An Evening Off

Ash wrote no authorised release date in the place where Harvey wanted him to write letter pending. The first phrase was less useful to Harvey. It was also the only one a customer could act on.

He had asked Harvey, in writing, why the letters were being held. Harvey had answered in person.

“If you put every unfinished thought in a file, nobody here will do any work,” he said, standing beside Ash’s desk.

“A promised letter isn’t an unfinished thought.”

“It’s in the queue.”

“Then the person who was promised it can be told that, without being given a date.”

Harvey looked toward the corridor. Delilah had gone to lunch. “She’s asked you to make this her crusade.”

“She asked when the letter would go. I asked you. That’s the whole exchange.”

Ash was glad he could say it truthfully. It did not make him less aware of where he would spend the evening.

“You know why you’re here,” Harvey said.

“Yes.”

“Then find out whether she’s the reason these people know things from inside my firm.”

Harvey left him with the question. Ash opened his working note. He could write that Delilah had asked for a promised letter, that she had altered a script and that she had taken a copy of the published customer guide. Harvey would read those three facts as evidence of a leak. They established nothing of the kind. Ash entered the request for the letter and the change to the script under process findings, each with its date. Under the inquiry into disclosure, he wrote: No source identified.

He left the file open and looked at the phone. He could tell Delilah what Harvey had asked him to do. He had been able to since Monday. The moment to do it without injury had already gone, because he had let her invite him somewhere private first.

He closed the file. He would meet her and tell her. He could not decide what she would do with it.

At half past six, the café beneath the railway bridge was loud enough that neither of them had to lower a voice to speak privately. Ash arrived early and took a table where Delilah could see the exit. He noticed himself doing it, disliked the satisfaction it gave him, and sat there anyway.

She came in wearing a blue coat with one button missing. At work her hair had been pinned away from her face; in the café she had let it down. He had told himself he wanted to know what she looked like when she was not watching a desk. Now he knew. He stood without meaning to.

“I didn’t think you’d come,” she said.

“I said I would.”

“That’s not always the same thing.”

She set her coat over the chair rather than keeping it on. He had earned nothing by noticing that she intended to stay long enough for tea. She saw the place he’d chosen and gave him a look he could not read.

“It’s your first time here,” he said.

“Yes.”

“I didn’t want you trapped against a wall.”

“You could have let me choose the table.”

“I could.” He moved his mug. “Would you rather?”

She considered the room, then sat. “No. I like this one. I just wanted you to know I noticed.”

He liked her more for making him answer. That was becoming a problem no amount of distance between chairs could solve.

For ten minutes they spoke about things neither could put in a report. Ash repaired his own shirts because he could never find one with a collar that sat properly. The dark stitch she’d noticed was the third attempt; he had kept the first two in a tin, thinking he might learn from them. Delilah asked whether the tin was labelled previous findings. He laughed loudly enough that the woman at the next table looked over.

“You sound different,” Delilah said.

“I haven’t had much practice making a noise at work.”

“You make one whenever you disagree with Harvey.”

“That’s a sigh.”

“You should hear it from the corridor.”

The train went over them. The cups trembled against their saucers and neither tried to keep talking through it. When the sound passed, Delilah was still smiling. Ash felt an unreasonable rush of pride that she had been smiling at him before the train arrived.

“What do you do when you aren’t writing other people’s letters?” he asked.

“I have a flat. I make dinner. Sometimes I finish a book.”

“You make it sound like evidence of an ordinary life.”

“It is.” She broke a piece from the biscuit that had come with her tea. “For a while I was only useful when something was going wrong for somebody. I forgot what to do with a quiet evening.”

He waited. She ate the biscuit. She did not owe him the story behind the sentence.

“I keep rescheduling dates,” he said. “Not because work is more important. Because as long as there’s another evening in the diary, I don’t have to find out whether I’d want a third.”

“And would you?”

He looked at her. “With you?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“No. You gave me a perfectly general question.”

“Answer it generally, then.”

He could have made the kind of joke that left them both a way back to the office. She had given him several. “Yes,” he said. “I would want a third evening with you.”

She set the last piece of biscuit on her saucer. “We’ve barely got through the first.”

“You asked.”

“I did.”

He saw her decide not to retreat from it. She turned her palm up on the table between the cups. She did not reach for him. She had left a place he could choose to cross.

Ash wanted to put his hand there. He could feel the warmth of her skin before touching it, an anticipation so exact it almost felt like memory. His own hand stayed wrapped around the mug.

“Delilah,” he said, “there’s something about why I’m at Sable that you need to know.”

The café’s door opened behind her. She did not turn. “Tell me.”

He had promised himself he would. There were people at the next table, a waiter setting down cups, a man by the till saying his card had been charged twice. None of them prevented him from speaking. The thing that stopped him was worse: he had come here hoping she might want him before she knew whom Harvey had paid him to suspect. He had used the evening to find out.

“I should have said it before we came here,” he told her. “I can’t give you half of it to make this easier for me.”

She turned her hand over, palm down. She did not take it away.

“Did you come because you wanted to know me,” she asked, “or because you wanted to know something I know?”

“I wanted to know you.” He made himself keep looking at her. “There is another reason Harvey put me near you. Both things are true, and I should have told you before I let you ask me here.”

She withdrew her hand. He had no right to be wounded by it.

“You don’t get to tell me the first thing and let me guess the second,” she said.

“I know.”

“And I’m not going to kiss you while I have to guess.”

The plainness of it struck him harder than the kiss he’d been imagining. “I want to kiss you too,” he said. “I won’t ask you to do it like this.”

“I didn’t say I wanted you to ask.”

He would have deserved the coldness of that. Her voice held more grief than coldness, and he could not make it smaller by defending himself.

She stood and took her coat from the chair. He stood as well, then stopped with his hand on the back of his own chair. The doorway was hers. He would not put himself between her and it, however much he wanted another minute.

“I came here on purpose,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about it since you left that note. I liked being here with you.”

“So did I.”

“That doesn’t make it all right for me to stay and wait for the part you won’t say.” She put on the blue coat. “Tell me when you’re ready to tell the whole truth. I may still decide I don’t want a second evening.”

“You may.”

She looked at the untouched biscuit. “For what it’s worth, I was going to ask.”

“About a second evening?”

“About a kiss.”

She left him with that. No interruption had spared them a choice. They had both made one, and she had paid for his delay with an evening she had meant to enjoy.

Ash waited until she was past the window before he picked up his coat. He would go to Harvey in the morning and withdraw the unsupported note he had started on Delilah. Then he would tell her what his brief had been. He could do those things whether she spoke to him again or not.

He left enough money for both teas and walked out into the noise from the bridge. He had not been deceived about what he wanted. He had been dishonest about the order in which he wanted it, and Delilah had made him hear the difference.