The Window Table

At ten to seven on a Tuesday at the end of May, Aled Pryor sat down at the window table of the café across the road from the outdoor pool, with his back to the door.

He did it on purpose. It still took a moment. His body wanted the other chair, the one against the wall, with the door and the counter and the street all in front of it, the chair he had taken in every café for fourteen years without once thinking about it; and he stood beside it with his hand on the back and let the wanting go past, like a car that did not stop, and sat where he had meant to.

Behind him the door opened and shut. Somebody came in for a takeaway. He did not turn round.

Across the road the pool gates were open. The board by the gate said fourteen and a half degrees in chalk. Through the railings he could see the near end of lane three, and the steps, and the clock on its pole at the corner, and a woman in an orange hat going in off the side without stopping to think about it, because there was no point otherwise.

He watched her go under, and come up, and start.

Then he looked at the menu, which he already knew, because it was something to do with his eyes that was not the street.

· · ·Scene break

The hearing had been a fortnight ago, in a room with a long table and a jug of water and three people on the far side of it who had read everything.

He had told them what he had told Adair, off the same envelope, in the same order. They had asked him questions for most of a morning, fairly, and he had answered all of them, and when they asked him whether he accepted that he should have reported it on the sixteenth of February, he had said yes. When they asked him why he had not, he had told them that too: that the principal had asked him to wait, and why, and that he had agreed, and that it had been his decision to agree and nobody else’s.

“And would you do the same again?” the one in the middle had asked.

He had thought about it for the time it needed.

“I’d tell you sooner that I’d done it,” he said. “I’d still do it.”

They had given him a final written warning and taken him off protection work for good, which was what Adair had told him on the ninth of March and what he had known since the sixteenth of February, standing at a kitchen counter with a phone in his shirt pocket. It had not been a surprise. It had been a date.

His resignation had gone in a week before the hearing, so that nobody could think he was offering it to get something back. He finished at the end of June. Twenty-one years and four months, and then he would not be a police officer, and he found, most mornings, that he did not know what he would be instead, and that he could stand not knowing it in a way that would have frightened him in February.

The other offer had come a week after the hearing. A man he had stood beside in London for three years, who had left the job and gone private and done well, rang him on a Sunday evening and said he had heard, and that there was a family, a good family, a house in town and one in the country, two children and a lot of money and a reason to worry about all three. Twice what he was paid now. Nobody would ever know his name. That was rather the point.

“You’d be perfect,” the man said. “You’re the best I ever saw at not being there.”

Aled had said he would think about it. He had thought about it for a week, which was longer than he needed and as long as he wanted, and rung back yesterday.

“No,” he had said. “Thank you. I’ve got a door now.”

The man had not understood. Aled had not tried to make him.

He had sat down in Pat Mayhew’s front room on the second Sunday in April, in the armchair nearest the window, with a cup of tea on the arm of it. Pat had looked at him from the doorway for some time. Then she had said, “Well,” and gone back into the kitchen, and he had heard her tell the tap that it was about time.

Jas had sat her exam on the twelfth of April and would hear in June. She said that if she failed it was his fault, for all the nights, and if she passed it was hers.

· · ·Scene break

At twenty to eight he went to the counter and bought two coffees.

A black. A flat white. The waitress was nineteen and had a ring through her eyebrow and had served him every Tuesday for six weeks, and she said “The usual, then,” and did not ask who the other was for, because she had seen who the other was for.

He carried them back to the window, one in each hand, and put the flat white down on the other side of the table, handle towards the empty chair.

On Thursday he had stopped at the services. He still did. Quarter past six; the same pumps; the loyalty card. He had gone in, and stood at the counter, and bought one coffee, black. Then he had taken it out to the car park and stood by the car for a minute, the way you would stand for a minute anywhere, and said, not aloud, Morning, Dennis, and got in and driven on.

It had been nine years. He thought Dennis would have said that was plenty. He thought Dennis would have said it with two sugars in.

Across the road a woman in an orange hat came up the steps at the end of lane three and stood on the side with the water running off her, and pulled the hat off, and looked, straight across the road, through the railings and the traffic and the café window, at him.

He did not wave. He lifted his cup an inch.

She went in to change.

· · ·Scene break

Her door was a quarter of a mile from here, at the bottom of her hill, on the main road, up a flight of stairs between a launderette and a shop that mended phones.

He had carried the desk up those stairs on the first of May, with the man from the launderette on the other end of it, and afterwards had stood in the doorway and watched the signwriter do the glass. The signwriter was a woman of seventy with a mahlstick and a hand as steady as a surgeon’s, and she had done it in gold, in small square capitals, the only kind Esther wrote in.

ESTHER MAYHEW. CHARTERED ACCOUNTANT.

One room. A window over the road. Two chairs for clients and one for her, and a filing cabinet, and on the wall, framed, a photograph of a woman in lane three in an orange hat with the pool clock in the corner reading 07:21.

Adair had sent it back after the sentencing, in a card envelope, with a compliments slip that said nothing but As requested. L.A. Esther had taken it to a framer on the same afternoon.

“It’s a good photograph,” she had said, when he stood looking at it. “It’s the only one I’ve got of me swimming. I wasn’t going to let them keep it.”

On the desk, on the first day, she had shown him the letter she would send to every client before she did a single hour of their work. Two pages. She had written it herself and he had read it standing, all of it, and then the top again.

The first line said: If I get something wrong, I will tell you, in writing, as soon as I know.

Not it was noted. Not it may be observed. I. He had read it three times, and she had watched him read it, and neither of them had said anything about Schedule Fourteen, because neither of them needed to any more.

Tyrer had been sentenced on the fourteenth. She had not gone. She had read the sentence on the court’s list on her phone, standing in her new office, and said, “Right,” and gone swimming.

· · ·Scene break

She came in at twelve minutes to eight with her hair wet and combed straight back and her face pink with cold, and her bag over her shoulder, and the orange hat in her hand.

He heard the door behind him. He did not turn round. He heard her feet on the café floor, and knew them.

She stopped by the table. She looked at him, sitting, with his back to the door and the street in front of him, and he saw her see it: the chair he had not taken, the one against the wall. She had it in a schedule somewhere. Sits with back to wall, facing door. First observed. He had seen the page.

She sat down across from him.

“Fourteen and a half,” she said.

“I saw.”

“Twenty lengths. I was quick. I wanted my coffee.” She put her hands round it. “You bought two.”

“I did.”

“One of them’s mine.”

“It is.”

She drank some of it. Outside, beyond the window, a bus stopped and let three people off and went on; a van double-parked outside the pool; a man with a dog crossed at the lights, and another came the other way, and there was a car by the pool gates with its engine running and somebody in it, waiting, as there always was, at eight in the morning, outside a pool.

He did not look at any of it.

He knew it was there. He could feel it at the edge of his eye the way you feel weather. Fourteen years of it had gone too deep to take out; he would feel a street for the rest of his life. But he did not turn his head to it, and he did not check the car, and he did not count the man with the dog. He looked at her: at her wet hair and her cold hands round the cup and the mark the goggles had left, and he let the street be somebody else’s.

You’re very good at being in a room, Aled. You’re just never in it.

He was in it. He was sitting in the middle of it, with his back to the door.

She saw that as well. She saw everything. She did not say anything about it. She put her cup down, very quietly, as if not to wake something.

“You’ve got a face on,” she said. “The one where you’re going to say something.”

“I am.”

“Is it about safety?”

“No.”

“Then go on.”

He had not planned it. That was the thing he would remember afterwards: that for the first time in his life he had not written it on an envelope first.

“I want to live with you,” he said.

And then nothing. He did not add if you’d like. He did not add whatever’s easiest, or we could, or any of the hundred ways he had once had of standing a sentence at the edge of a room so that it could not be blamed for anything. He said it, and he left it on the table between them, in his own name, and waited.

Esther looked at him for a long time.

“You said want,” she said.

“I did.”

“Not like.”

“Not like.” He held her eyes. “I said like once, in a kitchen at one in the morning. It was true. It wasn’t the word.”

She was quiet. He watched her think, the eyebrows first. He had watched her think across a table in a cottage, and a kitchen above a bakery, and a burnt hall, and through a sun-visor mirror down the length of a motorway, and he had never before watched her do it and not known what she would say.

He did not know now. He found he did not mind.

“I love you,” Esther said.

She said it plainly. Short. Her voice for the things she was not sure of, except that it was not that voice, quite; it was the other one, gone short and plain for a different reason.

“I haven’t checked it,” she said. “I haven’t added it up. I haven’t got it in a schedule, with the dates, and the instances, and a column for whether it’s stated or observed. I’ve got no working papers at all.” She turned the cup a quarter turn, and stopped, and left it. “I’ve never in my life said a thing I hadn’t checked. I’m saying this one. Yes. To living with you. I don’t know where, and I don’t know when, and I don’t care which of us has to move, and I’ll have to find out what you’re like with a kitchen that’s yours. I don’t know any of that. I love you. That’s all I’ve got, and I’m telling you anyway.”

He did not say anything for a moment. He did not need to. He reached across the table, in a café window at eight in the morning, with the whole street behind the glass, and put his hand over hers on the cup; and she turned her hand over under his and held on.

· · ·Scene break

The waitress with the ring in her eyebrow brought the receipt on a saucer, because they had sat long enough that she thought they might have forgotten, and put it down by Esther’s elbow.

Esther looked at it.

He watched her look. Two coffees, a black and a flat white, 07:40, and the name of the café, and a total. The kind of thing she had kept every one of since before she could remember, dated on the bottom in small square capitals, in a box on a shelf at head height, because they were the only thing anyone ever gave you that said what had happened.

She did not pick it up.

She finished her coffee. She put the orange hat in her bag. She stood, and so did he, and she waited for him to come round the table, and he came round it; and they went out of the café together into the street he had not looked at, which was only a street.

On the table in the window, on its saucer, by two empty cups, the receipt stayed where it was.