15. Willow
— ? —
Willow
Owen Rand did the step on a Tuesday, and I did not tell anybody he was doing it, and that turned out to matter.
He came at eight with a bag of cement and did it in a morning the way he said he would, and he took the old joist out and held it up to show me the state of it, and he said a thing about water that I have already forgotten, and then he sat at Ruth’s table drinking tea while it went off.
That is the whole crime. He sat at my table drinking tea.
“You’ll want to keep off it till tomorrow.”
“How will I know?”
“You’ll know because I’m going to put a chair across it,” Owen said, “and if you move the chair, that’s on you, and I’ll tell Marie you did it and she’ll be very disappointed in you.”
“Don’t bring your wife into this.”
“She’s already in it. She’s the one who told me to come.” He turned the mug around. “She says to say if you want feeding you’re to say so, and she’ll not ask twice, and you’re not to be proud about it because she’s had a bad year herself and people fed her.”
“Tell her thank you.”
“Tell her yourself, she’s at the shop Thursdays.” He drank. “Anyway. Wet the step in the morning if it’s hot. Not a hose. A watering can, gentle, like it’s a plant.”
“Like it’s a plant.”
“Cement’s alive for a bit,” said Owen. “Then it isn’t. Same as everything.”
“Is that a saying?”
“No, it’s a fact. I’ve no time for sayings.” He put the mug down. “There’s a bag left over. I’ll leave it in the shed, it’ll keep if it’s off the floor.”
“How much do I owe you for the bag?”
“Willow.”
“Owen.”
“A bag of cement,” said Owen Rand, “against a bag of apples off that tree, and I’ll not be haggled at in my own tea break.”
And I laughed, because he had no idea he had said anything, and because a man had come to my house and mended a thing and drunk tea and talked about cement and had not once wanted anything from me.
That was when the car came up the lane.
Michael got out and looked at the van, and the bag, and the chair across my step, and then at the window, where Owen Rand was quite visibly sitting at a table with a mug in his hand.
I watched it go across my husband’s face. All of it. Front to back.
“Afternoon,” Owen said, coming out, wiping his hands. “You’ll want to keep off that till tomorrow as well.”
“Right.”
“Owen Rand.”
“I know who you are.”
“Yep,” said Owen, entirely comfortably, because there is nothing in that man for a thing like this to catch on. “Right, I’m away. Willow, mind that chair.”
And he got in his van and went, and did not notice one single thing, and I have never envied anybody more in my life.
Michael stood in my garden.
“That’s done, then.”
“It’s done.”
“He’s done a good job.”
“He has.”
“When did you-” He stopped, and restarted, which he has been doing all season and which I have started to be able to hear coming. “When did you arrange it?”
“Last week.”
“Right.”
“Michael.”
“No, that’s - that’s good. It needed doing.” He put his hands in his pockets, and took them out again, and looked at the step, and then said, in a completely reasonable voice, “You could have asked me.”
And there it is, I thought.
“I did ask you.”
“You didn’t ask me about the step.”
“I didn’t mean the step.” I came down off the porch, on the good side, away from the wet.
“I asked you for one thing at a kitchen table and you told me what I was. I asked you at a party and you told a man to behave. I asked you on a boat in front of everyone and you asked me for a better day to do it on.”
“That’s not what this is.”
“It’s exactly what this is. You’ve turned up and found a man drinking tea in my kitchen and the first thing out of your mouth is a complaint about the arrangements.”
He did not answer, because there was no answer, and I watched him work through the same three doors he always works through and find them all shut.
“He’s got a wife,” I said. “Marie. She sends jam to people. She’s the one who sent him.”
“I know he’s got a wife. I know her mother. I’ve known that family since I could walk.”
“Then you’ll know the jam.”
“I know the jam, Willow.”
“Then what’s the matter with you?”
He did not answer straight away. He looked at the van tracks in the grass.
“Do you ring him?”
“What?”
“When something goes. Do you ring him, or does Dee ring him, or does he just-”
“Michael, listen to yourself.”
“I’m listening to myself. It’s not an improvement.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I’d like to stop, and I can’t seem to.”
Good, I thought, and hated myself for it, and thought it again anyway.
And Michael looked at that step, which was mended, which he had not mended, and at the chair somebody else had put across it, and said, “It’s not him.”
“Then what?”
“It’s that you’ve got somebody to ring.”
He said it plainly. He was not performing it, and he did not follow it with anything, and that was the trouble.
“For years I was the person you rang,” he said.
“That was the arrangement. You had a problem and I fixed it, and I was very good at it, and I liked being good at it, and somewhere in there I stopped picking up and you found other numbers. And I’ve just watched a man drink tea in a kitchen where I learned to cook, over a job I didn’t know needed doing, and I have got no standing to say one word about it. ”
“None.”
“I know.”
“Say the rest of it.”
“There isn’t any rest of it,” Michael said. “That’s the whole thing. I’m jealous of a man with a bag of cement and a wife in Wauwinet, and I have absolutely no right to be, and I’m going to have to go home and sit with that.”
Don’t, I thought. Don’t you dare be honest at me in a garden.
“You are,” I said. “Going to have to sit with it.”
“Yes.”
“Because I’m not going to make it smaller for you.”
“I’m not asking you to.”
“You used to. You used to hand me the thing you’d done wrong and stand there until I found a way to say it wasn’t so bad, and I always found one, because I was good at it and because it was easier than the alternative.
” My voice was doing something and I let it.
“I’m not doing that anymore. You can have the whole size of it. ”
“All right.”
“That’s it? All right?”
“Willow, if I argue with any part of that I’m doing the thing again.” He looked at the mended step. “It’s a good step.”
“It’s a very good step.”
“Yes,” said Michael. “It is.”
And he did not ask me for one thing, and stood in my garden with his hands in his pockets while a stranger’s cement went off, and it was so much worse than an argument that I had to go inside.
He came in for the boy, which was against my own terms, and I let it stand, because the person enforcing the gate was the person holding it open. Then he stayed for the reason everybody stays, which was that a two-year-old got hold of his leg.
“Dada. Book.”
“Give your father a minute, baby.”
“BOOK.”
“Which book, mate?”
“BOOK.”
“He means the green one,” I said. “It’s upstairs. I’m not going up for it.”
“You don’t have to go up for it.”
I looked at him.
He sat down. On the floor of Ruth Folger’s hall, on the boards, with our son climbing directly onto his lap without asking, and he did the whole thing from memory.
All of it, every page. Doing the voices.
Badly. Appallingly badly, in fact, because he does not have a range and has never had one, and the mother in that book came out somewhere between a duchess and a foghorn. Archie was in raptures. Archie was helping.
“Bad.”
“He is a bad dog.”
“Bad.”
“We’re agreed. You and me are agreed on this.”
“BAD.”
And then, over the top of Archie’s head, not looking at me:
“He’s had four clear chances to behave and the family has forgiven him every single time and he has learned nothing, and on page twelve he does the thing with the sausages and they still let him on the bed. There are no consequences in that book. None.”
I had to get a hand onto the doorframe.
“You’ve read it,” I said.
“I’ve read it more times than I can stand.”
“No. You’ve read it.”
He stopped. He looked up at me with our son under his chin.
“It’s a terrible book,” Michael said. “I have been thinking about it, on and off, for about a year, and there has been nobody in my life I could say that to.”
The hall went very quiet apart from Archie, who was chewing the corner of a cushion.
“Page four,” I said. “In the old ones. The illustration’s wrong.”
Michael’s whole face changed.
“It’s the wrong dog. It’s been the wrong dog since-”
“Since the first printing,” I said. “I know. I grew up with that one at the library.”
“You’ve got that one?”
“I’ve got the wrong one.”
“Where?”
“Upstairs, in a box, and I’m not getting it out for you.”
“I’m not asking you to get it out.” He had gone back to the page and Archie had gone back to the corner of the cushion. “I just wanted to know it was in the house.”
And we stood and sat there in the hall, either side of a wet child, having the conversation we should have had in a kitchen in New York a long time ago, about a dog.