The Paper Badge

Gethin Penrose asked me to dance while Fenna was still pinning the badge of our club to my dress. I wanted to say yes, which was an awkward way to thank the woman who had spent eighteen months helping me keep his name off our notices.

The pin caught my skin.

“Sorry,” Fenna said.

“For the badge or the company?” I asked.

She looked up. Gethin stood on the other side of the welcome table, holding his folded coat. He had not offered a hand. That would have made a little tableau of us, him waiting and me refusing, with Fenna trapped at the inconvenient point of the triangle.

“The badge,” she said. “I can only do one thing at a time.”

At forty-one I ought to have been able to pin a badge to my own dress. But Fenna had done mine while I did the float, because that was how we worked. She made the front of the table cheerful and I made sure we could give change for twenty pounds.

Gethin glanced at the row of envelopes beneath my hand.

“After your shift, if you’re on until nine.”

“She’s on until eight,” Fenna said. “I’m doing nine.”

She took the cash box from me. There went my most respectable reason for saying no.

The record had begun with an apologetic scratch. Someone had found a waltz in the hall’s ancient collection, and a trumpet was working its way towards a note I did not think it would reach.

“This one?” I asked him.

“Unless you’re waiting for the trumpet to improve.”

“We could be here all night.”

“Then this one.”

Fenna pressed the lid of the cash box shut. I could see the small effort she made not to look at either of us.

Gethin had helped run our Fridays before he left and opened his Sunday Assembly. In the months after the split, Fenna and I had spent a great deal of time saying that people must do as they pleased. We said it when another couple stopped coming. We said it over the notices we no longer displayed.

I had typed the notice about those notices. That had taken some doing.

“All right,” I said.

I bent for my bag.

“Leave it,” Fenna said. “I’ll be right here.”

Of course she would. She had been right here for ten years, with a spare pair of tights or an extension cable or the name of the person who could open the cupboard. When my bus had broken down on a wet Friday last winter, she had driven across Bellweather to fetch me. We had arrived too late to put out all the chairs and laughed about it. The following week we put them out early.

I put my bag beneath the table again.

Gethin carried his coat to an empty chair. I waited beside him, though there was no reason I could not have gone straight to the floor.

“You can change your mind,” he said.

“I know.”

“Good.”

He hung his coat over the chair back instead of folding it on the seat. There was room for me to sit there, if I wanted. I resented noticing.

“Do you say that to everyone?”

“Only people who look as though they’ve agreed to carry a wardrobe upstairs.”

“I don’t look like that.”

“You looked at my shoes.”

“They’re very large.”

“I’ll try to keep them under me.”

He was forty-three. I knew because I had once bought the candles for his fortieth and brought forty-one, one for luck, to find him looking mildly alarmed at the quantity of fire. We had known one another for seven years. I knew his birthday, his objection to peppermint tea, the way he counted chairs twice if the totals disagreed. None of it helped with the present difficulty, which was that I wanted to know what it would feel like to stand close to him.

At the edge of the floor he held out his hand.

I put mine into it.

His palm was warm. That was ordinary enough. The foolish thing was the pleasure I took in having my hand held while neither of us carried anything.

“May I?” he asked, the other hand hovering beside my waist.

“Yes. A little higher.”

He adjusted. I set my hand on his shoulder, finding the place through the smooth cotton of his shirt, and for a moment we waited for the music together.

I could have looked at the room. I knew the room. I had spent more Fridays here than I cared to add up: the curtains with their bleached folds, the noticeboard patched with cork from three different decades, the ceiling tile that needed turning so the stain faced the wall. Tonight’s fundraiser was for new curtains. Both our clubs had agreed that curtains were a subject on which we could cooperate.

I looked at Gethin instead.

“What?” he said.

“I’m remembering the last time we tried to dance together.”

“The electricity went off.”

“You said it was a sign.”

“It was a power cut. I may have been trying to amuse you.”

“You should try again.”

The corner of his mouth moved. Then we began.

For the first few steps I was occupied with the floor and the other dancers. A man in a green shirt had decided on an ambitious route; I watched him approach, waited to be crowded, and found that Gethin had already made room. He did it without pulling me. His hand stayed light, and I became aware of the space it allowed me to close.

I closed some of it.

His gaze returned to mine. There was a question in it, quieter than the one at the table. I answered by letting my fingers settle on his shoulder instead of keeping them politely raised.

The trumpet reached its note and regretted the attempt.

Gethin winced.

I laughed and missed a step.

It was not a graceful mistake. My foot went where his was about to go, I stopped short, and he stopped with me. Behind us, the green shirt sailed past untroubled.

“Sorry.”

“We’ve survived.”

“I don’t usually do that.”

“Laugh?”

“Get it wrong.”

“I know. It’s very inconvenient.”

“For whom?”

“The rest of us. We have to wait for the trumpet.”

I was still smiling when we moved again. His hand was steady at my back. For the length of the next phrase I stopped checking who might be watching, and felt the small changes in the pressure of his fingers instead.

I had danced with men who liked being seen to hold me. I had danced with men who explained where I ought to put my feet. Gethin seemed interested in whether I was enjoying myself, which ought not to have felt like a discovery.

I wanted him to ask me again. Before this one ended, before I had to work out what to do with my face at the table, I wanted the certainty of another.

The wanting made me cross.

“You could have asked anybody,” I said.

“I did ask somebody.”

“You know what I mean.”

His attention went briefly to Fenna, then back to me.

“Do you want to stop?”

“No. I want you to answer.”

We moved past the high windows. Evening light still lay across the floor there, exposing dust on the varnish and the grey at his temples. He had more of it than eighteen months ago. I wanted, absurdly, to smooth the hair above his ear.

“I wanted to dance with you,” he said. “I thought I’d ask you yourself.”

That last word stayed with me.

People asked Fenna whether I could do the welcome desk. They asked me whether Fenna would mind a new tune, another guest, a change of Friday. We had become a convenient way around each other.

“You make that sound simple.”

“The asking was.”

I looked at his mouth, then found I could not pretend I had been looking elsewhere. His fingers shifted once against mine. He did not bring me closer, or save me by talking.

We finished the dance with that look between us.

When the final note faded, he released my waist. I let my hand slide off his shoulder, feeling the seam of his sleeve beneath my fingertips. There was no necessity for taking so long.

“Thank you,” he said.

I wanted a less adequate sentence. I wanted to have earned one by saying something less adequate myself.

Instead I glanced towards the welcome table.

Fenna was giving directions to a couple in matching waterproofs. She held up two fingers for the corridor doors, then pointed left. Her badge had come loose on one side.

“I should—“

“Go on.”

He said it without resentment. That made it much harder to use him as the reason I was unhappy.

I crossed to the table. Fenna reached for a strip of raffle tickets.

“Would you check whether we’ve got any more green books?”

I crouched and opened the carton.

There were six green books. There were also three rolls of tape, somebody’s lunch and the small pair of scissors Fenna always said she had lost. I could have stayed there arranging things until it was time to pack up.

I handed her a book.

“Your badge has come undone.”

She looked down. “So it has.”

I leaned across and fixed it. The pin passed through the fabric easily this time.

“You could have said you wanted to dance with him,” she said.

“I didn’t know he was going to ask.”

“That wasn’t quite what I said.”

I looked at her. We had known each other too long for either of us to be pleased by a technically correct answer.

“I didn’t know how much I wanted to until he did.”

Her fingers stopped on the tickets.

Behind me the music changed to something brisk. A pair of women hurried past, already arguing cheerfully about which of them would lead. Fenna watched them reach the floor.

“He’s still said what he said,” she told me.

“I know.”

“And you agreed with me about it.”

“I still do.”

That was the difficult thing. I did. He had called our Fridays a waiting room for people who already knew each other. He had put it where people we knew could read it, and some of them had agreed, and some of the ones who had agreed had stopped coming.

There had been truth in it. There had also been the woman Fenna had met at the door for six weeks until she felt able to come in alone. I could not make the sentence fair just because I liked the hand of the man who had written it.

“It’s one dance,” I said.

Fenna tore the tickets along their perforations.

“Then you don’t need to keep explaining it.”

I had hurt her. She was letting me know, and she was also letting me go. I wanted to be grateful without having to feel the hurt.

“I’ll be back at nine to help clear the table.”

“I know you will. Now go before I ask you to alphabetise the raffle prizes.”

I laughed, though I didn’t quite feel like laughing. She pressed my bag into my hands.

Gethin was standing beside the chair where he had left his coat. He had a glass of water, and was examining the label on the sound cable that ran along the wall.

“If you’re about to fix something,” I said, “don’t.”

He straightened.

“There’s a hum on the speaker. I thought—“

“The hall committee have somebody.”

“I wasn’t proposing to take over.”

“No. I’m sorry. I just don’t want to spend the rest of the evening pretending you’re here because you’re useful.”

I heard how much I had said only after saying it.

He set the glass down on the windowsill.

“I was looking for something to do with my hands.”

I looked at them. He let me.

“You could sit down,” I said.

“So could you.”

The chair beside his was free. I put my bag on it, caught myself, and moved the bag to the floor.

We sat.

Nobody sounded an alarm. The floor was still crowded, the raffle remained unsorted, and a volunteer at the refreshment hatch was making tea with the expression of somebody who had not asked to be responsible for this many spoons.

Gethin turned his chair a little towards mine.

“I shouldn’t have written it like that,” he said.

I knew what he meant.

“Would you write something different now?”

He took time over it. I was glad he did, although it would have been easier to be handed an apology polished to the occasion.

“I’d say I was tired of watching people arrive alone and go home without a dance. And that I was angry nobody wanted to change the evening.”

“Some people were frightened of changing it.”

“I know.”

“You didn’t speak as if you knew.”

“No.”

He looked towards the floor. A woman there lifted her chin to acknowledge him, then returned her attention to her partner.

“I miss dancing with her,” he said.

It was an unguarded admission. He seemed to regret it at once, reaching for his glass.

“She comes most Fridays,” I told him.

“I know that too.”

I could have offered to say something to her. I nearly did. Bringing a message was a task I knew how to perform, and we would both have been relieved of this unfamiliar job of sitting with each other.

I kept my mouth shut until the impulse passed.

“I wrote the notice,” I said. “About not bringing your flyers. Fenna asked me to send it, but I chose the words.”

He looked at me.

“I thought you had.”

“You asked me to dance anyway.”

“Yes.”

The simple answer undid more than forgiveness would have. We were not agreed. I had done something that hurt him; he had hurt people I loved. There was no newly discovered innocence to make wanting him a tidy business.

His knee was close to mine. He could have moved his chair away and he hadn’t.

I turned a little more towards him. The skirt of my dress brushed his trouser leg. I watched him notice.

“Coralia,” he said, as though he had discovered a reason to use my name.

“Yes?”

He smiled. Not the public smile from the welcome table. This one came slowly, and I felt it low in my stomach.

“I’m glad you sat down.”

I wanted to put my hand back into his. I wanted to find out whether he would hold it without music giving us a reason.

For once I left the wanting visible.

“Would you have coffee with me on Wednesday?” I asked.