AI The bag split as Rory lifted it onto the bar. A carton slid through the wet paper, struck the brass footrail, and opened across her shoe.
For a moment she stood looking at the rice. There was something almost restful about a small disaster whose requirements were obvious.
“Don’t move,” Silas said.
“I’m not planning to chase it.”
He came around the bar with a dustpan, favouring his left knee. His silver signet ring clicked against the handle as he passed it to her.
“Yu-Fei?”
“Last delivery. She put your dinner in with it.”
“Generous of her.”
“That was your dinner.”
He looked down. “Less generous of you.”
Rory crouched. Rain had got under her jacket and down the back of her neck; her trousers pulled cold against her knees. She scraped rice off the floor while Silas fetched a cloth. Above her, the early evening drinkers carried on talking, glasses touched tables, and someone laughed at the end of a sentence she hadn’t heard. Through the window, the green neon sign coloured the rain on the pavement.
“Rory?”
She knew the voice before she looked up, although she would not have recognised it on the telephone. There was less breath in it now, less questioning.
A woman stood beside the nearest table with one hand resting on a small leather suitcase. Dark coat, cream blouse, earrings shaped like folded leaves. Her hair, once long enough to sit on, ended cleanly at her jaw.
“Carys.”
The woman smiled, then seemed to reconsider how much smiling was appropriate.
Rory was still holding the dustpan. A grain of rice clung to the crescent scar on her wrist.
“I thought it was you,” Carys said.
“What are you doing here?”
“Getting out of the rain.”
“In London, I mean.”
“Oh. Work.”
Of course she meant London. Rory stood too quickly and knocked the back of her head against the bar.
Silas took the dustpan from her without comment.
“Friend of yours?”
“Yes,” Rory said. Then, because the word seemed inadequate and also possibly inaccurate, “We went to university together.”
“School, too,” Carys said.
“Yes. School.”
Silas looked between them. “I’ll put the kettle on.”
“He owns the place,” Rory explained as he moved away. “I’m not in the habit of introducing people who happen to be sweeping.”
“I didn’t think you were.”
“No. Well.”
They hugged because there seemed to be no other move left. Carys’s coat was soft and damp at the shoulders. Rory remembered a different coat: purple wool from a charity shop, its lining torn, its pockets full of pencil shavings. She had helped sew a new button onto it in the university library, both of them hiding the needle whenever the librarian passed.
This embrace lasted less than a second. When they separated, Carys’s hand stayed briefly on Rory’s arm.
“It’s been ages.”
“Five years.”
“Is it?”
“Nearly.”
Rory knew exactly. There had been a photograph from Carys’s graduation, and she had wanted to write something beneath it. Well done was too little. I knew you would was both true and dishonest. She had shut the page instead.
They sat beneath an old map of the city, the river broad and pale between streets that no longer existed. Carys put her suitcase beside her chair. Rory hung her wet jacket over the back of hers, then wished she hadn’t. Her Golden Empress polo shirt had a grease mark above the waist.
“I didn’t know you worked here,” Carys said.
“I don’t. I deliver food. I live upstairs.”
“Oh.”
“It’s a flat. Not a room full of beer barrels.”
“I wasn’t picturing beer barrels.”
Rory picked a loose thread from the cuff of her shirt. She was doing it already: giving Carys words to defend herself against, making the old acquaintance carry the weight of every stranger who had asked what she did and then looked politely elsewhere.
“Sorry,” she said. “Long day.”
Carys glanced at the jacket. “You’ve been out in this?”
“People get hungry in the rain.”
“I suppose they do.”
Silas brought two mugs, milk in a little jug, and a plate of biscuits. His own dinner, salvaged from the other carton, waited behind the bar.
“Anything else, give me a shout.”
“Thank you,” Carys said, with the easy attention Rory remembered her reserving for animals and small children. Once, speaking to a waiter had made her blush down to her collar.
When Silas had gone, Rory nodded at the suitcase.
“Just here for the day?”
“Two days. Conference, then a meeting tomorrow.”
“What sort of conference?”
“Professional negligence.”
“That sounds cheerful.”
“There were pastries.”
“You’re practising, then.”
“Solicitor. Commercial litigation.”
Carys took off her coat. Beneath it, her blouse fitted without appearing to fit. Rory had never understood how people achieved that. Her own clothes either pulled or hung.
“Manchester,” Carys added. “I moved there three years ago.”
“I saw.”
“Online?”
Rory nodded.
“I thought you might have.”
There it was, placed between the mugs with care.
Carys’s hands were steady as she poured milk. At nineteen she had chewed the skin around her nails until the sides bled. Before seminars she would whisper her answers to Rory, who sometimes repeated them as though they were her own. They had both called that helping.
“You seem different,” Rory said.
Carys looked up. “Do I?”
“Not in a bad way.”
“You don’t have to qualify it.”
“No, I know. You just—” Rory stopped. “You used to apologise before asking for a chair.”
“I still do sometimes.”
“Not much.”
“Not much.”
A group near the window rose to leave. Cold air reached their table when the door opened, along with the smell of cigarettes and wet stone. Carys watched the door close.
“I had to learn,” she said.
“To ask for chairs?”
“To speak before I’d worked out whether everyone wanted me to.”
Rory remembered the two of them in a kitchen at three in the morning, Carys drawing on the back of a reading list while Rory described the life they would have. A flat with high windows. Good coats. Work that mattered, though she had been vague about to whom. Carys had drawn a plant on the windowsill and a cat asleep in a chair.
“You always knew what to say,” Carys said.
“I always said something. Different skill.”
“You were good in tutorials.”
“My father had been holding tutorials over dinner since I was eleven.”
Carys smiled into her tea. “I remember him asking me what I thought about the judiciary.”
“You said you liked their wigs.”
“I did like their wigs.”
“He was furious.”
“He gave me more potatoes.”
“That was how he concealed it.”
For a little while they had somewhere safe to stand. Rory’s mother’s roast potatoes. The bus that stopped outside the school but never when it rained. The lecturer who wore his bicycle clips through an entire class. Carys’s laugh had changed less than her speaking voice. It still escaped suddenly, catching her by surprise.
Then she asked, “Do you ever think about finishing?”
Rory’s hand stopped on the mug.
“The degree?”
“Yes.”
“Not often.”
“That wasn’t meant to sound—”
“I know.”
“I only wondered.”
“So does everyone.”
Carys leaned back. Her face closed, not sharply, but enough .
Rory looked at the pale river on the wall. Here was another thing she had become good at: finding judgement early, before anyone else could put it into words.
“I’m sorry,” she said again . “You’re allowed to ask.”
“I don’t know what I’m allowed to ask.”
The sentence was quiet. It arrived without the protection of a smile.
Rory rubbed her thumb along the mug’s handle.
“Neither do I.”
Carys looked down at her tea. “How is Eva?”
“Fine. Bristol now. She’s teaching.”
“Still?”
“Still. She says the children keep getting younger.”
“And you stayed.”
“Yes.”
When Eva had told her to come to London, she had made it sound like a weekend. Bring enough for a few days, she’d said. We’ll work out the rest. Rory had brought a suitcase, two folders of course notes, and the conviction that she would be back in Cardiff before anybody needed an explanation.
“Are you still with him?” Carys asked.
“No.”
A pause.
“Good,” Carys said.
Rory felt the word physically, a small pressure behind her breastbone.
“You can say his name.”
“I don’t particularly want to.”
“No.”
Silas moved behind the bar, stacking clean glasses. Rory was grateful for the ordinary noise.
“How long?” Carys asked.
“Since I came here.”
“I didn’t know.”
“I didn’t tell you.”
“I tried to get in touch.”
“I know.”
Carys’s mouth tightened. Rory remembered three messages and suspected there had been more. One had asked if she wanted coffee. Another had said she was worried . Evan had read that one over Rory’s shoulder and laughed.
She had laughed too. That was the part she had never found a useful way to remember.
“At the time,” Rory said, “it felt as though replying meant admitting you’d been right.”
“I wasn’t trying to be right.”
“I know that now.”
“I’m not sure I was even right about the right things. I thought you were giving up too much for him. I didn’t understand—” She stopped, pressing one fingertip into a mark on the table. “I thought if I said it properly, you’d listen.”
“You did say it properly.”
“At the party, I shouted.”
“You’d tried the other way.”
Carys looked at her then.
For years Rory had kept that evening as evidence against her: Carys standing in the hallway of Evan’s flat, flushed and shaking, saying she didn’t like who Rory was around him. Rory had defended him with a fluency she could still feel in her mouth. She had made Carys seem childish, jealous, incapable of understanding an adult relationship. Evan had stayed in the kitchen, letting her do it.
“I was horrible to you,” Rory said.
“You were.”
There was relief in not being contradicted .
“I’m sorry.”
Carys breathed out through her nose. “I should have kept trying.”
Rory shook her head.
“I tell myself you wouldn’t have answered.”
“I might not have.”
“That’s quite a convenient thing to tell myself.”
“You don’t have to make it your fault.”
“I know. But I missed you, and I was angry, and after a while being angry was easier.”
Rory watched her turn the mug a quarter of the way round. These were Carys’s hands, after all. The little finger bent slightly outwards where she had broken it falling off Rory’s bicycle. No manicure could correct that.
“Do you still draw?” Rory asked.
Carys blinked at the change.
“Sometimes.”
“What?”
“Mostly things in meetings. People’s shoes.”
“You used to draw houses.”
“I used to have longer meetings with myself.”
“Were you going to apply to art school? Or did I imagine that?”
“No. I got the form.”
Rory waited.
“I never sent it.”
“I didn’t know.”
“You were rather busy.”
Carys said it gently , which made it worse.
Outside, a bus passed, its upper windows bright with people going home. Rory could see only portions of them: a forehead against glass, a raised wrist, a yellow hood.
“Do you like what you do?” she asked.
“Some of it. I like being good at it.” Carys considered. “I like paying for things without checking first. I like that my mother doesn’t worry about me.”
“That must be nice.”
“It is.”
She didn’t apologise for it. Rory was glad, and envious, and glad again.
Carys glanced at her watch , then put her wrist beneath the table.
“Train?”
“Hotel. I said I’d join some people for dinner.”
“You should go.”
“I can be late.”
“You used to be late to everything.”
“Yes, but now I send an email.”
Rory laughed. Her eyes stung unexpectedly, and she reached for a biscuit to give herself something else to do.
Carys took out her phone.
“Have you got the same number?”
“Yes.”
“I haven’t.”
She passed the phone across. Rory entered her number, checked it, then checked it again. Under the name she wrote Rory Carter, although Carys had never known another Rory.
“Send me something,” she said. “So I’ve got yours.”
A moment later her own phone lit up on the table.
No message, just a full stop.
Carys looked embarrassed . “I couldn’t think what to write.”
“That’ll do.”
They stood. This time Rory reached first, and the hug was awkward because of the table, and longer because neither of them stepped away at once.
At the door Carys paused to button her coat. Silas raised a hand from behind the bar. She thanked him for the tea, then looked back at Rory.
“I’m here until tomorrow afternoon.”
“I finish at two.”
“I could miss the last session.”
“Professional negligence?”
“Yes.”
“Probably best not to.”
Carys smiled. “Text me anyway.”
After she left, Rory stayed by the window. Through the rain she saw her friend stop beneath the green sign, lift the suitcase handle, and look along the street before choosing a direction.
Her phone was still in her hand. She opened their conversation. Above the full stop there was nothing: no argument, no unanswered invitation, no record of what either of them had failed to do.
She typed, There’s a café round the corner. Three?
She sent it before she could improve it.
Behind her, Silas asked whether she wanted the rest of his dinner.
“In a minute,” she said.
The reply came while she was watching Carys cross the road.
Three.