The Width of Glass

Chapter Seventeen — What Normal Feels Like

Mara pov

Three weeks after Daniel I bought a second lamp.

Not because I needed one. My apartment had sufficient light, the overhead in the kitchen and the standing one in the corner of the sitting room and the small one on the bedside table that I had brought from before. I bought it because I saw it in a shop window on a Thursday afternoon on the way back from the archive and it was the kind of lamp that looked like it belonged somewhere specific and I thought about where that somewhere specific might be and the answer arrived without deliberation.

I took it to Eliot's apartment that evening.

He opened the door and looked at the lamp and then at me and said nothing for a moment.

I said, your desk corner is badly lit. It's been bothering me.

He said, you bought me a lamp.

I said, I bought a lamp that belongs in your desk corner. That's slightly different.

He looked at it and then at me with the warm unguarded expression that I was no longer surprised by and which still did something to my chest every time it appeared, and stepped back to let me in.

He put it on the desk corner. We both looked at it. It was better. The desk corner had been badly lit.

He said, thank you.

I said, don't make it significant.

He said, it's a lamp you carried here specifically. It's somewhat significant.

I said, I carried my last lamp up four flights of stairs and into a cab and across a city. I have a thing about lamps.

He said, I know. It's one of the first things I noticed about you.

I put my bag down and went to the kitchen and put the kettle on and stood at the window looking at my building across the road while it boiled. Four floors up, my kitchen window, the lamp on its timer, the ordinary rectangle of light that had been there every evening for three months. I looked at it from this side and thought about all the evenings Eliot had looked at it from this side and what he had seen and what it had meant.

He came and stood beside me.

I said, what did it look like from here. In the beginning.

He said, like someone making an effort. The lamp, the table, eating dinner sitting down. Someone who was being deliberate about the ordinary things.

I said, I was. I had to relearn them. Daniel had a way of making the ordinary things feel like they required his permission. I had to practice doing them just because I wanted to.

He was quiet for a moment and then he said, you practiced them very well.

I said, some evenings were harder than others.

He said, I know.

I looked at him.

I said, could you tell. From across the street.

He said, sometimes. There was a difference in the way you sat on the difficult evenings. Closer to the table. More deliberate about what you were doing, like you were concentrating on the act of it rather than simply doing it.

I thought about those evenings. The ones where making dinner and eating it and washing the plate and not calling anyone felt like a sequence of tasks to be completed rather than a life being lived. I had not known anyone could see that from across a street.

I said, that's either very perceptive or very unsettling.

He said, probably both.

I said, yes.

The kettle boiled and I made tea and we took it to the sofa and sat with the easy proximity of people who had stopped negotiating the space between them, my feet on the cushion beside him, his hand on my ankle, the television on quietly in the background without either of us watching it.

This was what the evenings looked like now. Not the careful structured conversations of the first two weeks, the notepad and the twelve questions and the information transferred across a table with the deliberate clarity of a briefing. Those evenings had been necessary and I did not regret them. But these evenings were different. These evenings were the thing that came after necessity, the thing that necessity had been building toward without either of us quite knowing it.

He was reading. He read in the same focused way he did everything, completely absorbed, occasionally making a small sound that meant he had found something interesting, setting the book spine up on the arm of the sofa when he needed to think about what he had read. I had learned his reading habits the way I had learned all his habits, through the accumulating attention of shared evenings, and I found them, without exception, unreasonably interesting.

I said, I spoke to Cass today.

He said, how is she.

I said, surprised. I told her about you. The edited version.

He said, what does the edited version contain.

I said, that I met someone. That he lives across the street. That it started unusually and became something I wasn't expecting.

He said, and the unedited version.

I said, the unedited version contains anonymous notes and government contacts and a man named Paul Wenn in Deptford and eight weeks of surveillance, and I'll tell her eventually but I wanted to give her a version she could process without immediately calling the police.

He made the sound that was his version of a laugh, low and brief, and turned a page.

I said, she wants to meet you.

He said, alright.

I said, just like that.

He said, should there be more to it.

I said, most people express some nervousness about meeting a friend's close friend for the first time.

He said, I've been assessed by people considerably more formidable than Cass. I expect I'll manage.

I said, don't tell her that. She'll like it too much and become insufferable.

He looked at me sideways and I looked at him and we sat in the uncomplicated warmth of a Thursday evening in an apartment that had slowly and without formal announcement become a place I spent most of my time, and I thought about the word normal.

I had not had normal for a long time. Not the real version. I had had the performance of it, the careful reconstruction of ordinary life that I had practiced in the months after leaving Daniel, the deliberate lamp and the deliberate dinner and the deliberate walking home via Renner Street because a folded note had told me to. That had been the scaffolding of normal, the structure you build when the thing itself has been damaged and needs support while it repairs.

This was the thing itself.

I said, I finished the Gloucester correspondence today.

He set his book down properly this time, spine down, his full attention shifting to me.

He said, the love story in the gaps.

I said, yes. I wrote it up in the official record as a collection of personal correspondence with historical significance. Which it is. But I also wrote a separate document that isn't part of the official archive. Just the love story. Just the coded version and my translation of it, what I think they were actually saying to each other through the official content.

He said, for whom.

I said, for myself. And possibly for them. I know that's irrational because they're both long dead and it makes no difference to them what I know about what they felt. But it felt important that it was written down somewhere clearly. That someone had read it and understood it and recorded it.

He looked at me with an expression I had not seen before, something that was beyond the warm unguarded version, something deeper and more considered, and said, that's not irrational. That's the entire argument for why archives matter.

I said, you sound like my line manager.

He said, your line manager is right.

I said, don't tell him that either. He's already insufferable.

He picked his book back up but kept his hand on my ankle and I leaned back against the arm of the sofa and looked at the ceiling and listened to the quiet apartment and the quiet street below and thought about the Gloucester letters and the love coded into the gaps and the man who had read seven years of wartime correspondence without knowing there was something personal threaded through the official content, waiting for someone with the right kind of attention to find it.

I thought about notes slid under doors.

I thought about the particular quality of attention required to see the thing that isn't written as clearly as the thing that is.

I said, Eliot.

He said, yes.

I said, I want to go to Norway in March. The light will be different in March, not the midnight sun, but the winter light coming back. I looked it up. It's supposed to be extraordinary.

He was quiet for a moment.

He said, I booked flights last week.

I sat up and looked at him.

He said, I was going to tell you when I had also booked somewhere to stay. I wanted to present it as a complete proposal rather than a component.

I stared at him.

He said, is that presumptuous.

I said, you booked flights to Norway without telling me.

He said, I booked flights to Norway for both of us without telling you. There's a distinction.

I said, Eliot.

He said, yes.

I said, that's the most presumptuous and most romantic thing anyone has ever done for me and I need you to understand that those two things are not in conflict.

He said, I'll take that as approval.

I said, when in March.

He said, the fourteenth. Two weeks. There's a place on the coast in Nordland, a small house, accessible by ferry. I found a photograph of the view from the window and it seemed correct.

I looked at him sitting on his sofa in his lamp-lit apartment with his book and his hand on my ankle and the new lamp on his desk corner throwing a warm light across the room and I thought about October and two suitcases and a note on my floor that had said don't take the Caldwell Street exit and all the distance between that Tuesday and this Thursday.

I said, it seems correct.

He said, yes.

I said, I'm going to need a warmer coat.

He said, we can go Saturday.

I said, you'll come coat shopping.

He said, I have opinions about the thermal properties of outerwear.

I said, of course you do.

He said, is that a yes.

I said, yes. All of it is yes.

He looked at me with the settled warm expression and turned back to his book and I lay back against the arm of the sofa and looked at the ceiling and felt the specific and unhurried quality of a life that was not being managed or survived or carefully reconstructed but simply lived, in a seventh floor apartment on a Thursday evening, with a man who booked flights to Norway without telling me and had opinions about thermal outerwear and had once slid a note under my door in the dark that had changed the direction of everything.

Outside the window the city went on without us.

Inside the apartment, the new lamp on the desk corner threw its warm light across the room.

It was, I thought, exactly where it belonged.