The Same People

“Is now all right?” Gethin asked.

I looked at the book beside my plate. “Yes.”

“I spoke to them at the café. The people who were at the hatch.”

I let him continue.

“I told them I’d made the joke easy to go on with, and that it wasn’t fair to make where you dance a reason to treat you as if you didn’t belong.”

He stopped. I could hear traffic at his end.

“Where are you?”

“Outside my flat. I walked home.”

“Go in. You don’t need to give the whole street this conversation.”

A key scraped in a lock. I heard the door close, then his steps.

“I didn’t want to put it off,” he said.

“You haven’t. What happened?”

The music man had said that he had only meant a joke. Gethin had said he knew; he had meant one too, and that was why he was talking about it. Red Shoes had asked whether I had told him to say this. He had told her no.

“I said you told me what it was like to stand there. What I did with that was mine.”

“And then?”

“Then it was awkward.”

I almost smiled. At least he was not offering me a little account in which everyone became wiser before the tea went cold.

The door volunteer had said she hadn’t thought about it in that way. Red Shoes had said she would be annoyed if people kept introducing her as someone from her previous club. The music man had looked down at his cup and said he would leave it alone.

“I don’t know if he agrees,” Gethin said. “He stayed, though. We talked about the new recording afterwards. Badly, for a bit.”

I could imagine it: their table between the blue chairs, his friends discovering that a pleasant part of their evening had become less comfortable. I could not know how it had felt from each of those chairs. I had his account, and he was giving me the parts that did not flatter him.

“Thank you for telling me.”

“There’s something else. I put a reply under the old post. About Fridays. I should have done that before I ever asked you to come on Sunday.”

I sat straighter.

“What did you say?”

“I’ll send it if you’d like. You don’t have to answer it.”

“I’d like to read it.”

The message arrived while we were still on the phone. It was a screenshot of the old local post, his name above the sentence I knew too well. Below it was a new reply from him.

I still think we needed to do more for people arriving alone. Calling Friday Rooms a waiting room for people who already knew each other made the whole club answer for that disagreement. People there gave time and care to newcomers, including people I failed to notice. I’ve let that sentence stand as though it were a fair account. It wasn’t. I wrote it in anger and enjoyed having people agree with me. I’m sorry for the harm it did.

I read it twice.

He had not mentioned me. He had not claimed the new relationship proved he was now welcome, or offered Fenna an apology in exchange for making Friday easy for him. The criticism remained, but it no longer carried everybody in the room as its evidence.

“Is that public?” I asked.

“In the same group. Under the original. I haven’t deleted what I wrote.”

“Has anyone answered?”

“Not yet. Someone may.”

There was apprehension in the last two words. Good conduct had not made him invulnerable to other people’s opinions.

“I don’t want you to think I’ve done two things and now you owe me Thursday,” he said.

“You haven’t asked for Thursday.”

“I would like to. I’m trying to do this in the right order.”

I looked at the paragraph on my screen. It could not repair eighteen months by itself. It could become another fine statement from a man who was very good at knowing what a room ought to be. Or it could be the beginning of him making his own room harder to hide in.

“Ask me,” I said.

“Would you go for a walk tomorrow?”

I wanted to hear him ask once more, just for the pleasure of it. I refused myself that small game.

“Yes. After work.”

We agreed a place and a time. Before we finished, I told him about the upside-down proof. It was several days old now, and still funny. He laughed at the right part. Hearing that laugh hurt for a second, then made me glad I had answered.

· · ·Scene break

On Thursday he was waiting by the library with his hands in his coat pockets. He took them out when he saw me, then seemed unsure what to do with them.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hello.”

We did not kiss. I had not yet decided whether I wanted the familiar gesture before the unfamiliar conversation.

We walked towards the river path. There was no reason to go by the allotments except that I had been there with Fenna, and I wanted this evening to have its own place.

“How was work?” he asked.

“Long. Yours?”

“About the same length.”

I laughed despite myself. He glanced at me, relieved, and I was glad he did not try to build a whole reprieve on it.

At the first railing we stopped. The river was low, showing a dark band on the stones. Someone had tied a ribbon to the rail and it twisted in the wind, its free end frayed almost white.

“I’ve thought about what you said,” he told me. “About wanting an easy minute with my friends.”

“And?”

“I did. I wanted them to like you, and I wanted not to have to change how I was with them. I thought if you laughed, I could have both.”

I turned towards him.

“I was doing it again,” he said. “Making a room that people could join provided they fitted what we already enjoyed.”

The sentence could have come from one of his arguments about Friday. He knew it; his mouth tightened after he said it.

“I didn’t want to see that about Sunday.”

“I don’t need Sunday to be worse than Friday,” I told him. “I liked being there. That’s why I minded.”

“I know now.”

He put his hands on the rail. His knuckles were reddened by the cold.

“I kept thinking about your kitchen,” he said. “What I asked of you when you invented the sound job. I wanted you to let the evening be awkward instead of finding a way to make me useful. Then I wouldn’t do the smaller version for you.”

I had not wanted an exact accounting of our faults, one exchanged for another. This did not sound like that. He was describing the standard he had asked me to meet.

“I don’t want us to keep proving a point on each other,” I said.

“Neither do I.”

“Next time you may get it wrong in a different way. So may I. I’d like to be able to tell you without doing quite so much convincing first.”

He looked at me.

“I can try to stop explaining before I’ve listened.”

“That would help.”

“And if you tell me what I meant, I may disagree.”

“You can.”

“I don’t want agreeing with everything to become how I keep you.”

There he was again: a man with an edge, not an improved version made smooth enough to fit my hand. I found the statement more reassuring than a larger promise would have been.

“Good,” I said. “I’d get bored.”

He smiled, then looked down at the river.

We walked on. There were ordinary things to catch up on: the potatoes he had finally used, a troublesome shift, the book I had borrowed. I told him about seeing Fenna, without giving him our conversation. He said he was glad I had company. I believed him.

After a while his hand brushed mine. Neither of us moved away, but he did not close his fingers.

I took his hand.

He looked at me, and I could see how much he had wanted it. That moved me more than any account of his week alone.

“I’ve missed you,” I said.

“I’ve missed you too.”

We stopped where the path widened beside an empty bench. I put my free hand against his coat and he leaned towards me, waiting until I lifted my face.

The kiss was cautious at first. Then I felt his fingers tighten around mine and answered with enough certainty that he drew me nearer. I had missed the warmth of him, the particular pressure of his mouth, the small sound he made when I touched his cheek. None of it had been replaced by being right on my own.

When we parted I kept my hand against him.

“That doesn’t make everything easy,” I said.

“No.”

“But I wanted to.”

“So did I.”

We sat on the bench. He put an arm round me, and I leaned into him with a relief that was neither forgiveness completed nor suspicion forgotten. It was the pleasure of letting what he had done matter, while keeping the right to see what he did next.

“Tomorrow,” I said.

He waited.

“I still want you to come. With me.”

“I’d like to.”

“Some people may have read your reply. Some won’t. Fenna may have. I haven’t sent it to her.”

“That’s all right.”

“I can’t promise she’ll be pleased to see you.”

“You’ve never promised that.”

I looked up at him. “I may spend the first half-hour watching everything go wrong.”

“And I’ll want to tell you what’s wrong with it.”

“We sound delightful.”

He laughed. “We could try a dance first.”

I considered this entirely practical suggestion.

“Yes. We could.”

At my street we stopped. I wanted to ask him up. I also wanted a little time to enjoy having chosen him again before finding out what the next evening would ask of us.

“I’ll meet you here tomorrow,” I said. “Seven.”

“Seven.”

He kissed me once, unhurriedly, and I let my hand trail down his sleeve before I released him.

Upstairs, the cream ticket was still beside my keys. I put it in the bag I would take tomorrow. I did not add a pen, a roll of tape or the hall’s spare key.

For the first time, preparing for the anniversary took less than a minute.