Although you were also not looking — not looking at him — you had a clear sense of his not looking. You could feel it. If he’d asked what it was like, you could have told him — it’s like a tender hollowness, or some odd colour in the fall of light.
He didn’t, of course, ask.
You didn’t, of course, tell him.
But you were paying attention.
You still are.
He’d then added, ‘Good’ rather quietly and with a kind of helplessness, after which he’d rallied and re-repositioned the seats. Something about his movements during these proceedings had suggested a happy assurance — there might be many areas of doubt, but here he was certain: sitting face-to-face wasn’t going to work. And anyone would have advised that side-by-side was a touch eccentric, if not reminiscent of pensioners waiting to die on a seaside bench — the type local councils fix near pleasant views to memorialise other pensioners who once also liked to sit near pleasant views.
You can imagine — are unable not to — a future within which you might lean against him as you consider your arthritis, or his replacement hip, and how the wind would ruffle what’s left of anything and make you love him all the more, while he loves you back to a comparable degree. Or maybe you’d just eat sandwiches in a bitter and familiar pause and then go home to hate each other for another decade. It’s not uncommon.
Which is inappropriate. You’re on a first date. Why picture the brownish parka in which you apparently think he’ll take decrepit holidays? Why conjure up domestic horrors and spats over too much pickle that will have dampened the nasty bread? Why assume you’ll have nasty bread?
It’s not that you believe this nonsense — ‘I can’t abide pickle, I’ve told you. And that bread’s nasty. Where’s my pills?’ — it’s more that you’d rather anticipate fictional disasters than deal with your awareness of how many true things can go wrong.
‘They’ll bury you in that parka.’
‘I’d like to see them try.’
This man isn’t a pensioner, or in a parka. He dresses nicely, like a person who understands his own shape. You appreciate it. Without looking. Without looking much.
And he’d understood the shape he’d required from his surroundings before he’d finally let you sit. He’d needed the chairs at ninety degrees to each other: enough to keep you close across one corner of the table, but not too close. He hadn’t wanted you too close.
So maybe you’d made him ambivalent from the beginning.
Or maybe your date is evasive — or else considerate, shy, romantic, a tease, anal-retentive, insanely controlling, or otherwise strange.
Your mind kicks and shies through a range of distracting suggestions: he might be someone who’s used to cramped tables, possibly keen on camper vans, works in a cubicle, poker player in miniature casinos, brought up on boats, lives in a shed.
None of this is true.
But, equally, you’re not too sure what is.
You do not know him, this man. He is practically a stranger.
And you can’t think why he chose to see you here: at a concrete theatre complex with an equally concrete café and this concrete square baking airlessly in front where there is no one — no one but this man and you. The other exterior tables and wiser diners and unadjusted chairs are over by the building. They nestle in its shadows, are thickest towards the angle where two wings meet. Ninety degrees again.
Four ninety degrees, to be technical. You’re in a square — it’s square.
Perhaps he has a thing for corners.
Or else he likes display. You do feel that you have been forced to become one half of an event. Inside the café, people are eating ahead of a matinee, grabbing a coffee, studying their programmes, chatting in a manner that suggests they have made good choices in life and are about to savour something enriching and not to just anyone’s taste. Outside, there’s you and this man and what amounts to an audience. Every now and then someone lifts their head in the shade, stops talking, glances over and sees — this couple meeting, this couple having lunch, this man telling this woman a story.
Only he’s not.
He isn’t really saying anything.
He began with the stutter and falter of, ‘Sorry. Excuse me. I’ll just. . Ah. Well. Hang on.’ And there was the minor chaos you guess that he always draws up and around him: the furniture moving and the scamper back and forth as he fetched superfluous napkins, another spoon, the glass for your apple juice, a glass of ice for the glass for your apple juice, some pepper in a handful of sachets which remain untouched. Then he sat, swallowed audibly and began, running off through longer and longer sentences, looping them forward while he showed you the flinch of his hands, the over-vigorous illustration of salient and mildly amusing points. All his details blur and fade, though, and he reaches no conclusions. He tangles and frequently breaks his own thread, and you feel that his general rush of words amounts to a hedge, a fence, energetic smoke. They are the cover that he ducks behind.
He was the one who asked to meet you, but he’s now in hiding. He is even crouching to a tiny degree, shoulders tensed, as he tells you the first coat he bought that was properly expensive had actually been a knock-off with fraudulent seams that unravelled and he’d also bought a second-hand stove that harboured almost fatal electrical flaws. You haven’t expressed any interest in fashion, or stoves, or very unwise decisions. Before this, he half-finished an anecdote about cats which seemed intended to be funny, but wasn’t. Perhaps if he’d made it to the end.
His being so far away and yet here makes you lonely.
You stare at your lasagne, which is ugly and has congealing historical layers, like a starchy lump of cliff — not something you can eat.
There’s a plate of allegedly Moroccan casserole in front of him. It hasn’t been attempted.
This isn’t having lunch with him, this is visiting lunch with him.
You should have brought your own food to ignore — bad cheese and wet pickle, nasty bread — it would have been cheaper.
‘I hate pickle.’
‘Well, I didn’t know that.’
‘Well, I’ve been telling you for thirty-seven years.’
Start as you’d rather not have to continue.
You remember arriving early — the more important the occasion, the earlier you’ll be — and then having to wander, wait, lean against the warmed bulk of the embankment wall.
It felt good, reliable, relaxing.
Not like this.
You’d looked down at the retreated tide and the narrow drifts of dirty sand it had abandoned. They made you think this lets it seem that somewhere underneath the grey and the burden of straight edges, unnatural angles, London could still be a living thing and might simply shrug one random morning and crack its surfaces and let fundamental elements — sand, rock, water — run loose.
Which might just have been something to consider rather than considering this man and your imminent meeting, or it might have been caused by the slowed and silvered air and the city being briefly turned to silhouettes, lacework and bright prospects. There was a sweetness when you breathed, as if leaves were waking somewhere out of sight.
You were happy. Unmistakably.
You didn’t quite believe that you were happy because of him, but could have been persuaded.
Then he arrived — quick and with a slight flail in his limbs, a vaguely tangential approach — and his nervousness made you nervous, as if he had identified a threat you couldn’t place.
They’re worse now, your nerves, because you are so firmly by yourself. Still, he would do you no harm. You can tell. This is rare in men, in people, and is therefore attractive and it makes you miss him.