Chapter Seven: Very Small Portions

The first date began on a kitchen floor, as agreed, at seven o'clock on the fifth of January.

The fortieth floor had emptied by half past six. In the narrow staff kitchen the dishwasher ticked as it cooled, the fridge hummed to itself, and the lino was still warm in the patch Poppy had picked out with her sock. She had arrived early, which she'd told herself was professionalism and which was in fact nerves. She had changed her mind about her outfit twice on the Victoria line and settled on the green velvet dress, because it had worked once, and the funeral blazer, because she was beginning to feel it was lucky.

Theo came in at two minutes to. He was holding a box of Cheerios in one hand and a bowl in the other, and he was wearing, she saw, a very good jacket and no shoes.

"I know," he said, before she could speak. "They're under my desk. I'll put them back on before the restaurant. I just wanted to start the way we meant to go on."

"With bare feet?"

"With honesty about footwear."

He had brought two bowls, not one. She noticed that, and said nothing, and felt it settle somewhere warm. They sat down against the cupboards with their legs stretched out across the floor, and he poured, and for a few minutes they simply ate, crunching, a little formal, like two people who have agreed to be on a date and are not yet sure what the rules of it are.

"It's strange," said Poppy at last. "I've sat in this room at midnight and told you about a man crying on a staircase. I've sat in your office and read you eleven dated entries from a notebook. And now I can't think of one thing to say."

"Nor can I. I wrote out topics. They're in my pocket."

"You didn't."

He took out a folded sheet of paper and held it up. It was, she saw, a numbered list. Item one was weather. Item four was Dee's opinion of me, if safe to ask.

She laughed so hard that a Cheerio went down the wrong way, and he had to slap her gently on the back, and after that it was simple.

---

The restaurant was called Little Fen. It was in a side street behind Spitalfields, with no sign outside, a single candle in the window and a menu that listed everything in lower case and nothing by price. Imogen had booked it. She had been very firm about this. "A man should be able to take a woman somewhere with a tablecloth," she had told Theo on Friday, "and I'll hear no more about cereal."

The portions were as small as promised. Poppy was presented with a single scallop sitting alone in a shallow white bowl, like a prisoner in the dock. A thing described as a memory of leek came on a spoon. "I think," she whispered, "that's a smear."

"It's a very expensive smear," Theo whispered back. "I'll take your word that it was once a leek."

They had been there forty minutes when she noticed the table in the corner.

There were five people at it. Meera was one. So was a man from IT and two women from Design, and a fifth person who had his back to her but whose hair, when she looked properly, was unmistakably Samir's. They were all studying their menus with a deep and unconvincing attention.

"Theo," said Poppy.

"Yes."

"That's half of the fortieth floor."

"I did wonder." He didn't turn round. "Imogen said the restaurant would be quiet. She may have said it in the sense that a battlefield is quiet before the guns."

At that moment Meera, who was the worst liar in the company, looked up, met Poppy's eyes, went the colour of a beetroot and raised her glass, with a small frantic smile, in what could only be described as a toast.

Theo did the only possible thing. He caught the waiter's sleeve, spoke to him for a few seconds, and ten minutes later a bottle of champagne arrived at the corner table with a card. Poppy, leaning sideways, saw Samir read it out. The card said: FLUENT IN DISCRETION. Enjoy the evening. T. Samir put his head on the tablecloth. Meera's whole face crumpled with laughter. They paid for none of it, and they stayed until close.

It was strange, Poppy thought, how it didn't spoil anything. She had expected to feel watched. Instead she felt, absurdly, looked after. The building had its eye on them, but it was the eye of a very large and affectionate aunt.

---

They missed the last-but-one train and caught the last one, in the end, at twenty to midnight, with a cold January wind coming down the platform and the carriage almost empty. Theo stood holding the rail. Poppy sat. Between Highbury and Finsbury Park he took the menu out of his coat pocket. She'd seen him slip it in at the table and hadn't liked to ask.

"I'd like to propose something," he said, and brought out a pen.

"Is this a list?"

"It's a protocol."

"Oh, Theo."

"I know. I know what it sounds like." He smoothed the menu over his knee and wrote, in his sloping hand, at the top of the back: DISCLOSURE PROTOCOL (DRAFT). "But I told you on the stairs that I'd rather be a bad boyfriend than a good hypocrite, and I meant it, and I think the only way to be sure of keeping a promise is to say what it is out loud first. So. Rule one. If I'm ever in a position where something I'm doing, or deciding, or hiding—"

"Hiding?"

"—might affect you or your work, I will tell you. At once. In writing, if necessary. With a copy to Margot."

"With a copy to Margot."

"I'm a man of rules, Poppy."

"I'm aware." She took the pen out of his hand. He let her. She turned the menu over and looked at what he'd written, and under his neat disclosure clauses and his sub-clauses and the small italic (see also: HR), she crossed out the lot, one line at a time, and wrote underneath in her own looping capitals:

THE MIDNIGHT RULE.

Anything that touches the other one gets said before midnight.

"It's shorter," said Theo.

"It's got a deadline. Yours had a copy to Margot." She chewed the end of the pen. "And I want something else. I don't want 'for your own good.' You're not allowed to hide a thing from me because you've decided I couldn't take it. If it touches me, I get to hold it. That's rule two."

He was quiet for a while. The train came out of the tunnel and the lights of Tottenham slid by in the window, orange and small.

"That's a very hard rule," he said.

"I know."

"I think it might be harder for me than for you."

"I know that too."

He held out his hand for the pen. She gave it back. He wrote, under her capitals, in his own slanting script: Agreed. Then he signed it, a full signature, with the date, the way he signed contracts. After a moment she signed beneath him, in her small neat notebook hand, the one her mother had taught her.

"Rule three," said Poppy. "You'll never make a rule about me without me."

He looked at her. The carriage rocked. Something passed over his face that she couldn't read, and then went.

"Never," said Theo. "I give you my word."

---

It was a ten-minute walk from the station to her flat, through streets hung with leftover tinsel and the stale, sweet smell of a night that had been cold for a long time. Neither of them said much. At the corner of her road, under a streetlamp that buzzed, he stopped.

"I should probably go back," he said. "There's a cab rank at the station."

"It's ten to twelve."

"Is it?"

"You're in the Midnight Rule's jurisdiction. I thought you'd want to know."

"I'm obliged." His mouth tilted. "Is there anything I should disclose?"

"Possibly the state of my radiator."

They walked the last twenty yards. At her door, he stood on the step below her, which put his eyes at the level of hers, and she could see his breath, and the small crease between his brows, and the exact grey of him under the light from the hall.

"May I say something," said Theo, "that isn't a rule?"

"Please."

"I haven't been this happy in a very long time. I'd like that on the record, too."

She didn't answer. She'd run out of clever things at about the third course. She took hold of the lapels of his good jacket and kissed him.

It was brief, and it was clumsy, and it tasted of champagne and Cheerios. It went on, in the end, for rather longer than it had started out intending to. When they came apart he was holding the doorframe, and she became aware, in the quiet, of a sound from inside the flat: a long, resentful, metallic knocking, the sound of an old pipe clearing its throat in the dark.

"That," said Poppy, "is Kevin."

"He's very loud."

"He doesn't like to be left out."

Theo laughed, and kissed her forehead, and said goodnight, and went down the path with his hands in his pockets like a boy of nineteen. Poppy watched him as far as the corner. She looked at her phone. It said 12:01.

She stood on the step with the menu in her hand for some time. Then she went inside and put it on the fridge with a magnet shaped like a lemon, and Kevin knocked twice, in what she chose to take as approval.

---

He had gone another hundred yards when his phone lit up in his pocket.

He took it out. The screen said Hugh, and underneath, in the preview, one word: Urgent. It was the fourth time that evening. He had silenced the first three during the scallop, and the memory of a leek, and the train.

He stood on the pavement under a dead Christmas light and watched it ring out. He thought of the menu, and of the signature, and of the small stiff feeling he had felt at never. Then he put the phone to his ear, because Hugh had held his hand at his father's funeral and had never once in twenty-three years called him for no reason, and because he was, after all, a man who answered.

"Hugh," he said. "It's gone midnight. What's happened?"