He Read the List Twice, at the Table, All the Way Through

They had coffee on the fourth of April and talked for three hours, which neither of them noticed until the café started putting chairs on tables.

Roy is sixty-one, a retired quantity surveyor, widowed eleven years, with a flat eleven minutes from Fran’s house that he moved into after his wife died and has never redecorated.

He passed item one without Fran having to check, which she noticed on about the third meeting and found slightly disorienting. He talked about Marie easily and not very often, in the way you talk about a fact rather than a wound, and when he did talk about her he did it without putting Fran in the room as an audience.

Item two: two sons, one of whom he sees constantly and one of whom he does not, and about whom he gave her, unprompted, an honest and unflattering account of his own part in it.

Item three: he had more friends than she did.

Item eight: he drove at night without being asked and without mentioning it.

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She told him about the list in June.

Not as a test. She is extremely clear about that and has had to be, because people assume she produced it as a challenge.

What happened was that they were at her kitchen table on a Sunday afternoon, and he asked her a direct question — “What do you actually want out of this? Not in a heavy way. I just realised I don’t know” — and Fran discovered that she was in the unusual position of having a document.

She said, “I’ll show you, but you have to promise not to be nice about it.”

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He read it at the table, all the way through, twice.

Fran did the washing up so as not to watch him, and then ran out of washing up, and stood at the sink with her back to him for slightly too long.

He did not laugh. He did not say it was wonderful. He did not do the thing she had braced for, which was to go through it item by item reassuring her that he met the criteria.

He put it down and said: “Four is going to be a problem eventually. Not now. In about ten years.”

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“I know,” said Fran.

“I’m not going to argue with it now.”

“I know.”

“But I’m telling you now that I’m going to want to argue with it then,” said Roy, “because of nine.”

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She has said that she did not properly understand that sentence for about a year.

What he meant — and he explained it later, badly, and then again much later, well — was this.

Item nine says: someone who says what they mean the first time.

He had read the whole list and worked out that the thing on it he could not agree to indefinitely was four. And he had understood that if he simply did not mention that, and let it sit, and raised it in ten years when his knees or her hip or somebody’s stairs made it urgent, then he would be presenting her with a want that had been quietly growing for a decade, at the exact moment she was least able to think about it clearly.

Which is precisely what Gordon used to do.

So he said it in June, in a kitchen, when it did not matter at all.

“He gave me ten years’ notice,” Fran says. “Nobody had ever given me any notice of anything.”

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She asked him, that afternoon, what he would have done if she had refused to show him the list.

He said, “Nothing. It’s your list.”

“But you’d have wanted to see it.”

“Enormously,” said Roy.

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There is one more thing about that conversation, which Fran does not usually include and which she told Bridie about a fortnight later.

After he had said the thing about item nine, he picked the envelope up again and looked at the back of it, where the actual gas bill was.

And he said: “March, this. You wrote this in March.”

“Yes.”

“Fourteen months before we met.”

“Yes.”

And he put it down and said: “Good.”

Fran said, “Good?”

“You wrote it when there was nobody,” said Roy. “That’s the only time it means anything. Anybody can write a list about a person they’ve already met.”

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She has told that story at two dinner parties.

Both times, somebody has said that it sounds cold.