Tea In The Flat

Charismata

Chapter 135: Tea In The Flat

Friday's work in Amanda's flat began with curtains and nearly died of Peter.

The hallway had gone well enough the week before that Connor came home Monday and Tuesday without bracing in the door.

Then Wednesday the living-room curtains came down when the rail gave up halfway through dusk and the entire room spent the evening looking undressed and accusatory. Amanda said one bad word in front of God and Connor. Connor said three better ones in front of the radiator. Jean said,

"Fine. Name the task."

So by Friday at four fifteen Peter Hallam stood in the flat with a drill in one hand and the anti-inspection sheet folded in his breast pocket like a tract against his natural instincts. Val stood by the sofa holding the new brackets. Jean had the screws. Connor held the curtain fabric bundled in both arms like an exhausted sea creature.

Amanda stood in the doorway to the living room and said before anyone moved,

"Curtains only."

Peter nodded.

"Curtains only."

"And if anybody says while we're here I'll throw them bodily into the stairwell."

Val said,

"Fair."

Connor added,

"Including me."

"Especially you," Amanda said.

The flat felt different now with the hallway light steady and the shoes by the door. Not transformed. Only less willing to declare defeat on entry.

That made the living room problem clearer. The naked window. The old rail twisted like bad metal theology. The chair by the radiator piled with clean washing because nowhere else had been made ready for it.

Peter looked at the wall. At the drill. At Amanda.

"Left bracket first?"

She blinked.

"Yes."

He had asked the room rather than assuming himself into it. Small miracle.

Val took the folded sheet from his pocket and laid it on the mantel where everyone could see.

TAKE A SCREWDRIVER, NOT A QUESTIONNAIRE

Connor laughed.

"That's actually about you."

"Cruelly targeted," Peter said.

"Correctly targeted," Jean replied.

The first twenty minutes were almost pure task. Peter on the chair. Val steadying the ladder because no one trusted the vicar with both height and initiative. Jean passing screws with the solemnity of ordination. Amanda choosing exactly where the bracket should sit and refusing all deferential language around her own wall.

Connor watched at first. Then, when the old rail came down with a clatter and one small shower of plaster, he grinned like a boy seeing Providence briefly lose patience.

"Again," Amanda said at once.

"No," Jean said. "Once is enough liturgy for this."

Peter tried the first hole. Missed by half an inch. Closed his eyes.

"Don't become symbolic," Val warned him.

"I'm trying not to."

Amanda took a breath.

"Can I say something before you try again."

Everybody stopped. Task suspended.

"Yes," Val said.

"When people used to come in here from church, they always started asking how I was before they'd touched the thing that was actually wrong."

Peter lowered the drill slowly. Color rose in his face.

"Yes."

"And it made me feel like the room was bait. Like the broken thing existed only to get you to the larger concern."

No one hurried to save him.

He nodded.

"I have done that."

"Yes."

"I'm sorry."

Amanda looked at the naked window.

"Good. Now put the bracket half an inch left and spare us your spiritual development."

Val barked a laugh so sudden Connor nearly dropped the curtains. Peter, to his everlasting credit, laughed too. Then moved the bracket half an inch left.

By five the new rail held. By five ten the curtains were back up. Not elegant. One side a little shorter because the hem had always lied and now had been exposed.

Connor stepped back.

"Looks like our house again."

Amanda heard the pronoun first. Our. Not this. Not here.

Peter climbed down from the chair and, perhaps from shock, forgot himself.

"While I'm here, the shelf in the--"

The whole room turned toward him.

He stopped. Actually stopped. Closed his mouth.

Then, with the dignity of a man being taught in public:

"I am leaving."

Val pointed at the anti-inspection sheet on the mantel.

"Read line four in your heart on the stairs."

"Yes."

He set the drill down by the door. Looked at Amanda.

"Would you like me to take the old rail to the skip."

She considered.

"Yes."

"Only the rail."

"Only the rail."

He took it and went.

Jean was still by the radiator folding the clean washing Amanda had already named in advance as permitted because once the curtains were right, the chair of laundry had become visible enough to tell the truth.

Named tasks could grow a little if the room itself asked. Not ambition. Sequence.

Val shook the dust off her hands.

"Tea."

Amanda looked round the living room. At the curtains. At Connor on the floor with one sock half off and his school shirt already untucked into human shape. At Jean folding. At the absence of Peter's concern from the air.

"Yes."

"In here or kitchen."

Connor said,

"In here."

Amanda waited one second longer. Checked the room inside her own body.

"In here."

Tea where the task had happened, because the task had not made the room feel colonized.

Val went through to the kitchen to fill the mugs. Jean kept folding. Connor sat under the rehung curtains and looked up at them once, as if still half-surprised fabric and wall had agreed again.

"Do you think Tuesday can stay Tuesday," he asked.

Amanda sat opposite him.

"Yes."

"And this can still be home."

"Yes."

"At the same time."

She looked at the room. At the chair now visible beside the radiator. At the mended line above the window. At the floor still needing vacuuming and the skirting still marked by old shoes and life.

"I think that's the point."

He nodded. Accepted it without smiling because thirteen-year-old boys should not be forced into epiphany when simple agreement will do.

Val came back with tea balanced three at a time and Jean followed with the fourth like a deaconess of mugs.

"Well," Val said. "No one has been saved and the curtains are up."

"Strong afternoon," Jean replied.

Amanda took her cup. Sat back.

No one asked how she was generally. No one turned the hour into a pastoral victory. No one tried to learn the house past the work it had named.

Connor drank too fast and burnt his mouth. Jean told him so. Val insulted Peter lovingly from a distance. Amanda looked at the living room and felt the strange lightness of a place that had been helped without being found out.

When Peter returned ten minutes later from the skip, he knocked and waited in the hallway till called. Good man. Slowly made.

"Rail gone," he said from the doorway.

"Thank you," Amanda said.

"Anything else named."

She almost laughed.

"No."

"Then goodbye."

Connor called after him,

"You're less annoying with tools."

From the hall came Peter's wounded voice:

"I will cherish that."

The door shut. The flat held.

Not beautifully. Not permanently. But enough that evening to let tea happen under its own curtains with no sense that the church had come in and learned more than it had been invited to know.

Later, when Connor left for Val's on Tuesday, he paused by the living-room doorway first. Looked in. Then at Amanda.

"Still ours."

She nodded.

"Still ours."

He went out lighter for having a second room and a first room both telling more truth than they had a fortnight earlier.

Amanda stood in the quiet after the door shut and understood something the papers in Geneva never would: what heals a house is not attention.

It is the right work, done by the right people, for the right length of time, and then gone.