The Burnt Sleeve

Keir nearly sent word that he would not come.

The lamps had fought him all day. Ordinary lamps, useful lamps, lamps that had no interest in being beautiful and nevertheless required a person to sit bent over their fittings for six hours. One had scorched his sleeve. Another had refused to sit level. By late afternoon his right hand ached and he had no entertaining observation to make about any of it.

Blythe had invited him, presumably, because she enjoyed his company.

He washed the soot from his fingers and wondered whether he possessed any company worth taking.

At her door she looked at his face and said, “You haven’t eaten.”

“That sounds like an accusation.”

“I am deciding whether to make it one.”

“I had bread.”

“When?”

“There was daylight.”

“There still is. Your defence lacks precision.”

She stood aside.

The kitchen was warm. A pot stood on the stove. Through the glass of the closed garden door, flowers shone with the beginning of evening. The ordinary room had crumbs on the table and a dishcloth hung to dry over a chair. He liked it so much that he briefly resented the garden for having made him imagine she lived inside an exhibition.

“Cap,” she said.

He held up his wrist. “Closed.”

“Good. Sit down.”

“You make invitations sound like military instructions.”

“You make hunger sound like a moral achievement. We shall both have to improve.”

He sat.

She put food in front of him and did not ask him to make the moth.

That should not have mattered. He had not thought it would matter. He ate three mouthfuls before he trusted himself to say anything.

“What is it?”

“Beans.”

“I recognised the category.”

“Then you have all the information I do. Tamsen brought them.”

He laughed, a tired sound that felt more truthful than his usual one.

Blythe ate with him. She told him about a customer who wanted a glass bowl that looked deeper than it was, so that his table might appear generous without additional expense. Keir told her about the lamp that sat crooked.

“Did you fix it?”

“I sold him a flatter piece of furniture.”

She looked up.

“No. I fixed it.”

“You are remarkably committed to seeming worse at your work than you are.”

“And you to seeming more severe.”

Her spoon paused.

He wished he had kept quiet. Then she said, “Sometimes it is easier than explaining how much I want something.”

The room grew still in a way her garden never did. This stillness was waiting, not preservation.

“The conservatory?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Tell me.”

She pushed her bowl away, then drew it back and finished the last spoonful before she answered.

“When I was first learning, Nerida took me there. I had seen pictures. They made it look enormous. It isn’t, really. It is only a room, though a high one. There was a blue branch in the middle, lit from a single moment of winter sky. I thought if I could make something that belonged beside it, I would have done what I came here to do.”

“And now you have.”

“I don’t know that.”

“You have made the garden. The room doesn’t change that.”

She shook her head. “You keep wanting recognition to be a foolish thing. It isn’t. I want people who understand the difficulty to see what I have done. I want my name in the book. I want to walk through the door and know I wasn’t merely invited to look.”

He sat back.

There was no pretty answer that would not diminish what she had told him.

“All right,” he said.

She watched him.

“I can want you to have it without wanting it myself.”

Her face eased.

“That will do.”

He flexed his right hand under the table. She saw.

“Is it hurt?”

“Tired. Nothing dramatic.”

“I didn’t ask for drama.”

She rose, poured warm water into a basin and set it beside him. Then she pulled her chair nearer and offered her hand, palm up.

“May I see?”

He put his hand in hers.

She turned it with a gentleness so unlike her brisk movements that he looked away. The skin over his knuckles was dry, a small scrape already closing near the thumb. Nothing that required rescuing. She seemed to understand that.

“The basin is there if you want it,” she said, and released him.

He put his fingers into the warm water.

Blythe gathered the dishes. She did not tell him how often he ought to rest. She did not ask whether his art was worth the discomfort. She let him sit in her kitchen with a tired hand while she made the room ready for an ordinary evening.

It undid him more efficiently than praise.

“I almost didn’t come,” he said.

She turned from the sink.

“Because of your hand?”

“Because I thought I would be dull.”

Blythe considered that with insulting seriousness.

“You have been,” she said. “I am bearing it.”

His laugh startled them both.

She came back and touched the burnt edge of his sleeve.

“That will fray.”

“Most things do.”

“Some things can be mended before they become a philosophy.”

He looked up at her. She stood close to his chair, the ribbon at her throat untied, one hand on the table. He could have touched her waist by moving only a few inches.

“Blythe.”

She knew. He could see that she knew, and the knowledge made him slow rather than hurried.

“I would like to kiss you,” he said. “Without being entertaining first.”

“I was beginning to wonder how to request that politely.”

He stood. She came toward him, and the kiss began with a laugh neither of them finished.

Her hands settled on his shoulders. His rested at her back. She drew him nearer, and he understood with a sudden, simple gratitude that she had wanted this while he was eating beans and failing to tell a good story.

He kissed her again. She met him with less restraint, her fingers tightening briefly in his shirt before she relaxed them. When he paused, she followed him, then smiled at being caught doing it.

“There you are,” he said.

“I was here the whole time.”

“I know.”

The clock struck the hour.

Blythe closed her eyes.

“The circuit,” he said.

“Yes.”

He stepped back because she needed room to leave, though every part of him wanted her to stay close.

“Come back after yours,” she said.

“It might be late.”

“I own a lamp.”

He touched her cheek. “Are you sure?”

“I would like another part of the evening.”

So would he. More than he had expected to want any evening in years.

· · ·Scene break

He walked the course badly.

Not dangerously; it could hurt nobody. But the long gold turn he had made beside the bridge failed to carry the blue trace from the previous week, and he had to walk it again. His mind kept returning to a kitchen, to a woman saying she could bear him dull.

At the fourth corner, an older running-light worker paused to watch.

“Your thread’s impatient.”

“So am I.”

“That won’t improve it.”

“I had noticed.”

He spent another hour getting it right. By the time he returned to Blythe’s house, the street lamps had been turned low and her kitchen window was dark.

He stood at the gate, ashamed of how disappointed he felt. She had probably gone to bed. She had every right. They had made no agreement about a particular hour.

Then the door opened.

Blythe stood in the passage with an ordinary lamp in one hand.

“You came.”

“I said I would.”

“People say things when they are being kissed.”

“I was listening to the things I said.”

She looked at him for a long moment, then opened the door wider.

Inside, the garden glowed behind its glass. She had finished the circuit. Every flower held itself as though nothing in the world had altered.

Keir set his closed coil on the table only after showing her the cap. He could take it off his wrist briefly; the course remained within it, waiting for the next dusk. His skin felt strangely bare without its weight.

Blythe looked at the pale mark it left.

“Eleven years,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Does it ever feel heavy?”

He could have made a joke. He had one ready.

“Tonight,” he said.

She put the lamp down and came to him.

They sat together on the narrow settle. Her feet were cold. She apologised for this as though it were a moral defect, and he offered to register a complaint with the proper authority.

“That is me,” she said.

“I suspected corruption.”

She kissed the corner of his mouth.

They stayed until the lamp needed trimming. There was no display, no new revelation. Her head rested against his shoulder. He felt her breathing grow slower and did not ask her to be interesting.

When he finally left, she took his hand in the passage.

“Tomorrow I shall be less sensible,” she said.

“A warning?”

“Something to look forward to.”

Keir walked home through the quiet streets carrying his coil in his pocket, and for once did not mind that nobody could see what he had made.