I wanted to know who had made it before proposing to hide it.

“Good,” she said. “Write down what you can see. Leave what you imagine for a separate question.”

I spent the afternoon doing exactly that. There was a pleasure in being new at work I knew well enough to be useful and not well enough to be proud.

At eight that evening I put my phone on the desk. Our call was at eight thirty. I read over my notes and thought of a better way to describe a loosened thread. At eight twenty-eight Felix called.

“You are early,” I said.

“Two minutes. I got tired of looking at the clock.”

I could hear the street outside his workshop, then the scrape of the door as he shut it. He had finished work and left on time.

“Tell me one thing you learned,” he said.

I told him about the pale line and the instruction to separate what I saw from what I imagined. He asked whether I could show him the jacket. I said I couldn’t, and he asked about my own supper instead. I had eaten bread, cheese and the last pear from the bowl. He told me his father had bought a second radio for parts, though the first one worked. We let the ordinary details take their time.

When the call ended, I put the two pieces of the lemon plate on the windowsill. Rafi had wrapped them separately and tucked them between my scarves. A gap of painted yellow remained between them. I could have glued it that night. I left them where the light would fall, and went back to my notes.