Chapter 3
Chapter 3: Eli
[Eli's perspective]
The WhatsApp notification came in at 11:43 PM on a Tuesday, which was already a bad sign. Nothing good arrives at 11:43 PM on a Tuesday. Good things arrive at reasonable hours — daytime hours, morning hours, the kind of time when you're in a state to receive information and form a proportionate response to it. 11:43 PM on a Tuesday is the time slot reserved for fire alarms, texts from your mother that begin "don't panic, but—", and his cousin Clara.
He read it twice before accepting it was real.
🎉🎉🎉 EVERYONE OUR ELI IS MOVING BACK TO LONDON FOR GOOD!!! he told us at dinner he's STAYING this time, he finally came to his senses, let's all make him feel so welcome he never leaves again, I literally cried in the car home 🥹🥹 love you Eli!! mwah
Forty-seven people were in this group. Eli knew this because he'd counted them once during a particularly long thread about his aunt's new kitchen, which had progressed from exciting news to thirty-one opinions on the merits of various worktop materials in the space of four hours, and he'd never quite felt the same about family gatherings since.
He put his phone face-down on the bedside table. He looked at the ceiling. He picked his phone back up and read it a third time.
By 7 AM the following morning: sixteen replies, three voice notes, one aunt who had reorganised the spare room and sent a photo of the reorganised spare room with the caption ready for you Eli! 🏠, two text messages from cousins expressing various forms of delight, and a text from Faye that said simply hey you, which was a small, self-contained disaster he'd need to deal with separately and with care.
He rang Rafi from the coffee shop at half eight.
He'd found the coffee shop three days ago, on a walk that had started as a route to Clerkenwell and become, through a series of street-level decisions, a longer route through Bloomsbury. Lamb's Conduit Street had the particular quality of a London street that had not been fully ruined — the independent shops still there, the pavements not given over entirely to café furniture, the buildings a consistent Victorian stock brick that he found structurally satisfying. He'd stopped at Anchor Coffee because it had no visible background music and a barista who made the coffee properly, in the right sequence, without attempting conversation.
He rang Rafi from outside, standing on the pavement until a man with an Alsatian of architectural scale moved him toward a table inside, because he needed to move while he thought and the pavement wasn't sufficient.
"Clara," he said, by way of explanation, when Rafi picked up.
"I saw," Rafi said. "She used three 🥹 emojis. I didn't know there were three different intensities of that face."
"I said I was thinking about it. At dinner. 'I'm thinking about it.' How does 'I'm thinking about it' become 'moving back for good, please reorganise the spare room'?"
"Because you said it at a family dinner," Rafi said, "and Clara was there. Eli, that's the same as telling a very excitable dog you're thinking about a walk. The gap between the thinking and the walk is a you problem."
This was, Eli had to admit, a fair point. Clara's relationship with information was exuberant and forward-moving. You put something in and it came out amplified, warm, and addressed to forty-seven people. He had known this since they were children. He had said a thing at a family dinner anyway.
The problem was that he genuinely didn't know. He'd come back to London eight months ago to deal with his father's estate, which his solicitor had described as "straightforward, once you've made a few decisions." Eight months later the estate remained open, the firm — Beckett & Associates, a small architectural engineering practice on Britton Street in Clerkenwell that his father had run for thirty-one years — remained technically operational, and his solicitor had quietly retired the word "straightforward" from their correspondence. His Edinburgh flat was sublet on a rolling monthly basis, which was either a decision or the suspension of a decision, depending on how charitable you were feeling about it.
She just went ahead and announced it, he told Rafi. I never said I was ready for that.
She being Clara. The announcement being about geography and permanence, not romance, though Faye's hey you suggested that Clara's post had been read with additional implications by at least one person, which he'd need to address separately.
"I have a structural problem," he told Rafi. "I can see all the elements of the decision. The estate, the firm, the flat, the question of what I actually want. But I can't establish which ones are load-bearing and which ones are just standing in place out of habit."
"That's very technical," Rafi said.
"I'm a structural engineer."
"I know," Rafi said. "I've known you since we were nineteen. What do you actually want, Eli? Not structurally."
A pause, in which Eli looked at the coffee the barista had just put in front of him. He wrapped his hand around it. "I don't know," he said.
"That's okay," Rafi said. "But you need to stop not-knowing in a way that blocks every road. You can not-know and still move."
I don't even know if I want to be here, he'd told Rafi — meaning London, meaning the estate, meaning the twice-weekly visits to the firm where Helen and Kit looked at him with a patience he found increasingly difficult to carry. The dog had put his enormous head on the table and was regarding Eli with the steady interest of an animal that had decided he was worth watching.
"I need to talk to Clara," he said. "She meant well."
"Clara always means well," Rafi said. "That's the thing about Clara. You can't even be angry. She was just so happy about it."
"And I need to text Faye."
A brief silence. "What are you going to say to Faye?"
"Something careful." He'd dated Faye three years ago, briefly, gently, and it had ended without acrimony, which he'd been grateful for and which he was now understanding had perhaps been read, on her part, as something more recoverable than he'd intended. "Something that closes the question without opening a different one."
"That's a delicate operation."
"I know." He was not, in general, good at saying things that needed to be said in the moment they needed to be said. He composed conversations in his head for two or three days and then delivered them, slightly overworked, when the opportunity arose or was manufactured. "I'll think about it."
"Go and have your coffee," Rafi said. "Think. Deal with Clara. Text Faye. And deal with the estate. In whatever order. Just—"
"Just what."
"Don't do the thing you usually do."
"What do I usually do?"
"Nothing," Rafi said. "Until it becomes a problem. And then nothing about the problem, until the problem has another problem, and then very careful nothing about both of them." A pause. "It's a specific skill, Eli. I just don't think it's serving you."
He'd rung off after that, which was, Eli thought, deserved.
He came back to Anchor Coffee the following morning because it was on a reasonable route from Barnsbury to Clerkenwell and because the coffee had been exactly right, which mattered to him more than it probably should. He had strong views on coffee ratios, developed in Edinburgh over three years of a very good independent shop near the university that had ruined him for chains entirely. Anchor had the ratio right and the barista had not tried to talk to him, both of which were significant.
He took the same table. Table five — the one with the slight diagonal angle that let you see most of the room without appearing to look at most of the room. He ordered the same thing: black coffee, no sugar.
The woman in the corner was there again.
He'd noticed her the previous morning, briefly, in the way he noticed structural things: something with a specific quality that filed itself as noteworthy. She'd been almost entirely still for the forty minutes he was in the room. Not the still of someone trying to be unobtrusive — the still of someone whose interior life was at full volume and whose exterior had learned to keep quiet about it. She had a pencil in her hair, dark and not recently styled, and she was looking at a laptop screen with an expression that suggested the screen had done something personal to her.
Now she was back, same chair — he noted this, the same chair, which suggested preference rather than accident — same expression of screen-directed grievance. She had a notebook beside the laptop now that hadn't been there yesterday, and the notebook was open and covered in what looked, from this angle, like very dense handwriting.
He opened his sketchbook — a reflex that Rafi had once described as you talking to yourself without acknowledging you're doing it — and drew the building across the street. Not for any professional reason. He just drew things he was looking at. It was how he processed spaces.
He thought, while drawing, about Clerkenwell. About going in to the firm tomorrow, Wednesday, which was when he went. About sitting in his father's chair, at his father's desk, in the office his father had occupied for three decades. The desk had a blue folder on it — the developer's offer, which his solicitor had put there two months ago and which Eli had not opened in the last six weeks, because opening it meant having a response to it, and having a response to it meant deciding, and deciding meant—
He'd been trying to know what he wanted before he moved. And he didn't know. And so he didn't move.
The woman in the corner made a sound — not a word, something that lived between oh and hmm, the sound of a person encountering something they hadn't expected. She typed very fast for about thirty seconds, then stopped, read what she'd written, and typed it again, differently. She did this twice more. On the third version she sat back slightly, and the embattled expression on her face changed to something else — the specific satisfaction of a thing that had been slightly wrong being corrected.
He recognised that feeling. In structural work, specifically. The moment when a calculation that hasn't been resolving finally produces the right answer.
She looked up.
They made eye contact for approximately two seconds. Her eyes were brown and extremely alert. She looked immediately back at her screen. Her ears — he noted this without particularly meaning to — had gone slightly pink.
He looked back at his sketchbook.
Outside on Lamb's Conduit Street, a bus went by — the 68, headed south toward Waterloo, the morning crowd on the pavement reorganising itself around the bus stop. London in its ordinary, enormous, self-interested way. A city that didn't require anything from you in particular, which was, he'd always found, both its best quality and its most alienating one.
He thought about the spare room in his aunt's house, freshly reorganised in his honour.
He thought about Faye's hey you.
He thought about the blue folder on his father's desk, and the quality of silence in those offices, which was different from ordinary silence. Had a presence to it. The kind of silence that was really the accumulated weight of a person's absence, which was different from the absence of sound.
He thought about the woman in the corner, who had found the wrong version of a thing and corrected it with the expression of someone who did this often and well.
He finished his coffee. Left exact change on the table — he noticed he always paid exactly, which was its own form of precision — and went out onto Lamb's Conduit Street without looking back.
By the following Tuesday he'd been back four times.
He told himself it was the coffee, which was true and not the whole truth. He told Rafi it was near the office, which was approximately true depending on your definition of near.
Rafi said nothing, which was also a form of commentary, and which Eli filed and chose not to engage with.
On the fourth visit he noticed that the woman in the corner counted things. She was counting the number of times a man at a nearby table said "I know" in the course of what appeared to be a difficult conversation with someone on his phone. He watched her count because he was watching her in the way he watched things he hadn't fully understood yet: carefully, without announcing that he was watching.
She counted six. He counted six. They were both right.
He did not mention this.
But he noted it.