The Sight of You

by Holly Miller

  I flop onto the sofa. “You bought proper wine.”

  “Sorry?”

  “If it’s got a cork that means it’s posh. Or did I make that up?”

  “Well,” he says, pouring a glassful, “it’s a good thing, apparently. For the cork forests. I’ve been reading up, now that you work in nature conservation and everything.” He crosses the room and passes me a glass that feels cold as frost. “Here, get stuck into this and I’ll run you a bath.”

  Oh, my heart. My heart is singing.

  “Thank you,” I manage, but he’s already disappeared into the bathroom to turn on the hot tap. I watch him as he goes—the spread of his shoulders, his dark jostle of hair—and feel an intimate sense of longing.

  After several intense weeks together, Joel and I still haven’t had sex. I know he’s reluctant to rush things, that his feelings around relationships are complicated, that he doubts his own competence in matters of the heart. So I’m happy to take things slowly. What we’re doing feels right for us.

  When the bath’s run and I go in there, Joel’s lit a candle, set a freshly laundered towel to warm on the rail. It’s like a slow dance of tender gestures, all the things I used to do for Piers that he’d never do back, presumably because he didn’t think I was worth the trouble.

  Until recently, Joel probably didn’t even own a candle, let alone the lavender bubble bath he’s poured into the water. It’s like he’s been waiting for years to have someone he can do this for.

  38.

  Joel

  It’s halfway through Callie’s first week at Waterfen, and we’re walking home from dinner at the home of my ex-boss Kieran and his wife, Zoë. After the warmth of their underfloor-heated den (they live in a blond-brick, double-fronted villa on one of Eversford’s most expensive avenues), the outside world feels scaldingly cold.

  “Is Kieran your only real friend?” Callie asks me gently as we walk, our breath aerosol-white in the December air.

  “Steve’s a good friend.” Better than most, given all he’s put up with from me.

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why are Kieran and Steve your only real friends?” Her arm hooked into mine, she asks the question like it’s no big deal. Except I know it is. I guess she’s wondering if a guy without a serious personality defect can really make it to halfway through his thirties without a crew to show for it. An ever-present stag-night-in-waiting. Doug, who has his own faithful cohort (old school pals, rugby mates, work colleagues, friends-in-law), has never thought so. He’s forever ribbing me about the lack of barbecues on my birthday, summers devoid of wedding invitations. World Cups come and gone without a squad to raise a glass with.

  “I guess after the dreaming started,” I admit, “I wasn’t very focused on making friends. It felt like a full-time job at times. Trying to keep track of everything, hold my mind together. Still does, if I’m honest.”

  Last night being a case in point. I dreamed about a near relative’s debit card being cloned, his bank account emptied. I’ve got a few months, but what to do? Tell him to pay cash only until June, beef up his Internet security? I deliberated all morning, eventually opted to send him an e-mail. Fabricated something about a friend being hot on this stuff. What he does with it, I guess, is up to him.

  When I next looked up it was nearly midday. I could barely remember Callie leaving my flat to go to work. I never took the time to kiss her as she woke, make her a coffee, ask if she fancied doing something this weekend. Tiny chances to connect, fluttering from my fingers.

  “It’s a shame,” Callie says now.

  I clear my throat. “You don’t miss what you never had. And friendships aren’t too easy to invest in when you have to keep to yourself all the stuff that defines you.”

  “Maybe it doesn’t have to define you.”

  But it does, I think. I don’t have a choice about that.

  We walk on, past wrought-iron railings laced with frills of winter jasmine.

  “Well, my friends love you,” Callie says. “I couldn’t keep up with my messages the day after Esther’s party.”

  I smile. “That’s good.” Because if you can’t be normal, then pulling off a decent impression of it is the next best thing, I guess.

  “You know, what you think of yourself isn’t always how other people see you.”

  I taste the sweetness of her words, compress her hand with the crease of my elbow. “Speaking of which . . . have you always thought of yourself as a secret Mastermind contender?”

  She laughs. “What?”

  “How does one person amass so much general knowledge? You know everything.” (We played a trivia game after dinner. And to cut a long story short, Callie wiped the floor with all of us.)

  Unsurprisingly, she’s pure modesty. “As if. I was only good on science and nature.”

  “And geography. I mean, where did you pick up so many random facts about Peru? And I don’t know anyone else who could name the capital of Tanzania off the top of their head.”

  Callie sinks her chin into her scarf. “Ha. Piers used to hate that about me.”

  “Hate what?” It’s hard to imagine Callie with any loathsome qualities at all.

  “That I knew lots of random facts. He thought I was trying to show him up.”

  “Like a kid,” I suggest, not particularly inclined to go all out and batter him. The guy messed up his chance with the best girl in the world. He’s already a hundred‒nil down.

  “Let’s just say, if he’d lost like you did tonight, he’d have sulked for a week.”

  I feign indignation with my eyebrows. “Hold on—like I did? I wasn’t as bad as Zoë. She didn’t even know who invented the telephone.”

  Callie starts laughing. Grips my arm a little harder. “Don’t you just know she was dying to say Mr. Telephone?”

  “Yep, and she only reined it in because Kieran kept kicking her.”

  Fizzing with mirth, our eyes meet. We start contorting with laughter. A solitary late-night dog walker gives us a wide berth, glancing over his shoulder as he strides away up the otherwise silent street.

  * * *

  • • •

  I don’t tell Callie about Kieran cornering me in the kitchen earlier, while I was helping to clear plates. (I learned years ago from Tamsin that when you’ve got kids, it’s the little things you appreciate.)

  “Where did you find this girl?”

  His question was rhetorical. Callie had already told them the story over parsnip soup, one hand gripping mine, the sole of her foot in the crook of my ankle. So I just smiled.

  “I’m happy for you, mate.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Seems like things are finally beginning to turn around for you.”

  I started stacking plates in the dishwasher. From the dining room I could hear Zoë shrieking with laughter at something Callie had said. The splash of more wine being decanted between glasses.

  I turned to face him. “I’m sorry I let you down.”

  “Joel.” Speaking gently, he reached out to me, resting the heel of one hand against my collarbone. “We’ve done this.”

  Over the years we worked together, Kieran turned out to be the kind of stabilizing influence I hadn’t fully realized I needed. Composed and tiller-steady, he was forever the firm eye over my most difficult clients and clinical decisions. When the hard work was done, we’d go out for a pint, games of pool. And I’d wait for the laughter lines that always shot to his eyes in the moments before he lost it. Because whenever they did, that was it: I’d be gone too.

  There were lines on his face that came later as well. But they were furrows of frustration as he watched me move further and further away from the life I’d built. He never lost his cool with me, though. He just waited patiently, like he was watching for the current carrying me away to about-turn. For m
e to begin the long and painstaking swim back to shore.

  I pulled out the top tray of the dishwasher, started upturning soup bowls into it. Kieran’s hand dropped away.

  “It was one time, Joel.” Like he needed to say it.

  One time too many.

  “What happened wasn’t your fault.”

  Some things you can be told a million times and never quite believe. Like when a bird flies from Alaska to New Zealand without once pausing for breath. Or a loved one slips away in their sleep, while the whole time you’ve been sitting next to them, holding their hand.

  For a few moments the room was silent as outer space.

  “Hey, can you do me a favor?” Kieran said then. “It’s to do with Callie.”

  A wry glance. “Don’t cock it up?”

  Kieran shrugged. “Yeah. I like the way she looks at you. As if you’re the only person in the room. That’s a rare thing.”

  I gripped the edge of the work surface then. Hoped Kieran wouldn’t notice. “Tell me how I can have that and not break it somehow.”

  He noticed. “It’s actually pretty simple.”

  “Enlighten me. Please.” Although he can’t, of course he can’t. Because he has no idea what drives my deepest fears.

  “You just have to commit. Jump. Feet first, no holding back.”

  We rejoined Zoë and Callie in the dining room after that. But for the rest of the night, all I could think was, How the hell do you commit to a relationship when you’re too scared to fall in love?

  39.

  Callie

  By the end of my first fortnight at Waterfen, I feel a rekindling inside me.

  I’ve never been so connected to my body. I marvel at the twitch and flex of long-dormant ligaments as my bloodstream fires, my lungs expand, and my muscles slowly wake. I am lifting logs and forking reed and wading through water, tasting all the while the coarse appeal of breathlessness. I laugh at the absurdity of subzero sweating, delight in the satisfaction of a scythe smoothly swung. And I begin to crave the opioid flood of exhaustion that comes at night, the swamp of analgesia as I sink into Joel’s sofa and he rubs out the knots in my back with his thumbs.

  I think back to how Piers used to tease me when I struggled to open jam jars or twist the cork from a bottle of fizz. Just look at me now, I tell him in my mind, as I load up the trailer with twenty-kilo logs, feeling the burn in my back as I pull weeds from the dikes, tossing them aside to form lofty piles, new high-rise homes for the mice.

  Every day the world is turning between my fingers, above my head, beneath my feet. I feel a terrestrial sense of homecoming.

  * * *

  • • •

  On Friday afternoon Fiona asks if I’m married. It’s hard to tell out here, I suppose, where nobody wears their wedding rings for fear of them entering the ecosystem.

  We’re reed-cutting in the fen. I’m on forking duty with Fiona, following Liam and a couple of volunteers on the brush cutters. The wind today has teeth, and it’s angling the drizzle sideways, but the work’s so hot and heavy I’m already down to just a T-shirt.

  How alive and on-fire I’ve been feeling of late is because of Joel too, of course. I’m wildly attracted to him in a way that’s utterly new to me. To feel his hands explore my body and his mouth against mine is like a daily dose of dynamite, deep inside.

  But he still wants to wait, before we take it any further. He whispers as much to me sometimes when we’re together, always breaking off before we reach the point of no return. I don’t want to rush this. Is that okay? You mean too much to me.

  So different from Piers or anyone else I’ve dated. And though, of course, I’m aching to have sex with Joel, at the same time the self-restraint and the holding back makes everything feel even more highly charged.

  “No,” I say to Fiona. “I’m not married.”

  “Living with someone?”

  Smiling, I push the hair from my eyes. “Sort of. I’m dating the guy who lives in the downstairs flat.”

  Fiona forks reed like she’s slaying it for dinner. I envy her technique, perfected over many years—she can pick up double what I can, and I know I’m slowing her down. “Yeah? What’s he like?”

  I begin to describe him—I love talking about Joel, tasting his name on my tongue. But as the words leave my mouth I start to feel almost childish, as though I’m telling her about an imaginary friend. Fiona probably thinks a month barely counts as a fling, let alone a relationship, though it’s difficult to know for sure. There’s much less opportunity for the nuances of body language when you’re halfway through a workout in the middle of a reed bed.

  “What does he do?”

  “He used to be a vet.”

  She doesn’t respond for a few moments. Then, “Wait. Joel. Not Joel Morgan?”

  “Yes! Do you know him?”

  She nods, still forking. “He saved my German shepherd’s life. She ate a baited fishing hook on the beach and swallowed it with the line.”

  “Ouch. Poor thing.”

  “I know. And she’s not a fan of male vets, either. But Joel was excellent. Very calm. Lovely guy—I’ll never forget how he was with her.”

  I’m more than happy to accept a compliment on his behalf. “That sounds like Joel.”

  “I popped back a week later to say thanks properly, but they said he’d left.”

  We carry on forking for a few moments. My breath is pneumatic and my palms are burning with blisters, even through my heavy-duty gloves.

  “So what’s he doing now, then?”

  “Just taking a bit of time out,” I say, as smoothly as I can manage, like it’s no big deal. “He does dog walking as a favor for some neighbors, the ones who can’t get out much.”

  “Oh. Well, tell him to hurry back. He was an amazing vet. One of a kind.”

  “Thank you. I will.”

  “And if he’s as nice to people as he is to animals, I’d say you’ve got a good one there.”

  * * *

  • • •

  A few hours later, I meet Joel in town for postwork Chinese. I’m ravenous, having essentially just clocked off from a heavy weights workout, eight hours long.

  “Dropped into the café earlier. Dot says hello,” he tells me. He’s been going there less often now, since I moved on. He looks tired tonight—he’s not slept much this week—but still his eyes are warm and full, searching my face for the story of my day.

  “You mean they’ve not filed for bankruptcy yet?”

  “Hey, you’ve only been gone a few weeks. Corporate collapses take time.”

  Smiling, I sip my water. “Is it weird without me there?”

  “A bit. Especially when Dot pulls up a chair at my table and refuses to leave.”

  “Did you meet Sophie? Dot said she started this week.” Sophie is Ben’s enthusiastic new hire who, according to Dot, has already suggested introducing a uniform, scrapping table service, and—in Dot’s words—“recklessly violating the menu with avocado.”

  Grace was allergic to avocado. It gave her cramps so severe she had to curl up in a ball.

  Rubbing my leg with his foot, Joel fixes me with pitchy eyes. “Yep. Though she’s not a patch on you, of course. She’s a bit . . . brisk.”

  I frown, breaking open a spring roll with my fingers. Grace so wanted the café to be friendly, a place without code for the size of your coffee cup, where you could wander in solo without feeling self-conscious.

  Sometimes you could hear her laughter from the street, spilling into the air like confetti. She’d be outside often too, chatting to passersby as she wiped down the pavement tables. Grace gave her whole self to the world around her—like a lit window at night, you couldn’t walk past somewhere she was and not feel warmed through.

  When Joel asks about my day, I tell him Fiona’s dog story. “She says you sav
ed her German shepherd’s life, the week before you left.”

  He refills our water glasses from the jug—mine first, then his own. “Fishhook?”

  “That’s the one.” I find it highly impressive, to be honest, that someone could bring a fishhooked dog in here right now and Joel would know exactly what to do.

  “Nice dog, as I recall.”

  “She doesn’t normally like male vets, apparently.”

  “Fiona or the dog?”

  I smile. “The dog.”

  “Oh, she was all right. Dogs like that are usually just afraid.”

  “Perhaps she knew.”

  “Knew what?”

  “That you were one of the good guys.”

  He shifts in his seat, uneasy as ever with being paid a compliment.

  “Fiona told me to tell you not to take too long out. She said you were excellent—her words, not mine. Although I do happen to think you’re pretty excellent too.”

  “Help yourself to chow mein,” he mumbles bashfully, gesturing with a chopstick. “Don’t let it get cold.”

  40.

  Joel

  Callie and I have just emerged from our local garden-center-cum-department-store, after spending an hour under optical and acoustic assault from a winter wonderland more illuminated than Blackpool. The place was Christmas on hallucinogens, a psychosis of overstimulation. Tambourines disguised as sleigh bells, the latent fug of gingerbread lattes. An infantry of hard-selling elves.

  I usually borrow my Christmas cheer from my sister. But when Callie discovered we could rent a tree from the garden center, who’d then return it to the growers for reuse next year, she asked if I fancied entering into the spirit of things.

  I said I did. But that was before I agreed to help maneuver a fir tree through a packed car park three days before Christmas.

  “So this is why people buy fakes,” I gasp.

  “But the plastic ones are so joyless.”