Two Books and a Cake Tin

On their third date, Nell told Asher that she hated his favourite book. She said it while holding a menu, with the mild distracted honesty of someone declining mushrooms, and watched the evening alter across his face.

“All of it?” he asked.

“Particularly the ending. Everyone suffers for three hundred pages and then the weather improves.”

He put down his glass. “The weather is doing rather more than that.”

“I thought you might say so.”

They had met in a queue outside the swimming pool, where a broken card reader had given thirty damp people an opportunity to become unpleasant. Asher made the receptionist laugh. Nell admired him for it. He admired the way she quietly bought a ticket for a man who had brought no cash. There had been coffee, then a walk, and now dinner at a place with candles in old mustard jars.

Nell was thirty-nine and sold commercial kitchen equipment. Asher, forty-three, arranged deliveries for a furniture company. Neither occupation had produced the mysterious sensitivity she associated with the beginning of love. Nevertheless, for two weeks she had found herself interested in the precise time a furniture van reached a loading bay.

“You don’t have to agree with me,” he said.

“Good.”

“I would be curious to know what you like.”

She named a comedy about a badly managed hotel. He knew it. His mouth moved slightly before he stopped himself.

“Go on,” Nell said.

“I found it a little relentless.”

“The funny bits?”

He laughed, genuinely, and the waiter arrived before either had to decide whether this was an argument. They ordered fish. Afterwards, Asher suggested exchanging books. Not the two already under discussion. Something each thought the other might enjoy.

“An attempt at understanding,” he said.

“Or revenge.”

“We could leave a note explaining which.”

At home Nell stood before her shelves for nearly an hour. She rejected the books she loved because loving them seemed suddenly revealing. A silly adventure had accompanied her through her divorce. A thick family saga belonged to a summer when her mother was still alive. She did not want Asher inspecting those experiences through sentences he might find relentless.

She chose a spare, elegant novel praised on its cover for restraint. She had bought it years before and abandoned it on page forty. It seemed a safe gift for a man who considered clouds meaningful.

Asher brought his choice to the pool the next Saturday. It was a detective story with an absurd yellow cover. He said it had made him laugh on a difficult journey. Nell accepted it with more pleasure than she expected, then handed over her respectable volume.

“One of your favourites?” he asked.

“I thought it would suit you.”

That was true, technically. She disliked herself for noticing the technicality.

They swam in separate lanes. Afterwards they ate toast in the leisure centre café, and he told her about an enormous wardrobe delivered to a house with a tiny staircase. She told him about a customer who wanted a dishwasher in a cupboard without water. Their books lay between the plates like two additional guests with better manners.

The detective story was wonderful. Nell read it over three evenings and found herself sending Asher quotations she liked, followed by messages he could answer without knowing the quotation. He replied with photographs of objects whose purpose he could not identify at work. One was definitely a footstool. The other remained disputed.

Her gift was less successful. On Thursday he sent a message asking whether she had found the main character cold. She answered that perhaps coldness was the point. He said he would keep going.

Nell opened her own copy and tried to catch up. By midnight she was exhausted and faintly angry with a woman on page sixty who had spent an entire visit refusing to explain why she came. She understood the impulse rather too well.

On Sunday they went to a street market. Asher bought two chipped bowls because he liked the blue inside them. Nell bought socks. He asked about the novel while they stood beside a stall selling old maps.

“The conversation in the garden,” he said. “What did you make of that?”

Nell could not remember a garden. She had reached a train journey. She said the conversations were rather indirect.

He looked at her, then down at his bowls.

“You haven’t read it.”

“Not recently.”

“Nell.”

They moved away from the stall because someone wanted to examine a map of a place neither had visited. A busker was playing a tune with one persistent wrong note. Nell concentrated on it while deciding how little she could admit.

“I never finished it,” she said. “I thought it was the kind of thing you liked.”

“Why didn’t you just say that?”

“Because I had already insulted the other one.”

“You disliked a book.”

“You looked hurt.”

He shifted the bag of bowls. “I probably was. Ridiculous, isn’t it? I spent a year persuading my former partner to read it. When she finally did, she said it explained a great deal about me. It wasn’t a compliment.”

Nell had expected an accusation. His embarrassment gave her something harder to defend against.

“My ex used to ask what I was laughing at,” she said. “Then explain why it wasn’t actually funny.”

“I did that over dinner.”

“A little.”

He nodded. For a while they watched a child try to persuade her father that a decorative brass horse belonged in their kitchen. The father was losing.

“I don’t want a reading examination,” Nell said.

“Neither do I.”

“And I don’t want to become someone who buys an impressive book and lies about enjoying it.”

“You bought it before you met me.”

She laughed reluctantly. “That’s an older problem.”

They sat on a low wall to eat pastries. Asher said he was giving up on her recommendation. Nell felt a sharp, absurd relief. She admitted she had been trying to finish it so that the lie would become true retrospectively. He laughed so hard he dropped sugar on his coat.

The afternoon recovered, but the question stayed with her. She liked him. She liked his steady curiosity and his jokes, the way he looked towards her before continuing a story to make sure she wanted the rest. Yet she had spent part of their short acquaintance attempting to become a suitable audience instead of a person.

At work on Monday she helped a customer choose an oven. The man wanted the model every other restaurant seemed to have. Nell asked what he actually cooked. After twenty minutes he chose a different one. She returned to her desk and sent Asher a message.

Would you like to come round on Friday? No homework.

He answered that he would bring pudding and nothing with a dust jacket.

Her flat looked different when she imagined him in it. The comic novel on the sofa seemed childish. The photograph of her parents seemed intensely private. She almost moved both, then left them where they were and cleaned the bathroom instead.

He arrived with a pear cake in a tin that belonged to his neighbour. Over dinner they discussed an aunt who called every sort of internet connection the television wire. Nell burned the edge of the pie. Asher ate the middle and asked for the recipe without making a joke about her profession.

Afterwards he noticed the abandoned book on a chair, bristling with slips of paper.

“You really did try.”

“I got as far as the second garden.”

“There’s a second garden?”

“Possibly the same garden. It was becoming difficult to care.”

He sat beside her. “What would you have given me if you weren’t worried about my opinion?”

She took the adventure novel from her shelf. Its cover had a crease across the heroine’s face. Nell explained that she read it in a hotel the weekend she moved out of her marriage. She had been unable to eat dinner alone in the restaurant, so she bought crisps and stayed upstairs with a woman stealing jewels from people who deserved it.

“It isn’t particularly well written,” she said, then stopped. “Actually, I don’t care. It was exactly what I needed.”

Asher turned it over carefully. “May I borrow it?”

“Yes. You may also dislike it.”

“I’ll try to dislike it respectfully.”

He kissed her then, without either of them having prepared a clever answer. When he left, he took the book and forgot the cake tin. Nell liked having an ordinary reason for him to return.

He did not love the adventure. He liked the heroine and thought the stolen necklace had changed colour halfway through. Nell checked. It had. They argued cheerfully about whether the mistake mattered. Then she asked what he had read on the difficult journey he mentioned.

He told her about travelling to collect his father’s things after his death. The detective novel had been bought in a station shop because it was bright yellow and he couldn’t bear another sombre object. It had kept him company through four hours he did not want to remember clearly.

Nell looked at the cover on her table. She had enjoyed it without knowing what it meant to him. That seemed suddenly generous: the book had been allowed to reach her before its history did.

A month later, Asher invited her to a gathering at his friend’s house. There would be dinner, he said, and probably too much conversation about books. Nell hesitated. He noticed and added that she could refuse any topic, including him.

The gathering was pleasant until someone asked whether she liked a fashionable novelist. She said she hadn’t read him. A man across the table began explaining where she should start, arranging three volumes into an order of increasing difficulty.

Nell felt the familiar urge to nod intelligently and purchase all three on the way home.

“Would I enjoy them?” she asked.

The man paused. “They’re important.”

“That isn’t quite what I asked.”

Asher looked down at his plate, smiling. He did not rescue her or repeat the question more loudly. She could manage her own conversation. The man’s wife recommended something completely different, involving a missing bicycle and several unreliable cousins. Nell wrote it down.

Walking home, she asked Asher whether he had minded her being blunt.

“I liked hearing you,” he said.

At her door she held his hand for a moment before finding her keys. They were still learning small things: that he left lamps on, that she answered difficult messages too quickly, that neither enjoyed choosing restaurants. None of it guaranteed they would suit each other. She no longer wanted a guarantee obtained by agreeing with everything he loved.

The yellow detective story remained on her shelf. His favourite novel stood at his home, still an experience they remembered differently. On her birthday he gave her a book about a woman who accidentally bought a bankrupt circus. Inside he had written, For whatever sort of week this turns out to be.

She read the first chapter aloud while he washed two cups. He laughed in the wrong place. Nell turned to look at him, and he explained what had struck him as funny. It was something she had missed. She went back a line, read it again, and this time they laughed together.