Thursday Evenings

The scaffold went up around truss four on a Wednesday, and on the Thursday I climbed it at half past five in the evening with a torch in my teeth, and Daniel stood at the bottom holding the ladder he had no business holding because it was tied off and didn’t need holding.

“You’re not helping,” I said, around the torch.

“I’m aware. It’s for me, not you.”

“You don’t like heights.”

“I like heights enormously. I like them best from underneath.”

At the top, the roof came down to meet me and stopped being a roof and became a piece of carpentry, which is the thing about scaffolds that never gets old. From the pool floor the trusses are a pattern. At eight metres they’re two-hundred-millimetre pitch pine with the saw marks still in them and a date pencilled on the side — G.S. 11.4.03 — in the handwriting of a man who has been dead for a century and who, judging by the flourish on the 3, thought quite well of himself.

“G.S. did this one,” I called down.

“G.S. did four, seven and eleven. Not nine. Nine’s someone with sadder handwriting.”

I put the torch on the shoe — the cast iron cradle where the truss sits into the wall — and there it was. Not corrosion. Or not only corrosion.

“Daniel.”

“Mm.”

“Come up.”

There was a silence with a whole personality in it.

“I’m going to need you to say that again in a way that includes the words it’s safe.”

“It’s tied off, it’s signed off, I did the handover this morning, and you’re going to want to see this with your own eyes because if I tell you about it you’ll think I’m exaggerating for effect.”

“You never exaggerate for effect. You state things flatly and let them terrify people.”

But he came up. He came up slowly, with a hand on each stile, talking the entire way — something about a survey in Whitby where he’d climbed a church tower and thought about his mortality “in an itemised fashion” — and arrived at the top a bit grey and entirely game.

“Right,” he said. “Show me.”

I showed him. The cast iron shoe had a crack running up from the bolt hole, old, opened, and packed — packed — with what turned out to be folded lead sheet, hammered in, painted over, and then painted over again in a different colour.

He looked at it for a long moment.

“Someone’s repaired this,” he said.

“Someone’s repaired it badly, and hidden it, and then told nobody. And then, I’d bet, took the money.” I ran the torch along. “Look at the wall plate underneath. That’s a modern bolt. Nineteen sixties, maybe seventies. Somebody came up here with lead and a hammer and a tin of paint and made the problem invisible for forty years.”

“And truss four is the one that’s gone flat.”

“Truss four is the one that’s gone flat.”

He let out a breath. And then he laughed, which was not what I expected, and put his forehead briefly against the scaffold tube like a man who has been handed a gift he didn’t dare ask for.

“That’s it,” he said. “That’s the roof saved. That’s not the glass has failed, that’s a repair has failed, which means the failure is local, which means — sorry, you say it, it’s your discipline—“

“Which means we jack it, replace four shoes, splice the plate, and the other thirteen trusses are exactly what they look like. Which they were always going to be, which is what you said in the first meeting before you—“

“Before I went and stood in the corridor.”

“I was going to say before you were shouted down by a woman who is right about most things and wrong about this, but yes. Fine. That too.”

We got down. My hands smelled of iron for the rest of the evening.

—

It was seven by then, and the light in the Baths at seven in late January is the colour of a wet pavement, and neither of us suggested going home. That’s the honest version. Neither of us suggested it.

Daniel went out to the van and came back with a folding table, two site stools, a roll of trace and — this is the detail I would put in evidence — a thermos of coffee and two enamel mugs, which meant he had come to a site visit prepared to stay.

“You planned this,” I said.

“I brought a flask. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s a flask.”

We set up in the shallow end, because the shallow end has the only three square metres of the building where the roof doesn’t drip. He rolled out the trace. I got out the level survey. And then for two and a half hours we did the thing I have been trying, on and off since I was twenty-four, to explain to people who don’t do it: we designed something.

Not talked about designing. Did it. He’d draw the shoe detail as he’d want it to look from the pool floor in eighty years, and I’d say that’s beautiful and it won’t take the horizontal thrust, and he’d say why not, and I’d draw the force triangle right on top of his beautiful drawing, and he’d say so if I bring the strap round the outside and lose the bolt, and I’d say then yes, and that would be the next thirty seconds of both our lives and nothing else would exist.

At one point I put my hand flat on a sheet to stop it curling and he put his mug on the opposite corner without looking, and we carried on, and I thought: we are two people who have never once had to explain ourselves to each other and I would like this to be my job forever.

At nine, he refilled my mug and said, “We should do this on purpose.”

“We are doing this on purpose.”

“No, we’re doing it because the scaffold’s up and neither of us had anywhere to be. I mean put it in the diary. Thursday evenings, here, until the detail’s done. There’s four months of work in this roof and if we do it in the office, Hester will walk past and it’ll become a meeting.”

Everything he said was true. The Thursday evening thing was, on its own terms, correct project management. There is no version of that sentence you could put in front of an ethics committee and get anything but a shrug.

I said, “Alright. Thursdays.”

And then, because I am a coward with a very good vocabulary, I added: “It’s cheaper than the alternative. Two of us in a meeting room with Kwame taking minutes costs the project about four hundred pounds an hour.”

“There it is,” Daniel said.

“There what is?”

“You always give me a reason afterwards. Have you noticed? You agree to something and then you hand me a justification about ten seconds later, all wrapped up, as if I’d asked for the receipt.” He was packing the trace away, unbothered, not looking at me. “You did it with the scaffold. You did it with the Faraday tiles. You did it just now.”

“That’s not—“

I stopped.

Because he was right, and because there was no version of arguing about it that didn’t involve doing it again, right there, in front of him.

“It’s a habit,” I said.

“I know. I’m not criticising it. I’d just rather you didn’t do it with me, if you can manage it. You’re allowed to want to do the work in the evening because the work is good.” He snapped the lid on the flask. “It’s a swimming pool, Tess. Nobody’s going to audit us.”

—

He drove me to Homerton station because it was raining properly by then. The van smelled of sawdust and, faintly, of the pear drop sweets he keeps in the door for his daughter, who I had not met, and whose photograph was clipped to the sun visor: a girl of thirteen or fourteen, mid-laugh, holding up a chess trophy at an angle that suggested she was about to hit somebody with it.

“Ada,” he said, when he saw me look. “She’d want me to tell you she won that, and that the man she beat cried.”

“Did he?”

“He welled up. Ada holds that it counts.”

“It counts.”

“That’s what I said. Wife of the organiser said it didn’t count. There was a scene.” He pulled in short of the station. “Same time next week?”

“Same time next week.”

He didn’t put the van in gear. The wipers went twice.

“Can I ask how long you’ve been married?” he said. “You can tell me to mind my business. I’m asking because I’ve worked with you for eight months and I know your opinion on cast iron and nothing else about you, and that seems like an odd balance.”

“Eleven years. Martin. He’s a double bassist — orchestral, freelance, which is a way of saying he’s very good and it’s a bad decade for it.” The rain was loud on the roof of the van. “We met at a wedding where the band was terrible and he was the only one of them who knew it.”

“That’s a good story.”

“It’s got a good first act.” I heard it come out and wished it back immediately. “I mean — everyone’s marriage has a first act. Ours was a long one.”

Daniel looked straight ahead through the windscreen and said nothing at all, which was, I would come to understand, the single most characteristic thing he could have done: he heard the crack in it and he did not put a finger in.

“Go on,” he said. “You’ll miss your train.”

I got out into the rain and got the Overground and stood the whole way with my bag between my feet, and at Hackney Central I got my phone out and opened the calendar and put in a recurring event, Thursdays, 17:30 to 20:30, sixteen weeks.

The title box wanted something. I typed IVY — site (D.S.), and looked at it, and deleted the (D.S.), and saved it.

Martin was up when I got in, at the kitchen table with a spreadsheet of his own — the diary sheet he keeps, which used to have forty dates in it by February and this year had eleven.

“You’re late,” he said, not as an accusation.

“We found a bodged repair from about 1968 hidden inside a roof truss under two coats of paint. The whole roof scheme turns on it. I was up a scaffold with a torch in my mouth and I nearly cried, and I’m going to be insufferable about it for a week.”

He put his pen down and grinned at me — the real grin, the one from before the auditions started going wrong — and said, “Now that’s a story. Tell me all of it. Start with the torch.”

So I did. I told him all of it, and he laughed in the right places, and asked two good questions, and it was, by any measure, a happy hour in a marriage.

Then he said, “Right — I’ve got something too,” and turned the laptop round, and it was the diary sheet, and he’d highlighted a line in green. A fixing job: eight weeks with a touring company out of Copenhagen, starting in September. Steady money. Good players.

“That’s brilliant,” I said, and meant it.

“It’s eight weeks away.”

“I know.”

“In your mother’s city, which is the part you’re not saying.”

“I wasn’t going to say it.”

“You were thinking it loudly.” He closed the laptop. “I haven’t said yes. I wanted to tell you before I did, because it’s — you know. Eight weeks.”

And I said, “Say yes, Martin,” and I meant that too, and I want it on the record that I meant it — that I sat at my own kitchen table at half past ten at night and told my husband to take the job that would take him out of the country in September, and that at the time I believed my reasons were entirely about him.

He said he’d sleep on it. He went to bed at eleven. I stayed up to put the roof photos in the project folder, and renamed them properly, and closed the laptop.

I told him everything about that evening except that the flask had two mugs in it.