The Customer Meeting

Delilah had written the last sentence of the customers’ account three times before remembering she was no longer the person authorised to write it.

She selected the paragraph and moved it into a separate note headed Questions still open. The handover was an account of what she’d done and what remained unanswered. It was not a place to persuade seven people that they would miss her if somebody else finished.

On Thursday afternoon she sent the amended inventory to Leonie. Each client’s section went only where that person had agreed it could go. The woman who had sat beside Oona wanted hers held for a separate conversation. Delilah sent it to Leonie for that purpose and did not fold it into a group conclusion.

Then she returned the part of the original fee allotted to work she would no longer deliver. She checked the amount against their agreement twice. She could afford it. She disliked watching the confirmation appear on the screen.

The money had stood for weeks she expected to spend following this through. Returning it left those weeks empty in a way a diary could not conceal. She shut the laptop before she could volunteer to fill them free of charge. Free would still have meant hers to direct.

Her phone held a photograph Ash had sent that morning of the chair he had once made lopsided. It looked ordinary now. Underneath he’d written, Safe for visitors. Subject to their own assessment.

She had answered, I shall sit down cautiously.

He had replied, I’d like you to.

She read that last line again. The warmth it gave her did not cancel the loss of the fee. She was beginning to distrust the habit of setting one against the other, as though every good thing in her life had to produce an invoice for the bad.

Leonie called before five.

“The independent reader has reviewed the inventory against the material each person authorised,” she said. “There are questions for you. I’ve put them in a separate list. Nothing needs a new visit to Sable.”

“Can I see the list before tomorrow?”

“Yes. Two people want separate conversations. The others can meet at four.”

Delilah looked at the blank place beneath the handover in her diary. “Are you recommending I finish?”

“I’m recommending a smaller task. They’re deciding whether they want you to do it.”

“You could tell me what it is.”

“I will. I wanted you to hear the second sentence.”

Delilah took her hand off the closed laptop. She had been about to open it.

“I heard it.”

· · ·Scene break

There were five customers at Friday’s meeting. Delilah noticed the two empty chairs before she noticed the packet of biscuits Oona was opening with a key.

“I tried the tear here,” Oona said. “An unreliable promise.”

Delilah nearly laughed. The phrase belonged to nobody. She could enjoy it without passing it on to Ash as a private joke made out of this room.

Leonie explained the absences first. One person wanted time before deciding about any further work. The woman who had objected on Sunday had asked to continue through Leonie without Delilah’s involvement. Neither person’s material would be included in the new task under discussion.

“She shouldn’t have to come here to say no twice,” Oona said, looking at Delilah.

“She doesn’t.”

Delilah could remember the woman’s letters almost line for line. Keeping her out of a new comparison would make the account less complete. It would also make the comparison one the people inside it had chosen. She left the empty chair alone.

Before Leonie could begin, she put her own short note on the table.

“There’s an update to the conflict I told you about on Sunday. Ash and I are seeing each other. That isn’t a possibility now. It’s happening.”

Oona nodded. The man who had sat by the window last time took off his glasses and cleaned them on the end of his scarf.

“Does he know any more about us?” he asked.

“No. He has shown me the passage of his working note that concerns me. I asked to keep the copy. It confirms the wording of the suspicion he told me he’d corrected. It doesn’t give me independent proof of everything he says about the file. I haven’t brought it as evidence for your claims.”

“Are you going to recommend him?”

“No. If you want anything from him, Leonie arranges that without me. If his own work needs assessing, I can’t be the person who assesses it.”

The man put his glasses back on. “That’s the answer I wanted.”

Delilah had expected to feel relieved. Instead she felt the absence of a part she had already begun imagining: sitting beside Ash, making two accounts agree. They might have done good work together. That did not make it work she should offer these people.

Leonie passed around a single page.

“The proposed task is to lay out dates already in the records you’ve authorised: what Sable promised, what each of you paid, and what reply followed. Delilah can identify where her own notes came from and answer the reader’s questions. She won’t decide what the pattern proves. The independent reader checks it, each of you checks your own section, and any use beyond that comes back to you.”

“Will it get my letter?” Oona asked.

“It won’t make Harvey answer,” Leonie said. “It will show where the answer is missing.”

Oona looked at the page for a long time.

“I know that’s useful,” she said. “I’m tired of useful things that aren’t my money.”

Delilah felt the familiar impulse to explain how one would lead to the other. She didn’t know that it would. Leonie did not fill the silence either.

Finally Oona tapped a line near the bottom. “I’d like mine to start with the date they first asked me to pay again. Not the date I complained. The complaint makes me look like the thing that began this.”

“Yes,” Delilah said. “That’s a change I can make.”

“And don’t put why I needed it back in the summary.”

“It isn’t required to show the payment.”

“Good. You may use my invoice. You may not use my grief to decorate it.”

Delilah drew a line through the heading she’d copied from her old outline. Effect on the customer. Oona had supplied that part of her story in confidence to explain urgency. It could guide how quickly Delilah answered a message without becoming a paragraph for somebody else to read.

“Removed,” she said.

The man beside the window wanted the opposite emphasis. He wanted the hours of calls recorded because the sums alone made it look as if he had paid and then done nothing. Leonie added a note beside his permission. Their accounts would not look identical. Delilah found she was glad of it.

They discussed the narrower fee and the date for a first version. Delilah did not offer evenings, weekends or a promise that she would stay until everybody was satisfied. She offered the time the work required. Each of the five agreed to their own section being included. The two absent members’ decisions remained separate and open to change only if they chose it.

Then Oona asked about the truthful call script.

“The one with his name on it. Could we ask him what he changed?”

“I can ask whether he’s able to provide an account of his own work,” Leonie said. “I won’t send him your files with the request. We decide what, if anything, follows when we have his answer.”

Delilah kept her pen still. She could picture Ash explaining the new stop-contact field, how clearly he would say what it did. She could also picture the word apparent and the woman whose seat was empty. He would have to answer for both kinds of work in his own voice.

When the meeting ended, Delilah had a task. It fitted on half a page. The proposed final account she had removed on Thursday would have filled several.

She stayed to stack the empty cups while Leonie gathered the permission notes.

“You can say you’re disappointed,” Leonie told her.

“I’m disappointed.”

“Yes. I thought you might be.”

“I wanted them to hear the limits and decide they didn’t need them.”

Leonie looked up. Delilah made herself finish.

“Not all of me wanted that. Enough.”

“That part doesn’t get to run the work.”

“I know.”

Leonie took two cups from her. “Go and have your Friday. I’ll send you the final scope after everyone has their copy.”

· · ·Scene break

Ash was waiting outside the small grocer near Delilah’s flat. She had asked him to meet her there because she needed dinner and wanted his company, two facts she had decided not to make compete.

He held up a paper bag when he saw her.

“What did you buy?” she asked.

“Bread.”

“You don’t know what I’m cooking.”

“I had to start somewhere.”

She caught his coat sleeve and pulled him down for a kiss. He came willingly, one hand warm at her back, the bread making a dry rustle between them. For a moment her mind went quiet in a way she had been trying to accomplish by force all afternoon.

“Hello,” he said when she released him.

“Hello.” She brushed a crumb off his collar. “You’ve started it.”

“The end came loose.”

“How fortunate.”

Inside, they stood in front of vegetables neither had made plans for. Delilah picked up an aubergine and put it down again. Ash chose two onions. She looked at them in the basket.

“You’re committing.”

“I can return them to the shelf.”

“No. Keep them. I need somebody to believe in dinner.”

He looked at her properly then, and she felt the question he wasn’t quite asking.

“I have some work,” she said. “Less than I wanted. I don’t want to go through the meeting.”

“All right.”

“I’d like to be disappointed without having to argue that it’s unfair.”

Ash put a tin of tomatoes beside the onions. “You can do that with me.”

“You won’t tell me they were right?”

“You sound as if you think they were.”

She laughed once, unwillingly. “Infuriating.”

“You predicted that.”

“Before dinner. You were going to wait.”

His smile made it easier to stand still. He had understood what she meant without asking her to make the other people in the story wrong. She chose the aubergine after all and set it beside his tomatoes.

At the till they divided the shopping into two bags. Ash paid for the things he had chosen, Delilah for hers. Outside, he offered her the broken end of the bread. She tore a piece from it and ate as they walked.

“I wanted to be the person who finished,” she said.

He waited.

“That’s what I keep coming back to. I told myself I wanted the work finished. I did. I also wanted to be the person they remembered doing it.”

“Would you think less of somebody else for that?”

“I’d ask whether they were still making good decisions.”

“Are you?”

She considered the transfer confirmation, the empty chair, the heading she had crossed out. “Today I am.”

“Then have your piece of bread.”

She bumped his shoulder with hers. He leaned back into the brief contact, smiling, and they walked the rest of the street close enough for her to feel him beside her even when they weren’t touching.

At her door, Ash waited while she found the key. He did not assume the groceries settled where they would be eating. Delilah set her bag on the step and turned to him.

“Come up. Cook with me.”

“I’d like that.”

“And stay after we’ve eaten. I’m not inviting you to mend the cupboard.”

His eyes held hers. She could see the pleasure reach him before he answered, a warmth that made her impatient to close the small distance between them.

“I wasn’t coming for the cupboard.”

She kissed him again, taking her time now, her fingers at the side of his neck. He shifted the bag to his other hand and drew her closer. The fact that he could want her so plainly while carrying two onions should not have undone her. It did.

When she turned the key, he followed her inside. She led the way upstairs with the shopping and the unfinished day. Neither needed to be put away before he could come in.