Chapter 9 Teddy's Table

Teddy's counter is a hatch in a plywood booth and there are four stools, one of which has been unstable since 2019. On the Friday she had moved the stool, which meant she had cleaned, which meant somebody was coming. I sat on the good stool with a coffee I did not want and a hand on the counter and did not say anything, and Teddy Vilar finished serving a man with a dog, and then came and stood on the other side of the hatch with her arms folded and looked at me. "No," she said. "I haven't said anything." "You've been standing there with a face on like a shopping list and you haven't said anything and you were going to make me do it, so no. I'm not doing it." "Teddy—" "I'm not mediating you and him," said Teddy. "I've been asked by about six people in the last year to be the person who has the conversation, and I have said no every single time, and the reason I say no is that I make tea and I give people news and the two things cannot go in the same hand or the news goes wrong. Do you know what happens if I put my hand on your arm? You tell me things. And then you have told me things and you have not told him, and it is in a woman of fifty-one who works in a booth, and it will be in that woman in ten years when I'm sixty-one and I can't remember whether I'm a good friend or a bloody liar." I said, "I want to know whether he's seeing anybody." That was not what I had come to say. That was the version I had rehearsed in the car. "Right," said Teddy. "Number one. No. And I'll tell you why that's not a crumb off a table, it's the answer, because I've been asked that exact question by a woman who works in the shop in Marrow Wharf and by her husband and I'm not telling either of them, and the fact that I'm telling you is the only reason I'm going to give you an inch. He is not seeing anybody. He is at the yard four nights out of seven doing work he is not paid for on a boat that isn't his, and on the fifth night he goes to his mother's, who is eighty-four and in a flat in Marrow Wharf, and cooks her dinner and does not stay, and the sixth and seventh he is on a boat on his own. "Now," said Teddy Vilar, and she came round the hatch and sat on the fourth stool, which is the one that was unstable, and which everybody knows about, "you've been married to him, so you'll know this, and I'll say it because you need it and because you're not going to get it anywhere else. That is not a man who is getting over it. That is a man who is doing the whole of the rest of his life in about four hours a week and has organised himself so that the four hours are on a towpath, and it is the saddest thing I have ever watched in this yard, and I watch men in this yard all day, and I have a husband and I know what it looks like from the outside when a man is not getting over it, and I know what it looks like from the inside as well, and he is doing the inside version and he is doing it very well and nobody can see it because he is on a boat." "What am I supposed to do with that." "I don't know. You could do nothing, which is what you did for four years, and it's not a moral judgement, it's an observation, and four years is a long time to do nothing with a man who is at the other end of a bike ride." "He doesn't have a bike. He had a bike. He hasn't got it now." "He's got a bike," said Teddy. "Roz, he cycles eleven miles. Eleven. In the rain. To look at a bilge. That's not transport, that's a pilgrimage, and you'd have seen it if you'd let yourself, and I think you have not let yourself for four years because the last time you let yourself you ended up in a solicitor's office with a rota in it, and I'd do exactly the same, so I can't give you any advice at all, and that's the honest position and I'm not going to pretend otherwise." She got up and went back behind the hatch, which meant the conversation was over, and then she stopped with her back to me and said: "What do you want." And there it was. That is the whole thing. That is what I came down here for and it took Teddy Vilar about four minutes to get to it, which is the fastest anybody has got to it in five years. "I want the schedule to change," I said. "That's all. That's the whole thing. Three weeks is too long and three weeks is not long enough and it's the wrong length. It's the wrong length for a person who works. It's the wrong length for a person who doesn't work. It's the wrong length for the boat, because you cannot do anything to a boat in three weeks that you can't do in two, and it's the wrong length for me, because in the fifth week I start counting, and I have been counting for four years, and I don't want to be a person who counts." "And what length do you want." "I want a week." "A week." "Five days, or a week, or a fortnight. I want to be able to go up on a Sunday and come back on a Wednesday, and I want to be able to not go at all for a fortnight if my mother's week is bad, and I want to be able to phone him and say, are you free, and have him say a time, like a person." I put my hand on the counter. "And I have never once said any of that to him. Four years. I've said the word *arrangement* about four hundred times and I've never said *I want to be able to phone you and ask when you're free.*" Teddy Vilar stood quite still. "Right," she said. "That's the sentence, then. And you know he's going to say yes." "He'll say yes and he'll do it for about three weeks and then he'll start coming round on the off days, and then I'll be the one who is on the boat when he isn't, and it'll be worse than it is now, because at least now I know where I stand." "Then phone him and say the sentence," said Teddy Vilar, "and don't tell him you've been told it by a woman in a booth, and don't tell him you've been up here for an hour today, and God knows don't tell him about the stool." I got up. I had about four things to say on the way out and I said none of them, and I got out into the yard, and it was March, and the light was long and cold and the water was up and there was a man in shed two planing a gunwale and the shavings were coming off in one long ribbon and curling on the floor like something being written. I stood in the yard for a minute and a half. And then I went out to the towpath and I sat down on a bench with my back to the cut and I took out my phone, and I looked at his number in there, which I had never once deleted in four years, and I put my thumb on it, and I did not press it, and I sat there long enough that a barge went past and the wash came over the wall and went back out again.