MORNING SERIAL
I COULD have watered it by crying occasionally. Twenty minutes later, she was late, and at eleven thirty later still. I could feel the blurred newsprint starting to come back into focus. I scrunched my eyes to prevent that. I waited some more. I was good at that. I had long experience, and currently a deeply felt lack of mobility.
I clocked her entrance, in both senses, at eleven forty five. She smiled at the East European behind the desk and gave him my name. She turned at his reply, in the direction where I’d told Pavel I’d be when requested. Bran had definitely dressed down. She had on flat dove-grey suede shoes with an understated silver buckle. The look was not quite casual. Perfectly judged, unlike my own sombre ensemble, from the light grey cotton, flecked and knife-edged creased, trousers to the opennecked pink shirt worn beneath the darker steel-grey of a wraparound cardigan with a loose belt. It left her elegant wrists on display. And on the left one she wore – nice touch this I thought – a silver and turquoise Navajo bangle, late 1940s I’d been told, which I’d once bought for her in Arizona before all the skies of our lives had clouded over. There was no discernible make-up this morning, and her full hair looked tousled. I’d tousled her a few times myself. She was a fine tousler, all right.
And a mind-reader, too. Now she smiled at me. I could see we were going to get along fine. She sat down opposite me in the matching armchair. Its charcoal fabric framed the pretty and complementary picture she made as if it had been designed for it. Somewhere, maybe, it had. She crossed her legs at the ankles. I kept mine straight. She said, “You’re all in black,” as if colour coordination was her constant and actual game. Maybe it was.
“Thank you for seeing me. Again. You know …”, she said.
I did, and told her that was fine and that we had unfinished business anyway, didn’t we? She raised one carefully underplucked eyebrow, and said nothing.