Robin had brought a camera, a second camera and an optimism Mara immediately distrusted.
“I've thought about it,” he said when they met him near the gardens on Friday afternoon.
“Dangerous,” Theo said.
“I thought we could try the happiest uncoupling. Though I’m beginning to think I should stop calling it that.”
Mara looked at the little bag across his shoulder. He was wearing a pale shirt which had already creased in places suggesting he'd been travelling for hours. There was a packet of biscuits half visible in the side pocket.
“Could we just look like people?” she asked.
“An excellent starting point.”
“With biscuit access,” Theo added.
Robin glanced down. “Emergency supplies.”
“They seem adequate.”
“Depends on the emergency.”
Mara liked him more after that. She had wanted good photographs when they hired him. Not proof that they were having the correct sort of wedding, just people looking alive and desirable in a place she'd saved for. She still wanted them. She had also spent several days trying to work out what she would do with pictures of Theo looking wonderful beside her when he would not be there later to roll his eyes at his own face.
Robin took them along a path into a shaded part of the garden. He spoke about the light without requiring them to understand it. Theo had changed into a blue shirt which she knew made his eyes look brighter. She disliked that he knew it too, because it left no room to pretend the choice was accidental.
“Separate ones first?” Robin asked.
They agreed.
Mara stood by a pale wall while Theo stayed out of the way. Robin asked her to turn slightly, then to stop turning quite so much. She became immediately uncertain what to do with her hands.
“They've followed me all my life,” she said. “Suddenly completely strange.”
“Rest one against the wall.”
“That's how they catch you.”
Theo laughed from somewhere beyond the camera. Mara looked toward him, and Robin took a picture before she could arrange the laugh into something more appropriate.
“That,” he said. “Keep doing that.”
“Complain?”
“If necessary.”
He took several more. Mara began to enjoy the absurdity of standing very still to look natural. Theo kept his face serious whenever she looked his way, which made it more difficult. She told Robin she could not work under these conditions. He said the light was excellent anyway.
When it was Theo's turn, he became stiff in a way she had never seen him manage while standing in a classroom full of teenagers. Robin moved him away from the wall, then back, then turned one shoulder slightly.
“You look like you're about to apologize for a bus,” Mara told him.
“It was late.”
“But you're taking personal responsibility.”
“I chose its route.”
He smiled. Robin took the picture. Mara watched Theo's face change under the laugh and felt something reach straight through the pleasant afternoon into the place where she kept everything she was trying to leave intact.
He was very handsome. She could say that to herself without qualification. The last six years had not improved him uniformly—he had a line between his eyebrows from trying to read the television subtitles without admitting he needed to sit nearer—but she loved the particular face more because she knew where it had acquired itself.
“Together?” Robin asked.
They moved beside one another with too much awareness. Mara put her hands behind her back. Theo put his in his pockets. Robin looked from one to the other, then at the distance between them.
“I can widen the shot,” he said. “But there's a rather uninteresting bin beyond you.”
“The bin can join us,” Mara said.
“A family portrait,” Theo added.
“I was going to suggest moving a little closer.”
They did. Theo took one hand out of his pocket, thought about putting it against her back and let it hang instead. Mara watched the action without looking at him.
“You can touch,” she said quietly.
His hand settled at her waist. She put hers against his shirt. Robin lifted the camera, and she forgot it for a moment because the fabric was warm and Theo was looking down at her as if she had arrived rather than moved six inches.
“That's very good,” Robin said.
“We're trained,” Theo replied.
Mara began to laugh, and the pose went wrong beautifully. She folded toward Theo. He held her more firmly. Robin moved around them without telling either to look at him, and she could hear the little sounds of pictures being made while her face refused to behave.
Eventually she rested her forehead against Theo's chest, still shaking.
He kissed the top of her head.
Robin stopped giving directions.
The garden was quiet around them, a few voices from the path, leaves moving in a warm breeze. Mara lifted her face and found Theo watching her. His hand remained on her waist. She wanted him to lean down and kiss her properly. She also wanted to keep standing exactly where she was, because going home from this would be easier to postpone if she stopped using the afternoon.
Robin lowered the camera.
“Shall we have a minute?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said.
He moved away to check something, far enough not to be part of their conversation. Theo let his hand fall. Mara stayed close.
“You look good,” she said.
“A bus company might employ me.”
“I'd buy a ticket.”
He smiled, then looked toward the path.
“There's something I should tell you.”
She felt her chest tighten before she knew what it was. Last night had made that simple sentence harder to hear.
“What?”
“I've kept the villa for Sunday night.”
She looked at him.
“One more night,” he said. “I paid this morning.”
“You paid?”
“Yes.”
“We've got flights.”
“I haven't changed them.”
“Then why?”
He put one hand in his pocket and took it out again.
“I wanted it to be possible.”
Mara looked back toward the villa paths. She could see none of their room from here, but the morning was still so clear it hardly mattered: his hair on the pillow, the blue dish with two pieces of fruit, sunlight pushing through shutters. Another day after the party, when the room emptied and they didn't have to leave immediately with it.
“You could have asked,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Before you paid.”
“I know.”
She waited. He looked at her, embarrassed and hopeful in a way she found almost physically difficult to withstand.
“I liked this morning,” he said.
The answer was so small she couldn't turn it into something he had done wrong without losing the thing they both wanted.
“I did too.”
He nodded. Neither smiled.
“I'm not saying yes,” she said after a moment.
“All right.”
“I mean I don't know what I'm saying.”
He looked down at the grass beside the path. Robin was speaking to somebody farther away, his camera held loosely at his side. There was plenty of afternoon left. She wanted to spend it as though every thing she said did not go somewhere afterward.
“We don't have to decide this minute,” Theo said.
“No.”
“I did want to tell you.”
She nodded. He had wanted to buy something they might use together. She was relieved by that, and less willing to admit it than to tell him he should have asked.
“What about tomorrow?” he asked.
“The party?”
“Do you really want it?”
She looked at him. “Yes.”
“All of it?”
“Not all. Quite a lot.”
He rubbed his forehead with two fingers.
“It feels enormous,” he said.
“It is enormous. We were very enthusiastic.”
“We could do something smaller.”
“We've told everybody.”
“I don't mean send them home.”
“What do you mean?”
He didn't answer immediately. She could see him trying to make the idea arrive without disappointment attached. It was a look she had lived with for years, and for a moment she felt tired in a place the excellent night hadn't touched.
“Come to dinner,” she said. “Tonight. We'll talk about it.”
He looked up.
“Something lovely,” she added. “Before we've all got to become Saturday people.”
“All right.”
“I haven't got the time yet. I'll tell you.”
He nodded. Robin returned, asking whether they wanted a few photographs near the terrace where the party would be. Mara said yes before she could become too aware of what she was agreeing to.
They walked together. Theo offered his arm to help her across a rough patch of path. She took it and didn't let go when the ground became smooth.
At the terrace, the tables were not yet set. There were stacks of chairs, folded cloths and a long low wall beyond which the sea was visible. She remembered choosing all of it with him, each decision pleasant in its own ridiculous way. They had argued about napkins. Not angrily, just with the joy of people permitted to have views about an evening designed to make them happy.
Robin put them beside the wall and told Theo to look at Mara.
“I've been doing that,” Theo said.
“Very useful.”
She looked back. The afternoon light was soft against his face now. There was a paid night waiting in the villa which she had not asked for, and a party she wanted more fiercely because he wasn't sure, and a photograph being made of two people who had found exactly how to make each other laugh.
She put her hand on his arm. Robin took the picture.
When the session ended, he offered them biscuits. Theo accepted two. Mara took one, broke it and gave Theo the larger half without thinking.
He looked at it, then at her.
“Structural integrity,” he said.
She laughed, softly this time, and ate the better bit herself.