Page 57

I look at the canal through the kitchen window. The Thursday evening light on the water, flat and clean. The city doing its ordinary thing around us.

This is what it looks like, I think, when a life makes room for someone. Not dramatically. Not with a conversation or a decision or a moment you can point to. Just: a drawer. Tea in the third drawer. A jacket on the hook.

The slow, ordinary accumulation of someone becoming part of the shape of things.

One day you realise they are no longer visiting.

They live in the architecture.

There was plenty of room.

He kisses me at some point, properly, in the kitchen, his hands on my face, and then he pulls back and says, with the tone of someone who has been sitting on something:

"We need to talk about summer."

I look at him. "Summer."

"It's July," he says. "You have vacation, presumably. Do you?"

He waits.

I put my cup down.

I have taken the last two weeks of August every year since I moved to Amsterdam. It is a system. It is in my calendar. It is — I had completely forgotten about it.

"The last two weeks of August," I say.

"Okay," he says. Immediately. "What do we do?"

I consider that.

"What do you mean what do we do," I say.

"I mean where do we go. What do we do with two weeks." He is entirely serious. "I can sort my roster. I've got some flexibility in August."

I look at him for a long moment.

"You want to go on holiday," I say.

"We're together," he says. "That's what couples do."

I open my mouth. Close it.

The thing is — I know this. I know that couples take holidays together. I have observed this phenomenon for thirty-two years. I have watched friends book holidays with their partners and thought, in the abstract, theoretical way of someone who has decided not to want things that aren't available: one day, possibly, perhaps.

I had not yet arrived at the part where "one day" was now.

Patrick is watching me do this calculation. I can tell because the corner of his mouth has gone and he is looking at me with the expression of someone who is enjoying himself.

"You forgot that couples take holidays," he says.

"I didn't forget," I say. "I just hadn’t…” I stop. "You turned my life upside down," I say. Which is the most accurate available description of the situation and which I mean entirely as a compliment.

He looks at me for a moment.

Then he grins. The full version.

"Last two weeks of August," he says again. "Where do you want to go?"