At the café on Tuesday, Adam was wearing a shirt without paint on it. Mary had spent twenty minutes choosing her earrings and then left them on the bathroom shelf.
She remembered this as he stood up to greet her.
“Have you forgotten something?” he asked.
She dropped her hand from her ear. “My very interesting earrings.”
“That's a shame.”
“You might have liked them more than me.”
“I'd have tried to hide it.”
He pulled out the chair opposite him. She sat down and liked that he seemed pleased, without immediately telling her she looked beautiful. She hadn't decided what to do with beautiful yet.
They ordered coffee. Mary added a cinnamon bun, then asked for a knife because she didn't want to spend the date with icing on her nose. The knife flattened the bun completely.
“Very elegant,” Adam said.
“It's a technique.”
“May I?”
She pushed the plate into the middle. He tore off a piece. She took the other side, accepting defeat.
He had lived in Merehaven for years. She told him about returning, and about the man who had delivered her washing machine and left it in the middle of the kitchen, where she had eaten breakfast standing round it for two days.
“You could have asked June.”
“June had already helped carry a sofa. I wanted her still to like me.”
“Does it work now?”
“Yes. And I can get to the sink. Luxury.”
He asked whether she missed the city.
“Some things. There was a bakery below my flat. I could buy a croissant in pyjamas and feel like it was a lifestyle.”
“Here it's just buying a croissant in pyjamas.”
“Exactly. No one understands my glamour.”
There were things she hadn't liked, too: the high rent, the long trips back to see her mother and June, the sense that she was spending another year waiting to decide where her life was. She told him enough of that. He didn't tell her she had made the right decision, as if he could know. He asked whether the new flat felt like hers yet.
“Almost. I haven't hung any pictures. I'm afraid if I start making holes I'll discover the whole place is held up by wallpaper.”
“You could start with one.”
“One picture or one hole?”
“Let's be ambitious. Both.”
By the time their cups were empty, she no longer minded that her earrings were at home.
Outside, the afternoon was brighter than she'd expected. She was free until a client call at five. Adam had finished a window that morning and didn't have another job until Wednesday.
“We could walk,” he said.
“We could.”
But across the road, a woman was propping open the door of a pottery studio. A board advertised a beginners' session starting in ten minutes. Beside it was a photograph of several deeply uneven bowls.
Mary stopped.
“No,” Adam said, before she had asked anything.
“You don't even know what I'm thinking.”
“You're looking at those bowls.”
“They look achievable.”
He looked too. “One of them appears to have melted.”
“I could manage melted.”
She had passed the place twice since coming home and wanted to go in. Going alone would mean being sensible about it. Going with a man she liked would mean producing an unfortunate object in front of him. For some reason that appealed to her more.
“We don't have to,” she said. “But I'd like to.”
Adam glanced down the street towards the river, then back at the bowls.
“You realise I'm going to expect praise.”
“Entirely unearned praise?”
“Probably.”
She took a step towards the crossing. He came with her.
There were four other people in the studio, already wearing aprons. The woman running the session gave Mary and Adam lumps of clay and sat them side by side at the table. They were making small pots by hand. Mary had pictured herself doing something gentle and capable with her thumbs. Within minutes she had made a hole straight through the bottom.
Adam leaned over. “Useful for a plant.”
“It's not a drainage hole. It's a crisis.”
She tried to close it and split the side instead. A laugh escaped her so abruptly that the woman opposite smiled.
“I make things professionally,” Mary told the table. “Please don't tell anyone.”
Adam's pot stood taller and thinner. He was carefully smoothing its rim, his mouth pursed in concentration. She watched his hands, then watched the pot begin to lean.
“You've got to stop going up.”
“It's nearly finished.”
“It's nearly falling over.”
He turned it. A section of the wall folded inwards.
Mary pressed her lips together.
“Go on,” he said.
She laughed. He put the pot down and laughed too, though he looked annoyed with it.
“I had a very good plan,” he said.
“That's the trouble. It didn't ask for your plan.”
She showed him how the tutor had pinched her clay lower and wider. He tried it. She borrowed his idea of making a pattern round the rim. Her first mark was crooked; she repeated it until the whole edge looked deliberately crooked.
“Cheating,” he said.
“Design.”
At the end, they left their creations on a shelf with their names on slips of paper. Adam's looked like it might hold something. Mary's looked like something had escaped from it.
He took a photograph of them side by side.
“Don't send that to June.”
“Will you tell her I was brilliant?”
“No.”
“Then I'm sending it.”
They bought sandwiches and took them to a bench by the river. Mary had clay beneath one fingernail despite scrubbing her hands. Adam pointed out that she had also put some in her hair.
“I've been sitting here thinking I looked quite nice.”
“You do.”
Now beautiful, or something close to it, was easier. She let him brush the dry piece away.
A dog on the path stole the attention of everyone on the bench opposite. Mary watched its owner disentangle the lead from a pushchair and wondered whether she had time for one more hour. She checked her phone. Four o'clock.
“Do you have to go?” Adam asked.
“Soon. I don't want to.”
He smiled at that, and she found herself saying the thing she usually saved until much later.
“I'm quite serious about things, eventually.”
“Things?”
“Relationships. I'm not asking you to promise anything while eating a sandwich. I just don't want to do another year of pretending I don't care where it's going.”
He put the rest of his lunch back in its wrapper. “What would you want?”
There was no reason to soften it into a wish for someone to watch television with.
“Marriage. A home together. Someone who wants that too.”
“Any particular home?”
“One with a kitchen we both use. I'd like to get good at making dinner for two without it being an occasion.” She looked at him. “There. I've made myself sound eighty.”
“You haven't.”
“I like the occasion as well. The wedding. Saying it in front of people. I know that isn't fashionable to admit.”
“You can admit it to me.”
She studied his face. He seemed to be considering what she'd said, rather than waiting for his turn to make a joke.
“And you?”
“I'd like to have someone to come home to. Properly. I'd like to be wanted there.”
“Even when you've made a terrible pot?”
He looked towards her bag, where the studio receipt was sticking out. “Especially then. I'll need support.”
She laughed, but she was glad he hadn't laughed at her.
He walked her back towards her flat. At the corner she told him she needed to prepare for the call, which was true, though she could have found another fifteen minutes.
“Can I see you again?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He moved closer without touching her. She liked having that second in which she could decide.
Mary put her hand on the front of his shirt and kissed him. The first kiss was brief. The second made her forget what time it was.
When she stepped back, he was still smiling.
She walked home with his photograph of their pots on her phone and arrived at the client call three minutes late.