The Harbour Wall

Elian asked Tressa to meet him after his walk with Selwyn, and she nearly said he needn’t.

They were standing in her kitchen on Thursday morning. He had come for breakfast before meeting Selwyn near the harbour, wearing boots and a jacket she knew by the worn place at its cuff. She was supposed to be buttering toast. Instead she was considering whether being available afterwards would look like waiting for a verdict.

“I would like to see you,” he said, apparently reading enough of her face to be impatient with it. “That’s why I asked.”

She put down the knife. “Yes. Where?”

“The bakery at twelve. If the walk runs longer, I’ll let you know.”

“I’ll be there.”

He smiled then, and she remembered that agreeing could sometimes be the whole useful contribution she had to make.

She had known since Tuesday evening that he intended to contact Selwyn himself. He had said he wanted a walk, not a conversation mediated by her or a chance encounter in which nobody could leave gracefully. The arrangement was now a fact. What would happen inside it was not hers to know in advance.

They ate breakfast. Elian complained that he had chosen the wrong socks and refused her offer of another pair because he had already decided to go home and change. Tressa laughed at him for arriving dressed for a walk and leaving to complete the task.

“I like to make a journey out of preparation,” he said.

“That explains several things.”

At the door he kissed her. She felt the familiar brief urge to hold him a little longer, to give him some transferable warmth that might make the morning easier. Then she held him longer simply because she liked kissing him, and the difference was hers to keep.

“Twelve,” she said.

“Twelve.”

He went down the path. She watched until he reached the gate, then returned to the kitchen and put away only the things that actually needed putting away.

· · ·Scene break

Selwyn rang at ten forty while she was pinning a sheet of paper to her painting board.

For one startled moment she thought something had happened. His first sentence was about the number of her house keys he ought to have, which did nothing to make the call less peculiar.

“I’ve found the spare in my coat pocket,” he said. “You asked me for it when the neighbour needed to water things. Did I ever give it back?”

“Evidently not, if it’s in your pocket.”

“Fair point.”

She could hear traffic behind him. “Do you need it today?”

“No. Keep it until lunch. I have mine.”

“Right. We’re just finishing.”

She held the pin between her finger and thumb. We. She had not asked where he was. He had offered a piece of information and then stopped at its edge.

“All right,” she said.

There was a pause. She could hear a gull, then Selwyn moving the phone against his coat.

“Mum, I wanted to say—“

She waited.

“No. It’s about him. I’ll say it to him.”

She pressed the pin into the board. “Good idea.”

“You sound as if you’ve been rehearsing that.”

“It has had some recent use.”

He laughed. “See you next month.”

“We still need to settle the time.”

“I’ll ring tomorrow.”

They said goodbye. Tressa laid the phone beside the paint water and looked at it until she was certain she would not call Elian to explain the conversation he had not heard.

It had been a test only because she wanted to make something of it. Selwyn could have found the key and phoned about the key. She did not need to find a secret purpose under every small contact between them.

She painted the red line in the leaf Elian had brought her. The colour spread beyond where she intended it to go. She left it, waited for it to dry and found another part of the page to work on.

· · ·Scene break

At twelve, Elian was outside the bakery with his coffee. He had not guessed whether she wanted tea or coffee, and had asked the server to wait for her.

“Tea,” she said. “I’m predictable in some useful ways.”

“I didn’t want to gamble.”

They took the cups to a bench further down the street, where the bakery’s queue did not require them to keep moving their knees. Elian sat beside her, his boots dusty, his jacket folded on his lap.

“How was your morning?” he asked.

She nearly said You first. Instead she told him about the leaf. It took less than a minute. He listened as though the minute was the reason he had wanted to meet her.

Then he looked into his coffee.

“It was good to walk,” he said. “Not easy all the way. Good.”

“I’m glad.”

“I’ve stopped expecting every Saturday back. I told him I’d like to arrange a walk when we both wanted one. Not keep an empty morning as proof I’m still his friend.”

She looked at his face. There was loss there which no successful conversation had removed.

“Do you want the old Saturdays?” she asked.

“Yes. Some of them. I miss not having to think.”

She nodded. He could miss something without asking her to become the price of recovering it.

“I also want this,” he said, looking at their cups, the bench, her hand close to his. “I don’t want to keep speaking as if it’s an unfortunate complication in a better life I had before.”

Tressa put down her tea. She was afraid that if she answered too quickly she would thank him for losing a friend he had not actually lost.

“I don’t want to be grateful for less than you want,” she said.

“Then don’t be. I haven’t offered you less. I’ve stopped promising myself I can have everything in the old arrangement and you as well.”

He looked out towards the street. A delivery driver was trying to find an address, carrying a parcel whose label seemed to be on the wrong side whichever way he turned it.

“I was a very convenient friend,” Elian said. “That’s not all I was. But I liked being the man who would nearly always come. I can’t blame anybody else for becoming used to it.”

“You can still go sometimes.”

“Yes. Because I want to.”

She rested her hand on his knee. He covered it with his own, then looked at her.

“I didn’t give him an account of you. I didn’t ask him to be pleased so I’d feel better. That’s my part of the morning. The rest can stay ours. Mine and his.”

“Yes,” she said.

She could feel the question about the application still somewhere in her mind, like a cupboard she had not opened. She did not ask whether Selwyn had mentioned it. She would not use the intimacy of his hand over hers to reach past the boundary he had just named.

“He found my spare key,” she said. “He called about it.”

“Right.”

“That’s all I need to tell you about the call.”

Elian smiled faintly. “That is more than I needed to know about your keys.”

She laughed. He squeezed her hand once.

They finished their drinks. The tea was good but had gone cold at the edge; she drank it anyway because she did not dislike it enough to bother with the bin. She finished it while Elian watched the delivery driver find the right door.

When they stood, Elian asked whether she would walk back with him by the harbour. It would take longer than the main road. She said yes without asking which useful destination would justify it.

· · ·Scene break

The tide was low. They walked beside ropes stretched from boats to rings in the harbour wall, stepping around a bucket somebody had left with unjustified faith in pedestrians. Elian told her about a film he wanted to see. She thought it sounded terrible and agreed to go because she liked films she could argue about afterwards.

At the end of the harbour she stopped.

“Is there anything you want from me about today?”

He considered. “Yes.”

She waited, surprised by how much she had expected him to say no.

“Don’t make the next few days particularly easy because you think I’m sad. If you’re irritated by something, be irritated. I don’t want to come to you as a guest of honour every time things are difficult elsewhere.”

She laughed softly. “I can probably manage irritation.”

“I thought so.”

Then she grew serious. “And if you want me to listen?”

“I’ll ask. About what belongs to me.”

She nodded. It was not a flawless arrangement. There would be sentences they regretted, careless guesses, days when each mistook the other’s silence. They were choosing a way to return from those things, not an exemption from them.

He put his arm around her shoulders after she moved close. She leaned against him and watched a man across the water coil a rope. The motion repeated until the rope was gone from the ground and held in his hands. Tressa had spent much of her life wanting to gather things like that.

“I used to think you were very easy company,” she said.

“A disappointing discovery for you.”

“No. I like you better now.”

He turned towards her. She could see that the words had reached him somewhere less protected than his sense of humour.

“I like being here better,” he said.

She kissed him, in daylight, with the wind pulling at her coat. He held her close until she drew back. There was no witness whose response she needed to check, no son waiting round a corner, no sentence that would make the afternoon official.

They walked home by the longer road. At her gate Elian said he wanted to spend the evening at his flat, finishing a book. She said she wanted to finish the leaf before the light went. They arranged tomorrow, then parted without making separate evenings a rehearsal for leaving.

Inside, her painting was dry. The red had spread farther than she intended and become part of the leaf. She sat down to see what she could do with it.