CHAPTER THREE A Clear Hour
CHAPTER THREE
A Clear Hour
Four days later he asked me to help him fix the gate.
He didn’t say would you come down to the shore, or we need to talk about, or any of the openings I’d been flinching from since the tide mark.
He stood in the back doorway with his sleeves already rolled and said the gate had dragged since before I moved in, and he’d found a plane in the shed, and did I want to hold things.
“Hold things.”
“You’d be surprised how much of it is holding things.”
It was an ordinary morning. Everything that follows hangs on that, so I’ll say it once and leave it. An ordinary Tuesday in the middle of autumn with nothing whatever wrong with it.
? ? ?
It was a bad gate. It had been a bad gate thirty years, which I knew because Liora used to swear at it, and her swearing was a fixture of my afternoons in that house long before the house was mine.
Elias lifted it off its hinges and laid it across two trestles and stood over it, hands on his hips, for so long I got bored.
“Is it very complicated?”
“It’s very simple. It’s been simple for thirty years and everybody’s been too busy.
” He went down on one knee and sighted along the bottom rail with one eye shut.
“It’s swollen at the heel, and somebody’s answer to that was to move the hinge.
Twice. So now it’s out of square two different ways, and both of them were somebody’s bright idea. ”
“You sound personally aggrieved.”
“I am personally aggrieved. Hold that end.”
I held that end.
Mostly what I remember is the quiet. The plane made a noise like a long breath drawn in over and over, and the shavings came off in pale curls and dropped in the grass, and past the wall somewhere a dog was having a lengthy argument with a cart.
Every few strokes he’d stop and run his thumb down the edge and go again.
My arms got tired and I shifted my grip.
“Don’t. You’ll pinch.”
“I’ll pinch?”
“The wood’ll pinch. I’m being economical with words.”
I laughed, and a blackbird shot off the wall in a temper.
Two hours of that. We didn’t talk about the sea. We didn’t talk about his father or the eleven pages or the nine things on my hearthstone, or whatever it was sinking into me instead of fading off.
Twice I caught myself waiting to be interrupted.
That’s something I’ve had to learn about myself, and I can’t say I’ve enjoyed learning it.
Some part of me had got so used to being braced that a morning with nothing in it felt like holding my breath.
I kept listening past the plane. For the light to go strange, or the pull to start up under my ribs, or a knock at the front.
When none of it came I got restless, and it wasn’t boredom. I didn’t trust the floor.
The second time, he caught me at it and stopped mid-stroke.
“It’s just a gate.”
“I know it’s just a gate.”
“It’s honestly only a gate. There’s no second meaning. I haven’t chosen this gate.”
“You’ve chosen it a bit.”
He looked at the plane for a while. “I’ve chosen it a bit,” he admitted, and got back to work.
? ? ?
We hung it about one o’clock and it swung true, and he was so obviously pleased with himself and tried so hard to hide it that it was worse than if he’d crowed.
I opened and shut it four or five times for the pleasure of that small clean click after years of lifting and shoving, and then twice more to watch him pretend he wasn’t watching.
We ate bread and hard cheese and too many apples on the back step with our shoulders touching, and he told me about a man in Rellhaven who’d taught him to sail and who’d been, by every account including his own, a shocking teacher. Capsized the pair of them on a millpond and blamed the millpond.
It was the best hour of my life. I know how that sounds.
I’ve been kissed on the brow on a cliff at midnight, carried out of a burning room, and watched a man ruin himself in front of a whole tavern on my account, and none of it comes anywhere near sitting on a step with cheese in one hand while somebody makes you laugh about a bad sailor.
? ? ?
Afterwards we were in the kitchen, sawdust in both our hair.
He’d been putting the plane away and I was at the basin, and I heard him stop in the doorway, and I knew. There was nothing uncanny in it. It was the way he stopped.
I put the cloth down and turned round, and my pulse went off at a sprint, which was humiliating and which I couldn’t do a single thing about.
“Now?”
“If you want.”
“That’s not.” I had to start again. “You keep saying if you want. As if that isn’t the whole problem. As if I’d know.”
“Rose.” He didn’t come any nearer. He stayed in the doorway with the plane still in his hand, which was so stupid and so exactly like him that it steadied me.
“This morning I made you hold a gate for two hours. You weren’t frightened.
Nothing was after us. You’re not hurt and I’m not hurt and nobody’s dead and nothing’s come up out of the water.
In about four hours it’ll be dark and something will probably happen, because something’s happened every week since summer. ”
“Yes.”
“So this is the hour. The clear one. I’ve been waiting for it since September, and I’d started to think it wasn’t going to come. Then you told me the wood was going to pinch me and I thought, there. That’s it.”
He put the plane down on the table. Carefully, since it wasn’t his.
? ? ?
I’m going to try to get this down right, and I’m going to fail.
There’s a thing nobody who hasn’t lived my life is going to understand, and I’ve given up trying to explain it. I’ll put it here the once.
I’ve been kissed maybe forty times, and every one of them was something I did to somebody.
Even the ones I wanted, those most of all, came through a door I’d opened without meaning to, and the man on the other side had the look I’d been seeing since I was fifteen: slack, lit up, gone.
It never mattered once whether I was any good at it, or whether my hands were cold, or whether he’d rather have had another woman altogether.
So when he came across the kitchen and laid one hand along my face, under the jaw, my whole body did what it’s always done. It braced.
And there was nothing there to brace against.
Only a man, a bit out of breath, with sawdust in his hair, smelling of cut pine and apples, and all of him there behind his own eyes. He stopped an inch away, and nothing was making him stop. He was giving me the inch.
I took it.
? ? ?
It wasn’t a good kiss. I’d like that on the record.
We got it wrong straight off. I tilted and he tilted the same way and my nose went into his cheekbone and I laughed right into his mouth.
He said sorry, sorry, against my lip, and I said don’t you dare apologise, and the second try was better, and somewhere in the third it stopped being tries at all.
His hand stayed where it was, and that’s what undid me. His thumb along the bone, not gripping, not wandering off anywhere. Staying there. Holding my face like my face was the whole point.
He tasted of apple. I made a sound I hadn’t given permission for.
His other hand found the back of my dress and closed on a fistful of it, slowly, like it was asking the cloth first, and I got both hands into his hair, sawdust and all, and pulled him down the last half inch he’d been too polite to take himself.
I’ve thought about that sawdust a lot more than is reasonable.
? ? ?
Then I had to stop. I stepped back and put my palm flat on the table.
He let go at once. That was the hardest bit, how quick it was and how complete, no question in his face, just the hand gone and the half step back and the waiting.
“I’m not.” My voice had gone off somewhere without me. “I’m not upset.”
“All right.”
“I need you to understand I’m not upset.”
“You’re crying.”
“I know that, Elias. I’m the one doing it.”
He didn’t move. Outside, the dog and the cart had sorted out their differences, and the kitchen had that ringing quiet a room holds on to when two people have suddenly stopped making any noise in it. My face was wet. I didn’t wipe it. I couldn’t think what my hands were for.
“I don’t know what to do with it,” I said in the end. “That’s all this is. Nobody’s ever. There wasn’t anything to manage. I’ve managed it my whole life, I’m very good at managing it, and you’ve gone and taken the whole job off me and now I don’t know where to put my hands.”
Elias thought about that. Then he pulled a chair out and turned it round and sat astride it three feet off with his forearms along the top rail, and looked at me exactly the way he’d looked at the gate.
“Then we’ll sit here till you do.”
So we sat. It took a while. He didn’t fill the quiet and he didn’t reach for me again that afternoon, and when something finally made me laugh and it came out all ragged, he had the sense to leave it be.
I’d love to tell you thirty-four years of scaffolding came down in that kitchen. It didn’t. That night I lay in the dark with my fingertips on my own jaw where his thumb had been, pressing, half sure I’d dreamt the whole morning.
The gate swung true, mind. I got up twice to check.
? ? ?
I woke at the hour when the gulls start up and the light hasn’t made its mind up yet, and lay there listening to my own house.
It creaks in a set order. The fourth stair goes first, when the cold comes up off the flags at the bottom and the wood remembers it.
Then the window frame in the back bedroom, two dry ticks a minute or so apart.
Then, if it’s been damp, the roof beam over the landing lets out one long groan like an old man getting up out of a chair, and after that the house has had its say and settles.
Five years of that as its owner, and a good many before that as Liora’s guest. I know it the way you know a heartbeat you’re lying on.
Under all of it, faint through two feet of stone and the drop of the cliff, the sea was shifting the shingle in the cove. That gravel drag, over and over. Something turning over in its sleep.