The Small Hours

Anouk carried a loaf, two pears and a packet of washing powder up the stairs in Varelle and wished Orson could see how unromantic her hands were. One handle had cut a red line across her fingers. The loaf was trying to escape. The washing powder had become, through some failure of engineering, the heaviest substance in the world.

She got the door open with her elbow and deposited everything on the table.

The room was exactly as she remembered: pale walls, a narrow bed, a desk under a high window and a cupboard that opened only if the chair was moved. The kitchen was shared with the other room on the floor, presently empty. The owner had left clean towels and a note confirming the arrangement for Orson’s October visit. All ordinary, all paid for, all chosen.

She loved being there.

She missed him so sharply that for a moment she had to sit down.

Those facts had been easy to place beside each other in his garden. Here, among the groceries, they felt less well behaved.

She took a photograph of the overloaded table and sent it.

The glamorous life. I may marry the washing powder if it agrees to carry itself.

His reply came an hour later, when she’d already started work.

Ask about its long-term intentions.

She laughed and went back to the index. The book required concentration, and she was glad of it. For three hours she could solve problems that had correct answers, or at least answers an editor would accept.

At dusk she walked out to buy supper. The town was familiar enough to be comfortable and different enough to make her look up. She liked the shop with the deep doorway, the uneven pavement beside the square, the route that turned unexpectedly and brought her out where she’d meant to be all along. She didn’t photograph every corner. Some things she wanted to keep for herself until she could show him in person.

Their first scheduled call went well. So did the second. Orson showed her a mug with a handle that had made him swear; she showed him the cupboard. He resisted offering advice for almost four minutes.

“I’m proud of you,” she said.

“I was suffering.”

“I could tell.”

They learned the odd intimacy of looking at each other through a small rectangle. She saw his kitchen at night with nobody else in it. He saw her tired after work, wearing the cardigan, hair pinned without care. Sometimes they talked for an hour. Sometimes twenty minutes was enough, and they practised ending without making it a test of affection.

The difficulty began in the third week, not with a catastrophe but with a meal that went on too long.

Anouk had been invited to supper by two people she knew from a previous stay. She’d planned to be back for the call. Then one story led to another, the food arrived late, and she looked at the time with a shock that turned immediately into self-reproach.

She sent a message from the pavement.

I’m sorry. I’m still out. Can we speak in half an hour?

His answer came quickly.

I have to be up early. Let’s leave it tonight.

She stared at it, trying to decide whether the plainness contained anger. Then she stopped trying to read a man’s entire heart in a few words and called.

He answered, but didn’t turn on the camera.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I lost track. I should have messaged before.”

“Yes.”

The agreement hurt, though she had asked for no other answer.

“Are you angry?”

“A bit.”

“All right.”

“I’d put off going out with Zadie because we had the call. That was my choice. I don’t think you owe me an evening every time I want one. But I sat here waiting and felt stupid.”

“You weren’t stupid.”

“I know. I felt it.”

She leaned against the wall outside the building. People passed, talking softly. She wanted to be back in his kitchen where she could touch his hand and show him how much she meant the apology. She couldn’t. That was part of what she’d chosen.

“I did the thing we specifically said we wouldn’t do,” she said.

“You did.”

“I won’t explain it as if supper happened to me.”

He was quiet for a moment. Then she heard him breathe out.

“Thank you.”

“Can we speak tomorrow? A time that suits you. If you want.”

“Tomorrow evening. After eight.”

“I’ll be there.”

They said goodnight without the usual joking kiss. She didn’t ask him for it. An apology did not entitle her to immediate reassurance.

· · ·Scene break

The next day she worked badly for an hour, then put the problem into words on a blank page. Not a letter to send. Something she needed to understand.

She had treated the call as a thing she could fit around the life happening nearest her. That did not make her wicked. It did make the promise unreliable if she kept doing it. Distance meant some of their life would always be happening somewhere she couldn’t see.

She set an alarm for the evening. It was a small and unromantic action, which was why she trusted it more than a large remorseful message.

At lunch the friends from supper invited her on an overnight trip that weekend. A place she hadn’t seen, a spare room in a house they’d booked, an easy addition if she decided now. Her first response was pleasure. Her second was to imagine telling Orson they could move Sunday’s call.

She could ask. He might agree without minding. The trouble was not any single change. It was the pattern in which every available thing near her became more real than the person elsewhere.

She said she would join them another time.

She did not tell Orson as if it were a sacrifice he now owed her for. Instead, when he called that evening, she was at her desk, ready, with the day put aside.

He turned the camera on. His face looked tired.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hello.”

“I’ve missed you.”

He nodded, then smiled a little. “I’ve missed you too. Even while being cross.”

“That seems inefficient.”

“Very.”

They talked about the missed call for ten minutes. She told him about the alarm, not as a grand solution but as something she’d actually done. He said he would stop declining invitations automatically before checking whether a call could move. They were not appointing her social life the enemy or his loneliness the judge.

Then he told her about a student who’d finally made the piece she’d been struggling with. Anouk listened until she could hear the pride beneath his fatigue. She asked what he’d said to the student, and he repeated it, embarrassed by how pleased he’d been.

“I wish I’d heard you,” she said.

“You would have laughed.”

“Probably. Kindly.”

He smiled fully then. The sight of it made her ache.

“What are you wearing?” she asked, suddenly.

He looked down. “A shirt.”

“I can see that. The one from the first supper?”

“Yes.”

“Leave the camera there a moment.”

His expression changed. Not dramatically. Enough.

She looked at his open collar, the familiar line of his throat, the hands she could only see when he moved. She told him she remembered how he had kissed her in the hallway that last afternoon, and watched the memory arrive in his face.

“Anouk.”

“Yes.”

“You’re making this difficult.”

“I know. Do you want me to stop?”

“No.”

They spoke softly for a while, of kisses and warmth and the specific things each missed. Nothing could replace being together. Yet hearing him say he wanted her, without making desire into complaint, brought him close in a way cheerful reports had not. She let him see that she wanted him too. There was vulnerability in remaining visible when all she could offer was her face, her voice and the truth.

Afterwards they sat in companionable quiet, drinking tea in different rooms.

“I bought peach jam,” she said.

“Wise. Already defeated.”

“I thought you’d approve.”

“I’d approve more if I were there.”

“So would I.”

They ended the call because both needed sleep, not because they had run out of feeling.

· · ·Scene break

Orson went to supper at Zadie’s on Saturday. He was forty-three years old and had somehow needed to be reminded that waiting was not an activity with moral superiority over dinner.

She served something hot from the oven and told him to stop looking as if she had rescued him.

“You’re good company when you aren’t asking whether everyone has enough bread.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“You looked at the basket.”

He laughed. She poured water into his glass.

They talked about her plans to take a week away alone in winter. She was forty-five and tired, she said, of calling time alone a problem to solve. He listened, hearing something he hadn’t expected to hear from someone so thoroughly rooted in her house.

“Do you get lonely?” he asked.

“Sometimes. Do you?”

“Yes.”

“Well. At least we’re efficient about admitting it.”

He didn’t tell her every detail of the missed call. Anouk had apologised to him, not to the neighbourhood. He did say that distance was harder than he had wanted it to be.

“Of course it is,” Zadie said. “You like the woman.”

“That doesn’t make it workable.”

“No. It doesn’t make it impossible either.”

He considered that while she fetched dessert. There were no instructions in it, which was a relief.

At home, a message from Anouk waited. A photograph of the blue evening through her high window, and underneath it: I found a place for breakfast in October. It has a chair you won’t need to rescue me from.

He sent back a photograph of his own kitchen, the chair by the window empty.

This one’s still available.

Then he regretted it, fearing it sounded like a reproach. Before he could explain, her reply arrived.

I know. I want it. I also want you to see this one.

He read that twice. She hadn’t apologised for being happy there. She hadn’t made his chair compete with hers.

He went upstairs and put the October dates on the calendar by his bed. Four days. He would take only what he could carry, and the book she’d left him to finish, and the part of himself that was curious rather than afraid.

That last thing, he suspected, would require the most deliberate packing.