The Folded Shirt

Tressa was carrying a basket of clean washing when Selwyn asked whether Elian had told her about the application.

“What application?”

She set the basket on the floor. Her son stood just inside the back door with the bowl she had sent him home with months ago. He had telephoned to ask whether he could drop it round on his way to work. She had thought that was what he was doing.

“Nothing,” he said.

“Selwyn.”

“I mean, that answers it.”

He put the bowl on the table. It made a harder sound than he intended. She could see him regretting the visit and, behind that, the question he had come to ask.

“Do you want to sit down?”

“I haven’t got long.”

“Then stand. But don’t say something and expect me to unknow it when you change your mind.”

The edge in her voice surprised them both. She had spent the week after their café lunch being careful with him. Carefulness had begun to feel like holding a cup so tightly she could no longer drink from it.

Selwyn pulled out a chair.

“I wasn’t trying to do that.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

She sat opposite, leaving the washing where it was. It was Monday, two days after the market. Elian had gone home on Sunday after breakfast; she had spent the afternoon with the cupboard under the stairs and achieved the modest ambition of making it worse. Her life had felt pleasantly untidy until this moment.

“You said last week that I might want a change,” Selwyn said.

“Did I?”

“On the phone. When we were talking about work. You said perhaps I needed something different.”

She remembered. He had complained about a rota, then about commuting. She had suggested a holiday before he said he could not simply leave everybody else with the awkward shifts. She had said something about a change. It had been a loose maternal sentence, one of hundreds she had offered over the years and expected to evaporate once it proved unhelpful.

“I meant a break. Or a different shift. I wasn’t referring to anything I knew.”

He looked at her hands.

“Has he mentioned a job to you?”

“No.”

“Or anything about moving?”

Her stomach tightened. He saw it and shut his eyes briefly.

“That’s why I didn’t want to say it.”

“I understand. I don’t know anything about an application. I wasn’t hinting that I did.”

“Right.”

He was not accusing her with the certainty of somebody who had caught her out. He was trying to discover where a fact had gone after leaving his mouth. She could answer where it had not arrived; she could not trace its whole journey.

“Do you want to tell me now?” she asked.

“Not really.”

She made herself nod.

He watched her do it. “It’s not because I don’t trust you with things.”

“You don’t have to give me another thing to make refusing this one nicer.”

He let out a breath. “Thank you.”

She hated, for a moment, being thanked for not knowing whether her son might move away. Then she felt the familiar danger of calling that hurt a right.

“I won’t ask him,” she said.

Selwyn looked up. “I wasn’t asking you to check.”

“No. I know. I wanted you to hear that I wouldn’t.”

He nodded. The relief in his face was small and genuine. She could not help wanting more of it: a reassurance that he did not think them careless, that this was a problem they could solve and then stop having. She imagined telling Elian what had happened and having him put the pieces in order.

That would be asking him, whatever words she used.

“If you want me to know later, you can tell me,” she said. “If you don’t, I’ll still answer the phone.”

“I know you will.”

He looked towards the basket. A sleeve had fallen over the side and lay on the floor. He bent to put it back, a gesture so ordinary that it undid some of her anger at the situation.

“Sorry to arrive with a cross-examination and a bowl.”

“The bowl was overdue. The other thing we’ll survive.”

He smiled. She walked him to the door and asked what time his shift finished, a question she was still allowed to ask. He told her. Then he touched her shoulder, kissed her cheek and went.

She carried the washing upstairs. At the wardrobe she found Elian’s clean shirt hanging beside her dress. He had washed it at her house on Sunday and forgotten it there. It ought to have made her smile. Instead she wondered how much of a man’s life came into a house with a shirt, how many other people’s sentences travelled with him.

She sat on the bed until she was ashamed of the question. Elian had protected a confidence in front of her before she had given him any reason to expect a kiss. She had evidence of what he did. She was frightened because she could not offer her son certainty about every conversation which would ever happen.

The fear did not become smaller simply because she had named it.

· · ·Scene break

Elian was making coffee when she arrived at his flat that evening. She had brought the shirt folded in a bag. He took it, looked inside and smiled.

“I’ve been looking for that.”

“It was enjoying the company.”

“Your dresses are a better class of neighbour.”

He kissed her. She answered, then drew back a little sooner than he expected. His hand stayed at her arm, loose enough that she could move away.

“Something happened?”

She had meant to wait until they had eaten. The question gave her a chance to make that decision again. Instead she heard herself say, “I need to know we haven’t been careless.”

His hand fell away.

“About what?”

“Things we’ve said. About Selwyn. I don’t want details.”

Elian put the bag on a chair. “Then what do you want?”

“Reassurance, I suppose.”

“What am I reassuring you about?”

She went to the window. Below, somebody was locking a bicycle to a post. The slow competence of it irritated her: a person with one clear problem and a chain long enough to solve it.

“He thought I knew something he’d told you. I didn’t. He hadn’t told me himself.”

Elian remained by the chair.

“What did you say?”

“That I didn’t know. That I wouldn’t ask you.”

“And now you’re here.”

She turned. “I’m not asking you what it was.”

“I can hear that. I don’t understand the question you are asking.”

“Can’t we just say we’ve been careful?”

He looked at her for a long moment. She wished he would come closer and wished he would stop seeing the imprecision of her request.

“I have been careful,” he said. “I’ve also talked to you like someone I want to know. I haven’t kept a record of every sentence so I could certify it afterwards.”

“I didn’t ask for a record.”

“You asked me to prove I haven’t carried something over. Without telling me what.”

“If I tell you, I tell you what he told me.”

“Then don’t.”

He said it sharply enough that she flinched. He saw that and looked away.

“I’m not angry that you won’t tell me,” he said. “I’m angry that I’m being asked to answer something I can’t see.”

The coffee had finished. The small machine clicked, then settled into silence. Neither moved towards it.

Tressa sat on the end of the sofa. “I thought you would understand why it upset me.”

“I do.”

“You don’t sound as though you do.”

“Understanding doesn’t make it fair.”

She pressed her palms against her knees. There was no useful retort to that, only the desire to have one.

“I was trying to make it safe,” she said.

“For whom?”

“All of us.”

He gave a short, unhappy laugh. “That’s a large job to bring me with a shirt.”

The remark hurt more than she wanted to admit. She had carried the shirt because it belonged to him. She had come because she wanted to be with him. She had also brought a problem and expected his gentleness to make it less costly. The mixture was not as innocent as she had wanted it to be.

“I didn’t plan to interrogate you.”

“I know.”

He sat in the armchair opposite. Distance she could measure: a low table, three books, the remains of the easy arrival they might have had.

“Do you think I’ve told you his private things?” he asked.

“No.”

“Then what has changed?”

She opened her mouth and stopped. She could tell him that her son might be moving, that a mother’s fear had got tangled in a lover’s wish to be held. She could make the story legible at the price of giving away the very fact she had promised not to pursue.

“Something I can’t explain without breaking my word,” she said finally. “I’m sorry. That’s an unsatisfactory answer.”

“It is an answer.”

He rubbed his face, tired now rather than angry. “I don’t need to know. I need not to feel you are sitting here wondering which bit of me you can believe.”

She looked at him. He had never sounded so exposed in a room with all his clothes on and the coffee waiting. She had thought of trust as what allowed her to be wanted without apology. She had given less thought to the trust he needed in order to speak without being inspected.

“I believe you,” she said.

“I’d like that to be something I can feel.”

She looked down at the table. One of his books was still marked with the wooden paint stirrer. She had teased him about it on their first evening here. Now she wanted absurdly to ask whether he had made any progress, as though a question about a book could lead them back before her first sentence.

“Could we have the coffee?” she asked.

“Yes.”

He got up. She stayed where she was, resisting the impulse to clear a space, wash a cup, be useful enough to earn an easier expression on his face.

When he brought the coffee, she took it with both hands. He sat again, not beside her yet. They had not finished. For once Tressa did not propose going home merely because she had run out of answers she liked.