Three Days

I came back to London on a Thursday carrying a bag of clean clothes and one photograph Mette had let me take of the scarf after we had settled its treatment. The repair was almost invisible at first glance. When I looked closer, I could see the small structure holding it. I wanted Felix to see why I was proud.

Rafi had asked me to meet her at the shop before the first client arrived. She had moved the fitting-room mirror. The press stood under the window as she had planned. A row of neat cloth samples hung behind the counter, and beside my old price list was a new one with her handwriting on it.

“I didn’t change your prices,” she said before I could ask. “Those are mine for work I take in. I wrote up the split for the shared costs.”

I read it. She had been more precise about thread and electricity than I had ever been. I felt the wrong kind of pride rise in me, as though I had trained her. Rafi had made a business decision because she was good at it. I put the list down.

“The fitting room looks better,” I said.

“I know. Don’t try to help me with the nine o’clock. You’re on leave from here.”

“I’m your landlord for the month.”

“You’re a woman holding a suitcase in my doorway. Go see your carpenter.”

I laughed, and then it caught in my throat. She came around the counter and put her arms round me. When she let me go she asked me to send her the terms for my return by the end of the placement, whether I came back full time or not. She wanted a decision she could plan a life around. I promised to give her one.

Felix was in the library when I found him. He had told me I could meet him there if I wanted, but not to come expecting him to leave before the children’s session finished. I stood near the shelves and watched two of the low tables in use. A girl had spread a book across the groove he had drawn for wandering fingers. Felix was crouched by the far table, tightening a fitting beneath it while the librarian read aloud.

He looked up. For one surprised second his face was unguarded. Then he put the tool down safely, rose and came to me.

“You got in early,” he said.

“The train did.”

We kissed between a shelf of books on gardens and a notice asking readers to keep the aisle clear. He smelled of timber, dust and the soap he kept at the workshop sink. I had expected the first kiss to tell me whether distance had altered us. It told me I had missed him in ways no call could carry.

“I have to finish this,” he said. “Ten minutes.”

“I can see the tables. I’ll wait.”

It was pleasant to wait when I knew he had chosen the work and told me what it would take. I sat at the grown-up table and looked at the photographs of the scarf on my phone. When he was done, the librarian insisted we both see the children’s finger marks along the edge. She said it was the first furniture in the room nobody had asked the children to be careful around.

Outside, Felix took my suitcase. I let him, though I was capable of carrying it. We walked toward his flat without deciding whose home I would use for the three nights. Halfway there he stopped.

“Do you want to go to yours first?”

“I was hoping to be at yours.”

“Then we can. I wanted to ask before I acted as though three days of you belonged to me.”

“You have my Thursday,” I said. “And Friday, if I can have yours. Saturday I promised Rafi I’d take her to supper.”

“I can do Friday. Saturday I’ve got Dad’s shed roof to measure. He asked me to price the work, and I said I’d look.”

I had imagined the visit as three whole days stolen from everything else. In the street I had to let the actual days have edges. Neither of us seemed diminished by them.

· · ·Scene break

At his flat the basil plant had outgrown the window. The florist’s cutting beside it had put out two leaves. On the sofa lay the book I had seen on my first night there, finished now and turned the other way up. I had the odd sensation of entering a room that had been waiting for me and continuing without me.

“You moved the table,” I said.

“The board came off it. I found out it has four legs.”

“I like it there.”

He set the suitcase by the bedroom door. I took his face in my hands and kissed him until we forgot the joke. He stepped back once to make sure the door was closed, and I pulled him toward me again.

“Nina,” he said, a warning only to himself.

“I know I can stay without going to bed. I want to go with you.”

“So do I.”

He kissed the place below my ear. My hands found the back of his shirt and the warmth of his skin. I had spent weeks seeing him in a bright rectangle on a desk. Having the full weight and hesitations of him near me was almost unbearable. I could have hurried to make up for every night apart. He put his hand over mine and waited until I met his eyes.

“We have tonight,” he said.

“Only tonight?”

“Tonight is the one I can hold.”

I wanted to argue with that, then felt how much easier it made breathing. I took him into the bedroom and closed the door.

· · ·Scene break

The next afternoon I showed him the scarf photograph. He held the phone at an angle to catch the line I meant.

“Someone will wear it again?”

“If they choose to. It can bear handling. That’s more than it could do when it came in.”

“You’re pleased with it.”

“I am. Mette asked whether I would write the final record for the collection. She has been watching how I describe uncertainty.”

Felix smiled. “I’ve seen you describe a crooked hem to its owner. They always know what can and cannot be fixed by the time you finish.”

“You don’t have to find a connection to my shop to understand the work.”

“I was thinking that I do understand it.”

I was embarrassed by how quickly I had defended myself. He had seen me in one room for years; I wanted him to know I was more than an old set of skills carried abroad. His answer let the new work belong to me without severing the old.

On Saturday I went to supper with Rafi while Felix looked at his father’s roof. She took me to a small place near the station where we used to order the cheapest dish and complain about the cut of the tablecloth. This time she brought a notebook. She showed me the figures for the shop, which were better than either of us had expected, and asked whether I had begun to imagine my own work differently.

“I thought I would come back to my cutting table,” I said. “Now I keep picturing a bench where I could examine things before promising to mend them. I don’t know where it goes.”

“It might not go in the front room.”

“I know. That was my room first. It doesn’t make it my room now.”

She closed the notebook. “If you want to find another place, I will help you measure it. If you want one here, tell me what it has to be. Don’t come home to the table you remember because I was polite enough to leave it in the same place.”

I looked at her. She had been working there for weeks and had already made it a place I could not simply resume. The grief of that was smaller than the pride I felt in her. I told her about the scarf, and she asked why Mette had trusted me to write its record. I was still answering when we reached the last of our supper.

When I left the restaurant Felix was under the awning outside the shop, neither one of us obliged to be there. His father had decided the shed roof needed only a small repair he could arrange himself. Felix had given him the name of a roofer and accepted that he might use it.

“Did you make yourself unnecessary?” I asked.

“I gave him a price. He said he’d rather argue with somebody who didn’t know where he kept his cards.”

Rafi had asked for an answer she could use. I told Felix so.

“Then you’ll give her one,” he said.

“I will. I don’t know what it is yet.”

He took my hand. I could feel the callus at the base of his thumb. London was not holding still for me, nor should it. When I flew back on Sunday I would leave him in a life that worked without my supervision. I loved him more for how much of it he had shown me this time, though I was not yet ready to say the word aloud.