Todos os capítulos de Staying with him: Capítulo 151 - Capítulo 160

She went through it on a Thursday evening in August, the flat, room by room, not in thegoing-through-things way of someone preparing to leave but in the attending-to way,the specific quality of attention she had been developing for five years brought to bearon the space that had held the five years.He was at the academy. The baby was asleep. She had two hours.She started in the hallway.The hallway was narrow, which it had always been, and had the specific accumulatedquality of a hallway that two people had been moving through daily for five years, thecoats and the keys and the bowl and the quality of the light at different times of day. Shehad put up the curtain rail in the hallway in the first week, the rail that had nothing to dowith curtains and everything to do with deciding this space was going to hold her things.The curtain rail was still there. It had held various things across the years — his coat onthe hook beside hers, a bag she was not using but not ready to mov

They went on Saturday mornings.This was the arrangement they arrived at after the first Saturday of looking, which hadbegun without an arrangement and had produced two viewings that they had scheduledindependently of each other and which had, logistically, produced the experience of twopeople who had not coordinated the managing of the baby and the looking, which wasnot difficult but was inefficient.She had come home from the second viewing on the first Saturday to find him in thegarden — not their garden, there was no their garden yet, she had come home to the flatand he was in the kitchen — with the baby and the quality of a man who had worked outan arrangement.Saturday mornings, he said. Both of us. Baby with Diana.Diana had not been consulted but Diana would be consulted and Diana would say goodand the Saturday mornings would proceed.So: Saturday mornings, both of them, beginning in October and proceeding through theautumn with the specific focus of two people who kn

She had been watching him in the kitchen for ten minutes.The agent had moved on to the next room. The baby was with Diana. It was Saturdaymorning in November and the new house was around them and he was in the kitchen.He had gone into the kitchen when the agent took them through it and he had not comeout.She had followed the agent to the first-floor landing and looked at the room with theright light, the room she was already thinking of as her room, the room that would be theroom she worked in at home, and she had confirmed the light and the quality of thespace and she had come back downstairs and found him still in the kitchen.He was standing in the centre of the kitchen.Not looking at anything specific. Not measuring, though she had watched him measurethings with his eyes, the specific scanning of a man who could estimate dimensionsreliably and was doing it. Not assessing the structure, which he would do but was notdoing now. He was simply standing in the kitchen with b

She went through it in the dark.Not the full dark — she left the hallway light on, the one that threw the specific hallwayquality of light she had known for five years, the quality that told her what time of day itwas without looking at a clock, the morning quality and the evening quality and the two-in-the-morning quality all distinct from each other in the way that lights you had livedunder for long enough became distinct.He was asleep. The baby was asleep. The removers were coming at eight.She had lain in bed until midnight and then she had gotten up and gone through the flatone more time, room by room, in the specific quality of a person making a record ofsomething before it changed.She started in the hallway.The boxes were in the hallway, the ones they had not managed to move to the newhouse in the earlier trips. The hallway had the specific quality of a space in the processof being emptied, the accumulated things of six years reduced to labelled cardboard,the bowl

The removers arrived at eight.There were three of them. They were efficient in the way of people who did this everyday, the specific efficiency of professionals who had carried other people’s things fromone place to another enough times that the things had lost their emotional weight andwere simply objects to be moved correctly. She had found this about removers on theday she had moved into the flat, which she had done alone, which had been the first dayof the flat being hers, and the removers on that day had been the same efficientstrangers carrying the things of her previous life into the new space.These removers were different in that he was here.He managed the removers the way he managed practical things, with the clarity and thenotebook and the specific knowledge of the order in which things needed to happen.She had labelled the boxes in October, each one with the room it was going to, and hehad cross-referenced the labelling against the floor plan and had developed a