The Seventh Turn

Blythe missed the third turn because she was thinking about Keir’s bed.

The rose bells faded at their edges. She swore, went back and held them until the colour steadied. The correction took twenty minutes. By the time she reached the sixth turn she was tired, and by the seventh she was furious with herself for behaving as though pleasure ought to make her less good at the thing she had practised for eighteen years.

It was Thursday. Since Sunday she had spent one night at his house and he had spent one at hers. Neither had abandoned any work. They were sleeping less. She disliked that the first consequence of happiness appeared to be inefficient mornings.

Keir knocked just as she finished.

“I brought supper,” he said.

“You are nearly an hour late.”

He looked at the clock through the kitchen door.

“We said nine.”

They had said nine. She had finished at eight because she had started early and struggled all the way through.

Blythe put a hand over her face.

“I know. I’m sorry. I have spent an hour wanting someone else to be at fault.”

“Shall I choose a minor offence?”

“You might have brought the food sooner by instinct.”

“A grave failure.”

She let him in.

They ate the soup he had bought from the eating house. He put bread in the crooked dish without asking whether it was decorative. She liked him for that, which did not stop her being cross about the rose bells.

He listened while she described the missed turn.

“Can you change the time?” he asked.

“Within dusk. I can start a little earlier. I can’t make it a morning practice because morning would suit me. The light has to settle when daylight goes.”

“Mine too.”

“Yes.”

They ate in silence for a while.

“I could come on the circuit with you,” she said.

“You’d have to finish first.”

“If I began at the first fading and you waited until the last?”

He considered it.

“Some evenings. The long turns need time.”

“Then some evenings.”

It was a modest plan. She liked its modesty. Not every difficulty needed to become a grand choice between love and art before they tried moving supper.

On Saturday they did it.

She began while the sky still held a narrow silver edge. Keir arrived as she finished, and together they walked to the west bridge. The course came from his coil in a ribbon so fine she could scarcely see it until it passed across the dark water. Then a dozen earlier colours rose through it, each altered by the one that followed.

She had never seen the whole of his work.

The moth was a joke, a small thing taken out and played with. This was something else. It made no picture she could name. It turned as the air turned, gathered the reflection of a window, lost it, carried the loss as a paler line. She understood suddenly why he walked for hours. He was not repeating a task. He was listening for the place where the work could go next.

Keir glanced at her.

“Too much?”

“Be quiet.”

He smiled and let her look.

They walked through the old market, where the stalls stood covered for the night. The thread moved between the awnings without touching them. At a narrow corner it split into two lines, one low and one high, then found its way together again.

Blythe stopped.

“You held that wrong turn.”

“Which?”

“The low one. You could have drawn it back.”

“I wanted to see where it went.”

“And now it’s part of it.”

“Yes.”

She thought of the dip in her dish, promoted to bread. Of the amber flower. Of the taller stem she had used to hide it.

Keir stood with the gold line moving between his hands. His expression had lost all its social ease. He was absorbed, stubborn, sometimes visibly displeased. She found this far more attractive than the effortless performer she had thought him at the river stairs.

At the next corner he paused to gather a loose edge.

She kissed him before he could say anything.

He caught the thread back to the coil, laughing in surprise.

“That was inconvenient.”

“I know.”

“Do it again when I close this.”

She waited until the cap clicked. Then she did.

They stood in the narrow street with the covered stalls beside them, kissing like people who had briefly forgotten how many other things they had meant to do that evening. His hand rested at her waist. She put hers under the edge of his coat, simply to be nearer, and felt him draw her closer in answer.

When they parted she said, “I like you working.”

“People usually prefer the finished part.”

“People miss a great deal.”

He touched her cheek with a knuckle.

“So do you, when you’re behind your wall.”

It might have hurt from another man. From him, standing with the evidence bright against his wrist, it was an invitation she wanted to accept.

They finished the circuit. They were hungry again by the end. They went to his house and ate bread and pears standing at the counter, laughing over the impracticality of a plan that had produced two suppers.

She stayed the night.

· · ·Scene break

On Tuesday he watched her work.

Capped, beyond the inner door, he could see through the glass while she made the circuit. She had offered to explain each turn. He said he would rather watch first.

At the fifth she forgot he was there. Her hand hovered beside a cluster of blue stems. The preserved colour had gathered too far toward the base. She drew her fingers upward, feeling the fine resistance that belonged only to this bed, this particular held evening. She steadied it without forcing it brighter.

When she looked up, Keir was still watching.

Later he said, “You make room around the colour. I thought you would press it into shape.”

“That wouldn’t keep it. Only flatten it.”

“I understand.”

She believed him because he had waited long enough to see.

They sat on the low wall beside the clear amber flower. His coil stayed capped. The six remaining turns shone beyond the closed strip.

“I don’t want you to think I dislike permanence,” she said.

“I don’t.”

“You might, after the things I’ve said.”

He waited.

“I have been proud of keeping this. I am still proud. But sometimes I use being faithful to it as a reason not to ask whether I would make the same thing now.”

“Would you?”

“Some of it. Not all.”

The answer surprised her by being so clear.

She pointed to the fourth bed, a line of pale green bells arranged in exact descending order.

“I made those for a visiting selector twelve years ago. I wanted him to say I had discipline. He did. I haven’t especially liked them since.”

“Why keep them?”

“Because taking them out would alter the circuit. Because the arrangement was praised. Because I wanted the whole thing to prove I had not wasted my time. Choose whichever answer makes me seem least foolish.”

“I don’t have to choose one.”

She leaned her head against his shoulder.

“What would you make now?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Something with space in it. Something that looked different from the kitchen than from the path. I am tired of making people stand in the correct place.”

“That sounds like a beginning.”

“It sounds like a great deal of discarded work.”

“That too.”

They stayed quiet. She could hear the ordinary city beyond the wall: a cart, a closing shutter, someone calling that a parcel had been left behind. All these years she had thought of that noise as the thing she shut out to work. Now she wondered what it would be like to leave a gap for it.

“I haven’t asked you about before,” she said.

“Before?”

“Other people. You needn’t give me names.”

He looked down at their hands.

“There have been people. All adults, all perfectly able to discover I was difficult.”

“And did they?”

“Eventually. I was very good at leaving an evening before it became a morning somebody expected again.”

“Were they asking you to stop working?”

“Sometimes. Mostly they were asking me to stop treating every request as if they had.”

Blythe lifted her head.

It was the least flattering thing he had told her about himself. She trusted it more for that.

“Have you wanted to leave?” she asked.

“Yes. Once or twice when I thought you were going to see something I couldn’t make appealing.”

“And?”

“I stayed. You gave me beans.”

She laughed, then put her hand against his face.

“I have other recipes.”

“A powerful inducement.”

She kissed him slowly. He met her without the bright deflection she now recognised as one way he hid.

That night they went upstairs in her house while the garden kept its colours below them. Her last thought before sleep was not whether she had chosen well enough to deserve the day. It was that Keir’s cold foot had found her ankle, and that tomorrow she would buy another blanket.