An Unreasonable Number of Apricots

Juno bought the apricots because the man at the market said he couldn’t take them home again. She paid twelve pounds for the crate, felt pleased with herself for twenty seconds and then discovered she couldn’t lift it.

“How far?” asked someone behind her.

She turned. The man wore a green jacket and carried a bag containing a single leek.

“Two streets.”

He looked at the crate. “Those streets may get longer.”

Together they carried it past the fish stall, around a woman arguing about carnations and up the hill to Juno’s flat. He held the heavy end without announcing it. At her door she offered him half the fruit.

“That would make this quite an elaborate shopping trip,” he said. “I came for soup.”

His name was Tomas. He lived in the next street, taught at a primary school and claimed to know nothing about apricots beyond their general appearance. Juno was forty-four, a bus mechanic and, since her divorce, the sole occupant of a kitchen too small for accidental acts of generosity.

She offered tea. He accepted, putting his leek on a chair as though it were another guest.

They divided the fruit into firm, soft and beyond persuasion. By the time Tomas left, Juno knew he disliked marking homework with red ink, had a daughter studying engineering and was very funny about the indignities of trying to look authoritative while wearing a paper crown.

He took six apricots. She still had what looked like several hundred.

The next afternoon he knocked with a large saucepan borrowed from his sister. He had looked up a simple compote recipe and thought she might need equipment. She had already made two trays of roasted fruit and run out of containers.

“This is becoming a commitment,” she said.

“To fruit, certainly.”

He stayed to help. They cooked, tasted and disagreed about cinnamon. Tomas wanted none. Juno wanted enough to announce itself. They made two batches and labelled them with their names.

Afterwards they ate toast over her sink because the table was covered with cooling dishes. He asked whether she had always worked with engines. She explained that her father taught her to repair bicycles, then complained when she turned it into a career.

“Apparently competence was meant to be a hobby.”

“Did he change his mind?”

“When his car broke down.”

Tomas laughed. She liked his laugh most when she had earned it.

Their third meeting had nothing to do with apricots. He invited her to a free concert in the park. She arrived in boots because the ground was wet. He brought a folding blanket that proved too small for two people unless they sat close together. Neither mentioned this practical discovery.

During a slow song he took her hand. She looked at their fingers for a moment before looking back at the stage.

“All right?” he asked.

“Yes.”

It had been six years since somebody asked her that while doing something she wanted. She had forgotten how reassuring it could be.

They went for supper afterwards. Tomas told her his wife had died eight years earlier. He did not offer the information as a warning, only as part of the account of where he had been. He had dated since, briefly. He liked living alone more than people expected him to.

“So do I,” Juno said.

“Good.”

“That could be inconvenient.”

“I expect we’ll find other inconveniences.”

For a month they met twice a week. Juno introduced him to the little restaurant where the owner let her order dishes from the lunch menu at dinner. Tomas took her to a second-hand bookshop with a staircase that made them both turn sideways. They kissed on doorsteps, sent each other unflattering photographs of badly parked cars and discovered that their taste in films overlapped only where nobody expected a happy ending.

One afternoon they passed a woman outside a shop near Tomas’s house. She greeted him warmly, glanced at Juno and began asking about his daughter. Tomas answered, introduced Juno by name and moved on before the woman could ask another question.

“A parent from school?” Juno asked.

“She used to organise things with my wife.”

He was quiet for the rest of the street. Juno did not ask him to explain a mood that might have nothing to do with her. Later, though, she noticed that their next two walks began in her part of town. It was a small change. Small changes were sometimes where she had first learned to ignore herself.

She told Willa about it without mentioning Tomas’s name. Willa asked whether the man was unkind. Juno said no, then realised she had been offered the wrong question. A person could be kind and still ask for something she could not comfortably give. She decided she would ask him directly if it happened again, rather than collecting incidents until she could present a case.

Then the neighbourhood association announced its autumn food competition.

Juno’s friend Willa, who had tasted both versions of the compote, suggested entering. She also suggested Tomas could bring his saucepan and his face to more of their gatherings.

“He’s a person,” Juno said. “Not an accessory.”

“I noticed. An attractive one.”

Juno filled out an entry form before asking him. She wrote both their names under the title Apricots, Two Opinions and felt absurdly pleased by the ink.

When she showed Tomas, he went quiet.

“You don’t want to?”

“The competition’s fine.”

“But?”

He folded the paper along its existing crease. “I’m not sure about making an announcement.”

She looked at the form. “It’s a pudding.”

“You know what I mean.”

She did. It made her colder than the words deserved.

Her former husband had disliked her taking up space in public. He loved her practical skills when they were useful and called her overbearing when other people admired them. At parties she learned to stand beside him, laughing at stories in which she became a larger, less agreeable version of herself.

She had spent six years recovering the size of her own voice. She was not going to become a secret because a kind man was nervous.

“Are you seeing someone else?” she asked.

Tomas looked startled. “No.”

“Then what are you hiding?”

“That isn’t fair.”

“Tell me what is.”

He set down the form. He had told his daughter about Juno. He had told his sister. He had not told the neighbourhood, where everyone remembered him as half of a couple he could no longer be.

“People will be delighted,” Juno said.

“That’s part of it. They’ll be delighted for me as though I’ve finished something. They’ll ask if I’m happy now.”

Her anger lost its simple shape. She could understand what he feared. She could also feel how easily understanding might become an indefinite agreement to stay out of sight.

“I don’t need a declaration,” she said. “I need to know we’re allowed to be seen together without you wishing we weren’t.”

“We go out together.”

“Where nobody knows you.”

They sat in her kitchen, the empty saucepan between them. Eventually he said he needed to think. She said he should. It sounded like a dismissal because, for that evening, it was.

Juno withdrew the entry the next day. She did not replace Tomas’s name with her own. The dish belonged to an afternoon they had shared, and she had no appetite for turning it into a statement.

Willa asked what happened. Juno gave her the short answer. To her credit, Willa did not offer to explain the situation to everyone on their behalf.

On Thursday Tomas asked if they could walk. They met in a busy street halfway between their homes. He looked tired, which she refused to find persuasive by itself.

“I spoke to my sister,” he said. “She asked whether the neighbours had actually said any of the things I was preparing to resent.”

“Had they?”

“Some. Years ago. Mostly I haven’t given them the chance.”

Juno waited.

“I’m allowed to dislike their questions. I don’t think that means you should have to organise your life around avoiding them.”

She put her hands in her coat pockets. “I should have asked before filling out the form.”

“Yes.”

“I liked seeing our names together.”

His face softened. “I think I might have, if I’d been ready to look at them.”

They crossed at the lights and walked beside the canal. She told him about parties with her former husband, the slow habit of making herself less conspicuous. He listened without pointing out the ways he was different. She could already see those. What she needed was room to explain why the same gesture could mean different things to each of them.

At a bench they stopped. Tomas said he wanted to keep seeing her. He also wanted the right to tell curious people that he did not wish to discuss his feelings between the raffle and the cake stall.

“That seems reasonable,” she said.

“Would you help me?”

“I can change a subject very forcefully.”

He laughed, then took her hand.

They went to the food competition the following Saturday without entering. Willa greeted them, glanced at their linked hands and asked Tomas whether he could carry a folding table. Juno could have kissed her for it.

Not everyone was so tactful. A woman who had known his wife touched his sleeve and said how wonderful it was to see him moving on.

Tomas grew still. Juno waited rather than rescuing him too quickly.

“I’m very glad to be here with Juno,” he said. “I wouldn’t put it quite like that.”

The woman looked embarrassed, then apologised. Tomas asked about her new dog. Within a minute they were discussing its alarming enthusiasm for cushions.

Later he leaned towards Juno. “I survived.”

“The dog sounds less certain.”

They judged the cakes privately, disagreeing about almost everything. They bought a jar of something labelled experimental chutney and decided the label was fair. Nobody awarded them a prize or asked them to explain the future.

On the walk home, Tomas stopped at the market. The same fruit seller was packing away. There were plums this time, a crate priced to disappear quickly.

Juno looked at it, then at Tomas.

“Don’t,” he said.

“I wasn’t going to.”

“You have the expression.”

She bought six plums in a paper bag. He bought a leek. They carried their purchases up the hill without needing help from one another, then went to her flat because they wanted to.

While he made soup, she roasted the plums. She left the cinnamon on the counter and asked how much he wanted.

“Some,” he said. “Not an announcement.”

She kissed him before choosing a smaller spoon.

They ate late, with the windows open to the ordinary sounds of the street. When Tomas went home, he took his saucepan. He would need it the next evening, when Juno was coming to his place for dinner. They had discussed that plan together, and both of them were looking forward to it.