The Chandler's

The chandler’s was still there.

I had not let myself decide, on the tram in from the airport hotel, whether it would be. Ten years is a long time on a street that has learnt what it is worth. The Shore had gone the way of every waterfront I have ever been paid to look at: the bonded warehouses turned into restaurants with one-word names, the pub on the corner painted the grey that means it now sells small plates, a boutique where the ironmonger’s had been. I walked along the water from the tram stop at nine in the morning with my bag over my shoulder, counting the changes, and I had got to fourteen before I saw it.

The same narrow front. The same gold letters on the fascia, flaking now at the edges. Rope in the window in coils, and brass cleats, and tins of marine varnish stacked in a pyramid that somebody had built with care. The door had a bell on a spring.

Above it, the two windows.

The one on the left had been the kitchen. It had a spider plant in it now and a row of cans along the sill. The one on the right, over the Water of Leith, had been ours, and there was a string of little lights across the top of it that somebody had forgotten to switch off, and a poster for a band I had never heard of, and on the sill, where I used to sit in the jumper and read out the funny parts, a pair of trainers put out to dry. There was a bicycle chained to the railing by the stair door. On the buzzer, beside the number, three names in marker pen on a strip of tape.

Students. Of course it was students. It had always been going to be somebody’s, and I had not once in ten years thought about whose.

I stood on the cobbles and looked up at the lights nobody had turned off, and I did not feel what I had come to feel, whatever that was. I felt that it was a flat. Two rooms above a shop, with somebody’s trainers on the sill. It had been the most important place in my life for five months, and it had gone on being a flat the whole time without me.

· · ·Scene break

The bell on the door went behind me.

“You’re still too thin,” said the chandler.

He was eighty if he was a day, in a cardigan with leather buttons, and he stood in his doorway with his hands in the cardigan pockets and looked at me the way he had looked at me at six in the morning ten years ago, when I came down for milk in Duncan’s jumper and he told me to eat something.

“You remember me.”

“You read out loud.” He jerked his head up at the window. “The floor’s a board thick. You could hear every word down here. There was a minister who didn’t like goats.” He considered me. “I used to wait for the goats.”

I laughed. I had not expected to, on that street, and it came out of me before I could put it anywhere.

“Come in,” he said. “I’ll put the kettle on. I owe you a cup.”

The shop smelled the way the flat had smelled: rope and brass and varnish and the sea. He had a kettle on a shelf behind the counter, a steel one, electric, that boiled without anyone holding it down, and he made the tea very strong in a pot and gave it to me in a mug with an anchor on it, and sat on his stool, and I sat on a coil of mooring rope, which he said was what it was for.

“July, it was,” he said. “He came with the van. Took him the whole day, up and down them stairs with his boxes. Wouldn’t let me help.” He drank his tea. “When it was all in, he sat on my step there an hour. Just sat. Then he gave me the keys, for the landlord, and he said, if she comes for them, you’re to give her a cup of tea.” He looked at me over the mug. “You’re ten years late for it.”

“I know.”

“It’s gone cold, then,” said the chandler, and poured me another.

· · ·Scene break

I was on the Shore at twenty to twelve, on the edge of the quay by the water, with my bag at my feet and the second mug of tea inside me, deciding nothing.

The Water of Leith goes out to the docks there between two stone walls, brown and slow and full of sky. There were swans. There always had been swans. A man was fishing off the far side with no hope at all in his face, and the tide was on the turn, and I stood looking at it and thought about a flight at nine that evening, and a desk in New York that was now Priscilla’s, and a note in a coat, and did not know which of those things I was going to do anything about.

I heard it before I saw it. An engine I knew, coming too fast along the cobbles and then too slowly, the way a man drives who does not know where to stop.

The estate van came round the corner by the pub and pulled up half on the pavement outside the chandler’s, badly, at an angle, with one wheel on the kerb. KERROW on the side, in the green. The engine stopped. For a moment nothing happened at all.

Then the door opened and he got out.

He had his coat on. He had not shaved. He stood on the cobbles beside the van with the door still open behind him, and looked up at the two windows, at the lights and the trainers and the spider plant, the way I had, and then he looked along the quay and saw me.

He shut the van door. He walked along the Shore towards me at the pace he does everything, and stopped a yard away, where the stone ran down to the water.

I had never seen him come after anything. In ten years, in all of the week, in everything Isla and Fergus and the chandler had told me, not once. He stood on a pavement in Leith with his hands at his sides, not in his pockets, and he looked like a man who had driven forty minutes without the radio and still did not know what he was going to say.

· · ·Scene break

“Did you come after me?” I said.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

He looked at the water, and then back at me.

“Because you told me where you’d be,” he said. “And I stood there and said you knew where I was. I heard it on the stairs after you’d gone. I’ve said it for ten years. I said it to Isla through a door. I said it on those stairs.” He tipped his head at the chandler’s. “I thought it meant I’d be there if you wanted me. It doesn’t. It means I’ll never once have to go and find out.”

The man on the far side cast again. The swans went past.

“I read your note,” he said. “On the steps, when the car had gone. I read it all night. This morning I stopped the van at the lodge gate to read it again, and my mother came out to see what was wrong, and I couldn’t tell her.” He took a breath. “Then I drove here.”

“You’ve never gone after anybody.”

“No.”

“How was it?”

“I don’t know how you do it.” It came out very plain. “It turns out you get in the van.”

I laughed again. It was the second time that morning, and it hurt, and I did not stop it.

“I want to tell you what I want,” I said. “I told you on Saturday and I meant it, and it’s more now. I’m not getting on the plane tonight. I decided that on the rope in there, before you came, and I want you to know I decided it before you came.” I made myself keep going. “I want to stay. Not the week. Not in your house. Near it. I want to find out what I’m like when I’m not selling anything, and I want you there when I find out. I’d like to be allowed to be bad at it. I haven’t been bad at anything in ten years. That’s the whole of it.”

He heard it all without moving.

“I love you,” he said.

He said it the way he says the practical thing, and it was the practical thing. It was the only thing in the conversation he had not needed to think about.

“I didn’t stop either. I tried. I told you.” He looked down at his hands, and then up. “And I’m done being owed. By you. By my grandfather. By your father. You don’t owe me the ten years, and I don’t owe you them. I spent seven of them paying off a thing that was never mine, so nobody could ever say I’d been bought. I wasn’t. You weren’t. Nobody in any of it was bought.” His voice went lower. “I’m letting it go. All of it. Mine too.”

Behind us, somewhere back in the town, a church clock began to strike twelve.

He listened to it. So did I. It went on for the whole twelve, slow, over the cobbles and the water and the van with one wheel on the kerb.

“That’s Stellan’s noon,” he said.

“You said no yesterday.”

“I know.” He almost smiled. “I wanted to be somewhere else when it went past.”

· · ·Scene break

We did not touch, on the Shore. We stood a yard apart at the edge of the quay for a long time and talked, the way we had not talked on Wednesday or Friday or Saturday night, without a contract in the room or a candle between us: about the bank he would go to on Thursday, with Isla; about Priscilla, who would ring me on Fridays; about the Reverend, who was in my pocket; about the chandler, who had waited for the goats.

At one the wind came up off the Forth, and I shivered, and he went back to the van without a word and came back with the navy jumper, folded in squares.

“You left this,” he said.

“It’s yours.”

“I know.” He held it out. “I’d like you to have it.”

It was not a payment. It was a jumper. I put it on over my shirt on the Shore in front of the man who was fishing, and it came down past my hands, and I put my thumb through the hole in the left cuff.

We ate chips on the quay out of the paper. We walked out to the end of the docks and back. The students came out of the stair door at three, two girls and a boy with the bicycle, and went off along the Shore laughing at something, and did not look at us, and there was no reason they should. It was their flat.

· · ·Scene break

The hotel was at the far end of the Shore, in one of the old warehouses: forty rooms, grey stone, a company in Manchester that neither of us had ever heard of, a young man on the desk who had never heard of either of us. It belonged to nobody I had ever had dinner with. I had checked, on my phone, on the quay, and he had watched me check and said nothing, and I had seen the corner of his mouth.

“One room,” the young man said. “For tonight?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Half each,” said Duncan, and got his card out.

I looked at him.

“I’m not paying for you,” he said. “And you’re not paying for me.”

“Half each,” I agreed, and the young man, who had no idea what he was part of, split it down the middle without a word.

The room was on the second floor, at the end of a corridor with the Water of Leith outside its window. We went up in a lift that was too small for two people who were being careful not to touch, and we were not careful enough, and his hand found mine between the first floor and the second, and held it, and neither of us said anything about that either.

At the door I stopped. I had the key card in my hand.

“I want to go in there with you,” I said. “I’m saying it out loud, because I spent ten years guessing what you wanted and got it wrong, and I’m not guessing tonight. Do you want that?”

“I want that.” He said it at once. “I’ve wanted it since the steps. The first night, with my hands in my pockets.” His hand was still round mine. “And if you want to stop, at this door or after it, you say, and we stop, and that’s all there is to it.”

“That goes for you as well.”

“I know it does.”

“Then I’m asking you plainly,” I said. “Will you come in?”

“Yes,” said Duncan. “Will you?”

“Yes.”

I put the card to the lock. The light went green. He opened the door and stood aside, the way he stands aside at the chapel, and this time he did not stay outside it. He came in after me.

The window was full of the evening, the water going out under it, the lights beginning on the far side and lying on the river in long lines. I turned round. He put his hand to my face, where it had been on Saturday night, and I put mine flat on his chest, over his heart, and felt it going.

He reached behind him without looking and closed the door.