Cal rang from home. Nora told him goodnight, plugged the phone in and went to the bedroom.
The patch on the wall looked almost white under the bedside lamp. In daylight it was closer to cream, except that both were wrong for the paint around it. Iris had said it would dry darker. It hadn't.
Nora stood looking at it until the pain in her arm persuaded her to sit.
Iris had arrived with two bags, a coat slung over one arm and a packet of biscuits she placed on the kitchen table before asking whether she could stay. Nora remembered thinking that was either remarkably confident or remarkably frightened. She had known her through Dominic, through the practical telephone calls which got a key found, a parcel accepted, a man reminded he had made an appointment.
“One night?” Nora asked.
“A few. I'll find somewhere.”
“Have you left?”
Iris looked around the apartment before answering. She didn't inspect it as a guest hoping to be impressed. She looked for somewhere to put the bags.
“Yes.”
“Does he know?”
“He watched me leave.”
Nora moved a stack of samples off a chair. Iris sat down.
“What happened?”
“I got bored of telling him something and having him explain it back to me.”
“He's good at that.”
“He thinks he's good at everything.”
They had eaten the biscuits. Iris slept on the sofa. In the morning she was up before Nora, making coffee with the windows open, and the apartment smelled more like a place in which someone lived than a place in which someone stored the work they hadn't finished.
Three nights became a week. Nora told her there was no hurry before Iris asked. Iris thanked her, then insisted on paying for food, which led to an argument neither of them had expected. Nora wanted to offer something freely. Iris wanted to know what owing it would mean.
“I don't keep a tally,” Nora said.
“Most people don't until they need one.”
At the time Nora had thought it was about Dominic.
Iris cooked badly and with confidence. She put the heat too high, refused to use the timer and made a tomato sauce Nora liked enough to forgive the pan. She bought pears which never ripened. She watched half of a film before saying the man deserved everything coming to him and turning it off, to Nora's fury because she wanted to know whether he got it.
“You can watch the rest,” Iris said.
“You said it was your choice.”
“It was. Now I'm making another one.”
She had taken up space in small, irritating ways. A coat on the wrong hook. The toothpaste laid sideways. Her own mug bought from a charity shop, because she said all Nora's handles were designed by people who didn't drink from them. Nora liked the mug so much she used it herself until Iris objected.
Cal had come round to mend the bedroom fitting. He took it off, announced the wall needed filling and said he'd come back with the right things. There was work at the showroom. He meant to return. There was always work somewhere, and Nora knew which things mattered most to him because she had usually told him.
Two days later Iris found a little tub of filler at the back of the cupboard.
“This will do.”
“It's old.”
“So's the wall.”
Nora watched her work from the bed, irritated that somebody could begin a job she had been waiting for without turning it into a larger question. Iris wore one of Nora's old shirts, sleeves rolled up. She spread the filler with an ancient bank card because the proper tool was at the showroom.
“You can't leave it like that,” Nora said.
Iris glanced at the little mound.
“I'm not finished.”
“I know, but—”
“Do you?”
Nora shut her mouth. Iris smoothed the patch and stood back.
“There. Your extension.”
“My what?”
“People who can afford one buy another room. You can have that bit back.”
Nora laughed. The room had been full of her laughter for a moment, which was why hearing the joke from Bell felt so indecent. Iris had given them something Nora still wanted to keep.
After Iris cleaned the card, they argued about the paint. Nora said they should wait and get the match. Iris said the little pot in the cupboard would be close enough until Nora got around to it.
“Close enough is how things stay wrong forever.”
“You sound like him.”
That stopped Nora more effectively than an insult would have.
“Don't.”
Iris looked at her. “You do sometimes.”
“I'm trying to have a wall the same colour.”
“I know.”
“Then don't compare me to a man who made you ask for money he'd already agreed to pay.”
Iris set the pot down. “He paid me.”
“When he felt like it.”
“That's not the only reason I left.”
“I didn't say it was.”
Nora knew there had been more between them. She disliked how close it came whenever she asked a simple question about the man's behaviour. Iris had been a housekeeper; that was easy to talk about. The other things Iris had wanted from him made Nora feel excluded from a story she wasn't entitled to hear.
They went quiet for a while. Iris screwed the lid onto the paint. Nora sat on the bed and pretended to answer an email.
“I won't do it,” Iris said.
“You can do it.”
“You've said you don't want me to.”
“I said I wanted it right.”
Iris wiped a fleck of filler off her wrist.
“Then you can do it.”
The argument should have ended there. Nora put the phone down instead.
“I don't mind you being here.”
Iris turned toward her, no longer looking at the wall.
“I know.”
“I mean I like it.”
Saying it embarrassed Nora. She could offer a bed, groceries, contacts, introductions. She was less practiced at saying she had wanted a sound in the kitchen when she came home.
Iris came and sat beside her. The mattress dipped. Nora looked at the cuff of her own shirt on the other woman's wrist.
“I like being here,” Iris said.
“Except for the mugs.”
“Especially with my mug.”
They smiled. Nora's shoulder touched hers. There was time to move away, plenty of it, enough that she knew she wasn't mistaking an accidental nearness for an invitation.
She turned. Iris's face was close and serious now. Nora kissed her.
It was not a long kiss. Iris's hand came up to Nora's neck; Nora touched the loose shirt at her waist. She could feel the filler dried against Iris's thumb when it brushed her skin.
Afterwards, neither of them said what it meant. Iris looked at the wall and laughed very softly.
“You should probably get the paint you want.”
Nora said yes. She did not get it. The patch stayed pale.
Now, sitting beneath the same lamp, Nora remembered how she had wanted to tell Mina and decided to wait. How she had almost mentioned it to Cal, then imagined his amused questions becoming something she could not retrieve from him. She hadn't owed him the knowledge. Still, she had concealed it with the guilty care of somebody hiding an expense.
Iris remained on the sofa for the rest of the stay. There were touches which could have been more, a hand on a back as one passed behind the other in the kitchen, the pleasure of being looked at across a table. There was also the money, entering their conversations until it became a way of talking about their futures without talking about each other.
Nora knew whose suggestion the theft had become. She had not been a woman kissed into a crime. She had wanted the showroom before Iris set down her bags.
She rose and went to the bathroom door, where she'd put the scarf. Iris had taken her bags before they left for Essex and overlooked it. Nora hadn't pointed it out. She had pictured Iris coming back for it, another reason to use the key after she'd moved elsewhere.
She held the scarf in her good hand. There was a faint scent of soap, perhaps her own. She couldn't honestly make it Iris's simply because she wanted something to survive.
I've never met her.
She had said it while this lay within reach. Iris might already know. She had walked into a police station thinking Nora was dead, and someone must have told her a woman she had kissed had called her a stranger.
Nora was angry with her. She could remember the shove with enough clarity that looking at the scarf made her feel foolish. Iris had not knelt beside her. She had not stayed to find out whether help was possible. Nora could hate that and still know the denial had been cruel.
She brought the phone back into the bedroom and found Iris's number. The last message, before the night of the theft, concerned bread. Want anything else? Nora's reply had been You followed, after a minute, by And milk.
She read it twice. The small joke was hers; she had sent it without knowing whether Iris would like it.
Nora touched the space for a new message and typed I'm alive. Iris knew that by now. Nora erased it, then sat with the blank space waiting beneath their old joke.
She couldn't find words for the rest.
She put the phone down. Then she laid the scarf over the chair where it had been before the police came, smoothing it once with her good hand.