The Outer Door

Blythe had spent the afternoon making a green bowl when she realised she was planning to finish early for Keir.

Not the garden. Not a customer. A man.

She set down the bowl and waited for the part of herself that objected.

It arrived promptly. There were three orders to finish, the conservatory arrangement to consider, a copper strip that needed cleaning. There were always three orders, some arrangement, some small thing requiring her attention. She had arranged it so that the list never ended.

She washed her hands.

Keir found her at the gate before dusk, wearing her coat.

“Am I late?”

“No. I am early. We should mark the occasion.”

“With a plaque?”

“A walk will do.”

They went down the long street toward the old market. She took his hand halfway there, after thinking about it for an embarrassing distance. His fingers closed around hers as though he had been waiting but had not wanted to presume.

“You could have done that,” she said.

“I know.”

“You are going to be very tiresome about letting me choose, aren’t you?”

“Only until you stop looking as though you want to argue with the things you want.”

She considered withdrawing her hand on principle. It would have made his point too neatly.

At the market they bought roasted chestnuts and ate them from a folded paper. Neither was particularly good at peeling them. Keir dropped one down his coat. Blythe laughed so hard she had to put her hand on the wall.

He watched her instead of retrieving it.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“That was not nothing.”

“I like you like this.”

She looked down at the torn paper in her hands. “Covered in chestnut skin?”

“Yes. It’s an unusual preference. I’m learning to live with it.”

He took a piece from her sleeve, then stopped touching her. She wished he had not.

They walked to the river. All along its darkening banks, running-light workers began their evening turns. A silver thread moved between two posts. A red wheel opened and folded into a narrow line. None lit the path well enough to replace the oil lamps. That was not what the work was for.

Blythe watched Keir watching them.

“Do you want to start?”

“I have time.”

“I don’t want you to spoil it because of me.”

“I don’t intend to.”

There was a firmness in his voice she liked. He was not offering her his work as a gift she had never requested. She did not want to become the person a man blamed, kindly or otherwise, for the things he ceased to do.

He drew a small loop from his coil, just enough to examine its colour. Then he put it away.

“What did you see?”

“The turn from yesterday. It held.”

“The one that kept you late?”

“Yes.”

She felt foolishly glad. She had wanted him in her kitchen. She also wanted the thing he cared about to be good.

A group of still-light visitors passed them on the embankment, recognisable by the little copper badges worn for the open-garden week. One looked at their joined hands. Another looked away with exaggerated speed.

Blythe felt the old impulse to separate.

Keir felt it too. His fingers loosened so she could let go.

She tightened hers.

The group passed.

“Was that difficult?” he asked.

“Yes.”

He did not say it ought not to be. She was grateful.

“Will it get easier?” she asked.

“Probably in some ways.”

“An inspiring answer.”

“I could give you a false one with better rhythm.”

She leaned into his arm. “Keep that for the audience.”

At the foot of the north steps he turned toward her. The river moved behind him. She could see the place beneath his jaw she had noticed on the first day, now properly shaved, which seemed a disappointing loss.

“Blythe,” he said. “I wanted to ask you something before we go back to our respective masterpieces.”

“Ask.”

“Will you come to my house on Sunday? Not to see the workshop. To have supper and stay as long as you like.”

The invitation was simple. It made her pulse hurry.

“Yes.”

His smile was not the one he used when he made a room laugh. She had begun to know the difference. This one was slower, less certain of being returned.

She kissed him because she wanted him to know it was returned.

His hand came to her waist. She stepped closer, felt him steady himself and then stop holding back quite so much. The cold air, his warm mouth, the pressure of his hand through her coat: she noticed all of it with an attention that had nothing to do with preserving anything.

When she drew back, he stayed near.

“Sunday,” he said.

“I heard you the first time.”

“I was reminding myself.”

They laughed softly. She touched his face, letting herself do what she had wanted at the garden gate.

Then the first bell sounded from the upper street, and both of them looked toward the darkening sky.

Their work was waiting.

· · ·Scene break

Blythe completed the circuit with an impatience that frightened her.

The flowers did not care. They did not know she had been kissed beside the river or that she wanted Sunday to be nearer. They asked only the thing they had always asked: her attention, entire and nightly, at each of the seven turns.

She gave it. She was good at giving it.

At the amber bed she crouched and touched the copper joining strip. A crumb of dust lay in the groove. She cleaned it away with the corner of her sleeve.

The flower shone, unchanged.

She had been nineteen when she caught that light. Thirty-seven now. Eighteen years of making sure a room with no furniture never became a different room in her memory.

It had been a beginning. She had made it into a rule.

She stood up too fast and felt dizzy, not from magic but from kneeling too long. The distinction mattered. People blamed their art for an astonishing number of ordinary discomforts.

Someone knocked at the outer door.

Keir stood beyond the arch with the coil closed on his wrist.

“You finished?” she asked.

“For tonight. You?”

“Yes.”

“I was going to pass without knocking.”

“That would have been a poor decision.”

“I am attempting to make fewer of those.”

She reached for him.

He came into the unlit passage and closed the outer gate behind them. She took his face between her hands and kissed him with the impatience she had refused to give the flowers. He answered, then paused, his forehead near hers.

“Tell me if you want slower.”

“I want you to stop being quite so far away.”

He drew her close. She rested against him, no glass between them, nothing to maintain. For a few moments she let the pleasure of being held occupy all the space she usually gave to judgement.

Then she looked past his shoulder at the garden door.

He followed her gaze.

“What?”

“I keep bringing you through the kitchen.”

“I like the kitchen.”

“I do too. That isn’t what I mean.”

She let go of him and opened the door.

The garden shone under the first stars. Its low wall, its glass petals, its seven exact turns. From the amber bed a warm reflection fell across Keir’s capped wrist.

“This is where I am,” she said. “Every night. The thing I make room around. And when I want you here, I begin by thinking what I must put away.”

He looked at the flowers, not at her, giving her time to hear what she had said.

“We don’t have to solve that tonight.”

“I know.”

“Or by damaging something you love.”

“It isn’t only damage when I choose to change it.”

He turned then.

“Sometimes it is still damage. Choosing doesn’t make a lost thing come back.”

She loved him for saying that. The word arrived uninvited and she did not examine it. There was too much else to hold.

She pointed to the amber bed.

“I can separate the first turn. The rest will keep. This flower would lose its place in the whole. If you brought a thread through, it might lose its colour too.”

“And the exhibition?”

“It would no longer be the complete work they saw.”

“Blythe.”

“I haven’t done it. I am telling you what it means.”

He looked at the small crooked flower. She could see that he remembered the honey jar, the empty room, the bread eaten standing up.

“My thread would change as well,” he said. “Whatever it caught here couldn’t remain in its old course.”

“Could you spare it?”

“I could choose it. I don’t want you thinking I’m bringing nothing to lose.”

The garden seemed very quiet around them.

Blythe laid her hand on the copper at the first turn. Not opening it. Not yet.

She could close the door. Keep Sunday. Kiss him in his house, let him kiss her in her kitchen. There was an entire reasonable life available on those terms. She did not despise it.

She could ask him to stay capped. He would. He had never refused.

But she had invited a man whose first unguarded act of beauty had been a moth that landed on mustard. She wanted to know what happened when she stopped arranging all the places where he might stand.

Keir held out his hand without crossing the line.

“I want to come in,” he said. “I want you. Those are true. You don’t owe me the flower for either of them.”

She looked at his open hand, then at the light she had kept since the first day of her adult life in this house.

The door remained open between them.