I file the observation as furniture.
At half past twelve, Laurence sticks his head round the door.
‘Patterson’s staying for lunch. I said yes before asking you, sorry.’
‘All good.’
The three of us are at the kitchen table. Soup from a tin. Heinz tomato, the orange one, the one Laurence keeps in the cupboard because he says it tastes like being eleven. Toast. Mr Patterson talks. He’s a filler of silences. Automatic. No check on whether anyone wanted the refill.
He tells us about a bridge in Stockport that he helped build in 1982. About his wife Margaret, who died four years ago, cancer, quick in the end, which he calls a mercy, while his voice says the opposite. About his son in Auckland, who rings on Sundays and whose vowels have gone a bit New Zealand after thirty years.
Then, over the toast, he looks between us.
‘How’d you two meet, then?’
Laurence goes very still. The stillness that comes before either a retreat or a truth, and which of the two depends on whose company he’s in.
‘He was my lecturer,’ I say. Even, no edges on it. ‘First-year algebra. I sat in the back row.’
Mr Patterson nods, chews his toast.
‘I married my typist,’ he says, eventually. ‘In 1971. The polytechnic, engineering department. She was twenty-four and I was twenty-nine and the head of department called me into his office and said it wasn’t done. I said it was already done. He said there’d be consequences. There were, small ones. We had forty-three years.’
He puts his spoon in the empty bowl.
‘My advice, if you want it, is that the consequences matter less than you think and the forty-three years matter more. Thanks for the soup.’
He stands. Puts his plate in the sink without being told. Pulls his coat on. At the door, he turns.
‘Same time next Saturday, Dr Haldrey?’
‘Same time.’
‘I’ll bring better custard creams. Those ones you had in the tin were stale.’
Door closes.
Laurence sits back down. He reaches across the table and finds my hand without looking. His eyes are on the closed door.
‘Forty-three years.’
‘Yes.’
The Heinz tomato is cooling in the bowls. The rain is harder on the window now. Laurence’s thumb against my knuckle. Left hand. The one that holds chalk. The one that held my waist on Wednesday night and refused the instruction, the hand I finally understood, for the first time, as the thing love looks like when it has to saywait.
Afternoon. He watches tv, I read Hardy. The sofa holds both of us, and my feet are in his lap, and his free hand rests on my ankle like a man resting a book he intends to pick up again.
Three paragraphs in, Hardy writes about mathematics and beauty, and I read the sentence twice because the first time I was watching Laurence’s hand.
Then the sentence goes in.
A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns.
I say it out loud.
Laurence hums. Doesn’t look up from the telly.
‘Go on.’
