The Winter Map

Tressa spread the map across the breakfast table and watched Elian become polite.

It was only a slight alteration. He put down his mug, leaned forward and asked sensible questions about ferry times. She had seen customers do the same thing in the shop when they disliked the expensive frame she had suggested and did not want to offend her. She had been paid to recognise it then. Here she would have preferred not to.

“You don’t want to go,” she said.

“I haven’t said that.”

“You asked whether the ferry ran every day in the voice people use for a blocked drain.”

He sat back. “I was asking about the ferry.”

“And?”

He looked at the route she had traced in pencil. “Three weeks is a long time.”

“It doesn’t have to be three.”

“You want three.”

She began to fold one edge of the map, then stopped. She was preparing to make her wish smaller before he had finished explaining his.

“Yes,” she said. “I think I do. Next June, while the evenings are long. I want time in a place after I’ve stopped looking for the obvious things.”

“That sounds good.”

“But not to you.”

“Some of it to me. I don’t have three weeks I can assume are mine. There are leave requests, the rota. Summer’s busy.”

“We could go earlier.”

“Tressa.”

She looked up.

“That’s one reason. It isn’t the whole answer.”

The map lay between them, its thin paper creased into little mountain ranges which had nothing to do with the land it described. She took her hands away.

“Tell me the whole answer.”

Elian turned his mug so the handle faced away. “I like coming home. After a week I usually want my own bed and the things I do without having to decide whether they’re worth travelling for.”

“You could still do ordinary things there.”

“They wouldn’t be my ordinary things.”

She heard the impatience in her next breath and disliked it. She had invited an opinion; now she wanted him to have a more convenient one.

“I thought you wanted to go somewhere nobody else had chosen for you.”

He looked at her. She remembered the water between them when he had said it, the pleasure of hearing a wish she understood.

“I do,” he said. “That doesn’t mean I want to go everywhere somebody I love—somebody I want to be with—wants to go.”

They both heard the correction. Tressa did not seize the first word and let it distract them from the harder sentence. He had stopped because he was not ready to say it that way, or not in the middle of a disagreement. Either reason could remain his.

“No,” she said after a moment. “It doesn’t.”

He looked relieved, then wary of the relief.

“Would you be disappointed?”

“Yes.”

His shoulders lowered a fraction. She had not been expecting honesty to look like reassurance on him.

“I’d like to see it with you,” she said. “And I don’t want you counting the days until we leave.”

“I wouldn’t count all of them.”

“What a recommendation.”

He smiled, and she allowed herself to smile back without pretending the disappointment had been a joke.

She got up to refill the teapot. It did not need refilling. She stood with it in her hand for a moment, then put it down and returned to the table.

“I’m used to having time now,” she said. “I forget that taking yours means asking you to stop something, not merely choose a place.”

“You remembered the rota.”

“As an obstacle I could improve. Not as your life.”

He was quiet.

Outside, somebody shut a car boot. The sound was loud enough to make her look towards the window. The world was having a Sunday in which two people disagreeing over a map were not a tragedy.

“The age difference is in this, isn’t it?” she asked.

“Some of it. You’re retired. I’m not.”

“I don’t want to turn that into an apology.”

“I don’t want you to. I’m also a man who likes a shorter holiday. I might still be that at sixty-two.”

She laughed, a little unwillingly. “You may have become intolerable by then.”

“There’s a prospect.”

He reached across the table, then stopped short of her hand. She closed the distance herself.

“I don’t want to wait for some later version of our lives to begin doing things,” she said.

“Neither do I.”

“I don’t mean because I’m running out. I mean I’ve postponed enough for reasons that sounded respectable at the time.”

He nodded. “Then don’t postpone the three weeks because I prefer one.”

She looked down at their hands. The offer was generous. It also meant accepting that being loved would not automatically give her a witness for every part of her life.

“Would you come for some of it?”

“Perhaps. If we can find a part I want and dates I can take. I don’t want to promise the answer before I’ve thought.”

“All right.”

She let go of his hand and turned the map towards him. “Choose somewhere to look at. Not to agree to.”

He did. He chose a small town near a crossing rather than the remote bay she had circled. She liked the bay better. They discussed both until the conversation began to resemble curiosity rather than bargaining.

· · ·Scene break

After breakfast they went out separately. Elian had washing and shopping to do. Tressa wanted to walk to the library and look at a newer guide before she made a plan around ferry times printed years ago. They would meet again at four.

She almost asked whether he minded her continuing to look. The question was unnecessary. She had heard his answer and did not have to test it by offering to give up the whole thing.

In the library she found a table near a window and made notes. The journey she wanted would be slower than the one in the old book. She could take a train north, stay in one town for several nights, make smaller trips when weather and inclination permitted. Nothing had to be booked today. Desire was allowed to be specific before it became a purchase.

A woman at the next table dropped a pencil. Tressa picked it up and returned it. The exchange reminded her how often a day away contained ordinary contact that did not belong to anyone’s plan. She liked travelling alone. She had not stopped liking it because she wanted Elian.

She wrote three weeks at the top of a page and left it there.

Under it she wrote ask about the week near the crossing.

Then she turned to winter. The long-light supper belonged to summer. In November there would be early darkness, wet paths, a reason to come indoors and sit close. She did not need to pretend a winter trip north would deliver the photograph that had started her wanting.

She found a coastal town nearer home, reachable by train, with a covered market and short walks along an estuary. Three nights. Time enough to leave the house without asking Elian to turn his life into a holiday he did not want.

At four he arrived with his own suggestion written on the back of an envelope. It was the same estuary, a different side of it.

“You’ve chosen the less attractive bank,” she said.

“I’ve chosen the station without three changes.”

“A compelling aesthetic principle.”

They sat at the kitchen table again. This time there was room for both sheets of paper.

“Three nights?” she asked.

“I’d like three. I can request two days in November. I need them confirmed before we book.”

“We’ll wait.”

“And your summer?”

“I’m going to plan it. I’d like you for the week if you decide you want it and the leave works. If you don’t, I’ll still go.”

He looked at her for a long moment. “Good.”

The word was almost too small for what she had done. She wanted him to know she was giving up an imagined version in which every future pleasure arrived doubled. Then she realised he had not asked her to give up the actual pleasure. Only the guarantee about its shape.

“I’m still a bit disappointed,” she said.

“I know. I’m glad you’ve told me instead of making the whole trip disappear.”

She leaned back. “I almost did.”

“I almost agreed to all of it.”

They looked at each other and laughed, the laughter less tidy than the conversation had been. It contained recognition neither would have enjoyed a month ago.

Elian got up to put the kettle on. Tressa watched him fill it, then stopped him with a hand at his waist as he passed her chair.

“What was the word you nearly said this morning?”

He went still.

She shook her head before he could answer. “No. That was unfair. I don’t want to collect it because you dropped it.”

He turned towards her fully. “I wasn’t taking it back.”

She could feel her pulse in the place where her hand touched him.

“I know,” she said. She did not entirely know; she was choosing to believe the face in front of her. “Say it when you want to say it.”

He touched her cheek. “I will.”

She stood and kissed him, a kiss without a demand to finish the morning’s sentence. He held her close until the kettle clicked off behind them. For once the practical sound did not make either of them move at once.

On the table their papers lay side by side: a long summer journey, a short winter visit, two different stations on the same estuary. Tressa would have preferred agreement to cost nothing. She liked what they had made better than the map she had first spread out for him.