Enough to Ask

After Felix left, I completed the application for the continuing role. He had not asked me to. Mette had invited me to apply, and I wanted to know whether I could say no to an actual offer rather than to the frightening idea of one.

I told Rafi the same day. She said she could hold her own plans until the date the studio expected to decide, but not until the end of the year. I gave her the date in writing. Sending it cost me the comfortable fiction that the shop would wait, unchanged, while someone in Copenhagen chose me.

Then I took a week to find out what an independent studio would require instead of repeating that I wanted one.

I asked Mette what work I could properly take on outside an institution. She told me which treatments she would never attempt without its equipment and which owners needed a careful examiner more than a dramatic restorer. I priced a bench, light, storage and the time a record took when nobody else prepared the folder. I wrote to two former clients who had asked whether I could assess fragile pieces after my placement. I did not promise them an address I didn’t have.

Rafi and I met on a call with both copies of the shop agreement in front of us. She wanted the alterations floor for the following year, on a lease in her own name. I had thought I might return to my old table and work among her fittings. It would have been cheaper, and it would have made every customer ask which of us owned which promise.

“Would you want the back room?” she asked. “I don’t use it except to store boxes. We could ask the landlord to let it separately while you find out whether there’s enough conservation work. You’d have your own entrance from the passage.”

“Only if we can keep your business out of mine,” I said. “No clients sent across because I’m in the building, and no expectation that you’ll cover my days.”

“I was about to say the same to you.”

We worked through the rent. The room needed better light and lockable storage; I could afford the changes from the money I had set aside before leaving, but only if I took a small beginning and kept my alterations clients to those I could finish myself. Rafi would not guarantee my income. I would not call her decision to stay a favour. We agreed to ask the landlord whether he would divide the tenancy and put separate terms in writing before either of us signed, after I had inspected the space.

The studio called me in for an interview. I spoke about the scarf, the jacket and one question I had not yet been able to answer about a client’s coat. I had expected the panel to ask what I could save. They asked what I would leave alone. I knew how to answer without pretending that restraint was fear.

The offer came a week later, subject to the ordinary employment paperwork. It was a real salary and a room full of equipment I would not have to buy. Mette had given me no assurance when I applied, and she did not treat my being chosen as a debt I owed her.

I carried the letter home unopened from the studio because I already knew the sum from the call. At my desk I read it properly and found myself longing for the ease it offered. There was no shame in wanting an institution that would pay me to do work I loved. If I stayed, I could still love Felix. We would have to discover whether visits and calls were a life, not only a way to keep one possible. He had said he could not move his workshop. I believed him. The letter did not make the distance smaller.

I called Rafi and told her the offer had arrived. She asked when I would decide. I gave her the date we had written down. She did not ask me to choose her shop or tell me the room would vanish if I thought another day. When the call ended, I spread the cost of the London room beside the salary from Copenhagen. The first year alone would be harder in London. The numbers were plain enough to frighten me without settling the question.

I took the offer down from the wall and went to the studio. Mette was at the long table, checking an examination record. I told her I would finish the placement and go home at its agreed end, but would not accept the continuing post.

“Because of the carpenter?” she asked.

“Because I want to make a room of my own and find out whether I can keep it. I love him. He is one reason London is home. He isn’t the reason I want the work there. The salary makes refusing difficult. That doesn’t make it the wrong choice.”

She read my face for a moment. “Then we have the rest of your placement to make sure you can defend what you do in that room.”

“I would like that.”

She set a folder between us. It held the record for the first jacket I had examined, the one with the pale line across its back. The owner had answered our question. Her mother had repaired it before she left for a job abroad; she had not wanted the marks concealed.

“You were right to ask,” Mette said. “You can write the treatment proposal.”

I had not been right about everything. I had simply left the uncertain part visible long enough for someone else to answer. I went back to the desk and began.

Before I went home I wrote to Rafi. I told her I had refused the post, that I would return on the agreed date and that I wanted to inspect the back room before either of us signed anything. She replied with a photograph of the passage door and three measurements. Beneath them she wrote, I have work until you’re back. We can talk about the room then. She had not waited in an empty shop for me to become certain.

· · ·Scene break

On our next call I told Felix about the back room before I told him about the application. The figures and the offer were both still on my desk.

“You haven’t seen it since Rafi took over,” he said.

“I know. I’ll inspect it when I come home. We have figures, not a lease.”

“Would you want me to look at the window and the locks?”

“As a carpenter? I could pay you for the assessment.”

“As a man who has seen the room. I’ll tell you what I know, and you can hire whoever you choose.”

“That is a strange sort of romance.”

“I can think of others.”

The expression on his face made me put down my pen. I had learned the difference between being protected from a cost and being met honestly inside it. Wanting him had lost none of its force while I worked out what the room would be.

“They offered me the job,” I said. “I turned it down. I’ll finish here and come back at the end we planned.”

He did not celebrate before asking why. I told him what I had learned about the work I could do, the costs I could carry and the uncertainty I wanted to choose. I told him I had applied because I needed the choice to be real, and had given Rafi an answer she could plan around. I told him I would be frightened when I came home, even if the numbers worked.

“I can be with you while you’re frightened,” he said. “I won’t tell you a client will come because I want one to.”

“And I won’t tell you I chose the studio for us. I want us. I made this decision for me.”

He smiled then, a little tired, entirely himself. “When you get back, will you come and look at the room with me?”

“Yes. I would like you there. Then I have to ask you something else.”

“You can ask it now.”

“When I’m home, would you make a place for me in your ordinary week? Not every evening. I want to be able to say Tuesday belongs to us and hear what you actually have on Tuesday.”

He looked toward the door of his flat, where his work boots stood. “Tuesday I can finish by six. Thursday Dad cooks. I want a weekend with you that we choose before someone else asks for it.”

“That is almost alarmingly practical.”

“You wanted an answer I could keep.”

“I did.”

We chose the first Tuesday after my return. It was months away. I put it in my calendar anyway, then went out into a Copenhagen evening that still belonged to me.

For the remaining weeks Mette did not soften the work because I was leaving. She asked me to present the jacket’s proposal to two colleagues who had not examined it. I laid the first photographs beside the owner’s account and explained why I would support the fragile lining but leave the pale repair visible. One colleague wanted more intervention at the shoulder; she showed me the movement I had missed. We changed the proposal together. I wrote the change with both our names. It was the sort of disagreement I would have to seek out deliberately when I worked alone.

The last week I packed my notes in their proper order and made copies of the records I had permission to keep for my portfolio. Mette walked me to the door after the final session. She gave me no ceremonial speech about following my heart. She said I was ready to make some decisions and wise enough to ask for help with the ones I wasn’t ready to make. I thanked her for letting me be wrong where the record could show it.

The return ticket lay beside the two halves of the blue plate. I had wrapped them once to leave them with the landlady, then unwrapped them. I wanted the evidence of a foolish Sunday purchase in the room I would try to make at home.