The Market Mirror

Elian asked Tressa for a Saturday while she was taking a pudding out of the oven. She nearly gave him the oven gloves.

“A particular Saturday?”

“Two, actually. Next month.”

She put the dish on the hob. “That sounds as if you have a proposal.”

“I have a calendar. It’s less impressive.”

He was standing by the kitchen table with his phone in his hand. He had come for supper on Saturday after a day spent doing jobs in his flat. She had painted in the morning and gone to the library. They had both arrived at the evening with things to tell each other which neither had witnessed. She liked that; she had been preparing to say so when he asked.

“What did you have in mind?”

“Nothing I need tickets for. I’d like to know I’m going to see you.”

She turned off the oven. “You are seeing me.”

“Yes.”

His face made her regret the answer before he said anything else. She had responded to the safest version of his question.

“Come and sit down,” she said.

“I’m not about to resign.”

“I know. I need to sit down myself. The pudding is heavy.”

He put his phone on the table and waited while she found two bowls. She left them on the counter. There was no need to carry refreshments into every difficult conversation as if she were chairing it.

“I like the evenings,” he said. “I don’t want all the days to be things we arrange after we know what everybody else is doing.”

“You mean Selwyn.”

“Sometimes. I mean you too. And me. I can keep a weekend empty so effectively that I end up spending it alone and calling that consideration.”

She looked at the phone, its screen now dark.

“I haven’t asked you to do that.”

“No. I’m asking not to do it.”

It was the same plainness he had brought to the question of the sea view, except that this time the answer would not be settled by choosing a path. She wanted him. She had told him so in words and with a willingness that still startled her. She had been more cautious about putting him in her diary than in her bed.

“I think I’ve been keeping spaces,” she said. “In case lunch starts again. As if I should be available the minute it does.”

“Do you want to keep them?”

She took a moment. He had asked what she wanted, not whether the wish was admirable.

“Some of them. I miss him.”

“Then keep some.”

“You make it sound easy.”

“No. I make it sound possible. I’d like two Saturdays. I’d also like you to say if that is more than you want.”

She reached for her diary in the drawer by the cooker. It was small, badly designed for the amount of writing she put in it and full of notes which would make little sense to anybody else. She opened October. The first Friday held the painting group; the following Wednesday a dental appointment she had been trying to stop thinking about. A lunch with a former colleague occupied a Thursday. There were unmarked squares into which she had placed an entire imaginary family recovery.

“The first and third?” she said.

Elian checked his phone. “The first I’m on the park rota until one.”

“Then after one. The third all day.”

“I’d like that.”

She wrote his name twice. There was something almost comic about how much the pen weighed. She had put men’s names in diaries before. She had once scheduled a married life down to when the boiler service could happen. This did not feel like restoring that system. It felt like admitting that she wanted a person to turn up.

“And tomorrow,” she said.

“You have plans tomorrow.”

“Yes. With myself. I’d like to keep them.”

“Good.”

“Don’t be noble. I intend to reorganise the cupboard under the stairs and then abandon the attempt halfway through.”

“An ambitious day.”

He was smiling now. She went round the table to him, took the phone from his hand and set it beside her diary.

“I wasn’t reserving you as an alternative,” she said.

“I know. I didn’t want to become one by accident.”

She kissed him. He rose from the chair into the kiss, his hands finding her back, and she let herself lean into the full pleasure of having answered something with a decision rather than reassurance. When they parted he looked towards the cooker.

“Did we ruin the pudding?”

“It may have improved with neglect.”

It had not. The edges were too dark. They ate the middle and left the rest without treating the loss as a judgment on her evening.

· · ·Scene break

The first Saturday in October arrived mild and clear, with a wind that made every open window sound more dramatic than the weather deserved. Tressa met Elian outside the park at half past one. He had changed his work shirt and was holding a paper bag in a way that suggested the contents were fragile.

“Lunch,” he said.

“Is it alive?”

“Two pastries. One has an insecure corner.”

She took the bag while he locked the gate to the staff yard. He did not show her round his workplace. She had not asked, and he appeared to be pleased to leave it. They walked out into the road as two people with an afternoon to use, without pretending that his having worked first had diminished it.

At the bus stop he asked which of the two routes she preferred. One would take them to the harbour, the other to a small town inland with an old market hall they had both passed without entering.

“The hall,” she said. “I’m capable of spending a day without inspecting the sea.”

“I had begun to wonder.”

The bus was half empty. She sat by the window and he sat beside her, his knee touching hers whenever the road turned. She liked being on her way somewhere without having to watch the road. When he pointed out a tree whose branches had been cut back too hard, she asked him how he would have done it. He explained until he noticed her smiling.

“I’ve made it sound like work.”

“You made it sound like something you care about. You’re allowed.”

He looked out of the window again. “I do care. I don’t always want to.”

She understood that more readily than the names of the cuts. At the shop she had cared whether a frame sat comfortably long after a customer had decided it was good enough. Retirement had not removed the habit of seeing what she could improve. She was learning that love was not the only place where she might leave something alone.

The market hall contained stalls selling second-hand books, pots, old tools and scarves whose labels claimed more certainty about their fabric than Tressa believed. Elian stopped at a box of postcards. She stopped at a long narrow mirror and immediately wished she had not.

There they were in it, side by side among strangers: her silver-streaked hair, his darker head bent over a card. He looked his age. She looked hers. The image was neither dreadful nor reassuring. It was only public in a way she had not prepared for.

She moved closer to read the postcard in his hand.

“What is it?”

“A garden with nobody in it. You can tell the photographer waited.”

She laughed. He looked up and found their reflection too.

“That mirror makes the room seem bigger,” he said.

She waited for the remark he did not make.

Then she slipped her hand into his arm. He turned towards her, pleased, and the image acquired the one thing she had been looking for: a choice she could see herself making.

They bought nothing for a while. At the bookstall she found an illustrated guide to northern islands and opened it to a photograph of a harbour in summer light. Elian leaned over her shoulder.

“Your late supper,” he said.

She looked at him. He remembered.

“Possibly.”

“That looks very far north.”

“It is.”

“Would you go for a long time?”

“I haven’t decided.”

The book was cheap enough to buy for the pleasure of not deciding yet. She paid for it, and he bought a packet of old postcards whose messages he admitted interested him more than the views.

They ate the pastries on a bench behind the hall. One corner had indeed escaped. Elian offered her the intact one. She took the damaged one because it had more filling, and he accused her of being calculating.

“You asked for the afternoon,” she said. “This is what you get.”

He brushed a flake from her sleeve. “I was hoping so.”

It was an ordinary touch. The warmth that followed it was not ordinary to her yet. She took his hand before he could put it back in his lap and kept it there while they watched a man struggle to fit a small table into a car that was evidently too small for it.

Nobody telephoned. Nothing required their attention except a decision about whether to help, which the arrival of a second, larger car settled before they had to stand.

They walked through the streets behind the hall, disagreeing over which houses they would choose if required to live there. Elian chose a plain one with a deep front garden. Tressa chose the one with a window above the bakery. He said she would get tired of the smell. She said he underestimated the seriousness of her affection for bread.

At the bus stop on the way back, he kissed her. He had turned to say something, found her looking at him and paused. She lifted her face. His mouth was warm from the coffee they had bought, and she forgot what she had been going to say about the timetable.

When the bus arrived they were still holding hands.

· · ·Scene break

At her house he put the postcards on the kitchen table and asked whether he should go home for a clean shirt.

“Would you like to stay?” she asked.

“Yes. That’s what I was trying to ask. Badly.”

“Then yes. I would like that too.”

He went to fetch it, walking the short distance while she put the kettle on and opened the windows. She had time to wash her face and look at the room without imagining herself through his eyes. There was a cardigan over the chair, a stack of library books, dust on the picture rail. She straightened nothing except the rug where she might trip.

When he returned she was at the top of the stairs. He looked up, his small bag in one hand, and smiled with a pleasure so unguarded that she came down three steps to meet him.

“Hello again,” she said.

He set down the bag. “I like this part.”

“The stairs?”

“Coming back.”

She took his face between her hands and kissed him. He stayed still until she drew him closer, then put his arms around her. There was no departure to negotiate after it. The night lay ahead of them, made possible by a Saturday they had asked for and kept.

Later, in bed, she listened to the window catch moving in the breeze and felt his hand settle over hers. They had found their way towards each other without hurrying, asking small questions and accepting the answers, the tenderness warm with desire rather than duty. Now she could feel the quiet of him, no less intimate for needing nothing from her.

On the bedside table lay her diary. She reached past it to turn down the lamp.

“Not off?” he asked.

“Not yet.”

He moved nearer when she turned back. She liked seeing his face, and liked that she did not have to explain the preference again.

The northern-islands book waited downstairs, still in its paper bag. Tonight she was not deciding where to go next. She had managed to arrive at the day she had already chosen.