A girl from Scarborough

The Photograph

In the photograph, Lana was pretending not to look at Richard.

She remembered doing it. What she had forgotten was the effort involved: the deliberate turn of her shoulders towards whoever was speaking, the glass held unnecessarily close to her mouth, the concentration required to appear interested in a conversation taking place three feet away from the person whose presence had become the principal difficulty of her evening.

Pete had sent the photograph to the group without explanation. A moment later, a second message appeared.

Found this while looking for something Emma needed. Some excellent decisions about hair.

Lana enlarged the image. They were in somebody’s garden, beneath a string of coloured lights that had done very little to illuminate anything. Tom stood at the edge of the frame with a bottle in his hand, laughing at something the camera had missed. Pete occupied rather more of the foreground than was necessary. Behind him, Richard leaned against the wall, his head turned towards Lana.

She had not known he was looking at her.

From upstairs came the sound of a drawer closing, followed by Richard’s footsteps. He had been home for barely ten minutes and was still changing out of his work clothes when she called him.

“Have you seen what Pete’s sent?”

“If it’s another photograph of the parking outside his house, remind him I no longer live there.”

“This is considerably worse.”

He appeared in the sitting-room doorway, pulling the cuff of his shirt down over his wrist. Lana was curled into the corner of the sofa with her shoes on the floor and the papers she had brought home from York abandoned beside her. Through the open window came the sound of a car passing slowly along the street, its tyres whispering over the damp road. It was the middle of September, and the evenings had begun closing in while she was still on the train.

Richard sat beside her and took the phone.

For a few seconds he said nothing. Then his expression changed.

“Oh.”

“You remember?”

“Yes.”

Lana watched him examine the photograph more closely. There was something unexpectedly affecting about seeing the younger version of him while the man himself sat close enough for his thigh to rest against hers. The years between the two had altered his face, broadened him, added lines she knew best from the way they gathered when he smiled. She could remember wanting him before she had known what it was like to be wanted by him in return, and still find herself distracted by the ordinary business of watching him roll up his sleeves.

“I thought you spent most of that evening avoiding me,” she said.

“I was making an effort.”

“At avoiding me?”

“At not making an idiot of myself in front of everyone.”

She took the phone back. “You concealed that admirably.”

“Apparently not from whoever took the photograph.”

Lana looked at it again. She remembered the garden, the damp creeping into the soles of her shoes, the way Richard had taken her empty glass without being asked and returned with another drink. They had been circling each other for weeks by then, finding reasons to stay at the end of evenings, remembering things the other had said, turning conversations that should have lasted five minutes into an hour. Whenever they found themselves alone, something in the air seemed to tighten. Then somebody would arrive, or one of them would make a joke, and they would retreat into the safety of being people who had known each other for years.

That night, she had finally run out of patience.

---

By the time they left the party, Lana had spent nearly an hour deciding she would go home without him.

She had collected her bag, said goodbye twice and reached the side gate before Richard caught up with her.

“Were you going to tell me you were leaving?”

“You were busy.”

“I was talking to Tom.”

“I noticed.”

He stood with his hand on the gate, looking at her. Behind him, somebody called for the music to be turned up, and a burst of laughter came through the open kitchen door. Lana wished she had left five minutes earlier, before he could catch her in this ridiculous mood, but now that he was there she wanted him to come with her so badly that it made her angrier.

“I can walk home on my own,” she added.

“I know. I’m coming anyway.”

Outside, away from the noise, she found herself unable to think of anything to say. Richard walked beside her with his hands in his pockets, occasionally glancing at her, while she concentrated on the pavement and tried to recover some of the ease they normally had together. She could talk to him for hours when she was not thinking about the fact that he might touch her. That evening she seemed incapable of thinking about anything else.

At the first crossing, he caught her elbow as a car turned into the road. It was a small, necessary gesture, over almost immediately, but she felt the warmth of his fingers through her sleeve. When they reached the other side, she moved a little farther from him.

“What have I done?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“You’ve barely looked at me since we left.”

Lana turned towards him. “You barely spoke to me all evening.”

“I did.”

“You asked if I wanted another drink.”

“And then you went off with everyone else.”

“Was I supposed to follow you around?”

“No. Of course not.”

They walked a few more steps. Lana could hear how childish the conversation sounded and hated that too. She had imagined telling him, sometimes with perfect composure and sometimes by kissing him before either of them could make it difficult. None of those imagined versions had involved arguing about who had spoken to whom at a party.

Beside her, Richard let out a breath.

“I kept coming over to talk to you.”

She looked at him despite herself.

“And then?”

He gave a brief, embarrassed laugh and looked down the street. “And then I couldn’t think of anything that didn’t sound stupid.”

The admission quietened her. For the rest of the walk, the distance between them seemed to narrow without either of them deliberately moving closer. Once, the backs of their hands brushed. Neither apologised.

At number seventeen, Lana stopped on the doorstep and turned towards him instead of looking for her keys. Richard stood close enough that she could see the small crease between his eyebrows, the one that appeared when he was trying to decide something. She knew his face so well by then that it was almost unbearable to find herself unable to read the one thing she needed from it.

“Are you going back?” she asked.

“To the party? No.”

“Oh.”

She could have opened the door. He could have said goodnight. Neither did.

Through the wall came the faint sound of the television, then silence. Lana glanced towards the dark sitting-room window, suddenly conscious of where they were, and when she looked back Richard was watching her mouth.

This time he did not look away quickly enough.

Her heart began beating so hard that she wondered whether he could see it.

“Richard.”

“What?”

“You can kiss me.”

He stared at her for a fraction of a second, as though he had heard something he had wanted too much to trust. Then he stepped closer, one hand rising to her face, and Lana caught his wrist before he could mistake her stillness for doubt.

Their first kiss was nothing like the tentative moment she had imagined. The instant his mouth touched hers, she moved towards him, and he drew her close with a suddenness that made her fingers tighten around his arm. There was no room left for the careful distance of the previous weeks. She could feel him trembling slightly where her hand had found his shoulder, and the discovery that he was as overwhelmed as she was made her kiss him harder.

He broke away just enough to look at her. His hand was still against her cheek, his forehead almost touching hers, and she could not have said which of them was breathing more unevenly.

“All right?” he asked.

“Yes.”

She hardly let him finish smiling before she pulled him back.

This time he followed her until her shoulders met the door. Her bag slipped down her arm and landed at their feet, forgotten as she put both hands behind his neck. He held her as though he had finally been allowed to do something he had spent weeks stopping himself from doing, and Lana felt the same urgency in herself: all those conversations during which she had watched his mouth, all those goodbyes she had prolonged in the hope that he would understand, crowded into the impossibility of getting close enough.

There was a brief, awkward collision of noses that made her laugh, and Richard laughed too, his face still against hers. The sound barely had time to escape before he kissed her again. She had never known that happiness could make her feel so unsteady.

When he finally lifted his head, she kept her hands at his neck.

“I thought you knew,” he said.

“How was I supposed to know?”

“I’m always with you.”

“You’re always with Tom as well.”

His laugh came out half strangled. “It’s different.”

“I’d noticed.”

He looked at her then with such undisguised pleasure that the weeks of uncertainty seemed suddenly absurd. Lana brushed her thumb against his cheek, wanting to remember his face exactly as it was: the embarrassment, the relief, the way he could not quite stop smiling even as he bent to kiss her again.

Above them, a window opened.

“Lana?”

They separated, though Richard’s arm remained around her for a moment before he appeared to remember where they were.

“If you’re coming in, come in,” Susan called. “Some of us have work tomorrow.”

Lana closed her eyes. Richard bent to retrieve her bag, his shoulders moving with laughter he was making a wholly inadequate attempt to suppress.

“Goodnight, Susan,” he called.

There was a pause.

“Goodnight, Richard.”

The window closed.

Lana took her bag from him, unable to decide whether she wanted to laugh or never look at her mother again.

“She’s going to be unbearable.”

“Sorry.”

“You don’t look sorry.”

“I’m not, really.”

He took her hand while she searched for her keys with the other, his fingers closing between hers. That small gesture affected her almost as much as the kisses. It assumed something neither of them had yet put into words, and when she looked up he was watching her with a seriousness that made her stop fumbling in her bag.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said.

This time, she liked the sound of it.

She found the key, opened the door and turned back to him. He kissed her once more, slowly enough that she had to make herself let go when it ended. Inside, she stood with her hand still on the latch until she heard his footsteps leave, then pressed her fingers to her mouth and discovered she was smiling.

---

On the sofa beside her, Richard shifted, bringing Lana back to the photograph in her hand and the room around them.

“Your mother knew,” he said.

“Of course she knew. I spent the following morning trying to have breakfast without looking at her.”

“She was very kind to me.”

“She asked me whether I intended to invite you in next time or keep conducting the relationship on the doorstep.”

He laughed, and Lana put the phone face down on the cushion.

For ten months, they had been learning the less dramatic parts of belonging to each other again: which silences meant tiredness, when to leave a difficult day alone, how much of the duvet each was prepared to surrender before negotiations became necessary. Richard knew which train she would try to catch when she said she was leaving the office early and which one she would actually arrive on. Lana could tell from the way he put his keys down whether work had been merely irritating or properly bad. None of that familiarity had made her indifferent to the weight of his hand when it settled on her leg.

“You really thought I knew?” she asked.

“I hoped you did. It would have saved me having to tell you.”

“You weren’t particularly helpful.”

“I was twenty-one. I didn’t have a plan.”

“You had plenty of opportunities.”

Richard turned towards her, his smile changing as he saw her expression.

“I’m beginning to think you’re still annoyed about it.”

“A little.”

She kissed him before he could answer, her hand finding the back of his neck with an ease that made the memory feel briefly close enough to touch. He shifted towards her, drawing her nearer, and the papers beside her slid unnoticed to the floor.

When they eventually separated, Richard glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece.

“We’re supposed to be at The Ship in twenty minutes.”

“It doesn’t take twenty minutes to walk there.”

“No,” he agreed, making no attempt to move.

Lana smiled and kissed him again. His hand slid into her hair, holding her close while she settled against him, and for several minutes the arrangement they had made with their friends seemed a poor reason to leave the house.

Her phone began to vibrate beneath her elbow.

Richard reached for it and looked at the screen.

“Your sister.”

“Don’t answer.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

He put it on the table, beyond her reach, but Lana was already laughing.

“She’ll come down here if I don’t.”

“Then we should lock the door.”

“She still has a key.”

He looked towards the hallway with the resignation of a man discovering a flaw in an otherwise reasonable plan. Lana touched his cheek before getting up, then bent to collect the papers from the floor.

“Tomorrow morning,” she said.

Richard caught her hand as she passed.

“I’ll hold you to that.”