With the Metronome

I didn't join Cal at the depot because I was lonely. I want that on the page so nobody gets the wrong idea. I was twenty-nine that spring, working parks and rec, and my weekends had gone soft. I'd date somebody for six weeks, it would end fine, and I'd have a Sunday with nothing in it. So when Cal asked if I'd help him with paperwork for a heritage grant, I said yes mostly because I was curious about the steam engine itself. And a little curious about him. He'd got divorced at thirty-two and come out of it cheerful, which I didn't understand, and I wanted to see how a man did that.

Cal was thirty-four and lived in a row house in Oakley Rise with a garden shed full of engine parts. His back garden looked like a scrapyard had been tidied by hand. He had the last of the engine's brass fittings laid out on an old tea towel the day I first came round, and he talked about the boiler for an hour while I filled in forms. I learned that a heritage grant asks you more questions about yourself than a job application does.

The depot was a railway shed outside Ibarra, red brick with a corrugated roof, and it smelled of damp fuel and old iron. Four engines sat in there, three dead and one half alive, and that one was Cal's project. He'd been at it two years. The town festival was in September and he wanted the thing to move under its own steam by then, even just a few yards, so the whole yard could see it.

I drove out with him most Saturdays. I held things. I read things off forms while he swore at bolts. It was good work for a man with soft weekends, and I never once thought about what else the depot might hand me.

* * *

Roz arrived on a Thursday in June. I'd heard about her before I met her, the way you hear about weather coming. Cal said a friend of his was coming up from London to coach dialect for the theatre production, a midsummer thing the amateur group was putting on, and she'd need looking after because she didn't drive. He said it like a warning. He said she was forty-seven and frightfully direct and he'd known her since drama society days, and I nodded and forgot all of it by the next morning.

She came to the depot that first Saturday because Cal had promised her a look at the engine and she'd promised him she'd stay out of the way. I was sitting at the trestle table near the office door with the grant paperwork spread out, and she walked in past me without a word, went straight to the half-alive engine, put her hand flat on its running board like she was greeting a horse, and stood there a while.

Then she turned around and came back and said, "You're the one doing his homework for him, then."

"I'm Nik," I said. "Parks and rec. I do forms, not homework."

"Well. Somebody does them properly, that's the main thing." She pulled out the stool across the table and sat down, uninvited, which somehow felt like an invitation instead. She was maybe five foot four, grey coming in at her temples, and she had a way of looking at you straight on that made sitting still feel like an exam. "Roz. I'm coaching vowels at the theatre for a month. Cal says you're the useful one. He says it like it surprises him."

"Everything surprises Cal," I said, and she laughed, one short bark, and I decided I liked her inside about four seconds.

She had a metronome with her. A real one, the pyramid shape, brass wind-up, carried in a canvas bag like other people carry laptops. She set it on the table while she talked about the production. The lead actor was dropping his vowels into flat nothing, she said, and the period of the play demanded something rounder, northern but not cartoonish, and she was going to fix it by making him speak against a tick.

She wound the metronome and set it going while she explained. Tick, tick, tick, slow, about forty a minute. She spoke a line over it, then another, and the rhythm pulled her vowels long. I'll be honest with myself now, the way I wasn't then: I stopped hearing the vowels after a bit. I was watching her hands and the way she tapped one finger on the table in exact time, a half beat off the metronome on purpose, syncing and breaking and syncing again.

"Do you hear it?" she asked. "The shift. Listen to the o. O-not-O. It's not a shape thing, it's a time thing. People think accents live in the mouth. They live in the clock."

"Nobody's ever told me that," I said.

"Nobody ever tells anyone that. They all want it to be the mouth." She stopped the metronome with one finger flat on the pendulum, a clean stop, no wobble. "You're staring at my hands."

"I was watching the timing," I said, which was true, and she looked at me a second longer than comfortable, and then let it go, or filed it, I couldn't tell which.

Cal came clanking out from under the engine about then and asked her if she wanted a look inside the firebox, and she said she'd rather watch him work than watch telly, which was a lie, but a kind one. The three of us spent the afternoon there. I did the hazard section of the grant. She sat with her back against the engine's wheel and read a rehearsal script, and once, without looking up, she said, "Cal, you say depot like a man from Manchester who's given up," and Cal said, "I am a man from Manchester," and she said, "Yes, and it shows," and he laughed the way you laugh at family.

At five we locked up. The shed door needed two locks and a bar, and Cal did the bar while I did the locks. Roz stood on the gravel outside in the flat yellow light and said the engine was the best thing she'd seen all week, including the theatre, and Cal told her that was slander against her own production, and she said, "The production will survive honesty. It's built to."

Then the trouble started, the small ordinary kind. Cal's car wouldn't start. Battery, he said, dead as the third engine, and he'd have to get the bus home and come back with jumper leads tomorrow. Which left Roz with no ride and a hotel booking at the narrow hotel by the depot, the one with six rooms and a pub on the ground floor.

And then the trouble got worse in the ordinary way troubles do. Cal rang the hotel from the office landline to confirm her room and came back looking as though he had lost a football match on penalties.

"They've double-booked you," he said. "Folk festival in town. Every room's gone. They've got you down for tonight only, and someone's in it."

"Right," said Roz. She didn't raise her voice. She put one finger on the table and tapped it twice, like she was setting a tempo for her own bad news. "Well. I'll sleep in the engine, shall I. It's got a firebox."

"You'll not sleep in the engine," Cal said. "I've got a sofa but it's in Oakley Rise and I'm on the bus till morning."

I should say here that I'd been thinking, the whole last hour, about nothing in particular. So what came out of my mouth surprised me more than it surprised them. "I've got the car," I said. "And my flat's ten minutes away. There's a spare room. Well, it's a spare wall with a sofa bed against it. But it's clean."

Cal looked at me. Roz looked at me. The metronome was back in its canvas bag, but I swear I could hear it anyway, forty ticks a minute, holding the moment in time.

"That's very decent," Roz said, and her voice had gone one degree warmer, and she looked at me straight on again, the exam look. "I'll warn you now. I snore like a goods train."

"I work near a railway shed," I said. "I'll hardly notice."

So that was how it began, with a dead battery and a double booking and a sofa bed I'd bought secondhand and never once had a guest for. Cal got his bus. I drove Roz to the hotel to collect her bag, and the man behind the pub bar apologized to her twice and gave her a free packet of crisps, which she accepted like it was a knighthood.

In the car she wound down the window partway and said, "Thank you for this. And for the forms. Cal deserves that engine running."

"It's his whole face when he talks about it," I said. "You can tell."

"Yes. That's how you know about a person, isn't it. What their face does when they talk about the thing." She looked over at me at a red light. "And what does your face do?"

"Nothing yet," I said. "Still looking for the thing."

"Hm," she said, and tapped her finger on the door armrest, four slow taps, and said nothing else the rest of the way.

The sofa bed was a disaster, in the way secondhand things are. The bar of it sat across my back all night in theory, except I gave her the bed and took the sofa cushions on the floor, which she argued about for one minute and then stopped arguing when I said I'd slept on worse in a scout hut. She snored. She had not lied about it. It came through the wall at about one in the morning, a low rolling drone, and I lay there and thought, well, she said goods train, and the goods do come through at night, slow and heavy, and eventually I slept too.

In the morning she made tea in my kitchen, found the mugs by herself, and stood at the window in her nightshirt drinking it while I fried eggs. She said my kitchen was tidier than her flat in London, which she said like it was a confession. At eight I drove her to the theatre hall in town and she got out with her canvas bag and said, "Same time Thursday," which was not a question, so I said yes.

That was June. I want to be plain about what I was thinking, because I wasn't thinking anything scandalous. I was eighteen years her junior and I knew it, and she knew I knew it, and neither of us made anything of it. But the thing I noticed, driving home that morning, was that my face had done something when she said same time Thursday. It had done the thing Cal's face does about the engine. I filed that under later.

***

The next Thursday she was at the depot again, and Cal's car was fixed, and the hotel had her room back, and everything was ordinary, except that when she left she tapped my arm twice with two fingers and said, "The grant reads better. You've a plain style. It suits forms." I drove home pleased about a form. That is the sort of man I was that summer.

The trip after that was the badly booked one. Cal mentioned it at the depot on a Saturday, while we were degreasing something, and Roz was in town rehearsing. "Her company's useless," Cal said, wiping his hands on a rag that had been black since the previous century. "They've got her coming up the last four weekends of June and they've booked her rooms for two of them. Two. The woman doesn't drive. She's on trains and goodwill."

"Goodwill," I said. "That's me, is it."

"You offered once," Cal said. "You'll offer again. You're built like that, it's your trouble."

He was right, which annoyed me. And I'll admit the pull was there by then, whatever a pull is. Not lust exactly, or not only. More like the metronome. Forty ticks a minute, steady, and you find your own pulse trying to match it without deciding to. She was forty-seven and funny and she looked at you like your homework was due, and I was twenty-nine and single and my longest relationship had lasted six weeks because I get restless, and none of that added up to anything sensible. But arithmetic isn't the point of a pull.

***

A week later my phone went on a Tuesday evening. Roz.

*Nik. Theatre has lost my room again. Something about a wedding. I am stranded in a metaphor.*

I sat on my bed and typed and deleted three replies before I sent one.

*There's a single vacancy at the depot inn. Pub downstairs. Six rooms, one free. I checked last week for Cal's cousin, long story.*

*You checked rooms at a hotel for a man's cousin. What are you like.*

*Helpful.*

*The depot inn. Is it grim.*

*It's narrow and the pub does pie. I'll drive you.*

A minute passed. Then: *Saturday then. Come to the hall at six, I'll be finished rehearsing. Bring the pie enthusiasm.*

I put the phone down and looked at the ceiling and thought, this is a room with one free bed in a hotel ten minutes from my flat, and I am driving there on purpose. Then I thought about the hazard section of the grant and went to bed.

***

Saturday I picked her up outside the hall. She came out with the