Blue Ink

Tressa opened her diary while Selwyn was still suggesting that lunch could move to the following Sunday if the first was awkward.

“The first is fine,” she said. “The following weekend I’m away with Elian, if his leave is confirmed.”

“Oh. Where?”

“An estuary town. Three nights. We haven’t booked yet.”

Her son was quiet for a moment. She could hear him moving something on a counter at his end of the call.

“You don’t have to explain every plan,” he said.

“I wasn’t explaining. I was telling you when I was free.”

“Right.”

She softened her voice without changing the answer. “I’d like the first Sunday with you. One o’clock?”

“One. I’ll cook.”

“Shall I bring anything?”

“No.”

She wrote the time beside his name. Then she put down the pen before she could offer three things he had just said he did not need.

“I can manage a lunch,” he said.

“I know you can. I was deciding whether to believe you wanted to.”

“I asked you.”

“Yes. You did.”

He laughed, a little exasperated. She liked the sound more than she would have liked elaborate reassurance.

It was Friday morning. She was going to paint that afternoon and see Elian in the evening. Her diary held the old kinds of appointments and the new ones in the same indifferent blue ink. It looked much less dramatic than making room for all of them had felt.

“About the job,” Selwyn said.

Tressa stopped moving the diary.

“You don’t have to tell me.”

“I want to tell you this part.”

She sat down.

He had applied for a different scheduling post, in the same wider organisation, with a different base. There was no offer yet. He might not get an interview. If he did, he would think about moving, and he would tell her when he had something to decide.

She listened. The facts were modest. The fear she had constructed around them had not been modest at all.

“Would you like it?” she asked.

“Some of it. I’d like to find out more before everyone has an opinion.”

“Then I can wait for you to ask mine.”

“You can have one.”

“Privately?”

He laughed. “For a while.”

She could ask where the new base was, what the hours would be, whether he would still come for lunch. Some of those questions would be reasonable. She asked the one she could hear without trying to turn its answer into a plan.

“Are you pleased you applied?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’m glad you’ve done it.”

The silence afterwards was easy for the first time in several minutes.

“I shouldn’t have arrived at yours as if I’d caught someone out,” he said.

“You were worried.”

“That doesn’t make it a nice way to arrive.”

“No. It didn’t.”

He let out a breath, almost a laugh. “You could let me off a bit.”

“I love you. I’m not going to keep a charge sheet. Does that do?”

“Yes.”

She smiled at the diary. On the first Sunday in November his name stood alone. That was a pleasure, not a concession to be explained to anybody else.

“I still don’t want to have lunch with both of you,” Selwyn said.

“I haven’t invited him.”

“I know. I just need—“

“You don’t need a deadline for being comfortable. You do need to speak to me as though I’ve made a choice I can mean.”

He was quiet. She was glad they were on the phone; she could let the sentence stay without softening it in response to his face.

“I know you mean it,” he said at last.

“Thank you.”

“I might still be awkward.”

“You were awkward about my new curtains for three months. We survived.”

“They were terrible curtains.”

“They’re still up.”

“I know. It’s an ongoing burden.”

She laughed. They ended the call discussing potatoes, because Selwyn wanted to try a recipe and needed to know whether she disliked mustard. She told him to make the recipe he wanted. She could leave mustard at the edge of a plate without regarding it as a crisis of motherhood.

· · ·Scene break

Elian came over that evening with the news that his two days of November leave had been approved. Tressa was in the middle of finding a vase for flowers she had bought herself and put down in the hall with the shopping.

“The first full weekend,” he said. “Friday and Monday off. If you still want it.”

She looked at him over the flowers.

“I have continued wanting things for longer than five days before.”

“I hoped so.”

She put the flowers in the nearest jug, filled it with water and went to kiss him. He held her while she smiled against his mouth.

“We can book tomorrow,” she said.

“Yes. I’d like to look at the room properly, not choose it between the door and supper.”

“You’re a demanding holiday companion.”

“Increasingly.”

She liked the word. She liked that he could use it without apologising.

They ate the apple pudding she had made from the last of her friend’s apples, after a supper which neither intended to remember. The evening had acquired an expectant quality she could not blame on the booking. It was in the way he looked at her when she spoke and in her own inability to stop noticing his hands at the table.

She had not mentioned his unfinished sentence about love since Sunday. She did not intend to begin by asking him to finish it now.

After they washed up she went into the front room, then came back because he was looking at the leaf painting on the dresser.

“It’s finished,” she said.

“I can see that.”

“How?”

“You’ve stopped leaving the brush beside it.”

She laughed. He turned, smiling, and she felt how much of her life he had learned by paying attention to things nobody would have put in an account of her. Where she left a brush. Which tea she drank when she wanted to stay awake. The way she could sound most practical when she was asking for something that frightened her.

“I love you,” she said.

His smile faded into an expression she had no wish to protect herself from.

“Tressa.”

“I wasn’t intending to say it beside the fruit bowl.”

“I’m glad you didn’t wait for better furniture.”

She laughed once, shakily. He took her hand, and the warmth of his fingers steadied her without making the admission smaller.

“I love you,” he said. “I’ve been trying to find a time when it wouldn’t sound like a reason you ought to agree with me.”

“I would still disagree.”

“I know. It’s one of the things I love. Occasionally after an interval.”

She moved close. He put his arms around her, and for a while they stood in the kitchen without kissing. Tressa could feel the back of his hand warm through her shirt, the rise of his breath near her temple. She had imagined the words might make her feel claimed. Instead they made her feel more fully present in the life she was choosing.

“I don’t want to move in together because a drawer has become convenient,” she said into his shoulder.

He laughed softly. “That’s a very specific answer to being loved.”

She drew back. “I mean I want to keep asking. About all of it. I like having my house. I like going to yours. I don’t know whether that will always be enough, but it’s what I want now.”

“It’s what I want now too. And I want to be able to say if it changes.”

“Yes.”

“Not disappear because I think asking would be difficult.”

She touched his face. “Especially that.”

He kissed her then. She felt no need to make it a beautiful moment from the outside. The flowers were still in the wrong jug, there was a tea towel on the floor where it had fallen from the oven rail, and she had left the kitchen light too bright for anybody’s idea of atmosphere. His mouth on hers was tender and then less restrained when she drew him nearer, the familiar wanting newly easy to name.

She loved him. She wanted him. Neither wish excused her from knowing the person he actually was.

When they went upstairs she asked him to stay for breakfast too, not assuming the night contained the morning. He said he would like that, then asked whether they might go to the pool before their outing tomorrow.

“You’ve begun planning,” she said.

“I’ve been planning for some time. I was hoping it wouldn’t show.”

“I like it showing.”

He smiled. She took his hand and led him into the room where his things now occupied a drawer.

· · ·Scene break

Much later, she woke briefly to the sound of rain. Elian was asleep beside her, turned away, one hand loose on the pillow. She did not touch him to make the moment mutual. It was enough to be awake with her own feeling.

Tomorrow they would book three nights. Next week she would have lunch with her son. In summer she might go north for longer than Elian wanted to come. There was no single table at which all those plans would be ratified.

She had given up the hope of arranging one.

The loss was real. So was the space it had made. She could love her son without passing his private life to her lover. She could love Elian without making his patience the proof he deserved to stay. She could travel alone, change her mind, be inconvenient and still answer a telephone with pleasure.

She turned onto her other side and looked towards the window until the rain quieted. In the morning she would have to decide whether to take a waterproof. A small decision. She was looking forward to making it.