The Long Way Home

The next evening Felix sent me a message at six seventeen.

Can you walk for half an hour?

I was standing in the shop with a client’s wedding trousers over one arm. He could have come in, as he always had. Instead he had given me a question I could answer without seeing his face.

Yes. Seven?

Seven. By the bus stop.

He didn’t add anything about the night before. I read the three messages until the screen dimmed, then went back to the trousers. The right leg was half an inch shorter than the left. I measured it twice because I no longer trusted what my hands did when Felix was in my head.

By seven the rain had become too fine to see and too steady to ignore. Felix waited under the bus shelter with his coat buttoned badly, the repaired hem showing through the gap. He had worn it to work. I looked away before he saw me looking.

“You missed a button,” I said.

“I noticed at lunchtime.”

“You could have fixed it.”

“I know.”

Usually a remark like that would have led to my reaching across and doing it for him. I kept my hands in my pockets. Felix looked at them and then at me, and we both smiled without having agreed what the smile meant.

We crossed at the lights and took the street past the closed florist. The shutters had been painted with enormous orange flowers, each one shaped differently. The florist’s real flowers had never looked as cheerful. Felix had once spent a Sunday helping her straighten the warped back door; she paid him in a bowl of pears I ate nearly all of. I could tell him that story, make us comfortable again, and lose the chance to ask the question that had kept me awake.

“Did you know I was leaving when you came in?”

“No. I saw the boxes.”

“Then why the coat?”

“Because I wanted to see you.” He took a breath. “I thought I could arrive with a reason and leave before I asked for anything else.”

He said it without trying to make the sentence charming. That was worse. A year of unexplained visits altered itself in my mind: a loose stair tread he had meant to fix for weeks, the day he brought a spare key and sat through an afternoon of bad tea while I cut a dress apart. Some visits had been work. I had let myself believe they all were.

“I would have let you in without the coat,” I said.

“I know you would.”

“That isn’t the same thing as wanting you there.”

“It isn’t.”

He stopped at the corner so a cyclist could pass. I wanted him to tell me whether he had been waiting for me to see it. Instead he watched the cyclist turn into the side street and let me take the next step first.

“I didn’t tell you about the final interview,” I said. “I told everyone else who mattered.”

“I guessed that part.”

“I was afraid you’d say you were pleased and then offer to help me close the shop. You would mean every word, and I’d have no right to ask for the one you hadn’t said.”

The rain gathered on his eyelashes. He blinked it away. “You had a right to ask what I wanted, Nina.”

“Would you have answered?”

“I don’t know.” He gave me the truth before the kinder version of it. “I’m answering now.”

We walked the length of the florist’s street without speaking. In the shop I knew what to do with a cloth that pulled against its own seams: let it out and see what room it needed. I couldn’t make that sort of space for us by working quietly while Felix stood near the lamp.

“I don’t want you to think I kept the placement from you because I thought you’d stop me,” I said.

“I wouldn’t.”

“I know. I wanted to find out whether you might wish I would stay, and I was ashamed of wanting that from you.”

“I did wish it,” he said. “For about three seconds. Then I remembered what you sound like when you talk about that work.”

I looked at him. He had heard me practising a description of the placement to people who didn’t know what a textile conservator did. He had also heard me talk without practising, about a length of fabric that could survive a century if someone touched it less, not more. He knew the difference.

“You can wish both things,” I said.

“I can. The problem is when I act as though one of them doesn’t exist.”

We reached the little square behind the library. A bus could have taken us back in four minutes. We went around it instead, under the trees. The pavement there was uneven. I had walked it with Felix after late suppers so many times that my hand moved toward his arm before I saw it move. I stopped.

“You don’t have to make yourself strange around me,” he said.

“I’m trying not to take things that I haven’t asked for.”

He held out his hand. He did not close the distance himself.

“Would you like to?”

I had seen that hand carrying timber, lifting a kettle off my broken hob, turning a page with surprising care. I’d held it exactly once, in a crowded train carriage when the doors opened and someone pushed between us. I had kept my grip a second too long and spent years calling that second an accident.

“Yes,” I said.

His palm was warm despite the rain. I put my hand in it, and he waited for my fingers to settle before he held on. Nothing about the square changed. A woman hurried past us with a parcel under her coat. The library lights went out floor by floor. The wanting I had tried to put into another category was simply there, in my hand and along the back of my neck.

“Is this all right?” he asked.

“You know it is.”

“I hoped.”

I tightened my fingers around his. “It’s all right.”

The difference between knowing and hoping had made a life of its own between us. I could feel it every time we passed a shop window and saw our reflection together, two people who looked as though they had worked this out years ago.

I was thirty-nine. Felix was forty-two. We were old enough to know that holding hands in the rain settled nothing by itself, and I still wanted him to keep holding mine.

“What did you do today?” I asked.

“The stair rail for the house on Merton Street. One post had been cut short, so I made a new one.”

“And after that?”

“I came home. I ate supper. I didn’t go back to the workshop.”

That should not have been news. Felix worked for himself, which everyone took to mean he could stop whenever he liked. Usually it meant he stopped only after everyone else had asked for what they needed.

“I’m glad,” I said.

“I don’t want that to be remarkable.”

I knew he meant it. I also knew that if I asked him to spend every evening with me before I left, he might agree and find a way to finish his own work after midnight. We would call the hours romantic because they were ours. I would be the one sleeping while he paid for them.

“It hasn’t occurred to me often enough to ask when you’re free,” I said. “I just ask if you can come.”

“Sometimes I want to come.”

“That isn’t an answer.”

He laughed then, briefly. “You were listening.”

“I was.”

We took the longer side of the square and came out by my shop. I could see the boxes beneath the cutting table through the window. The placement letter was on my desk; I had printed it because I wanted proof it existed. In eight weeks the room would belong to someone else for a while, and nothing Felix said tonight would change that.

He let my hand go before we reached the door. I missed it instantly, which was inconvenient information about myself.

“I’m at the workshop tomorrow,” he said.

“All evening?”

“I haven’t decided. I promised myself one night this week without anybody needing something.”

I nearly said that I didn’t need anything, but I had been doing precisely that for years: arriving with a small excuse and staying because he made room. He had offered me his hand tonight. That did not entitle me to tomorrow.

“Then keep it,” I said.

“Thank you.”

I found my keys. He stood close enough that I could see the drops caught in the seam I had mended. I wanted to straighten his collar. I wanted him to decide I was an exception to his one free evening. Neither wish was a reason to reach for him.

“I want to see you again,” I said. “Tell me when you have time.”

His expression changed. Not relief exactly. He looked as though I had put something he valued down carefully instead of keeping it because he had always let me.

“I will,” he said.

I opened the shop door. Felix waited until I was inside, then turned toward the bus stop with his coat still buttoned wrong. I could have called him back to fix it. For the first time I let him go home in a coat that was his to put right.