Chapter 19 #2
Into the dining room. The table that had held Neil's school reports and his university offer letters and the divorce papers he'd signed with a black pen before bringing a copy here so his parents could know from him and not from Gemma's mother.
Four settings. Freddie was in the good room with the whale book and a plate of sandwiches and strict instructions not to come up until pudding.
They sat.
'Mr Cavanaugh, could you pass the...'
'Rory.'
It was Rory. Quiet. No challenge. A correction with a half-smile under it, the half-smile that had arrived in the staff room at the end of October and never left.
'Yes. Right. Rory. Could you pass the mint sauce.'
'Of course.'
The mint sauce in its small blue jug moved from Rory's hand to Malcolm's hand without incident. Diane watched the transaction with the intensity of a border-control officer watching a passport go through a scanner. When it arrived safely, she served the potatoes.
For the first forty minutes, Malcolm managed Mr Cavanaugh three more times before catching himself. Each time, he corrected. Each time, his lips thinned and the correction cost him and the cost was visible and nobody said anything about it.
Rory called him Malcolm without fail.
The asymmetry hung in the room like a wrong note in a hymn.
At minute forty-one, Malcolm put his fork down beside his plate.
The forks at Malcolm's table always went down parallel to the plate edge; it was from this man that Neil had learnt to align his utensils.
He laid the fork down now and looked at the tablecloth and then, with a small lift of the chin Neil had seen exactly twice before in his life, the lift Malcolm used when he had decided to do a difficult thing and would not be ashamed of doing it, looked across the table at Rory.
'The mural. At the school. Freddie showed me a photograph.'
Rory, who had been carrying his plate forward one bite at a time like a man crossing a rope bridge, set his own fork down.
'Did he now.'
'On his tablet. The little one Gemma got him.'
'What did you think?'
Malcolm considered the question with professional seriousness. He'd been a buyer for a wallpaper wholesaler for thirty-one years. He had a small, dry, reliable eye for pattern and colour, and nobody had ever asked him what he thought about a piece of art.
'The roots.' Malcolm paused. 'The way you've done the roots. They're not decorative. They're... structural. Like you're showing how the thing holds itself up.'
'Yes.' Rory's voice had dropped half a register. The voice he used when someone got it right. 'That's exactly it.'
'Why did you put the words into the bark. Not over it.'
'Because a tree grows round a thing. I didn't want the language to sit on top. I wanted it to be part of the surface.'
'Like rings.'
'Yes.'
'A tree records a bad winter in the ring.'
'Yes, Malcolm. That's the idea.'
Malcolm grunted. He picked up his fork again. He ate a potato. The potato was seasoned as Diane had seasoned potatoes for forty-six years and the seasoning was correct and Malcolm ate it and looked at his plate and did not look at Rory again for the rest of the main course.
Three minutes of conversation. That was the whole of it. For Malcolm Ashworth, it was a speech. Diane served Rory a second helping of roast potatoes without being asked, because Diane's language was carbohydrates, and the second helping was her part of the conversation Malcolm had just had.
Pudding was apple crumble. Freddie was allowed up. Freddie told Malcolm about blue whales having hearts the size of small cars and Malcolm said is that right in the voice he used for his grandson, which was a voice Neil had forgotten Malcolm had.
On the drive home, Rory did not speak until Neil had merged onto the A-road. Then, looking out at the hedgerow:
'He's trying.'
'I know.'
'The tie, Neil. The man put on a tie.'
'He did.'
'That's not nothing.'
'That's not nothing.'
The decision was Neil's.
'I want a place where neither of us has history. Where the first marks on the walls are ours.'
'Spoken like someone who'd been turning it over.'
'I've thought about nothing else.'
So, in July, they looked at seven houses. Two were too small. One carried damp. One was above a kebab shop, which Rory declared 'character' and Neil declared 'untenable.' One was beautiful but had no room for a studio. One had a studio but no room for Freddie.
The seventh was right.
A first-floor flat in a Victorian conversion.
Two bedrooms, one for them, one for Freddie.
A bathroom with an actual bath, which Rory considered essential and Neil considered a cleaning obligation.
A kitchen large enough for two people to cook without colliding, with a counter long enough for two people's worth of clutter.
A living room with a bay window that faced south and flooded with light in the afternoon. And at the corridor's far end, behind a door that would need a new handle, a box room. Eight by six. Small. But enough for an easel and a worktable and the residue of work.
'The home studio's smaller,' Neil said. Standing in the box room.
'I'll make it work.'
'You'll need to stack canvases vertically.'
'I already stack canvases vertically. I've been stacking canvases vertically since I started painting in a bedroom at twenty-two. The size of the room isn't the point. The point is it's here. In the same flat. Down the hall from where we sleep and where Freddie sleeps and where the coffee is.'
'The coffee is very important.'
'The coffee is foundational.'
They signed the lease in August. The landlord was a retired teacher who asked what they did and said 'Art and English, the school must love you' and didn't blink at two men signing a joint tenancy.
Shirley Jennings's office was on the fourth floor of a building on Deansgate Neil had not walked into since the summer of Clause 6.1.
The receptionist recognised him. Her eyebrows lifted a small polite amount and came down again. 'Mr Ashworth. Shirley's expecting you. She said to go straight up.'
Up the stairs. The carpet was the same. The print of a Lowry on the second-floor landing was the same.
Shirley stood up when they came in. Bottle-green suit. Reading glasses on a chain, the chain a new addition since the divorce.
'Mr Ashworth.'
'Shirley.'
'And this is...' She extended her hand to Rory. 'Mr Cavanaugh, I presume. Shirley Jennings.'
'Rory.'
'Rory. Sit down, both of you.'
They sat.
Shirley looked at Neil over the top of her glasses. The look lasted about two seconds and contained a sentence it would have been unprofessional to speak.
'Mr Ashworth. I did not expect to see you back in this chair so soon.' A pause. 'Certainly not for this.'
'Not for this.'
'A joint mortgage and a Declaration of Trust. Your previous visit was Clause six point one. I find the asymmetry...' She allowed herself a quarter of a smile. '...cheering. Professionally. Now. Two options. Joint tenancy or tenancy in common. Are you familiar with the difference.'
'Roughly.'
'Then I'll be quick, and then we'll do this properly.
Joint tenancy is the standard. Fifty-fifty, everything shared, and if one of you dies, it all goes to the other.
It's designed for married couples. Tenancy in common is different.
You each own a share. No automatic transfer.
It's more flexible, but it needs documenting. '
She glanced at the folder.
'Given your situation, I'd recommend tenancy in common.
Mr Cavanaugh is providing the deposit, from the sale of his property and the gallery payment.
Mr Ashworth contributes to the mortgage from his salary.
We reflect that in a Declaration of Trust. If things change, we update it.
If not, it sits in a drawer and does its job. '
She looked up.
'You'll both need wills as well. I can do those for you.'
'Yes,' Rory said. The attention of a man taking notes without a pen.
'Yes,' Neil said.
'Good. Signatures here. Here. And initial here and here. Mr Cavanaugh, both pages.'
They signed. Black pen, medium nib, the brand Neil used at school. Neil's hand was steadier than it had been for the divorce. Shirley watched both signatures land and dated them herself.
'Keys in a fortnight. The vendor is being reasonable, which is a rarer thing than you'd think.'
'Thank you, Shirley.'
'Don't thank me, Mr Ashworth. This is the part of the job I like.' She closed the folder. Looked at him once more over the glasses. 'I am pleased for you.'
Neil found he could not answer.
'Off you go. Mr Cavanaugh, Rory, it's been a pleasure.'
Moving day was a Saturday in early September. One year since the staff meeting. One year since Rory had walked through the double doors with paint on his hands, and Neil pressed his pen into his notepad and the indent started everything.
Neil found Rory's card while clearing his jacket from the hook by the door. Inside pocket. White rectangle, the corners gone soft. He held it for a moment, the address he'd memorised without intending to, the paper worn thin at the fold. Then he put it in the new jacket.
It was a Tuesday in late August. The afternoon before the moving van came. The old flat was half packed. Kieran was in the hallway on the floor, cross-legged, taping up a box of books he should have packed a week ago, and swearing at the sellotape.
Rory came out of the kitchen with a set of keys.
'Oi.'
'What.'
'Catch.'
He tossed the keys underarm. Kieran caught them without looking up. Then he looked up.
'What are these.'
'Keys.'
'To what.'
'To a flat on Oxford Road. Two minutes from the Arts Building. First floor. One bedroom. A kitchen. A shower that works on Tuesdays and not Wednesdays, according to the agent, but we'll sort that. The landlord's a decent type.' A pause. 'Actually, scratch that. There's no landlord.'