Two Stops

Tressa stopped outside Elian’s flat on Sunday afternoon and discovered that she had not arranged how to say goodbye to a weekend.

His bag was at his feet. Her own was in the boot, with a damp swimsuit inside a carrier bag and a postcard she had bought for herself. They had swum in the supervised part of the bay on Saturday, eaten fish beneath an awning and spent an hour apart while she painted something that might have been the harbour. There had been no miraculous afternoon in which she ceased to think about her son. There had been hours when she did not think about him at all.

Now Elian took off his seat belt and stayed where he was.

“Do you want to come up?”

She did. She also wanted to go home, open her windows and put things where she kept them. It seemed an ungrateful combination.

“I want my own kettle,” she said.

“It’s been without supervision for two days.”

“It may have developed ideas.”

He smiled, but she could see that he was waiting for something less defended.

“I’ve liked being away with you,” she said. “I don’t want going home to look like relief.”

“It can be a bit of relief. I want to find out whether my washing has dried.”

“You left it out?”

“Indoors. I haven’t abandoned it to the elements.”

She turned towards him. He put his hand beside hers on the gear lever, without covering it.

“Wednesday?” she asked.

“The pool?”

“And supper. At mine. You haven’t seen the pears.”

“I’ve been trying to contain my expectations.”

She took his hand. The ease of the hotel had not followed them into this parked car unchanged; they had to make this small piece of it here. She leaned across and kissed him, awkwardly past the handbrake. He laughed when her bag fell off the seat and kissed her again before retrieving it.

Then he got out. She watched him find his own front-door key, heard the short buzz of the lock and drove home before she could make leaving into a test neither of them had agreed to take.

Her house smelled faintly of rosemary. She opened the back door, unpacked the wet things first and put the postcard against the blue bowl. The picture showed the beach at a tide they had not seen. It was still the right beach.

Selwyn had sent a photograph of the inside of his washing machine with a message: Apparently this is where money goes.

She sat down to reply. She could answer the washing machine without supplying a report about the bed she had slept in. That ought to have been obvious; it was a relief nevertheless.

She asked whether the repair had worked. He said yes, then asked whether the traffic had been bad.

Not bad. Home now, she wrote.

A minute passed. She put down the phone, picked it up and typed that she would like to see him sometime that week, wherever suited him. She deleted wherever suited him. She was not applying to be given a slot in a life from which she had been expelled.

Would you like lunch in town on Thursday? I can meet you at one.

She sent it. Then she put the kettle on.

· · ·Scene break

By Wednesday, Elian had arranged a walk with Selwyn for the following morning, when both could manage it. He told her while they stood beside the lockers, still dressed, their swimming bags hanging between them.

“That’s good,” she said too quickly.

“I hope it will be.”

She looked at his face. He was not offering a piece of good news for her to take possession of. He was telling her where he would be.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Not before I’ve done it.”

“No. Of course.”

She went to change, troubled by how readily she had heard an arrangement as forgiveness. Perhaps the walk would be uncomfortable. Perhaps it would be pleasant until somebody remembered something. Neither possibility belonged to her yet.

In the water she swam her usual lengths. Elian stayed at the shallow end for a while, stretching one shoulder, and did not follow her pace. She liked seeing him occupied by his own body, indifferent for a moment to what she might read into his face. When she came back he asked whether she was still determined to show him the paintings.

“You can withdraw now.”

“And never know whether the pears are worse than you said?”

“Cruelty is an unexpected development.”

“Curiosity.”

At her house she spread the sheets across the kitchen table after supper. There were eleven pears, as promised, and several objects she had not intended to show him at all. He looked at each one instead of saying they were lovely before he had seen them.

“This one,” he said.

“Is it the most recognisable?”

“It looks as if it has an opinion about being painted.”

“It was going soft. That may be resentment.”

He put it down. “I like the green there.”

She looked where he pointed. She liked it too, a watery place where a mistake had dried better than an intention. She had expected to be embarrassed by showing him something she was bad at. Instead she found herself telling him which brush she had used and how impossible yellow could become if one interfered with it.

He listened. When she reached for a sheet near his hand, he caught her fingers and kissed them, briefly, as though the interruption were his opinion of the evening.

“That wasn’t a critique,” he said.

“I didn’t mistake it for one.”

She moved around the table. He pushed his chair back, giving her space to stand between his knees, and she rested her hands on his shoulders. The wanted closeness was easier here than in the car; she knew where the doors were, what the house sounded like, which light would buzz if she left it on too long. She did not have to be away to want him this much.

He looked up at her.

“Stay a while,” she said.

“I planned to.”

“Good. I’m tired of being the only person who admits to planning.”

His hands rested at her waist. “I thought about kissing you most of the way here.”

“You could have told me in the car.”

“You were criticising a roundabout.”

She bent and kissed him. He answered at once, then stood with her, leaving the chair crooked behind him. She felt the warmth of his hands through her shirt and the slight tremor of laughter as she told him not to crease the resentful pear.

They moved into the front room and stayed there, kissing, talking, letting the evening run past the hour when either would ordinarily have thought of leaving. He went home because he wanted to collect his walking things and have an early night, and she did not turn the reason into a rejection. At the door he asked whether he might ring tomorrow evening.

“Yes,” she said. “You don’t need a report to ring me.”

He looked at her for a moment, then kissed her forehead where she had tipped it towards him.

“I know.”

She hoped she had said it as much for herself as for him.

· · ·Scene break

The next morning she went to buy envelopes and came back with envelopes, lemons and a small pot she did not need. She put the pot on the kitchen windowsill. There was no task left that could honestly account for checking the phone again.

Elian and Selwyn would be walking now. She imagined the beginning: boots on gravel, a remark about weather, two men choosing which ordinary sentence could bear the weight of the first one. Then she stopped. She knew nothing about it. Supplying their dialogue in her head was only another way of attending a meeting to which she had not been invited.

Her lunch with Selwyn was that afternoon. His reply had arrived on Monday: One is fine. Café by the bus station? She had said yes without arguing for somewhere more familiar.

Elian rang shortly before she left.

“Am I interrupting?”

“Only the fastening of a very uncooperative shoe.”

“I’ll be brief. I’d rather tell you this myself before you see him. We did walk. We aren’t going back to the usual Saturday arrangement for now.”

She sat on the bottom stair.

“Are you all right?”

“Disappointed. It was good to see him. Both things.”

“Did he—“

She stopped, the question unfinished but already showing its shape.

Elian waited.

“I was going to ask whether he was angry. You don’t have to tell me.”

“Thank you.”

The small answer hurt. She wished it had not been necessary to earn it.

He went on after a moment. “I said I wasn’t going to give an account of you to make it easier. Of us. I can answer for myself, but I’m not taking questions about your private life.”

“Was he asking—“

“Tressa.”

She pressed her hand against the stair tread. “Yes. I did it again.”

“I’m telling you what I chose to say. That’s all.”

“Right.”

Outside a delivery van stopped, its reversing signal loud in the quiet house. She listened until it moved on.

“I’m glad you said it,” she told him. “I would have hated being explained.”

“I would have hated doing it.”

She could hear a door close at his end of the call. He was home, then. A man in his own flat, with disappointment she could not cure by finding the correct sentence for her son at lunch.

“I want to see him without rehearsing your conversation,” she said.

“So do I.”

“I mean—“

“I know what you mean.”

His voice had softened. She let it be enough. They talked about his work the following day and the pot she had bought. He asked what would go in it. She said she had not reached that level of commitment.

After the call she finished fastening her shoe. She put on her coat, then took it off because it was warmer than she had thought. In the hall mirror she saw a woman preparing to have lunch with her son. The fact was still true. It did not need to be the only true thing about her.

She picked up her bag and went out to catch the bus. There were two stops before the café. For both of them she kept her phone in her bag, leaving each man, for once, where he actually was.