Hold

by Kirsten Tranter

  He glanced up when I set my shopping bags on the floor next to the counter. ‘The sofa?’

  ‘Can you tell me how much it is?’

  He frowned. ‘There should be a price on it.’

  ‘I didn’t see one.’

  We went back to the sofa, side by side. He let me walk ahead when the pathway between the pieces of furniture became too crowded. He examined the sofa when we came to it, looking for a tag.

  He stood up and gave an irritated sigh. ‘Sorry, I can’t see a price.’

  ‘Can you give me a rough idea?’ The thought that I wouldn’t be able to buy the sofa now, on the spot, was suddenly, unreasonably worrying. I felt horribly severed from it, where a moment before I had imagined myself joined to the thing. Not joined to it, exactly. In possession of it, or on the verge of possession. The feeling wasn’t one that I had towards objects very often. I’d felt it with the house, I remembered, in a fleeting sort of way, and with some shoes I had become obsessed with years before, so beautiful and impossibly expensive I could barely bring myself to try them on, let alone buy them. It was the feeling of wanting to own something completely. I associated it with the initial phase of falling in love, the mad covetous joy of desire.

  He looked at me for a long few seconds, and I had the sense that he was evaluating me with the same expression he might have turned on the sofa at that moment if he had been trying to judge its price. ‘It’s hard to say,’ he told me. ‘I’ll have to ask.’

  ‘I’m very interested,’ I said.

  He nodded. I wondered whether there was an inventory of stock and prices on the laptop, or in one of the ledgers on the overcrowded counter, but the place didn’t seem quite that organised. I pulled a card from my wallet and gave it to him. He inspected the card with the same appraising glance he had just given me. His hands were long, with slim fingers, altogether different from Conrad’s. But they were nice hands, callused and elegant at the same time. I asked him to call me when the manager had returned, when they could tell me how much the sofa cost.

  ‘So you’ll hold it for me?’

  He looked around and grabbed a roll of masking tape from the top of a cabinet nearby, and then frowned. ‘Do you have a pen?’

  I shook my head. ‘There’s one,’ I said, seeing the lid of a ballpoint pen poking out of his shirt pocket.

  He smiled. ‘Thanks.’

  I watched him write HOLD on the tape in confident capitals. He tore it off and stuck it to the back of the sofa, and straightened up with a flourish that looked like a barely restrained bow. ‘All yours,’ he said.

  I looked down at the sofa and wondered how he saw it. Its beauty seemed so objective and true, but in a surprising kind of way. I wasn’t sure whether it would be apparent to him, or how he would judge my taste. There was something excessive and quaint about the thing: too long and yet oddly shortened, so defiantly red and plush, with that overtly sensuous curve to the arm. Its tapered legs had a classical elegance that reminded me of a woman’s slim ankle. It belonged in the room; it would stake out my claim to the space.

  David would hate it but he would never have to see it. I had given in to all his modernist neutral palette wishes with the rest of the house, hadn’t I? The room was mine, and I wanted to keep its dark floors and richly coloured finishes.

  ‘Dinner party?’ he asked, indicating my bags. Bunches of mint and basil, starting to wilt, spilled over the sides.

  ‘No.’ I smiled. ‘Home alone.’

  ‘That’s a shame,’ he said.

  This is when you say your partner’s away, I thought, but I remembered the shadow behind David’s smile that morning, and didn’t say it.

  I had bought too much food. For a moment I wanted to invite him over to help me eat it. Then I thought about the combination of things in the bags and realised that the bits and pieces didn’t add up to any kind of coordinated meal that could be impressively presented to a guest. But that is not the problem with the idea, I reminded myself. That is the least of the problems with it.

  He wore a plaid flannel shirt in shades of red and black, the kind that used to be cheap at Target, and probably still was, but had also come into fashion recently, with expensive versions for sale at the designer clothing stores that lined Oxford Street. It was hard to tell which kind he was wearing, the Target or the upscale version. Conrad had owned one very much the same, with a tear down one sleeve that eventually ripped completely through to the shoulder. The top button was undone and I realised that I was staring at the exposed skin on his chest.

  ‘Can you deliver it?’ I asked hastily, feeling my face begin to burn. ‘Once I’ve bought it, I mean.’

  ‘No problem,’ he said, and tucked my card into his shirt pocket.

  *

  When the phone rang that night I was halfway through watching an old movie on TV, curled up on the beige couch with the intractable stain. I wasn’t thinking about the sofa or the room; it was around the time I had expected David to call, and I answered sleepily, about to yawn.

  ‘It’s Kieran, from Oxford Antiques,’ he said.

  I sat up sharply, trying not to spill my wine. He told me the price of the sofa, and I bought it from him over the phone with my credit card, doing a quick mental calculation of how many hours of work it would take to cover the cost. It came to about half the anatomy book.

  ‘When can you bring it?’ I asked. It would be delivered the following afternoon, he told me, and checked the address. On screen, Humphrey Bogart kissed a woman hard on the lips. I waited for the camera to pan out and show them together on a sofa, but the next shot reminded me that they were in a car, with rain streaming down the windows, and gleaming leather upholstery inside.

  Three

  When the doorbell rang the next afternoon it startled me. I had been distracted all morning, unsettled by anticipation, and had eventually forced myself to sit at my desk and immerse myself in trying to finish a section of the book. The vessels of the blood. I was staring at different combinations of colour swatches on screen, variations of ruby red and emerald green, when I heard the door. It took a second to register. Then I remembered, and almost slipped on the stairs on the way down.

  ‘Delivery?’ said the man at the door. ‘A sofa?’ He was short and heavily muscled, his dark face obscured by the shade of a baseball cap.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and looked over his shoulder to see if Kieran was behind him somewhere, unlocking the truck or van perhaps. There was a yellow station wagon double parked just down the street from the house, its engine running. That could be him at the wheel. The sun glinted off the windows, making it difficult to see inside.

  ‘Where’s it going?’ the man asked.

  ‘Upstairs,’ I told him. He walked out to the street, and rapped on the window of the station wagon. There was a quick exchange with the driver and the engine switched off.

  I went to the gate and glanced up and down the street to see whether there were any parking spaces, but the whole block was jammed with cars. It was Saturday afternoon, the neighbourhood filled with visitors to the markets and Oxford Street shops. A car drove by, a four-wheel drive with a Porsche logo, and honked.

  And then Kieran was there, walking backwards, holding one end of the sofa, and I moved out of the way. ‘Upstairs?’ he asked, his voice tight with exertion.

  ‘I’ll show you,’ I said, and followed them inside. Watching them manoeuvre the sofa into the house I was struck by the size of it. It was larger than I remembered, and I wondered whether it would go through the door to the little room, and whether it would fit in the space as I had imagined it.

  They stopped at the foot of the stairs. ‘This way,’ I told them, ‘it’s a spare room, off the bedroom.’ I went up. The door had stuck, earlier, when I had gone in, just after waking, to reassure myself that the space was real and to plan where the sofa would go. It had taken a hard couple of shoves to get it open, and there was a moment when I had thought about what David had said about the screwdriver and how it
might possibly be used to lever open the door somehow.

  It opened easily enough now, but kept swinging shut. I went to the bedroom door and saw Kieran’s back as he made his way up the stairs. He was wearing a different plaid shirt today. It strained across his shoulders as he took the last step onto the landing.

  ‘Through here,’ I told them. ‘It’s a bit of an odd space — you’ll see. It’s through the closet, just as you come in.’

  I stepped into the room and held the door open. The two men paused once they were inside the bedroom, and I could hear them grappling, shifting the thing between them as they worked out the angles.

  ‘In here,’ I called. Kieran backed in, followed by the guy in the baseball cap. They set the sofa down. Kieran straightened up and put his hands on his hips. ‘Where do you want it?’

  The other guy looked back at the door they’d just come through, and glanced around. I felt aware again of the oddness of the space. How empty it seemed, more than ever now that the bulky sofa was here. I felt as though I ought to explain the room, what it was doing there through the closet, but I couldn’t think of what to say. I couldn’t explain the weird design of the rooms.

  ‘Shelley?’ Kieran said. How did he know my name, I wondered. I had never told him. Then I remembered the card I had given him, and tried to remember whether he’d said my name when he had phoned the night before. Maybe he had, but it hadn’t sounded like that, the way it sounded now in the room.

  ‘I’d like it facing the window — not quite against the wall, more towards the centre of the room.’ I had pictured myself on the sofa reading a book, glancing up to look out the window now and again. In this image the window was open, though it had remained stubbornly closed when I had tried it again that morning.

  They shuffled it around, trying to find a spot where the door wouldn’t bang into it and it wouldn’t feel too squashed into the corner. It was surprisingly difficult to place it in a way that felt right.

  ‘Just a little to the left,’ I said, looking at the sofa, and across to the door, and the wall, trying to decide. They shifted it and set it down. Kieran came and stood beside me, his eyes travelling the same path mine just had. My arms and the side of my body nearest to him felt strangely warm, as though he was radiating heat. He probably was; there was a glow of sweat on his forehead. Stop looking, I told myself.

  ‘Okay?’ he asked. The other guy checked his watch.

  ‘I’m sorry for keeping you so long — thank you so much,’ I said.

  ‘No, no hurry.’

  ‘It’s perfect — it’s fine. Thanks. I can shift it myself if I change my mind.’

  ‘Careful. It’s much heavier than it looks.’ He looked me over, as though assessing my potential strength. I folded my arms, aware of my own slightness in comparison with the two men. Kieran was less muscled than the other guy; he had breathed harder and exerted more effort lifting the sofa.

  ‘I’m happy with it there, anyway, for now.’

  The other guy stepped over to the door. ‘You want to get this handle fixed,’ he said.

  ‘I know, yes. I only worked out the room was here a few days ago. I haven’t got around to it.’

  He shrugged and left, taking the stairs quickly.

  ‘Let me know if you need help with that door handle,’ Kieran said.

  I waited for him to leave. Seconds passed and I felt my throat tighten. The room had seemed so small a few minutes earlier; it somehow felt larger now that the sofa was in the right place and we were standing so close together. I wondered whether the delivery guy was back in the car yet, whether the other cars driving by were still honking at it. I looked at Kieran, expecting to meet his eye, but he was gazing at the sofa. The echoes of Conrad were still there today, and I let myself see them fully, instead of flinching away as I had yesterday.

  ‘It suits the room,’ he said. It did, he was right. I felt a rush of happiness then, at finding the sofa as beautiful as I had remembered. The red velvet glowed against the coloured wallpaper and made it look more elegant. There was a patch of wallpaper in one of the corners that had started to curl at the edges. I had noticed it that morning and considered doing away with all of the paper, stripping it back and painting the walls. I changed my mind, seeing the room with the sofa in it. The corner could be glued back down.

  A buzzing noise interrupted my thoughts. Kieran reached into his pocket and answered the phone.

  ‘Yep. No worries. Yep. Thanks, mate.’ He pocketed the phone and smiled at me. I wondered whether the call had been from the other guy, and whether he was still waiting. Kieran didn’t seem in any rush to leave. I didn’t want him to go. I wondered how transparent that was. The burning sensation on the side of my arms grew stronger. He was younger than me, I was sure of it. I forced my hands into my pockets, fighting the urge to bite my nails. I had forced myself to not think carefully about what I wore, choosing jeans and an old T-shirt that had been worn thin by too many rounds in the washing machine.

  ‘Big Saturday night planned?’ he asked. Just like the day before, when he had asked about my plans, I had the sense that he was performing a reflexive type of flirtation, part of a routine. It was what you asked the customers, it was nothing personal. Then he swallowed, and looked away when I didn’t answer immediately, and I wasn’t sure.

  I shook my head. ‘No, home alone again. My partner’s away. He’s in Melbourne.’

  He glanced at me, his mouth opening to speak, and then his phone buzzed again. ‘Sorry,’ he said, and took it out, swiping his thumb across the screen.

  ‘No, go ahead.’ I stepped over to the sofa and touched the arm, the plush curve of it. The velvet had a satisfying texture, smooth without being slippery, and then rougher when the nap of the fabric was stroked back the other way. I sat down and laid my arm on the place my hand had just been resting. The transaction of purchase was complete: it belonged to me now.

  I watched Kieran finish typing a response to the message on his phone. He replaced it in his pocket and put his hands on his hips, in the way he had when he’d put down the sofa earlier. I drew my bare feet up off the floor and the velvet was rough and smooth at once against my soles.

  ‘What about you?’ I asked.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Your big weekend.’

  ‘Nothing major. Going out later.’

  He took a step towards the sofa and stopped, and ran his fingers across the upholstery close to where my hand rested. I almost moved, as his fingers came closer, and it seemed as though they were about to brush against my hand. It felt like a test in some way, to see whether I would move or not. I stood up, suddenly tired of the flirting and ambiguity.

  ‘I’ll see you out.’ I held open the door and he walked through it.

  We chatted on the way downstairs about what other furniture might go in the room. If I was looking for a small desk he might have something at the shop, he said, and a lamp to go with it; and he could definitely find a match for those missing drops on the chandelier. He didn’t ask about the room, the oddness of its position there through the closet. Part of me was glad to do without the Narnia jokes, the predictable questions about it. But I wished for them as well — I wasn’t sure what to say about the room or how to articulate my pleasure in having discovered it, but I wanted to try. As we walked along the hallway I thought about asking him to stay for a drink, and telling him about the room as we worked our way through a bottle of wine. We could drink it sitting on the sofa. As soon as I pictured this I pushed it from my mind — it was too nakedly erotic, too obviously a prelude to seduction.

  We stopped at the front door and I saw Kieran inspect a framed photo hanging on the wall. It was me and David, together in Paris, a trip we had taken in our first year together. A month or two after my discovery of the pearl earrings. David had been invited to give a keynote at a symposium in France, some gathering of historians, and he had taken me along. We were standing at the window in our hotel room, the unmistakeable city skyline beyond, sno
w on the balcony and the rooftops in the distance.

  Kieran looked at me, questioning.

  ‘That’s David,’ I said.

  ‘You’re married to him?’

  ‘We’re not married,’ I said. ‘We own the house though. We own it together.’ David and I didn’t talk about marriage. I had waited for him to bring it up, especially after he’d invited me to buy the house with him, but he hadn’t. I understood, and I never pushed it. It didn’t matter. His divorce had been so bitter, and buying the house together had seemed like an equivalent, modern form of commitment.

  ‘I saw that series he did, the one on the ABC,’ Kieran said. I nodded. ‘He was one of my teachers, at uni,’ he told me. ‘We all loved him.’ He looked at me and I saw that appraising expression in his eyes again, the sense that he was adjusting his evaluation of me with this new information. I wondered whether it made me more valuable, or less, and rejected the thought. Why would I care? Even so, it was hard not to feel the loneliness that came over me as I saw myself for a moment as I imagined I appeared to him: a woman alone in a big house, someone’s wife, or something like it, spending money on frivolous antiques.

  He reached for the door and undid the latch, pulling it open, a proprietary gesture that surprised me. The noise of the street met us with the warm hum of Saturday afternoon traffic. A group of young women in party dresses and high heels walked by the house, passing a bottle of champagne between them, arguing about which bar they were headed for, and which one they had visited last week that had been full of hot men. One said it was the other direction, and another one said that she had been too pissed to remember.

  Kieran shook his head in mock horror, smiling. I smiled too, and something relaxed between us. There was no sign of the yellow station wagon. ‘Are you okay without a car?’ I asked.

  ‘No worries, I’m done with work for the day.’

  I thanked him again. There was something achingly boyish in the way he said goodbye, and shrugged and put his hands in his pockets. By the time he reached the gate he’d taken out his phone once more, and I watched him read the screen with a sober face and walk away in the same direction as the women.