I. A Person, Not a Service Clara Bennett was painting the word PLEASE on a board when her sister called to ask if she could please paint eleven more. “Eleven more what?” “Signs. Only little ones. The woman from the hire company called the freestanding ones ‘a separate product,’ which was a horrible thing to say after I'd already told Mum they were coming.” Clara wiped the paint off the tip of her little finger. The board in front of her was a commission for a theatre, an instruction to keep a fire door clear, and by a small miracle she was being paid by the word. She had put the letters close enough together to make them look like they belonged to a single thought. That was generally the difference between a sign you read and a sign you looked through. “Send me a list,” she said. “I'll see what I can price.” There was a gap in which Clara heard, very clearly, the ticking of Elsie's indicator. “I thought I could ask you as my sister.” “You can. That's how you got me on a ladder at ten on a Tuesday.” Her sister laughed, which was something. They had a habit of ending arguments with a joke when both of them knew the argument would resume the next time it found a place to stand. Elsie said she would send the list and reminded Clara that the last day to add a guest was Friday. Clara started to say she didn't need a guest. By the time she reached the floor, she had said it twice. At home that evening a man was sitting outside her flat with a sack of potatoes between his feet. His name was Jamie Reid. He lived downstairs, taught Year Four, and on the occasions when they had passed in the entrance hall had given her a running account of a disagreement between the people in his class about whether a square could be a rectangle. There had been developments over several weeks. Clara had begun to look forward to the news. “Have you been evicted?” she asked. “I took the wrong keys.” He lifted the sack. “I'm offering roast potatoes in exchange for the use of a telephone.” She took out her phone. He looked at the dark glass, then at the tote on his shoulder, as if he might find another life in it in which he had remembered his own. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I'm usually better at being a person by this hour.” Clara let him call his brother. While they waited, she brought two mugs out onto the landing. He took his tea without milk, because he had once been given a drink made mostly of warm milk by a pupil and was still recovering. She told him about the signs. He asked whether the wedding would be outdoors. “In the glasshouse by the old railway. If it rains we move inside. If it doesn't rain we still move inside, because the garden's got a hole in it where they took out a tree.” “A good hole?” “Deep enough to lose a distant relative.” “And are there any distant relatives you'd like to lose?” “I don't know,” Clara said. “I'd need to see the seating plan.” Jamie laughed with his whole face. He always looked a little tired until he laughed, and then she could see how much of the tiredness was a deliberate arrangement of the muscles around his eyes. She wondered when she had started paying that kind of attention. His brother texted to say he was still forty minutes away. Jamie put his tea on the stair and took a paper invitation out of his tote. It was pale green, with a watercolour of a robin that had been printed upside down inside the fold. “My dad's getting married in two weeks,” he said. “He says I can bring somebody. What he means is that he would like me to bring somebody so he doesn't have to wonder whether I've got anybody to talk to.” “Have you?” “He's invited my uncle, who's been explaining the rules of bowls to me since the nineties. I think we're both waiting to find out how it ends.” Clara took the card. On the back there was a note about a buffet and the instruction to wear shoes suitable for uneven ground. Underneath, in different ink, somebody had added that there was to be dancing. “You could come to mine,” she said. She'd meant to say, You could bring a friend to yours. Now that the words were out, she found she liked the thing they offered. “In exchange for me coming to yours. We could go to two weddings and have one conversation each that we wanted to have.” He set his mug down. “Do I need to pretend we're in love?” “God, no. I can't be responsible for how good you are at that.” “I was in a production of Our Town.” “That's not reassuring.” She held out the invitation. “We go as friends. We leave when we've had enough. Neither of us gets put in charge of anything involving a microphone.” He took it back, holding the corner she wasn't holding. “Can I add a clause?” “What is it?” “If anybody offers us cake, we answer for ourselves.” Clara didn't know what she had expected him to say. She did know that by the time his brother let himself into the building, she'd sent Elsie a name. II. Somebody Who Makes Signs The list arrived at eight forty-seven. There were eleven items and a photograph of a mahogany easel propped in front of a fireplace. Clara studied the easel to work out why her sister had sent it. The caption read: Our aesthetic? It was the sort of photograph in which the walls had been washed of every sign that anybody lived on the other side of them. Clara sent back an estimate for six printed signs and a hand-painted welcome board as her wedding gift. She included delivery, a bracket for the board, and a ten-pound charge from the print shop for a replacement if Elsie changed any name after the deadline. She reread the estimate six times. On the seventh, before she could take off the delivery fee, she hit send. Elsie called before breakfast. “I think I'm going to ask if they have a whiteboard.” “For what?” “The seating plan. Dev says his uncle could write the names if we draw him a grid. What do you think?” “I think your uncle should write your names in a grid, if he can spell them.” “His uncle,” Elsie said. “I don't have one to spare. And yes to the welcome board.” Something came loose in Clara's chest. She had been prepared to explain what a day's work cost, including the hours it took to arrive at a number you could say out loud. She had not prepared to have the number accepted. “Can you put the date under our names?” Elsie asked. “Just in case we forget when it was.” “Where are you?” “Standing in front of the fridge eating slices of cheese. Dev thinks I'm looking for my passport.” Clara sat down on her own kitchen floor. For a while they talked about cheese. Elsie confessed she had wanted a lunch at the registry office and a couple of tables at the pub. Now she was having lunch in a glasshouse with an order of service and three different chairs for three different parts of the afternoon. She liked the chairs, she said, which was why the whole thing was harder to make fun of. By the end of the call Clara had agreed to paint a board twenty inches wide. Elsie had agreed to make a decision about the grid herself. At midday Clara went to look at a drop cloth in a shuttered drama school. She had been shortlisted to repaint the wings of a repertory theatre in Glasgow, a three-month job with a crew of four and a studio where the floor could take the weight of a full backdrop. Her own studio was the back half of a draughty lock-up and took the weight of a full backdrop only if she folded it across the middle. On the application form, under Anything else we should know, she had written that she'd once painted a city skyline from the top of a moving platform. She had left out the bit about the moving platform making her sick. The recruiter wanted a sample showing how she would fix paint that was flaking away from an old design. Clara worked at her kitchen table on a strip of the cloth until the last good light came in through the window. When Jamie knocked after six, she opened the door with a dry brush tucked behind one ear and white paint on the cuff of her cleanest jumper. “I wanted to ask about dress code,” he said. “If I say formal, will you tell me you don't own a suit?” “I've got a suit. I'm worried you own a much better one.” “I do.” She pushed the door open with her foot. “Come and help me work out if a patch is visible.” They stood over the strip of cloth from either side of the table. Clara pointed to the two places she had treated. Jamie looked where she pointed, then at the rest of the design. “I can see one,” he said. “It's brighter.” “Good. That's the one I need to do again.” He took his jacket off and put it over the back of a chair. “You had to make it look old?” “I have to make it look like it belongs with the rest. That's different from painting something to look old. Sometimes the old bit is the one that still has colour.” He leaned in to look. A strand of hair dropped toward the cloth. He stopped himself from touching the paint with one hand and from pushing back his hair with the other, which left him stranded with both hands in the air. Clara laughed and handed him a clean rag. “Tell me about the job,” he said. So she did. She told him about the studio and the scale of the job, the two weeks of training for assistants that she would get to run, and the flats for a play whose scenery she had seen once at sixteen. She even told him what it paid, because she wanted to hear herself say that part to somebody who had no claim on it. “I hope you get it,” he said. “Where would you live?” “I don't know. I haven't looked.” “I'd want to live somewhere with a bath,” he said, and stood up to put the kettle on. She had expected either an observation about the distance or an account of somebody he knew who could rent her a room. Instead he asked which drawer had the spoons. She showed him. III. The Unaccompanied On the day of Elsie's wedding, Clara found Jamie at the bus stop holding two umbrellas and a packet of cheese sandwiches. He wore a dark blue suit with a faint chalk mark at the knee. She pointed to it. “Should I be worried?” “I practised kneeling down to tie a shoelace,” he said. “Not everybody wears trousers you can move in.” She opened the packet of sandwiches. “We're going to a catered event.” “We are. Last time I went to a catered event, I spent four hours holding a canapé and asking where the rest of it was.” Clara ate half a sandwich while she waited for the bus. They reached the glasshouse before eleven, along with a woman carrying eight bunches of eucalyptus and a man with his toddler asleep on his shoulders. The venue had planted sweet peas around a rack for bicycles. Nobody had parked a bicycle in it, but at least three people had tied a dog to it. One dog wore the same colour bow tie as Dev. At the door Elsie was standing in jeans and a blouse under a borrowed raincoat. Her hair was already up and Clara could see a row of bright pins above her left ear. She looked younger than she had for years. In the middle of a conversation with the coordinator she broke off to wave. “There's the board,” she said. “And there's a person.” Jamie introduced himself. Elsie looked from him to Clara. Clara waited to be asked the question everybody asked when a woman brought a man to a family function without a matching history. Elsie said, “Could I borrow your sandwich? I think I'm about to have a second coffee.” Jamie gave her the packet. Then he helped Clara take the board out of the sleeve and put it on the bracket she had made. When she stepped back to see it at the correct distance, he stepped back too. He didn't tell her it looked good until she'd finished looking. Inside, the left side of the room had been reserved for guests who arrived without a partner. There were two widowed aunts, a man who had lived alone all his life, two friends whose husbands couldn't get away from work, and a small boy whose parents were upstairs looking for him. Somebody had called them THE UNACCOMPANIED on the printed plan. Clara had a long look at this designation. Underneath, in a neat hand, Dev's uncle had added seats for Clara and Jamie in the gap between the bride's cousins and the table for the photography crew. “Do we have to sit together?” she asked. “Not if somebody more interesting arrives.” “I like that you've left the possibility open.” “I can teach you the rules of bowls in the meantime.” They were halfway through an argument about whether a ball had a top when Clara saw her mother crossing the room with a strip of card. Her mother didn't say hello. She held out the card. “While you've got your pens,” she said, “could you do a few names? Only the top table. Your sister's terribly busy.” “My pens are at home.” “There's one on the register.” Clara looked down at the card. It was cream, rather soft, and wouldn't hold ink unless you touched it lightly. She knew what she would have to do to write on it and also that nobody in the room except her would care how the letters looked. Jamie had gone very still beside her. He didn't move in to answer. “I'm here for the wedding,” Clara said. “Ask the coordinator where you can find the place cards.” Her mother opened her mouth. Then she looked at the card, turned it over, and walked across to the coordinator. “Thank you,” Clara said to Jamie. “For what?” She was trying to decide how to answer when the photographer asked them to move out of a patch of sun. Jamie took Clara's elbow, lightly enough for her to draw away. She didn't. They stood side by side in the shade and watched Elsie walk into the room in her dress, her hair coming loose at exactly the place where the pins were. After the ceremony, the coordinator found the place cards on the windowsill. Nobody could remember who had put them there. Clara's mother saw her across the room and held one up in triumph. Clara waved back. There was no reason, once something had worked out, for either of them to have a worse day. IV. A Dance for Five People The photographer had a list of groups on a board in the shape of a spade. Clara spent twenty minutes standing near it, waiting to be included in groups whose other members had been summoned from different parts of the garden. Jamie went and came back with two glasses of water. His own glass had an insect in it. He looked around to see if there was somewhere private to fish it out. There was not. “Do you want me to wait here?” he asked. “I think I've got one more photograph.” “I'll be by the door.” He left. Clara found herself disappointed, then pleased that she'd had enough room to feel disappointed. For years she had told people she was fine on her own and meant it, including the times when she wished somebody would notice how long she had been on her own. Jamie seemed to have heard her both times, which was either a promising sign or a complete accident. In the last photograph she stood next to Elsie. Her sister had taken her shoes off and hidden them in the garden. The grass was too long to tell. When the photographer asked them to lean together, Elsie tucked a cold hand into Clara's. “I liked that you said no to Mum,” she said, while the photographer fiddled with a dial. “Were you watching?” “I was watching the whole room. I think I thought if I stopped looking something would happen in the bit I'd stopped looking at.” She lifted their joined hands an inch. “I want to do that less tomorrow.” Clara squeezed her hand. “I liked the chairs.” “There were only two sorts in the end.” “Don't tell Dev's uncle. He's getting a speech out of the third.” The photographer asked for a straight face. Both of them lost theirs. Clara found Jamie where he'd said he'd be. There was music playing inside, and five people on the dance floor. One of them was the small boy from earlier. He was kneeling with his hands on the floor as if he thought the movement of the adults required him to keep the room in place. The song changed. The boy's father went in to get him and ended up dancing with him instead. “Are we staying?” Jamie asked. “I'd like to dance once.” “I'll hold your bag.” She turned to look at him. “I was asking you to dance.” He put his glass on a ledge. “That was the part I was trying to avoid getting wrong.” She held out a hand. There was nothing graceful about the first few bars. Clara had chosen shoes she could stand in, but standing and dancing were different matters. Jamie counted quietly under his breath until she told him she couldn't hear the music over the numbers. Then he started singing badly in an attempt to disguise the counting. They were laughing by the time the boy got up off the floor. He saw them laughing and came over, keeping a straight face for perhaps two seconds before joining in. At the edge of the room the photographer raised her camera. Jamie saw the movement and moved a hand between Clara's shoulder and the lens without touching her. Clara had time to choose. She lowered his hand, and the flash went off when she was looking at him. At half past five they were waiting outside the entrance for a lift. A woman from the flowers team brought Elsie's shoes out in a bucket. On the seat next to Clara lay a foil parcel of wedding cake, one slice each, labelled in Jamie's tidy handwriting. He had drawn a small rectangle around her name. “It's a square,” she said. “So it is.” She could smell the rain in his suit, and the clean cloth he'd tucked into his pocket after the work on her sample. It would have been an easy moment to put her head against his shoulder. The trouble was that she wanted him to know she was doing it. She was still thinking of how to make that clear when the car came and he stood up to open the door. Inside, he gave her the window. She rested her forehead against the glass for about a minute. Then she put her head on his shoulder. He didn't say a word, but by the time they reached the first traffic light his palm had turned upward on the seat between them. V. An Appointment On Monday, Clara took her sample to the post office, where a clerk who had never seen a paint sample before asked if it was a rug. She said it wasn't. He asked whether it was a towel. She said it was closer to a towel than a rug. He looked at her with relief and wrote CLOTH on the customs form, which neither of them needed, because Glasgow was in the United Kingdom. Afterward she went to the supermarket for dinner. Jamie was standing in front of the frozen peas with a calculator open on his phone. “What's happened?” she asked. “There are three different sizes. None is the cheapest per kilogram if you include how many I'll be picking up off the floor when the bag breaks.” She handed him a medium packet. He put it in his basket without looking at the price. They went around the rest of the supermarket together, Clara on the inside and Jamie on the outside, where he could keep the trolley from bumping anybody. At the end they had bought four things between them and spent thirty minutes doing it. “Would you have dinner with me?” Clara asked at the crossing. Jamie looked down at the peas. “At a place that cooks its own peas,” she said. “Tomorrow. With a table for two and everything.” The signal went green. Neither moved. “I would,” he said. “Are we calling it a date?” “I'd like to.” A cyclist who had been waiting behind them rang his bell. Jamie stepped sideways into the flower bed. Clara stepped after him. They both stood in it while a pensioner went across the road, then climbed out and waited for the light to change again. On Tuesday they went to a restaurant that did not serve peas in any form. They ate fried aubergines with yoghurt, ordered too much bread, and talked about what they would do if they were each given one free hour in a place with no one else around. Jamie said he'd go to a swimming pool without a lane rope. Clara said she'd go into a paint shop and ask to see every colour that had been returned because it looked wrong on the wall. He asked if she would be happy for him to come along. She said it depended on whether he was going to tell her which colours were nice. He said he was mostly interested in finding out what people had meant to buy. On the walk home he asked if she still wanted to go to his father's wedding. “Of course. Does this change the agreement?” “I don't think so. I'd rather go and spend the day with you than go and spend the day explaining what it means that I'm spending the day with you.” “Then let's do that.” There was a small traffic island where they had to wait halfway across the road. Someone had stuck a supermarket receipt onto the crossing button with a piece of chewing gum. The receipt was for four lemons. Clara could see that much because Jamie had gone quiet and she had been looking for somewhere to put her eyes. “Can I kiss you?” he asked. “At the traffic island?” “I thought we could finish crossing first.” She looked at the cars. The red signal was holding two lanes of them in place. “We've got twenty seconds,” she said, and kissed him there. His glasses caught briefly against her nose. He made a sound of surprise that she felt through his coat. On the far pavement somebody was having an argument about a parking space. It went on through the kiss, and afterward, when Clara picked up the paper bag of bread they'd brought from the restaurant, the person was still saying that everybody knew the space belonged to number fourteen. “Do you want to come upstairs?” Clara asked. Jamie glanced down at the bag in her hand. “I'd like to. Are we taking the bread?” “We paid for it.” They took the bread. He left a little after midnight, because he had to teach fractions in the morning and had learned from experience that he needed to sleep before attempting it. Clara listened to his feet on the stair and had the strange sensation of wanting to call somebody to tell them that something had happened, though she couldn't yet have said what had happened beyond the facts. She put the leftover bread in a tin and went to bed. VI. The Offer Glasgow rang on Thursday while Clara was underneath a table. She had been trying to get a roll of tracing paper out from behind the radiator. When the phone lit up, she gave herself a knock on the head that she felt down to her teeth. She answered standing, because she wanted the first thing her body did on receiving good news to be something other than crawling backward on both elbows. The woman on the phone liked her sample. She liked the paragraph Clara had written about the paint that had lasted best on the cloth. She explained that the start date might have to move forward, because the studio was now available a week earlier than expected. Could Clara be there on the second Monday in November? Clara turned her back on the table. This was a room she had lived in for five years. The curtain was unhemmed, the top cupboard door had never closed properly, and the shape of her own tea mug had been worn into a section of the table where her hand always put it down. She had spent most of those years looking for a job with three months' work in a row. She had never imagined hearing about one and looking first at a cupboard. “I can be there,” she said. “Can you send the terms and the travel allowance in writing?” She had learned to add that second sentence on the phone rather than later in an email. The woman said yes. By the time Clara hung up, she was sitting on the floor beside the roll of tracing paper she had gone to fetch. She phoned Elsie. Her sister made a sound so loud that Clara took the phone away from her ear. “Are you going to do it?” Elsie asked. “Yes.” “Good. I was going to have to come over there and ruin your afternoon if you didn't.” Clara said she'd be gone by mid-November. She waited for Elsie to say something about Christmas, or Mum, or the annual trip to the tip, which her family treated as a communal activity despite the tip's obvious wish to have them come one at a time. “I can come up,” Elsie said. “I've never been to Glasgow without Dev's cousins, and they always take me to the same pub.” They spent the next ten minutes looking at trains. The easiest one went from a station Clara had never heard of. Elsie said it was probably a spelling mistake. Clara found the station on a map and took a picture of it for future use. She considered texting Jamie. He had been at a parents' evening the day before and had sent her a photograph of an empty classroom at half past seven with the caption SOMEHOW I HAVE ATE NINE BISCUITS. She didn't want him to get the news between one door and the next. She also wanted, with an appetite that took her by surprise, to be congratulated in person. When he got home she went downstairs with two cans of lemonade. He opened the door in socks and the blue shirt he wore for important meetings. The chalk on his cuff was less conspicuous than the amount of blue ink down the side of his hand. “I got it,” she said. He lifted both arms in delight, caught sight of the ink, and held them out away from her. “It's all right,” Clara said. “It's the cheap jumper.” He put his arms around her and lifted her just enough that she had to put a foot down again. Then they sat on the step inside his door and drank the lemonade warm. “Three months,” he said after a while. “Yes. I start earlier than I thought.” “What's the second thing you want to tell me?” “How do you know there's a second thing?” “You drank the bit of your lemonade you normally leave in the can.” Clara looked down. He was right, although she didn't know how he could possibly know that. “I want to keep seeing you,” she said. “I'd like us to work out what that looks like when I have a start date and a place to stay.” He reached for her free hand. “I'd like that too.” “Are you thinking something else?” “I'm thinking three months sounds shorter when it's an amount of work.” She let him sit with it. She was proud of the offer and afraid of the distance and did not particularly want to make one feeling less visible by holding the other in front of it. After a little while he asked if she had told her sister. Clara told him about the station that might have been a spelling mistake. They looked it up together. It was real and had a café open only three mornings a week. Jamie wanted to know which mornings. VII. Ross and Mo Jamie borrowed his brother's car to take Clara to the second wedding. The driver's side window opened but did not close. At every roundabout Jamie put a hand on the handle as though a little encouragement would bring the glass back up. Clara had tied her hair with a ribbon. By the time they reached his father's village, she could see the ribbon moving in the wing mirror. Mo had chosen to get married in the village hall because she had played badminton there for twenty years and already knew which part of the floor was uneven. She met them by the door in a long green coat. From a distance she looked like a woman who had stopped in on the way to somewhere else. Close to, Clara saw that the buttons on the coat were little painted birds. “You brought a friend,” Mo said to Jamie. “I did. This is Clara.” “I'm glad.” Mo took one of Clara's hands with both of hers. “I tried to tell him it was all right to come alone, but I wanted him to bring a friend, so it came out like something I was saying to the vicar.” “Nobody's got it right with me so far,” Jamie said. “That's because you like to be asked two different ways.” Mo went to get the flowers. The hall smelled of fresh mop water and the pies that had been delivered to the kitchen that morning. On the wall above the stage were a series of photographs from badminton championships, all of people looking as though they would rather be watching a game. In one, Mo was kneeling on the floor with the same woman who had carried the wedding pies. Her hair had been cut to fit under a headband. She looked a great deal like herself now, more than some people did in photographs of themselves twenty years younger. Ross was at the far side of the hall with a white carnation in his buttonhole. He had a lower voice than Jamie and the same way of lifting his head to hear a person better. Clara noticed that he kept getting up to put things back where they belonged. When they reached him, he was carrying a glass with somebody else's lipstick on it. “I've lost the card with my words on it,” he told Jamie. “Which words?” “The ones for the part when she comes in.” Jamie looked at the clock. “You could write them again.” “They were different the first time I wrote them.” Clara had just met him. She still felt, for a moment, the desire to get a piece of card out of her bag and put the situation right. She waited. Jamie sat down with his father and asked him to tell him one thing he wanted Mo to hear. Ross said he'd like her to hear that she could have the new side of the bed. Jamie asked what he meant. Ross said she'd never slept on it because Jamie's mother had, even when she wasn't there. Jamie looked toward the doors. The people bringing in the flowers were making a noise with the metal feet of the stands. Clara walked away far enough for him to be able to say something his father would be the only person to hear. A woman at a trestle table offered her a paper cup of tea. Clara took it and held it in both hands. The ceremony started fifteen minutes late. When Mo came in, the boy who was carrying the rings was several steps ahead of her and had to go back. Ross spoke from a square of blue paper. He said he liked mornings when Mo got up first and opened all the curtains. He said he had been afraid to change the rooms after his first wife died. He asked Mo if she'd open the curtains with him the following morning, in case the ladder was still in the wrong place. Jamie stood next to Clara through all of it. At the last sentence he took a deep breath. She put her hand on the inside of his wrist, and he covered it with his own. VIII. One Other Favour The hall had a small back room with two unclaimed coats, a stack of gym mats, and a clock five minutes fast. Jamie found Clara there after the speeches. She had gone to take the ribbon out of her hair because the knot had caught on an earring. He stood very close and undid it, working slowly with the pads of his thumbs. The end of the ribbon fell onto her shoulder. When he finished, he kept hold of it. “How are you doing?” she asked. “I thought I'd feel I'd lost something again,” he said. “I haven't. I'm going to have to get used to that.” Clara touched his collar, then straightened it. He had worn a white shirt and a dark red tie with a small pull in the fabric. She could see the pull only at this distance. She took the ribbon from him and put it in his pocket, where it made a little blue flag. “I like Mo,” she said. “So do I. She asked me not to bring a gift and then made me promise I'd stay for the first dance.” They could hear the first dance starting. Neither knew whether Ross and Mo were already out on the floor. Jamie kissed Clara once, softly. Then he went to find his father, and she came after him a moment later with the earring in her palm. At their table Mo's sister Jean was holding a small wooden panel. It said MEMBERS ONLY in white letters. She told Clara it was from the old badminton cupboard. The hall committee had agreed to turn the cupboard into a lending shelf. They were looking for someone to do the letters. Clara had been introduced earlier as a scenic artist, and Jean had evidently been waiting for a moment when she could bring this up. “Jamie said you'd do a lovely job,” Jean said. “He said he was sure you could squeeze it in before you leave.” Clara looked at Jamie. He was setting two puddings on the table. The look he gave her wasn't guilty until he saw her face. “Did you say that?” “I said you made signs. I said you'd know what they needed.” “Did you say I'd squeeze it in?” Jean put the panel down. Its corners were as smooth as the corners of a thing people had handled for years. A piece of coloured tape on the back identified which way was up. “I said I'd ask you,” Jamie said. “You told me she wouldn't mind,” Jean said. She wasn't accusing him. She was giving him the words to work with. Then she put a hand over the sign and said, “Listen. It's a cupboard. It'll still be here in spring.” She took it away. Jamie sat down. Clara could see him making an effort to remember what he had said, as though it might prove less important if he could recover the exact sentence. “I didn't promise it,” he said at last. “Why would it make me feel better to hear that you came most of the way to promising it?” He put his spoon down. His ears went red. Clara had wanted him to say, I did, and I'm sorry. The more he tried to explain how little he'd done, the larger a thing there was between them to talk about. “I was trying to help,” he said. “Help who?” For a moment he looked as though she had caught him on the wrong side of a simple question. Then he said, “Jean. I suppose. She's done a lot for Dad.” “Yes,” Clara said. “She has.” From the floor somebody waved for them to come and dance. Jamie looked at Clara as if he would be happy to refuse on her behalf. She shook her head. “Go and dance with your dad,” she said. “I'm going outside for a few minutes.” The village hall had a shallow ramp that led to a yard with two cars and a clothing bank. Clara walked down it in shoes too good for the surface. In the yard she had the whole sky and nowhere to be. She phoned a taxi company and asked when they could send a car. They said they could send one in an hour. She told them she'd ring back. On the bench beside the door there were little flecks of paint in the shape of somebody's fingers. Clara sat and put the earring in her bag. She stayed outside until she could hear through the glass which song the band was playing. By then she knew she could go back in and finish the evening without having to finish the conversation. IX. After the Band She went back in during a song she knew from working in a theatre where the director had played it every morning before rehearsal. The first eight bars made her expect somebody to ask her to find a table. Nobody did. On the floor, Ross had one arm around Mo and the other around his brother. Jamie was standing by the drums with the ring bearer, holding a glass of orange juice high enough for the boy to drink from it without bending. When he caught sight of Clara, he set it down beside the cake and came over. “Do you want a lift home with my brother?” he asked. “He's leaving after this.” “What are you going to do?” “Stay and help my dad take the chairs down.” She remembered their agreement. It seemed less important, now, to leave at the same time than it did for each of them to go at the time they wanted. “I'd like the lift,” she said. Jamie walked with her to the coat rack. He didn't take down her coat until she pointed to it. A button had caught on the one next to it. She had to reach over his shoulder to release it. He held still while she worked. “I told Jean I offered your time without asking,” he said. “She's going to put a call for paid quotes in the hall newsletter.” Clara freed the button. Jamie handed her the coat. “I'm sorry I made you answer for that in front of her,” he said. “When you asked me what I'd said, I was more interested in getting out of it than in giving you the answer.” She looked at him. The blue ribbon was still in his pocket. It had gone down inside the opening, so there was only a little triangle of it visible above the fabric. “Thank you for telling her,” she said. “I don't want her to think I was angry with her.” “She knows. She gave me six teaspoons to bring back to the kitchen and said I could work up to being useful.” Clara smiled, despite herself. She put her coat on. “I liked the day until then,” she said. “Quite a lot of it.” “I did too.” “I still might want to tell you more about it later.” “I'd like to hear.” Ross came over to see her off. He had managed to lose the carnation from his lapel and had put a sprig of rosemary in its place. Mo had done the pinning. Clara kissed each of them on the cheek. At the door she saw Jean with the board under her arm, looking for the person who'd left a coat. She waved. Jean waved back with the board, nearly knocked it into the door, and caught it before the corner touched the floor. Jamie's brother drove with the broken window open, because there was nothing else to do with it. He turned the heater on so high that Clara took her coat off again after five minutes. Somewhere between two villages he asked if she knew how to turn off a particular warning on the dashboard. “No,” she said. “What's it warning you about?” “That the driver's window is open.” They laughed so hard that he had to wait at the next junction until he could see. Afterward the drive was quiet. He dropped her by the shop rather than taking the car around the block to the front of the building. She walked the last bit herself. The windows of her flat were dark. The only thing she could see of Jamie's was the shade of the lamp he left off when he was out. Upstairs, Clara took the foil off the piece of wedding cake she had been given at the door. It was the kind with fruit in it, which she liked better than the kind Elsie had chosen. She ate half at the kitchen table. Then she wrapped up the other half and wrote JAMIE on the foil. She had done the same thing on many occasions for men she was angry with. The difference tonight was that when she thought about giving it to him, she could imagine telling him she was angry, and about what, while he ate it. She took her earrings out, discovered she was wearing only one, and went back for the other in her bag. It had settled in the little seam at the bottom, beside a paint chip that had come loose from her sample. She held both in the palm of her hand for a minute. Then she put the earring away and left the chip on the table, where it would be easy to find in the morning. X. A Room Above the Shop Clara's room in Glasgow came with a table, two chairs, and a radiator that whistled. It was above a shop that sold instruments. In the afternoon a child played the first four bars of a tune on an electric piano. She made it as far as the fifth bar twice in Clara's first week, and the second time somebody applauded. Before Clara had left, she and Jamie had eaten the cake together and talked about the hall. She had told him that she'd been watching him all day with people he loved. She had liked the way he was with his father. That had been one reason it hurt when he offered her time. She'd thought he knew how much of a thing time was. He said he had understood what she wanted when she said it about her sister. He hadn't applied it when his own family had asked. “I'm used to saying yes to Jean,” he had said. “She asked you something you couldn't say yes to.” “I know.” They hadn't settled the question of how often they would see one another. Clara didn't have a calendar for her first week in Glasgow and Jamie didn't yet know whether there would be a school trip on the second Friday. He had written the second Saturday in pencil on the back of the upside-down robin. Clara stuck it to the wall beside her window. At work she was given a key card and a floor plan. She was also shown the bit of the studio that everybody expected her to use, with half its clear space occupied by a rack of costumes. The woman who'd called about the job, Saira, said she was sure they could push the rack over during the day. Clara went through the motions of pushing it in her head. It would have put the rack in front of a fire door. “I can start on the smaller pieces,” she said. “For the full flats I need the floor space in the terms we agreed.” Saira looked at the rack. “I'll see if there's somewhere else.” She didn't sound happy. Clara spent the morning making small adjustments to a chair back whose painted rose had lost a petal. At lunchtime Saira came back with the names of two people who could move the costumes to another room. Clara looked into the new room. It had space on either side of a wall of cupboards and hooks at the height the costumes needed. It would work. She was glad she had asked to see it. She was tired by four from both the painting and the asking. She sent Jamie a photograph of the rose with the petal back on. He sent her a photograph of his whiteboard. Across the top was written RECTANGLES WE KNOW ABOUT. In the bottom corner somebody had written WINDOW? in very small letters. Later they tried to talk on the phone. The whistling radiator was louder on the phone than it was in the room. Jamie could hear an engine, he said, and asked if she was going somewhere. Clara stood in the stairwell instead. A man with a guitar came up the stairs and waited for her to move. He smelled of oranges. “Can we try again tomorrow?” she asked. “We can. Do you want to tell me one thing about today before you go?” She told him about the new petal. She didn't tell him about the costumes until the following evening, when she was ready to have had that conversation at work and finished it. Jamie told her he had called about the train. There were two cheap seats on Saturday, but one would get him in after dark. “Do you mind if I get the late one?” he asked. “It's dark at four,” she said. “Get the one that lets you have a Saturday.” She could hear him smile. The radiator started up again. Clara put her hand on it and was surprised by how cold it was. That evening she went down to the shop and asked whether somebody could tell her the name of the tune the child had been playing. It turned out to be one Clara's father used to whistle in the car. Nobody had ever told her the name of it. She went upstairs with a piece of paper on which the shopkeeper had written the title and, underneath, four notes that meant nothing to her until she said the letters out loud. She put it on the wall beside the robin. She could already tell which chair Jamie would choose when he got there. It was the one that gave him a view of the street. XI. A Seat by the Window It was nearly six when Jamie got to the room above the instrument shop. He knocked and waited until she called through the door. Clara had made dinner for him. By made she meant she had bought a rotisserie chicken, warmed two plates, and obtained a bottle opener from the man with the guitar. The table was too narrow to accommodate the chicken between two place settings, so she had put it on a chair. When Jamie saw this he bowed to the chicken and introduced himself. “Did you have a Saturday?” she asked. “I did. I went swimming. The pool was full of children in goggles. I had a lane to myself for four minutes, because they all had to get out to do something involving a float.” He took the chair that looked onto the street. Clara didn't tell him she'd known he would. She had liked guessing and didn't want to turn the result into an obligation. From that chair he could see the glow of a shop window across the road and, if he leaned in, an upstairs room where a woman was putting washing over a radiator. He watched the woman for a moment. Then he turned his chair so that he could see Clara properly. After dinner they walked to the theatre. Clara wanted to show him where she worked. In the street outside the back door she pointed to an upstairs window that had been blacked out from the inside. “Is that the studio?” “That's a lavatory. The studio's on the other side. I'm trying to work out how to show you a building where the thing I want you to see is a room you can't get into.” Jamie took two steps backward to look at the building as a whole. “What would you put on it if they let you paint the outside?” Clara looked up. There was a long strip of empty wall above the loading door. At the far end you could see where a single small letter had been screwed to it years before. “I'd put the names of the people who work in the rooms where you can't see them.” “How long would you leave it up?” “Until somebody new came to work. Then I'd add them.” They started walking again. A bakery on the next street had turned all its lights off except the light above a counter where three people were still packing loaves into crates. The warmth from the open back door reached them at the corner. Jamie asked if she thought she might do this sort of job again after February. Clara said she'd like to. He took this in for half a block, which gave her a chance to find out that she had actually meant it. She liked working big. She liked a floor on which the design could lie flat. She wasn't sure she had ever chosen to make things small. “What would that look like for you?” he asked. “I'd take jobs where the jobs were. I'd still want somewhere that was home.” “I want to be one of the people you come home to,” he said. Clara kept walking, slowly now. It was easier to hear him with her eyes on the road. “That's a big thing to say for somebody who's been on two dates.” “Three if you count the supermarket.” “Nobody counts the supermarket.” “Then two,” he said. “I wanted to say it anyway. I can still take the late train on Saturdays. I can still have a Saturday of my own before I take it.” There was a bench opposite a closed florist's. They sat down. One pane of the window had been painted with a row of tulips. Clara could tell, by the direction of the brush marks, which ones had been painted from inside the shop and which from outside. She put her head against Jamie's shoulder. She didn't have to think about making it clear this time. He settled his cheek against her hair, and they stayed until a bus stopped beside them and the driver opened the doors to see if either wanted to get on. “Thank you,” Jamie told him. “We're staying here a minute.” The driver closed the doors. Clara took Jamie's hand out of his coat pocket and put it in hers. “I want to come home to you,” she said. He let out a breath. “Good.” They sat for another minute. Then Jamie's phone rang. It was Ross, who wanted to know whether Jamie had seen a blue ribbon anywhere. Mo had found one on the floor at the hall and thought it might be his. Jamie said it was somebody else's. He asked his father to put it somewhere he would be able to find it. Clara listened as they discussed three possible drawers. When he hung up, she asked if he thought it would still be there the next time they went down. “Only if he chooses the right drawer,” Jamie said. “Then we'll look in all three.” XII. A Place for Two The Glasgow job ended on a Wednesday. On the last morning the crew ate lunch at ten thirty because the first scenery truck was due at eleven. Clara stood by the loading door with a sandwich on a piece of folded tracing paper and watched the flats go out in the order they had marked them. Each one passed through the doorway sideways, which made the street look, for a few seconds at a time, like the inside of a different building. A woman who was walking past stopped and asked whether one of the doors on the backdrop was real. Clara said it was real enough if you stood ten rows back. Before she left, Saira gave her a date for another job in autumn and asked if she would put together a price. Clara wrote down the date. She also wrote down how much floor space she would need and where she would want the racks to go. Saira looked at the list and asked if she would include the price of moving the racks. “Of course,” Clara said. She took the train home with a case of brushes, one small suitcase, and a bundle of bread rolls the woman from the shop had insisted she take for the journey. She didn't have to carry the flat she had painted on the train, which was something she was still grateful for when she got as far as the carriage door and found that a man in front of her had a bicycle and could not see where he was going. She held his back wheel for him until he'd got it onto the platform. At the station Jamie was waiting on the right side of the barrier. He had a red wool hat in one hand. It belonged to her, though she could not remember leaving it with him. He handed it over because the wind was blowing hard enough to turn the bottom of her coat inside out. She put it on, gave him her case of brushes, and kissed him. “What would you like to do?” he asked. “I'd like to take these rolls somewhere and eat them while they're still good.” They went to the park. It was one of the first afternoons of the year when you could sit for a few minutes without losing all feeling in your fingers. They sat on a broad bench in the sun. In front of them the council had planted a row of bulbs around a drain cover. Jamie took out a little metal tin and opened it. Inside was the blue ribbon. Ross had put it in the cutlery drawer, because it was the drawer he used most often. “Jean sends her regards,” Jamie said. “They've got a sign.” “Did they?” “A woman called Linda from the next village. She painted the cupboard doors as well. They're yellow.” Clara liked the sound of that. She wound the ribbon around the tin and tied it. A little girl came down the path with a paper crown pushed almost flat against the back of her head. Behind her a man carried a bunch of balloons. None of the balloons matched the crown. They were still going to look quite good together in the photographs. “I got an invitation while you were away,” Jamie said. “Oh no.” “It's a raffle. At school.” “Do I have to go?” “Absolutely not. I don't have to go either. I was hoping you would come to dinner with me that night.” “At a place that cooks its own peas?” “I can promise you a table for two. I can't promise you peas.” Clara opened the bag of rolls. The shopkeeper had put a small packet of butter at the bottom, under a square of waxed paper. She gave Jamie one of the rolls and spread butter on the other. Before they went home, they took out their phones to look at the following Saturday. The night of the raffle was free. The Saturday after it was free as well, though Jamie was going swimming in the morning. Clara wanted to go out to her studio and see how much floor she could clear. They wrote down dinner on both days. After that they put the phones away and finished their rolls in the sun.