Chapter 6
NAROD
The living room is, relative to the hallway, spacious.
This is a purely comparative assessment.
By any objective metric, it is a small human room containing a sofa, a coffee table stacked with colour-coded folders, a bookshelf organised by subject category and then by spine colour , I notice this immediately and find it deeply reassuring about her character, and a radiator under the window that is beginning to tick and hiss as the heating engages.
I fit into it the way a shipping container fits into a parking space, which is to say, technically, but with significant caveats.
I locate the sofa and sit on it with great care.
The sofa is a sensible, neutral-coloured thing that looks like it was selected from a catalogue with practical criteria in mind.
I lower myself onto the far left cushion slowly, testing the frame, distributing my weight as evenly as possible, and the springs produce a sound that I would describe, charitably, as expressing concern.
I sit completely upright, my hands on my knees, my shoulders angled inward in their habitual apologetic hunch, and I attempt to calculate whether I have, in the act of sitting, already caused structural damage to her furniture.
The springs do not give way. I consider this a reasonable outcome.
The rain hammers the window with genuine intensity.
A full, sustained, statistically improbable downpour for the third week of April, and my shirt is soaked entirely through, plastered against my chest and arms, the argyle vest clinging in a way that is both uncomfortable and, I suspect, somewhat absurd in appearance.
I can feel the cold coming off the fabric in waves.
I am not, technically, in any danger of hypothermia, given my core temperature regulation, but the sensation is deeply unpleasant and I am very aware that I am sitting in a human woman's living room dripping onto her upholstery.
I hear her in the kitchen. The kettle fills.
A cupboard opens. The small, precise sounds of someone who moves efficiently in a space they know well, who doesn't think about the choreography of it, and there is something about the domesticity of those sounds that does something irregular to my pulse rate that I have no actuarial category for.
I look at the towel in my hands.
It is a standard hand towel. White, slightly worn at one edge, soft from many washes.
It is a flannel when held against my forearm.
I try to use it to blot some of the water from my hair and succeed in a modest, limited way, and then I hold it in my lap because I am not sure what else to do with it and I don't want to put it down on her upholstery and make it wet.
I should not have come in.
I had calculated, standing on the pavement in the rain outside the bar with water pouring off the brim of her umbrella and her looking up at me with those dark, direct eyes, that accepting her invitation to come inside was a choice with a high variance of outcomes.
On one end of the distribution, a pleasant and uneventful cup of tea after which I would excuse myself politely and take the night bus home.
On the other, a series of cascading disasters in which I damaged her belongings, occupied too much of her space, and confirmed every intuition a reasonable person might have about the wisdom of inviting a very large Orc into their flat on a first date.
I had already wedged myself between her bookshelf and her coat rack.
I had knocked four books onto the floor.
I had required her to retrieve a towel by pressing herself into the gap between my arm and the hallway wall, and in the process her cold fingers had been briefly enclosed in my hand, and I had been entirely incapable of processing that sensation with anything resembling composure for approximately twelve seconds.
The distribution of outcomes, I revise, is skewed toward the disaster end.
"Builder's or herbal?" she calls from the kitchen.
"Whatever you're making is entirely fine," I say, and then, because I worry that sounds passive to the point of evasion, "Builder's, please, if you have it. Milk, no sugar."
A pause.
"A man who knows his own tea order," she says, and I can hear the smile in it without seeing her face, and my grip on the towel tightens slightly.
I look at the bookshelf. Accounting theory, two volumes of tax law, a dog-eared copy of something called Getting Things Done that has a bookmark about forty pages from the end, and then, slightly out of keeping with the rest of the shelf, a small collection of what look like natural history books and a battered illustrated guide to European fungi.
I catalogue this discrepancy and find it very pleasing.
People are rarely as straightforward as their primary organisation system suggests, and the fungi books feel, for reasons I cannot fully articulate, like a window into something genuine.
She appears in the doorway holding two mugs, except that in her other hand, balanced with the slightly resigned expression of someone who has assessed all available crockery and found it wanting, is a very small porcelain teacup.
"The mugs are in the dishwasher," she says. "I have this." She holds up the teacup. It has small blue flowers on it. It is as small as my palm.
"That's very kind," I say. "I'm sure it will be perfectly—"
"It holds about four sips. I'm sorry. I have a very large travel mug if you want that instead, it's just got a Leeds Marathon logo on it and it's a bit embarrassing."
"The teacup is wonderful," I say. "I prefer it."
She looks at me for a moment and then walks over and sets both cups on the coffee table, her own mug a solid, practical earthenware thing that says something on the side I can't quite read from this angle, and then she sits on the other end of the sofa, tucking one foot under herself, and pulls a small throw blanket over her shoulders.
She is still wet. Her hair is flattened and dark against her cheeks, and she has taken her glasses off and set them on the coffee table, and without them there is something slightly unguarded about her face that is different from before, the careful, dry-witted assessment softened into something quieter.
I pick up the teacup.
I do this slowly and with full awareness of the physics involved.
I use my thumb and the knuckle of my index finger to pinch the handle, which is delicate to the point of being essentially symbolic, a small ceramic loop that serves as a gesture toward the concept of a handle rather than a functional gripping mechanism, and I lift it and take a sip and it is, in fact, a good strong cup of tea, and the warmth of it spreads immediately through my chest in a way that my body registers with something very close to relief.
"How is it?" she says.
"Excellent. Genuinely." I lower the teacup, or attempt to, and it occurs to me that I have nowhere safe to put it down because my hands are significantly larger than the saucer on the coffee table and reaching forward to place it down without incident requires a degree of fine motor calculation that I am, in this moment, prepared to commit to.
She is watching me hold it.
There is a specific expression on her face that I am beginning to recognise, a controlled effort not to smile, the corners of her mouth pressed very slightly inward, her eyes bright with something she has decided, for politeness, to contain.
I have seen it twice this evening. Once when I drank the cosmopolitan.
Once when I apologised for the water glass.
"You can laugh," I say. "I recognise that the visual is somewhat—"
"I'm not laughing," she says, and her voice is very careful.
"Livia."
She laughs. It is short and genuine and she immediately covers her mouth with the throw blanket, and I feel the sound of it go through me like something structural shifting, like a recalibration of weight, and I think, sitting on her small sofa with a tiny floral teacup between two fingers and my sodden vest still dripping quietly onto her upholstery, that I would produce the same situation deliberately if it would make that sound happen again.
"I'm sorry," she says, pulling the blanket down from her mouth. "It's just—"
"The cup is comically small relative to my hand. Yes. I'm aware."
"It's not—" She pauses. "Okay, it's slightly that. But it's also the care you're taking with it. You're handling it like it's a bomb."
"It is an antique," I say, carefully. "The transfer pattern indicates it's pre-1960, probably part of a set, and the glaze has very fine crazing along the interior which suggests significant age and use. I didn't want to—"
"I noticed the cabinet when I came in," I add. "I have some familiarity with ceramics. It's a secondary interest."
The room falls into a stretched, peculiar quiet for a moment, punctuated only by the persistent drumming of rain against the glass and the soft metallic ticking of the radiator cycling through its heating patterns in the corner.
"Narod," she says, very slowly, her tone careful and measured in a way that makes my shoulders tighten reflexively.
"Yes," I answer, setting the teacup down on the small side table with excruciating precision because my hands have suddenly become unreliable.
"You identified my grandmother's tea set," she continues, her eyes fixed on me, "by looking at the glaze crazing. In the span of about fifteen seconds. While dripping water onto my floor."
I shift slightly on the sofa, which protests faintly beneath my weight.
"I didn't want to presume that it was sentimental in nature, but the pattern and the condition suggested that it might have personal significance, and I thought it prudent to treat it accordingly.
The crazing is quite distinctive, and the—"
"In the dark. While soaking wet. Having just been wedged between my bookshelf and my coat rack."
"It was a brief assessment. I didn't want to damage it."