The Standing Invitation

Synopsis

Tess Anyanwu-Lund is forty-one, eleven years married, and the best structural engineer at a practice that saves old buildings. Daniel Sowande is the conservation architect she shares the Ivyholt Baths with: her equal, not her boss, and the first person in years who asks her what she thinks and then waits for the answer. They draw a failing Victorian roof together on Thursday evenings. They argue well. When the thing between them is finally named, in a builders' merchant car park, they write rules to contain it — and keep every one of them, scrupulously, for four months, while the hour becomes the truest thing in her week. Her husband Martin is not cruel and not a villain. He is a good man in a marriage that has been quietly maintained instead of lived, and Tess has done at least half of that maintaining. When he asks her a direct question at the kitchen sink, she gives him the answer that lets them both go to bed. Nothing happens for a long time. Then something does, in the wrong order, and Tess has to decide about her marriage with no promise that anyone will be waiting — and to say out loud, at last, the true sentence she has spent two years avoiding.