Violet

The corridor at Bramhall Heath Nursery always smelt of poster paint and damp coats by ten to four. Violet had stopped noticing it years ago, except on days like this, when a child had upended a pot of glitter and the stuff had travelled farther than any four-year-old should have been able to manage.

“Miss Ashby.” Theo planted himself in front of her as if he intended to remain there until Christmas. His mother, behind him, gave Violet the look of a woman who had already tried. “You have to see the dragon.”

It was, in fairness, a very committed dragon. Red paint, a great deal of sellotape, and one eye significantly higher than the other.

“It’s magnificent,” Violet said. “Does it breathe fire?”

Theo considered this with the seriousness the question deserved. “Only at tea.”

She crouched to admire it properly, which was when she felt the glitter grind into her knee. Her chestnut hair had come loose from its clip some time after lunch and she had not had a free hand since. Collection always went like this: a missing glove, a parent with a question that could not wait until tomorrow, somebody’s little brother who was not meant to be in the building at all.

Maisie’s glove turned up in the sand tray. Tom’s father wanted to know whether Friday’s charity walk was still going ahead if it rained. Violet said it was, because if they cancelled every time Cheshire threatened weather they would never leave the classroom.

She was tired. She was also, in the particular way of a day that had been loud and useful, content. Parents knew her. Children claimed her. She had taught half the corridor and had been at the other half’s birthday parties. That was the size of Bramhall Heath, and she liked it.

The last of the coats were coming off the pegs when a tall figure filled the doorway at the end of the corridor, and Violet’s face did what it always did when she saw him.

“Ronan.”

He was in a dark suit that had no business being anywhere near poster paint. Shaved head, height easily six-foot-three, the look of a man who had come from a meeting and had another waiting. Helen Walsh was already moving towards him with her professional smile, the one she kept for governors and people who wrote cheques.

“Mr Bannister. Thank you for coming in.”

“Helen.” He shook her hand. “I won’t keep you long.”

Bannister Carpeting International had paid for the new outdoor play equipment, and there was to be a small official opening the following week, photographs for the local paper, a ribbon the children would be allowed to ruin. Helen spoke to him as the town spoke to him: warmly, and with the faint extra care reserved for the man whose name was on half the employment contracts in Bramhall Heath.

Violet waited until they had finished the practicalities. Ronan listened, asked two sensible questions about the photographer and the weather, and then his attention drifted, almost idly, to the drying rack by the window.

She came up beside him.

“Don’t criticise. That’s a dragon.”

“I wasn’t going to criticise.”

“You had your quality-control face on.”

“I have no idea what that means.”

“My mother does.”

His mouth moved, not quite a smile. “Then I shall endeavour to look less like a finishing inspector.”

“Too late. Theo will be crushed.”

Ronan regarded the dragon with grave attention. “Tell Theo I think it’s a very fine beast.”

“I’ll pass it on. He’ll want that in writing.”

Helen had been claimed by a parent. The corridor was thinning. Violet hooked her bag over her shoulder and felt the ache in her feet all at once.

“I need to get over to Bannister’s,” she said. “Mum’s finishing late. I said I’d meet her.”

“I can take you.”

“Can you? I thought you were—”

“I was. Now I’m going back to the factory. It’s on my way.”

She did not hesitate. There was nothing to hesitate about. She said goodbye to Helen, promised Theo she would see the dragon again on Monday if it survived the weekend, and followed Ronan out to the car park.

His car was parked with the neatness of a man who did these things without thinking about them. She opened the passenger door herself, dropped into the seat, and only then realised how glad she was to be off her feet.

Ronan got in, reached into the compartment between them, and held out a small cold bottle of sparkling water without looking at it.

“Yes, please.”

She took it, twisted the cap and settled back. The first mouthful was perfect. It always was. She had stopped noticing that too.

“Long day?” he said, pulling out of the car park.

“The sort that starts at seven and then someone puts glitter in the sand. You?”

“A supplier who believes time is a flexible concept, and a conference call that could have been an email. I survived both.”

“The Brussels one? You were dreading that yesterday.”

“The Brussels one.” He glanced at her, surprised into something warmer. “You remembered.”

“You complained for twenty minutes. It would have been difficult to forget.”

She told him about Theo’s dragon, and about the father who had asked whether rain cancelled walking, and about the little girl who had announced, with great dignity, that she would not be putting her coat on because coats were for people who were cold and she was a penguin. Ronan remembered the penguin’s name from last month. He asked whether Maisie’s other glove had ever come home. Violet said it had not, and that she had begun to suspect the sand tray of eating knitwear.

“And you?” she said. “Is the Singapore order still behaving?”

“More or less. Your mother will tell me if it isn’t.”

“She will. She lives for the opportunity.”

He drove the way he always drove with her in the car: unhurried, competent, the radio low enough that they could talk over it. Violet watched Bramhall Heath slide past the window, the row of shops, the green, the turning that led down towards the factory, and felt the day begin to loosen its grip.

“What are you and Jacob doing this weekend?” Ronan asked.

“That was going to be a long walk and a terrible film. It’s become a suitcase and a timetable. He’s got an interview.”

“Has he?”

“Edinburgh.”

Ronan was quiet for the length of a junction. “That’s rather a long way to go for an interview.”

“It’s rather a good job.”

She explained it as Jacob had explained it to her, over toast, two nights ago. He had not applied. Someone had approached him after a conversation at a conference he had only attended because his current company had a spare ticket. There had been a call. Then another. Now they wanted him in Edinburgh properly, in a room, to talk about a role that was not a sideways step but the thing he had thought he might reach in two or three years’ time.

“Would he move?” Ronan asked. “If he got it.”

“I think he probably would.” She turned the bottle in her hands. “It’s that sort of job. He’d be mad not to think about it.”

“And what would you do?”

Violet laughed. “He’s not even got the job yet.”

“That isn’t what I asked.”

She looked at the passing hedges. She had not, until that moment, let the question sit still long enough to have a shape.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t... I haven’t really got that far.”

Ronan’s voice stayed easy. “Bramhall Heath wouldn’t be the same without you.”

It landed where she thought he had meant it to. She was touched, not troubled.

“You’d cope.”

“I’d endeavour to.”

She drank her water. The conversation moved, as their conversations did, to whether Helen would let the children cut the ribbon themselves and to a dinner Ronan was expected to attend when he would rather have eaten in his kitchen. By the time the factory chimneys showed above the trees, Edinburgh had become only one of the things they had talked about.

Bannister Carpeting International occupied the long brick buildings on the south side of town as if it had always been there. In a sense it had. Violet had been coming through these gates since she was small enough to hold Barbara’s hand and be told not to touch the rolls. The signage had grown smarter. The lorries had started carrying names she did not recognise to places she had only seen on maps. The smell, when the loading doors were open, was still wool and dye and the faint mineral dust of new carpet.

She knew her way. That was the point of it. This was not a factory she visited. It was the place her mother worked, and the place Ronan’s name had settled over the town like weather.

They walked in together. A woman from reception said, “Afternoon, Mr Bannister.” A man in a high-vis waistcoat nodded and called him the same. Ronan answered both by name. Violet watched the small adjustment people made for him, the straightened shoulder, the quicker step, and felt the usual private amusement. Twenty minutes ago he had been standing in a nursery corridor being told not to criticise a dragon.

Darren from dispatch caught them on the way through and needed a signature on something that would not wait until morning. Ronan read it, asked one question, signed. Violet waited by a stack of wrapped samples and did not mind. This was him, too: not a man playing at being important, just a man who was.

“Sorry,” he said when Darren had gone.

“Don’t be. I’d only have used the time to steal more of your water.”

“There’s more in the car.”

“I know. That’s what I was counting on.”

Barbara was at the far end of the finishing floor, where the light was better. She had a runner unrolled across the inspection table and her white hair was pinned up in the way that meant she had been at it since early and had not stopped to redo it. She did not look fifty-one. She looked like a woman who had spent a lifetime finding faults other people missed.

“There you are,” she said, without turning. “Ronan, come and look at this before I start a war.”

Violet came anyway, because she always did. The runner was beautiful. Deep green, a border of something that might have been ivy if ivy had been designed by somebody expensive. She could not see anything wrong with it.

Ronan could, once Barbara put her finger on the edge.

“The binding,” he said.

“The binding,” Barbara agreed. “It’s irregular through the last two feet. It’ll pull. I’m not sending it like that.”

“No.” No pause. No glance at the cost. “It isn’t leaving.”

Violet looked between them. “I thought it was perfect.”

“That’s because you work with people who eat glue,” Barbara said. “Ronan?”

“She’s right.”

“I usually am.”

He almost smiled. “I wouldn’t put that on the website.”

“You put my name on the inspection reports. That’s worse.”

Violet leant her hip against the table. “Are you two going to stand here insulting each other, or can I tell you that I’ve been on my feet since seven and nobody has offered me a chair?”

“There’s a chair,” Ronan said.

“It’s full of samples.”

“Then I’ll move the samples.”

“Don’t you dare. Mum will only rearrange them.”

Barbara gave her a look that was fond and unimpressed in equal measure. “You can sit on the table if you must. Not on the runner.”

“I know the rules.”

“You invented half of them, standing here after school with your feet swinging.” Barbara finally looked at her properly, then at the glitter on her cardigan, and then at Ronan. “She’s been glittering at you, has she?”

“I have been glittering at nobody,” Violet said. “The glitter and I merely share a workplace.”

“That was a dragon, I understand,” Ronan said.

Barbara’s mouth twitched. “Of course it was.”

The rhythm of it was old. Barbara teased him about the new coffee machine on the first floor, which he still refused to treat as anything other than an enemy. Violet sided with her mother, then changed sides the moment Barbara looked too satisfied. Ronan accused them both of running a closed shop. Barbara reminded him that she had been finding faults in his carpets when the export list still fitted on one sheet of paper. He said that was why he kept her. They laughed, and the runner stayed on the table, condemned and magnificent, and for a little while the factory was only the place where the three of them had always known how to stand.

“Jacob’s got an interview,” Violet said, because it was the other thing she had been carrying.

Barbara’s head came up. “Edinburgh?”

Violet stared at her. “How did you—”

“Ronan has a face. And you’ve got that look you get when you’re about to pretend something isn’t a bigger deal than it is.” Barbara folded her arms. “Edinburgh?”

“Everybody keeps saying it as if he’s announced he’s emigrating to Australia.”

“It’s Scotland, Violet. It isn’t the next village.”

“It’s a job. A good one. They approached him.”

“And if he gets it?”

“I don’t know.”

Barbara looked at her the way she had looked at the binding. “Yes, you do.”

Violet picked a loose thread from her sleeve. “I’d consider it. Going with him. If it came to that. I’d at least consider it.”

Saying it aloud made it real in a way the car had not. She felt it settle.

Barbara’s face did what Violet had known it would do: a flicker of something she would not ask her daughter to carry, and then the practical kindness that had always followed it.

“If it’s extraordinary,” Barbara said, “you think about it properly. You don’t stay here because I like having you for Sunday lunch.”

“I like Sunday lunch.”

“So do I. That isn’t the same thing.”

Ronan had been quiet. When he spoke, it was the same voice he had used in the car.

“She’s right,” he said. “You should think about it. If he gets it.”

Violet smiled at him, grateful without examining the gratitude. “See? Even Ronan is being adult about it.”

“I have my moments.”

“Don’t spoil it.”

They might have stayed like that longer if the door at the end of the floor had not opened.

Jacob came in with his helmet still in one hand and his hair flattened from the ride over. Blond, burnt a little across the nose even now, at the end of a working day, as if the weather kept finding him. He looked, as he always looked to Violet, like somebody who had taken a wrong turn on the way to the sea and had decided to stay anyway.

She was pleased to see him. It rose in her without effort.

“Hi,” he said, and then, seeing the other two, “Sorry, am I late, or early?”

“Both,” Barbara said. “Come here.”

Violet kissed him. He put his arm around her waist as if it belonged there, which it did, and she smelt the outside on him, oil and cold air and the faint rubber of the bike.

“Ronan.” Jacob held out his free hand. “All right?”

“All right.” Ronan shook it. “I hear congratulations may be in order.”

“Not yet. Interview.” Jacob grinned, a little helplessly. “They’ve booked the train and a hotel. Overnight. Which I think means they’re not just being polite.”

Violet felt it go through her, pride first, bright and uncomplicated. “That’s brilliant.”

“It is,” Ronan said. “Congratulations.”

Jacob ducked his head as if praise were a weather he had not dressed for. He talked about the role the way he talked about long rides: the shape of it, not the machinery. More responsibility. A team of his own. The sort of money that would make the rented house look different. Edinburgh, he said, as if he were still getting used to the word in his own mouth.

“Would you actually go?” Barbara asked. “If they offered.”

Jacob’s hand tightened slightly at Violet’s waist. “I’d have to talk to Violet. I’m not dragging anyone north because a job looks good on paper.”

“That’s not an answer,” Barbara said.

“It’s the only honest one I’ve got.”

Violet looked up at him. “You’d be mad not to want it.”

“Wanting it and taking it aren’t the same thing.”

Ronan said nothing to that. He did not need to. The four of them stood in the good light over the condemned runner, and for a moment Bramhall Heath held all of them at once.

Barbara glanced at the clock. “I’m done after this. If nobody has a better idea, the Heath Arms will still be serving.”

“I haven’t eaten,” Violet said, and heard how true it was only once the words were out.

Ronan was already moving. “Then we should go before you start eating the samples.”

“They’re wool.”

“I have seen you hungrier.”

The Heath Arms was half full and ordinary, which was what they needed. They took a table near the window. Ronan went to the bar. Jacob hung his helmet off the back of a chair and told Barbara about the hotel, which was nicer than anything he would have booked himself. Violet sat with her shoulder against his and felt the day finally putting itself down.

When Ronan came back he had remembered that she liked the crisps that were not the ones everybody else liked, that Barbara drank bitter, and that Jacob would want water before he wanted beer because he had cycled. He set the glasses down as if carrying four people’s preferences were simply a thing he knew how to do.

Violet took the packet he passed her without looking at it.

“You’re cold,” he said.

She had not noticed. The door kept opening. The evening had come in while they were still talking about trains.

He had already taken off his jacket. He put it round her shoulders, and she put her arms into it because that was what she did, and the sleeves came down over her hands the way they always did. She was five foot two. He was not. The jacket smelt of his soap and the factory and the inside of his car.

“You’ll get it back,” she said.

“I know where you live.”

Jacob smiled into his glass. “He does, you know. It’s unnerving.”

“It’s Bramhall Heath,” Violet said. “Everybody knows where everybody lives.”

They talked. Nothing in it would have looked like anything from the outside. Barbara told a story about a buyer in Hamburg. Jacob described the hill he had come down too fast on Sunday. Ronan asked whether the nursery opening was going to involve speeches and looked faintly pained when Violet said Helen would like him to say a few words. Violet ate her crisps and drank Jacob’s water when he was not looking and let Ronan’s jacket make her warm.

She loved them. That was the simple fact of the evening, too obvious to need examining. She loved her mother. She loved Jacob. She loved Ronan, who had driven her from the nursery and remembered the crisps and was, at present, arguing mildly with Barbara about whether the coffee machine had been an improvement or an act of war.

They were not the same love. She knew that without having to name it.

Barbara left first, with a kiss to Violet’s hair and a warning that Sunday lunch was still happening whether Edinburgh existed or not. Ronan stayed until Violet had finished eating.

Outside, the car park was going blue.

“See you later in the week?” Violet said.

“I’m sure you will.”

“Try not to run the entire global carpet industry into the ground before then.”

“I’ll do my best.”

Jacob had the bike to deal with. They had already decided he would ride and she would walk the short way to his; it was closer from here than her mother’s, and she had a key. She looked back once, because she did look back, and saw Ronan standing by his car.

He lifted a hand.

She waved.

Then Jacob said her name, and she turned, and that was that.

They ate pasta because there was pasta, and because neither of them had the energy for anything that required a recipe. Jacob’s house, theirs most nights, in all the ways that mattered, was the usual comfortable mess of cycling kit and her cardigans and a plant she kept forgetting to move out of the draught. He talked about the interview properly once the plates were down. The team. The building. The fact that the salary made him slightly embarrassed.

“I’m not taking a job in Edinburgh and just expecting you to pack your life into boxes,” he said.

“I know.”

“If you absolutely didn’t want to leave Bramhall Heath, that would matter. There will be other jobs.”

She believed him. That was one of the reasons she was sitting there.

Violet turned her fork. “What’s it like? To live in.”

Jacob looked at her.

“Edinburgh,” she said. “I’ve been looking. Not deciding. Looking. Nurseries. Early years posts. What we could afford. How long the train takes if I wanted to come home on a Friday.”

He set his glass down.

“You’d really consider coming?”

She thought of Barbara’s kitchen on a Sunday. The corridor at the nursery, and Theo’s dragon, and Helen’s lists. Her friends. The particular way Bramhall Heath held a person if you had been born to it.

She thought of Ronan, holding out a cold bottle without looking, as if the gesture had always belonged to them.

Leaving would be enormous.

Then she looked at Jacob, who had not assumed, and who would have turned the thing down if she had asked him to, and who was watching her as if the answer mattered more than the job.

“Who said I wouldn’t want to go?” she said.