The August Page

Anouk wrote Orson’s name beside Thursday and realised she had begun to assume he would be free. She sat at Meriel’s desk with the calendar open, her finished index sent, and felt an unreasonable suspicion towards her own handwriting.

It was only supper. People had supper regularly without reorganising their lives around it. She had also written laundry, invoice and buy tea. None of those entries frightened her.

Her phone rang. Meriel’s face appeared in the little square, windblown and cheerful.

“Are you alive?”

“Mostly.”

“Is the table?”

“Better than me.”

“Good. Priorities.”

Meriel was sitting outside a café, a rucksack propped beside her. She looked tired in the satisfying way that came from choosing the source of it. Anouk had known her for twelve years, since they shared an office and the conviction that the office would be improved by windows that opened. Their lives had diverged without either becoming an argument against the other’s.

“I’m forty-two,” Meriel said, “and I have discovered that I dislike carrying all my possessions up hills.”

“You only brought some of them.”

“The wrong some.”

They talked about the trip, the flat, a parcel that had arrived for Meriel and was waiting unopened on the hall table. Then Meriel asked whether Anouk had met the neighbours properly.

“Yes.”

“Zadie can be abrupt. She means well about half the time.”

“I like her.”

“And Orson?”

Anouk looked at the calendar before she could stop herself.

“Oh,” Meriel said.

“What?”

“You’ve got a face.”

“I’ve always had one.”

“Not that one.”

Anouk closed the calendar. “We’re seeing each other.”

Meriel sat back. Her first expression was pleasure. Her second was more complicated, and Anouk braced for advice.

Instead her friend said, “Is he being good to you?”

“Yes.”

“Are you being good to him?”

“I hope so.”

“Good.”

There was no warning about August. No account of his divorce offered as community property. Anouk felt grateful enough to tell more of the truth.

“I didn’t expect to like him this much.”

“That usually helps.”

“Does it?”

“At the beginning.”

Anouk laughed reluctantly.

“I’ll be back on the twenty-third,” Meriel said. “Still all right? Three days of us both under one roof?”

“We agreed. I’ll use the sofa.”

“You paid for the room through the twenty-sixth.”

“And you live here. We’ll work it out.”

“Just don’t acquire any furniture.”

Anouk glanced at the little room, with its borrowed lamp and orderly shelves. “I don’t acquire furniture.”

“I know.” Meriel said it kindly, which somehow made it harder.

After the call, Anouk reopened the calendar. Four weeks remained. There was nothing mysterious about the arithmetic.

She went out to buy tea.

· · ·Scene break

Orson was in the garden when she arrived that evening, trying to pull a stem free of a knot of others without damaging it. He looked up, smiled, then lost his hold and had to start again.

“Come and tell me I’m doing this badly,” he said.

“I know nothing about it.”

“Neither do I. We can be confident together.”

She set her bag on the step and crouched beside him. There was a patch of earth near his knee, a discarded length of string, and a mug he’d forgotten until the tea had gone cold. She picked out the end of the stem and held it while he loosened the rest.

“Teamwork,” he said.

“We should stop while we’re impressive.”

He sat back on his heels. She brushed dirt from the side of his hand. It had become natural to touch him. That was one of the things she was learning to fear.

Inside, she took vegetables from her bag and found the knife she liked. He put water on. They cooked a meal neither had planned in detail, and while the onions softened she leaned against him at the counter. He kissed her hair.

For a moment she let herself imagine that she had never written a date in August. The imagining was easy and unfair. She moved away to stir the pan.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

He didn’t answer. She looked up.

“That’s not true,” she said. “But it isn’t something you’ve done.”

“All right.”

“Meriel called. She’s back on the twenty-third.”

He nodded.

“I knew that,” she added. “I’m telling you as if it’s news.”

“Sometimes a date becomes news twice.”

She set the spoon down. “Yes.”

They ate outside. The evening was warm enough for bare arms, and the little garden smelled of earth and the herbs he’d accidentally planted too close together. Anouk asked about his day. He told her about a class that had gone well, then about one student he’d finally found a way to explain something to. He was pleased. She liked hearing him be pleased without apologising for it.

After supper he brought out the biscuits. She had started eating them. Neither mentioned this important defeat.

“Will you come to the beach on Sunday?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Peaches optional.”

“I might bring something robust. Apples. A turnip.”

She laughed. He smiled, then set the packet down and looked at his hands.

“Anouk.”

She knew, before he continued, that this was why his happiness had felt so deliberate tonight. Not false. Held carefully beside something else.

“I need to say something without making it your fault.”

“Then say it.”

“I don’t think I’m having a holiday romance.”

The words landed gently. That made them harder to deflect.

She could hear the distant rattle of a bicycle over the stones in the lane. A leaf had fallen onto the table between their plates. She picked it up, then put it down again.

“I don’t know what we’re calling it,” she said.

“Neither do I. I thought I could just enjoy the weeks. I am enjoying them. But I’m also looking forward to Thursday on Monday. I buy things because I think you’ll like them. Not only food. I saw a book yesterday and wanted to argue with you about it.”

She smiled despite herself.

“I want you in the part of my life where nothing much happens,” he said. “That’s the problem.”

She looked at him. There was no reproach in his face. If there had been, she might have found this easier.

“I can’t promise you that autumn.”

“I know.”

“I booked it before we met. I want to go.”

“I know that too.”

“You’re making this difficult.”

He gave a small, unhappy laugh. “I’m trying very hard not to.”

“No. I mean by being decent about it.”

He looked away towards the garden wall, then back.

“I don’t want to be so decent that you can’t tell what I want.”

That silenced her.

He leaned forward, his forearms on the table. “I want to keep seeing you when you go. I want to know whether you want that too. Not a promise to stay here. Not a promise that we’ll manage it. But something more honest than pretending August is a line we won’t mind crossing.”

She had expected a request to cancel. She had been ready to defend the room, the tickets, the pleasure of the place. This was more difficult. He wasn’t asking her to give up the journey. He was asking her to carry him into it.

“I’ve done distance badly,” she said.

“So have I.”

“That doesn’t recommend us.”

“No.”

He let the admission stand. She wished he would offer a solution she could reject.

“What would it mean?” she asked.

“I’d like us to decide together. But I’d need a real return. Not just sometime when it suited.”

“December.”

“Is that a plan you want with me, or the date you already happen to be coming back?”

She looked down. It was the right question, and she resented it for a moment before she could hear the courage it had taken to ask.

“I don’t know yet.”

“All right.”

“Don’t say all right if it isn’t.”

“It isn’t the answer I want. It’s still an answer you’re allowed to give.”

She got up because sitting had become impossible. He did not follow her into the garden. She stood beside the tangled plant they’d freed and pressed her thumb against the rough edge of the wall.

There were two defensible choices. She could say that what they had was lovely and that she couldn’t give him what he needed. They could stop before it became harder, or decide together how to finish the weeks. She would grieve it. She would survive it. So would he.

Or she could ask him to expect her.

That was the frightening part. Not being waited for as a passive pleasure, a light left burning in someone else’s house. Asking for it. Owing an answer when a different place delighted her. Having another person notice the shape of an absence because she had invited him to.

Orson came to the step but stayed there.

“You don’t have to answer tonight.”

She turned. “I want you. I need you to know that isn’t the uncertain part.”

His face changed. She crossed to him, put her hands against his chest and kissed him. He met her with an ache she could feel in the restraint of his hands. She drew him closer, wanting to make one truth unmistakable even while the other remained unsettled.

When she stepped back, his forehead rested against hers for a moment.

“I know now,” he said.

“I should go home and think.”

“Yes.”

He didn’t ask her to stay. He packed the remaining food into a container because she had paid for half and would need lunch tomorrow, and the ordinary kindness nearly undid her.

At the door she turned back.

“Tomorrow morning?”

“I’ll be here until ten.”

“I’ll come before then.”

He nodded. She left without another kiss, not as a punishment but because the last one had said all it could.

At Meriel’s flat, Anouk put the food in the fridge and opened her calendar to December. The page was almost empty. There was room for anything.

For twelve years that had felt like freedom.

She sat with her pen above the page, trying to decide whether she could ask Orson to be there when she returned.