Outside the Launderette

He lives above a launderette on a road in Leytonstone with a bus garage at the end of it, and the entrance is a blue door beside the machines, and I stood in front of it for ninety seconds working out that if I rang the bell I would be a woman who had turned up at a man’s flat.

I rang the bell.

He came down in a T-shirt with a tea towel over his shoulder and opened the door and his face went through about four things.

“Tess.”

“I’m not coming in,” I said. “I want you to come out here and have the argument, because if I come in it becomes a different thing and we both know it.”

“It’s raining.”

“Then we’ll get wet.”

So we had it on the pavement outside a launderette in Leytonstone, at twenty to eight on a Wednesday in July, in front of nine washing machines and a man doing a service wash.

“You took the building off me.”

“I made room for you to—“

“Don’t.” I put my hand up. “Don’t do the version. I’ve read the email nine times, it’s beautiful, it would win prizes. Say the real one.”

He opened his mouth. Closed it.

“I’m waiting.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“I want you to say why you sent it at 16:41 from eleven feet away instead of turning round in your chair.”

“Because—“

“Say it.”

“Because if I’d turned round in my chair you’d have talked me out of it!” It came out of him hard enough that the man in the launderette looked up. Daniel put his hand over his mouth, briefly, and then took it away. “There. That’s the real one. Are you happier?”

“Yes,” I said. “Enormously. Keep going.”

“Tess—“

“No, you don’t get to stop at one. You’ve had eight days of being pleasant at me and I’ve had eight days of thinking I’d lost my mind, so you can stand in the rain and finish it.”

And he did. That’s the thing I want recorded, because it is the single most important event in this book and there is no kissing in it: he stayed on the pavement.

“You stood in that meeting room,” he said, “and told me you might be married for another twenty years, and that if you weren’t it couldn’t be because of me, and that you might never decide anything at all. And you were right. Every word. And I said thank you for saying it straight and went and sat at my desk and did a cost plan for four hours and could not have told you one number in it.”

“So you removed yourself.”

“I removed the situation. There’s a difference—“

“There is no difference! You removed the thing I’m best at, and my Thursdays, and my name off a building I saved, and you did it to protect yourself from a conversation.” My voice was not under control now. “You want to know what you actually did? You made a decision about my life and didn’t tell me. Which is what my husband does. Which is what I do. Do you have any idea how much I needed you not to be like the rest of us?”

He looked as though I’d hit him.

“That’s not fair.”

“No, it’s not, and it’s true, and you can have both.”

The service wash man went out past us with his bag. Neither of us moved.

“I’ve done it before,” Daniel said, eventually. “Obviously. You know I have. Priya used to say I was the easiest person in the world to live with and the hardest one to reach, and she said it for about four years before she stopped saying anything, and then she said it once more, at the end, very quietly, in a kitchen.” He wiped rain off his face. “I don’t have a temper. I have a door. And I’d rather be behind it than be somebody who makes a scene, and I’d rather be behind it than be somebody who asks a married woman for something.”

“Then ask me.”

“No.”

“Ask me for something, Daniel—“

“No.” He said it properly. “That’s not the door, that’s the one thing I’m sure of. If I ask you, you’ll hear it for the rest of your life, in every room, every time your husband’s decent to you. You’ll never get a clean look at your own marriage again.” He shook his head. “You don’t want a man who’d do that. You want a man who won’t, and then you’re furious with him for not doing it, and I don’t know what to do with that, and I don’t think you do either.”

Which was, of course, completely accurate.

The rain got heavier. We both stood in it like idiots.

“Can I say the unforgivable thing,” I said.

“You’ve said four.”

“This is the one.” I had to look at the launderette to do it. “Part of me wanted you to. Not to ask — to decide. To turn up at my flat and say something enormous and take it out of my hands, so that whatever happened next was a thing that had happened to me. And you didn’t, and you’re not going to, and I have spent ten days being furious with you for it and calling it something else.”

He didn’t answer for a while.

“Yes,” he said. “I know. I could see you wanting it and I’ve been very frightened of how much I wanted to give it to you.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Because of a Tuesday in 1994,” Daniel said.

“What?”

“You asked me on the pavement why I don’t have a temper. There’s a date. There’s always a date.” He wiped his face again; it was useless by then. “My father left on a Tuesday in August 1994 and he had been standing in our kitchen wanting to for about three years, and my mother knew, and I knew, and I was thirteen. And the thing about a man who wants to go and won’t say it is that everybody in the house arranges themselves around the wanting. You get very good at being easy. You get extremely good at being easy, because if you’re easy enough he might not.”

“Daniel.”

“And then he went anyway, and married the woman, and she was perfectly nice, and he sat in her front room for twenty-two years being pleasant and never once said a true sentence to anybody, and he died in 2016 and I gave the eulogy and I had almost nothing to put in it.” He shrugged. “So no. I will not be the thing in somebody’s kitchen. I’d rather want you for the rest of my life from a distance of eleven feet.”

“That’s an appalling plan.”

“It’s the only one I’ve got that I can look at.”

“It’s still appalling. You’ve built a whole personality out of not being your father and it’s made you exactly as unreachable as he was.”

He looked up sharply.

“Yes,” I said. “You can have that one. I’ve had mine.”

And he laughed — shocked, unwilling, entirely real — and said, “God, you’re a horrible woman.”

“I’ve been told.”

“Alright,” I said. “Terms.”

“Terms?”

“You like arrangements. So do I.” I was shivering. “One: you don’t manage me. Not ever again, not kindly, not in an email. If you want to change something about my work you say it to my face, in the room, out loud, and you take the argument.”

“Yes.”

“Say it back.”

“I say it in the room. Out loud. I take the argument.” He nodded slowly. “And one from me.”

“Go on.”

“You don’t decide about your marriage in front of me.” He said it carefully. “Not out loud. Not at a site, not on a pavement, not in a way I can react to. Because I’ll react, Tess. I’m not a saint, I’m a man with an extremely good filing system for his feelings. If you start working it out where I can hear you I will put my thumb on it without meaning to, and then we’re back to it being my fault, and I cannot be the reason. I’ve told you why.”

“Because of the Tuesday in 1994.”

“Because of the Tuesday in 1994,” he agreed, to the pavement.

“Right,” I said.

“Right.”

“And Ivyholt?”

“Ivyholt’s yours. I’ll withdraw the email tomorrow, in person, and tell Hester I sent it for personal reasons and it was a mistake.” He grimaced. “She’ll want to know what the reasons are.”

“She’ll already know.”

“She’ll already know,” he agreed, wretchedly.

I started laughing then, which was the rain and the nine washing machines and the fact that I was standing on a road in Leytonstone with my hair flat to my head, having a boundary negotiation, at nearly eight at night, with a man I had kissed for ten seconds a fortnight ago and would now not touch again for over a year.

“What?” he said.

“Nothing. This is the most sensible conversation I’ve ever had outside a launderette.”

“I’m a sensible man. It’s my curse.”

“I’m going,” I said.

“Can I—“

“No, you can’t drive me. Obviously you can’t drive me.”

“I was going to say can I lend you an umbrella,” Daniel said, “but I’d like it back, so the answer’s probably no.”

And then, because neither of us could think of a single available gesture in the entire human repertoire, we shook hands.

On a wet pavement. Formally. Like two contractors agreeing a variation. His hand was warm and mine was freezing and it lasted about a second and a half and it was, without any competition, the most intimate thing that had happened to me in two years.

Then I walked to the bus stop and he went back inside, and I got home at nine, and Martin was in the kitchen with the radio on, and he said, “God, look at the state of you — where’ve you been?”

And I stood in the doorway of the kitchen we built, dripping on the tiles he laid, and thought: this is the eleventh time this year I’ve been asked that question, and every single answer has been a small one, and I am going to have to tell him the large one, and it is going to take the rest of the summer.

“Walking,” I said. “I’ll tell you about it. Not tonight.”

And Martin — who was not stupid, who has never once been stupid, who I have spent a year describing as a man who stopped asking — put down the tea towel and looked at me and said:

“Alright. But you will tell me.”

“Yes.”

“Tess. You will tell me.”

“I will,” I said.