Veda arrived at the restaurant seven minutes early and found Roscoe already outside, reading the menu with the concentrated expression of a man trying not to watch the road.
“I said yes,” she reminded him. “You could have trusted me to turn up.”
“I did. I’ve been trusting you for eleven minutes.”
She had chosen a green dress that did not require a better body or a different age to make it work. His glance moved over her and returned to her face with such open pleasure that she forgave the drive, the parking charge and the ten minutes she had spent wondering whether the dress was too much.
“You look wonderful.”
“I clean up.”
“I liked you on Friday too.”
There was a useful silence after that. She let herself stand inside it before opening the door.
The place was half an hour inland, beside a millstream too narrow to sustain anyone’s political convictions. The owner gave them a window table. Roscoe waited while Veda chose the seat she wanted, then sat opposite her and folded his hands so tidily that she almost laughed.
“Are you nervous?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
“That’s a punishing answer.”
“I’d dislike doing it alone.”
His hands separated. “Better.”
They ordered coffee and food. Veda chose fish, then looked up in time to catch the careful absence of comment on his face.
“You may eat whatever you want,” she said.
“I was going to.”
“Excellent. We’re progressing.”
He ordered the same thing. She refused to interpret it as either diplomacy or proof of anything. A meal could be a meal. She was here to discover whether two people who had already made kissing difficult could manage potatoes.
For the first few minutes they talked about the journey and the restaurant and a dog occupying most of the adjacent chair. These subjects were safe and therefore disastrous. She found herself sounding like somebody interviewing a prospective lodger.
Roscoe lifted his cup. There was a fine pale scar across one knuckle, and she remembered the warmth of that hand at her waist.
“Tell me something you haven’t rehearsed,” she said.
He put the cup down. “I changed my shirt three times.”
“Which one won?”
“This one. The other two were both versions of a man I don’t know.”
She laughed. He wore dark blue, soft from washing, open at the throat. It suited the man she had kissed sufficiently well that she wanted to lean across the table and check.
“I put on earrings,” she admitted, “and took them off because I thought they made it too obvious.”
“That you’re having lunch?”
“That I wanted you to notice.”
“I noticed without them.”
Heat rose beneath the neckline of her dress. He watched it happen. Neither of them looked away until the food arrived, and the interruption was a mercy they had not needed but could use.
She tasted her lunch and let him ask about the boat. Not her submission, not projected displacement, but how she had come to own Morrow.
“I bought a share first,” she said. “Worked on other boats before that. Saved. Borrowed. Paid it off. It makes a dreadful inspirational story. Mostly I was tired and bad at answering letters.”
“How old were you?”
“Twenty-eight when I started fishing. Thirty-six when she was wholly mine.”
“What were you doing before?”
“Warehouse dispatch. I was very good at telling other people where things ought to go.”
“I can imagine.”
“Can you?”
He smiled. “I’m attempting restraint.”
She described her first season as an adult beginner, the indignity of being competent in one place and astonishingly slow in another. He listened without supplying a lesson about courage. That made it possible to tell him the embarrassing bit: how she had gone home after one early day and wept because everybody else seemed to have been born knowing where to stand.
“Did you want to stop?”
“For about an hour. Then I wanted to be better.”
“And now?”
She looked past him at the stream. A leaf moved under the bridge, vanished, appeared on the other side.
“Now I know where to stand.”
His expression changed. She could see the answer he was tempted to give, something about how knowledge might travel with her into a different life.
“Don’t,” she said.
He stopped.
“Whatever reasonable thing you were about to say.”
“I was thinking it.”
“I know.”
He took a sip of water. “I’m sorry.”
It was a small apology, correctly sized. She found she could receive it without having to forgive his entire campaign.
“What do you like about it?” he asked instead.
“Which part?”
“The work. Nobody asked you that at the meeting.”
She set down her fork.
There was the obvious list: independence, being outdoors, the particular pleasure of work done well. But he had asked a particular question, and she wanted to give him something better than the answer she offered on forms.
“When the boat settles after you turn,” she said. “When you’ve allowed for the water and she does what you expected. The sound changes. Not by much.”
He waited.
“And some mornings the marks all line up before the sun gets onto them. You know where you are in your hands before you’ve checked it with your eyes. You still check.”
“Of course.”
“I like being there. That’s the worst of it.”
“Why the worst?”
“Because it sounds childish beside a conservation assessment.”
“It doesn’t sound childish to me.”
She believed him. It did not alter the boundary on his campaign’s map, but for the first time she could imagine being with him without continuously translating herself into an economic unit.
She asked about his work then. Roscoe told her about a customer who wanted an old table to look untouched by time and also exactly like the one in a new hotel. About the pleasure of finding the original construction beneath a careless repair. About days when he made almost no visible progress and went home content.
“You get paid for that?”
“Not sufficiently.”
“That sounds familiar.”
He owned his workshop tools and rented the little building behind his house. Work came from households and a few independent shops; he had learned from a restorer in his twenties and stayed because he liked the process more than the prospect of managing a larger business.
“I don’t want employees,” he said. “People assume I mean not yet.”
“Do you?”
“No.”
“Then they can keep assuming.”
He glanced at her with a look she could not immediately name. Relief, perhaps. She had become accustomed to people praising independence while suggesting improvements to its form.
They shared a pudding because both wanted it and neither wanted a whole portion. He gave her the crisp corner without remark. She pushed the dish back so he would get some too.
Outside, the afternoon had warmed. They walked beside the stream, beyond the car park, where the path widened under a tree. Roscoe offered his hand. She took it.
“This is strange,” she said.
“Good strange?”
“I haven’t decided.”
His thumb moved over hers, once. “You may return the hand at any time.”
“Don’t make me fill in a form.”
“No. That’s the premium service.”
She stopped walking, turned towards him and touched the open edge of his shirt. “I’d like to kiss you without a gull supervising.”
He looked around with exaggerated care. “We should use the opportunity.”
This kiss lasted longer than either of Friday’s. He put his arms around her only after she leaned into him, and she liked the weight of them, the unhurried welcome. The fabric beneath her fingers was warm. When she lifted her mouth from his, he followed an inch, then stopped, leaving the last little distance for her.
She closed it.
Later, back by their separate cars, he asked whether she would like to come to the workshop one evening.
“As an interested member of the public?”
“As the woman I would like to see on Wednesday.”
She liked the effort that plainness cost him. “Yes.”
He kissed her once more, briefly enough to leave her dissatisfied.
On the drive home she did not rehearse a defence of the date. She thought about the chair he had mentioned, the faulty joint somebody had hidden under polish. She wanted to see what his hands did when he had time. She wanted to be in a room where he belonged and watch him forget, for a moment, to be reasonable.