The Good Chair

Anouk Fennell moved her chair closer to Orson Salter before he could offer to exchange it for his. In six weeks she would leave this town, and the sensible thing was to stop noticing the space between his bare forearm and hers.

“Leave the good chair alone,” she said. “I might be where I want to sit.”

He put down the folded cushion he had fetched from the kitchen. Across the courtyard, Zadie was shaking a bottle of salad dressing with an expression that suggested a personal dispute.

“This one lists to the left,” he said.

“So do I.”

“That could be a problem. Together.”

He had intended a small joke. She watched him hear the last word.

Meriel had described the neighbour as useful. Useful for a parcel, a spare key, the mysterious business of the bins. Nothing about the patient brown eyes or the way he had arrived at supper carrying a dish without announcing what trouble it had taken. Nothing about this: that when Anouk smiled at him, he seemed to want to smile back and to be deciding whether he ought.

She was forty. She recognised the decision. It had been quite some time since she had wanted to interfere with it.

“Put the cushion down,” she said. “Sit.”

He sat. The chair gave a disapproving creak.

“That was the chair,” he said.

“I hoped so.”

Zadie brought the salad over. “Are you two doing anything useful?”

“Testing the furniture.”

“Oh, good. Meriel worries about that table. She said three times you weren’t to let it get wet.”

“She said that to me twice.”

“She likes me more.” Zadie set the bowl between them. “And you’re the one living with it.”

Anouk looked up at the rear windows of the flat she had rented. One of the curtains was caught in the open sash; she’d left it that way after rescuing a bee. Her suitcase was unpacked, the cupboard already contained tea she liked, and on the desk in Meriel’s small study lay the first pages of an index she was being paid to make. Six weeks was a perfectly respectable length of life.

It had felt so that afternoon.

Orson passed her the bread. He did not offer her his chair again.

There were only the three of them. Zadie lived across the lane, in a house with a front door the colour of plum jam. Orson lived next door to her. Anouk had arrived in Lanton Wick on a Tuesday; by Friday, she had accepted two parcels, discovered the cheapest grocer and received this invitation. Meriel, meanwhile, was on the first stretch of the walking holiday for which she’d saved since February. Their arrangement had been written down, approved by the landlord and paid for. Anouk found the paperwork comforting. A friend could offer a home impulsively and resent it later. A sublet had an end date and a number.

“So,” Zadie said, taking the chair opposite them. “Book indexer.”

“Yes.”

“Do you put all the interesting entries under something misleading?”

“Only for people who ask that.”

“What would you do with me?”

“Hospitality, hostile.”

Orson laughed with bread still in his hand. It was a sudden laugh, fuller than she had expected from his careful manner, and she turned towards him before she could choose not to.

“That’s going to stick,” he said.

“I’ve had worse.” Zadie helped herself to salad. “He teaches people to make bowls. There’s nothing you can do with that.”

“Bowls, unreasonable expectations.”

“Actually,” Orson said, “that’s most of the job.”

After that supper acquired the agreeable looseness of an evening nobody was trying to improve. Zadie described the cupboard she’d bought without measuring the stairwell. Orson admitted to having helped carry it halfway up, where it remained until the doors were removed. Anouk contributed the narrow bed she’d once rented for a month because the photograph had been taken through a mirror.

“You didn’t complain?” Zadie asked.

“I did. The owner said nobody else had found it narrow.”

“How narrow?” Orson asked.

Anouk held her hands apart.

He looked at the space, then at her. The glance was brief and quite unlike the others he’d given her. It travelled no further than her shoulder. Yet she felt the awareness of her own body arrive as if she’d been touched.

“I moved,” she said.

“I’m glad.”

Zadie reached for the dressing. Anouk reached for her water, although she wasn’t thirsty.

She had liked men in rented towns before. Sometimes she had spent a pleasant evening with them; once she’d spent three months. She had learned to be clear about what she could offer. The unkindness was not in leaving. It was in letting someone mistake the dates because one enjoyed how they looked at you.

“I’m here until the twenty-sixth of August,” she said.

Orson’s gaze came back to her face. “Meriel said.”

“And then abroad until December.”

“For work?”

“I’ll work while I’m there. But that’s not why.”

“What’s why?”

There was no accusation in it, no invitation to sell him a brave and picturesque version of herself. She considered giving the usual answer anyway. New places. Different light. A bag light enough to carry upstairs. All true; none sufficient.

“I like being someone who can go,” she said.

He nodded once. “That sounds like a reason.”

Zadie asked where, and Anouk told her about the room she’d booked in Varelle, over a shop that sold household things. She’d stayed there twice before. The owner had sent a photograph of the desk to assure her it had survived the latest tenant. It wasn’t an adventure in the way people usually meant. She knew where to buy washing powder. She was looking forward to the ordinary days.

“I get that,” Orson said.

“Do you?”

“I like knowing where the washing powder is.”

She smiled. “That’s only half of it.”

“I know.”

There was something in the answer she couldn’t ask about in front of Zadie. She let it remain between them, a small thing set on the table and not yet claimed.

· · ·Scene break

They carried the plates upstairs because the courtyard tap produced a discouraging trickle. Zadie had a call to make and left with a dishcloth over her shoulder, realised halfway across the courtyard, and came back swearing mildly at herself.

Orson stood at the sink while Anouk dried. There was room for one person comfortably in Meriel’s kitchen. Two required decisions.

“You don’t have to do this,” she said.

“I ate.”

“You also cooked half of it.”

“I like washing up.”

“No one likes washing up.”

“Perhaps you’ve been washing up with the wrong people.”

She looked at him. His sleeves were pushed up, and he had put on Meriel’s yellow rubber gloves without comment. That was unfairly attractive. Not the helpfulness itself; the absence of a demand that she praise it.

“I haven’t known you long enough to tell whether that was deliberate.”

He rubbed a thumb along the edge of a plate. “Neither have I.”

She laughed, and he glanced up. They were standing closer than they had been downstairs. The window was open, the street below carrying the sounds of a radio and someone wheeling a bin over uneven paving. She could smell soap and the warm skin at his throat.

“How old are you?” she asked.

“Forty-three.” He passed her the plate. “Is this a complaint?”

“I’m forty. It seemed fair to exchange the information.”

“All right.”

“Meriel called you useful.”

“I’m afraid that’s true.”

“She neglected several other things.”

He stopped washing.

Anouk turned the plate in the towel. There were straightforward ways of doing this. She’d used them. She could ask him for a drink, ask whether he was single, say what she’d been thinking since he reached for the cushion. The thing that made her hesitate wasn’t shame. It was that he’d heard the date and stayed beside her, and she couldn’t yet tell what that meant.

“I’m divorced,” he said, very quietly.

She set down the plate. “I wasn’t asking that.”

“You were considering it.”

“Yes.”

“Five years. There isn’t anyone else.”

“Thank you.”

“Are you?”

“There’s nobody. I’ve never been married.”

He nodded, then resumed washing the plate in his hand. She liked that he didn’t use the information as an invitation. She also wanted him to put the plate down.

Instead she dried the next one. They finished in companionable silence, except when he handed her a fork still sporting a piece of lettuce and she held it up for inspection.

“My reputation,” he said.

“Ruined.”

“Don’t tell Meriel.”

“I’ll need a new parcel arrangement.”

He took off the gloves. She hung the towel over the oven handle. Anouk had the unhelpful thought that they looked like people who did this often.

At the door he paused beside the hooks. One held Meriel’s spare raincoat; the others were empty. His own jacket lay over the back of the chair below them. He picked it up, slowly enough for her to know he was leaving by choice rather than because he’d suddenly remembered something.

“I should go.”

“Probably.”

“Thank you for helping with supper.”

“Thank you for failing to move me.”

He looked at her mouth. This time there was no mistaking it.

She could have lifted her face. There was no rule against kissing a man she’d met three hours ago, and nothing in his stillness suggested he would dislike it. But the date sat there too, between the raincoat and his hand on the door, and she didn’t want their first choice to be something either could later blame on proximity.

“I was going to walk up to the headland on Sunday,” she said. “Take lunch. Find out whether the sea looks different from there.”

“It does.”

“You’ve spoiled it.”

“Sorry.”

“Would you come with me anyway?”

His fingers tightened on his jacket.

“As a useful local?”

“No.”

She let the answer stand. She had spent too much of her life making invitations sound harmless so that refusal would cost less. This one could cost what it cost.

Orson looked at the empty hooks, then back at her.

“I’d like to.”

“Good. Noon?”

“Eleven might be better.”

“Do you have somewhere else to be?”

“No. I’d like longer.”

The plainness of it undid her more thoroughly than a clever answer would have done. She put her hand on his arm. Just above the wrist, where he’d rolled his sleeve. Warm skin, a fine scattering of hair, a pulse she could feel if she let herself concentrate.

“Eleven,” she said.

He put his hand over hers for a moment. He didn’t pull her closer. The touch was an answer all by itself.

When he had gone, she remained by the door, listening to his steps descend the stairs and then cross the courtyard. Her phone was on the little table beside Meriel’s shopping list. She picked it up, opened the calendar and found Sunday.

She had marked the last day of the sublet, the deadline for the index, the journey to Varelle and the date she expected to return to England. There were very few other entries. She liked it that way.

Under Sunday she wrote his name.

Then she stood looking at the small word and wondered what, precisely, she had just invited into six weeks.