What Ruki Saw

Ruki came to the site in March because she wanted to see the roof, and because she is the only person I know who will drive across London on a Saturday to look at a piece of carpentry.

She is a coroner. She spends her working life establishing what actually happened to people, and she has no patience whatsoever for the way the rest of us describe our lives.

“It’s a shed,” she said, standing in the deep end among the stacked chairs.

“It’s a Grade II listed shed.”

“It’s a cold Grade II listed shed. Show me the famous truss.”

I showed her the famous truss. I showed her the shoe with the lead packed into the crack and the 1968 bolt, and the new cross-beam sketched in chalk on the brickwork where it would go, and she listened properly, which she always does, with her hands in her coat pockets.

“And this is the thing you’ve been doing on Thursdays,” she said.

“This is it.”

“Hm,” said Ruki.

Daniel came in at eleven to meet the scaffolder, which I had told Ruki about and had spent a genuinely embarrassing amount of thought on: whether to mention it at all, whether to mention it early or late, what it would look like either way. In the end I’d said, in the car, in a voice I had rehearsed, “The architect might be about,” and Ruki had said “Mm,” and changed the subject, which should have warned me.

They got on, obviously. Daniel gets on with everyone; it’s practically a medical condition. He asked her what a coroner actually does, and then asked a second question, and then a third, and Ruki — who normally shuts that conversation down inside a minute because people only ever want the grisly part — talked for ten minutes about inquest procedure and the reform of the reporting system, and he stood with his arms folded, listening, occasionally saying “wait, go back.”

Then the scaffolder arrived, and Daniel went off to argue about ties and loadings, and Ruki turned to me and said:

“Right. What are you doing?”

“What?”

“Teresa. What are you doing.”

“I’m restoring a swimming pool.”

“Don’t.” She said it almost gently. “I’ve been watching you for eleven minutes. Not him. You.”

“There’s nothing to watch.”

“I know there’s nothing to watch. That’s what I’m asking about.”

I turned away and made a note on my clipboard about a tie loading I had already noted, because my hands like to be doing something when I’m being told the truth.

“Nothing has happened,” I said.

“I believe you.”

“Nothing is going to happen.”

“I believe that too, mostly.” Ruki came round so she was in front of me again. “That’s not what I asked. I asked what you’re doing, and the answer, from where I was standing, is that you have a whole face that you use for that man and I have not seen it since roughly 2019.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“You laughed at something he said about a scaffold tie. It wasn’t funny, Tess. It was a joke about a scaffold tie.”

“It was funny in context.”

“It was funny because he said it.” She let that sit. “Do you know what he actually said, or were you just watching his face while he said it?”

I did know what he’d actually said. That is not the point; the point is that it took me a full second to retrieve it, and she watched me take it.

“You’ve got a word in your head,” I said. “Say it.”

“You say it. It’s your word.”

“Affair,” I said. “That’s what you’re implying. And it’s insulting, because nothing has happened, and nothing is going to happen, and I’m not — Ruki, I’m forty-one. I’m not going to blow up my life over a man who brings a flask.”

“Did I say the word affair?”

“You were about to.”

“I was about to say emotional affair,” Ruki said, “which you would have told me was a magazine phrase, so I was choosing another one.”

“It is a magazine phrase.”

“Fine. Then let’s do it my way.” She put her hands back in her pockets. “When did you last tell Martin something true before you told it to yourself?”

I didn’t answer.

“When did you last tell Martin something true at all?”

“I tell Martin things constantly. I told him about this roof for forty minutes.”

“You told him about a roof.” She said it without any cruelty, which made it worse. “I’m asking when you last said: I’m frightened, or I’m lonely, or I’ve stopped enjoying my own house. Because if you can’t remember, then the thing that’s happening isn’t happening on a Thursday at your swimming pool. It happened months ago, at home, quietly, and this poor man with his flask is just where you’re keeping the evidence.”

Across the pool, Daniel was pointing up at the roof and the scaffolder was shaking his head, and both of them were enjoying it.

“I don’t want you to be right,” I said.

“I know.”

“I’m serious, Ruki. If you’re right, then I’m the person in this story who’s doing something to a man who has done nothing wrong, and I don’t know how to be that.”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s the shape of it.”

I got angry then. Genuinely, properly angry, in a way I don’t often let myself be with her — I said something about her being unable to see a relationship without opening it up on a table, which was unkind and deliberately aimed, and she took it without blinking, because she’s been my friend for sixteen years and she knew exactly what it meant.

“Alright,” she said, when I’d finished.

“Alright?”

“You’ll ring me on Sunday and we’ll talk about it properly.” She kissed my cheek. “Beautiful roof, by the way. Genuinely. The dead man’s handwriting on the timber is the best thing I’ve seen all month.”

She went. I stood in the empty pool hall with my clipboard.

—

I rang her on the Sunday.

I got as far as “I think you might be right” and then couldn’t do the next sentence, and Ruki — who once told a room full of barristers that she’d wait as long as it took — waited.

“I don’t want to leave him,” I said, eventually. “I want to be told something. I want someone to tell me whether it counts.”

“Whether what counts?”

“Any of it. Whether thinking about someone counts. Whether looking forward to a Thursday counts. Nobody’s touched anybody, Ruki. There’s no — there’s nothing you could show a judge.”

“You’re asking the wrong person for a verdict.”

“You’re literally a—“

“I establish what happened,” she said. “I don’t do blame. You want someone to tell you that you’re allowed to enjoy your job.” A pause. “Tess. Nobody’s coming to give you that. You’re forty-one.”

“So what do I do?”

“You either tell Martin the true version of your week, including the flask, and find out what happens,” she said. “Or you go on not telling him, and know that you’ve chosen it. Those are the doors. There isn’t a third one where you keep the Thursday and stay innocent.”

I sat on the edge of my own bath with the phone against my ear and the door shut, at four in the afternoon, while my husband practised in the next room.

“I hate this,” I said.

“I know, love.”

“Can I ask you something and will you answer it as you and not as a coroner?”

“Probably not, but go on.”

“When you left Fiona.” I had my hand over my eyes. “How did you know? Not how did you decide. How did you know, before you decided, that you were going to.”

Ruki was quiet for a while.

“I didn’t have a moment,” she said. “That’s the thing people want and it isn’t there. What I had was a Wednesday in November where she had a fall on the ice and rang her sister first, and I found out about it at half seven that evening, and I wasn’t hurt. I noticed I wasn’t hurt.” A pause. “That’s all it was. Not a scene. An absence where a feeling should have been, noticed in a kitchen, on an ordinary day.”

“That’s horrible.”

“It’s the most horrible thing that has ever happened to me and I’d already left her by then; it just took my mouth nine months to catch up with the rest of it.” She said it briskly. “Now listen, because this is the only advice I’ll give you and then I’m going to talk about something else. Whatever you do, don’t do it in stages. Don’t do the thing where you take six months to leave a room. It’s the stages that ruin people — not the leaving, the leaving slowly, with everybody watching and nobody allowed to say so.”

“I’m not leaving anybody.”

“No,” Ruki said. “I know.”

“I’m not going to do either of them, am I.”

“Not this month,” she said. “No.”

—

I tried, though. I want that on the record too, because it would be tidier to say I didn’t.

That evening I made dinner, and put music on, and waited until we were both sitting down, and said: “Can I tell you something about work?”

“Course.”

“I’ve been doing Thursday evenings at Ivyholt. With the architect. Daniel. We’ve been drawing the roof detail.” I turned my glass around. “And it’s — they’re the best hours of my week. By a distance. And I think that’s telling me something about the rest of my week.”

Martin put his fork down.

“Right,” he said.

“I’m not saying anything’s wrong.”

“No, I know.” He was nodding. “You’ve always been like this, though, Tess. You go all in on a project and then it finishes and you come back up for air. You were the same with the church. You were unbearable about that church.”

“This isn’t the church.”

“You said that about the church.”

He was smiling. He meant it kindly — I’ve thought about this a great deal since and I am certain he meant it kindly, that he believed he was reassuring me, that in his version of the conversation I had just confessed to working too hard and he had just told me it was fine.

And I let him have that version. That’s the thing. I had the true sentence loaded — it’s not the project, it’s that somebody asks me questions — and instead I said:

“Probably.”

“Eat your dinner,” he said, “before it goes the way of the salmon.”

So I ate my dinner. And we watched the detectives. And at some point in the second half he put his hand on my knee, and I put mine on top of it, and I sat there in my own front room being touched by my husband and thinking about what I was going to say to another man on Thursday.

That is the closest thing to a confession in this book, and it happened four months before anyone kissed anybody.