Chapter 1: The Early Arrival at Dawn
The knock came at twenty past six, three hard raps that carried through the empty house and up the stairs before the sun had properly cleared the rooftops.
Danielle had been in the kitchen with her first cup of coffee, still in her housecoat, hair unbrushed, the morning ordinary as any other. She froze with the mug halfway to her mouth. The service call wasn't due until nine. She'd planned to be dressed, made up, the house tidied, herself composed. Instead she stood in bare feet on cold tile, wearing nothing but thin cotton that she had belted tightly at the waist, and the knocking came again, patient and unhurried.
"Just a minute," she called, and winced at how it sounded, too high, too flustered.
She made it to the front door in eleven steps and paused with her hand on the latch. Through the frosted glass she could make out the shape of a man, broad shoulders, a tool bag set down at his feet. She tightened the belt one more notch, checked the overlap of the coat at her chest, and opened the door on the chain.
"Mrs. Davison? Josef Wiesner, I've got the nine o'clock for the boiler. My morning job cancelled, so I thought I'd come early. Saves you waiting around." He said it easily, already reaching for the bag. Rain hung in the air, and his canvas jacket carried the smell of it, wet wool and cold.
"Nine," she repeated. "You're very early."
"You're very welcome to send me away for two hours." He smiled. It wasn't a pushy smile. It was the smile of a man who had been turned away from a hundred doorsteps and took no offence from any of them.
She hesitated, then slid the chain off. "It's fine. It's fine, come in. It's just, I wasn't expecting anyone yet."
He stepped past her into the hall, and she felt him pass. Not brushed, nothing so deliberate, but a displacement of air, the wet-rain smell of him moving through the narrow space, and behind her she heard his boots on the mat. She closed the door and, without quite deciding to, kept her hand on the belt.
"The boiler's in the kitchen, yes? You said on the phone it's making a noise."
"It's in the cupboard off the kitchen. It's a banging, mostly at night." She was talking too much. She heard herself doing it and couldn't stop. "My husband said it was probably nothing, but it's got worse, and he travels, so."
"So you're on your own with it." He was looking at her when she turned, and his gaze wasn't on her face. It had been lower, on the way the damp cotton had settled and clung since her hurried walk from the kitchen, and when she caught him his eyes came back up without apology or embarrassment, a professional man taking stock of a room, except she wasn't a room. "Cold mornings, it'll bang worse. Expansion, usually. I'll take a look."
He followed her down the hall and she was aware of him behind her the whole way, aware of the length of her stride in the floor-length coat, aware that nothing showed and that it didn't matter, that the awareness itself was the strange thing. She hadn't been looked at by a man other than Richard in twenty years, not really looked at, and the sensation sat somewhere between insult and warmth and would not settle into either.
"Coffee?" she said at the kitchen doorway, because it was the script, because offering something gave her hands a job. "I've just made a pot."
"That'd be good, thanks." He set the bag down by the cupboard and was already unzipping it, all business, and the tension in her shoulders dropped a fraction. He pulled out a torch and a spanner and crouched in front of the cupboard door, and for ten minutes she stood at the counter with her back to him, pouring coffee, pretending to arrange biscuits on a plate she had taken down without thinking.
He did not make conversation while he worked. She liked that and distrusted it in equal measure. She could hear the clicks of the panel coming off, the tap of metal, and once a low sound in his throat, half a laugh, that she couldn't assign to anything.
"There's your banging," he said at last. "Pump's on its way out. Not dangerous, just old. I can order the part, be back Thursday, or I've a near match on the van that'll do for now. Your call."
"Thursday's fine. He'd rather you did it properly." She brought the coffee over and crouched to set it near him, then thought better of crouching and set it on the floor instead, and straightening up she overbalanced slightly on her heels, and his hand came out and caught her elbow.
Just that. Two seconds of calloused fingers through cotton sleeve, a grip firm enough that she felt the strength in it, then gone. He went back to the pump as if nothing had happened.
"Sorry," she said.
"You're fine." He didn't look round. "Mind your toes near the boiler, it's warm."
She stood there with her arms crossed, holding the coat shut at her chest though it was already shut, and watched him work. His hands were extraordinary, she thought, and then was appalled at herself for thinking it. Brown and scarred and certain, each movement placed without hesitation, and she realised she had been watching those hands for the better part of a minute and had not heard one word of what he was saying.
"Mrs. Davison?"
"Sorry. Thursday, you said."
"I said the part comes Thursday." He turned and looked up at her from his crouch, and this time he let his eyes stay where they went, down the front of the housecoat, at the shape of her, at the heavy line of her breasts where the belt pulled the cotton taut between them, and he did not hurry it. "So I'm finished here today unless you want me poking around. Anything else on the list while I'm out the van?"
The kettle ticked on the counter. Rain started properly against the kitchen window, a soft drumming that filled the silence where an answer should have been.
"No," Danielle said. Then, hearing how it closed the morning down, how it sent him back to his van and her back to her empty house and her ordinary day: "No, but it's pouring now. You may as well finish your coffee before you go."
He weighed that for a moment, torch in one hand, and then he set it down and got to his feet, slowly, unfolding to his full height so that he stood over her by more than a head. "That's decent of you," he said, and picked up the coffee she'd poured him.
He crossed to the table and pulled out a chair, the old pine one that faced the window, and sat down in it as though he had sat in this kitchen before. She noticed how much space he took up, elbows on the table, jacket still on, the coffee held in both his scarred hands. She had never seen a man at that chair except Richard.
"You'll want to take that off, the wet's coming through," she heard herself say, and immediately wished she hadn't. It sounded like an invitation to stay longer, or worse, like fussing.
"Mind if I do?" He shrugged out of the canvas jacket and hung it over the back of the chair, leaving the grey t-shirt underneath, rain-darkened at the shoulders. He sat back down. "Thanks. What was the name again, your husband? Richard, was it, from the booking?"
"Richard, yes. He's away until Sunday. Germany." She said it and heard it land wrong, too much information offered to a man she had known eleven minutes, and she busied herself at the counter, straightening the biscuits she had already straightened.
"Germany's far." He drank his coffee and looked out at the rain on the window. "Nice house. Quiet street. You hear that? Just rain and the pump."
"It's very quiet when he's away." She brought her own mug round and sat down opposite him, because standing seemed ruder now than sitting, and it put her at a disadvantage anyway, him in his chair with all that height above her. She sat with her knees pressed together under the cotton and her hands cupped around the warm ceramic. "Twenty years in this house. You get used to the sounds. When they change, it's like somebody else is living here."
"Aye, that's it exactly. That's why people ring us. Not the noise itself. The change in it." He turned his mug a quarter turn on the table. "You rang about the noise, then. He'd have got to it Sunday, I suppose, when he's back."
"He'd have tried something with a spanner and made it worse." It surprised a laugh out of her, a small one, and she hid the end of it in her mug. "Don't tell him I said that."
"He knows what he doesn't know. Most men do at our age." His eyes came back from the window to her, unhurried again, and this time she felt it travel, face, throat, the deep curve of her chest where the belt crossed, back up to her face, and he let her see him do it. "You're up early for someone not expecting a workman till nine."
"I'm always up early. He used to say I had a farmer's clock in me." She heard her own voice go lower, almost confiding, and pressed her lips together. She was forty-four years married and could not stop talking to this stranger as if they had known each other always. The rain drummed harder. The kitchen felt smaller than it had looked that morning.
"Mind if I ask, Mrs. Davison. You don't have to answer." He set the mug down. His tone had not changed, still the tradesman's flat courtesy, but something underneath it had shifted, a weight finding new footing. "Your husband travels. You're alone with the house. And you asked me in for coffee at half six in the morning when you could have had it back Thursday with the part fitted and nobody the wiser."
"It was raining," she said. It sounded thin even to her.
"It was raining," he agreed.
She looked at her coffee. Her hands were not quite steady and she could see them not being steady and could do nothing about that. Twenty years, and in all that time she had not once sat at her own kitchen table with another man, not like this, not with the door shut and the morning dark and the awareness of him sitting in her skin like warmth. She thought of Richard, far away, asleep probably, and felt guilty, and then felt the guilt was itself a kind of proof, that there was now something real to be guilty of, or close to real, closer than it had been ten minutes ago, and her face must have shown some of it.
"Whatever it is you're thinking," he said quietly, "I'd stop. You've had a fright, some stranger at your door, wet clothes, early hours. People talk themselves into things at that time of day."
"Into what things?" She hadn't meant to ask it. The words were out before she could weigh them.
He looked at her for a long moment. Rain, the tick of the cooling pump, nothing else.
"Into nothing, most likely," he said, and picked up his mug again. "Where's the cupboard, by the way. Your husband's tools. I'd have a quick look at the isolator valve while I'm here, save a trip."
That was the sensible thing, the door back to ordinary. She stood up too quickly, the chair scraping, and led him two steps to the cupboard under the stairs, and as she opened the door the belt of the housecoat caught on the latch and came half loose at the knot, and she fumbled at it, hot-faced, holding the cotton closed with one hand.
"Here." He was beside her before she could protest, not touching her, just reaching past her, one arm across her shoulder to press the latch flat so it wouldn't catch. Close enough that she could smell the rain and the coffee and, under it, him. "There. It snags, that latch. Should get a file to it."
"Thank you," she said, to his collarbone, because she could not look up.
He withdrew his arm and crouched at the open cupboard, and she stood over him with her hand still at her belt, and neither of them said anything about it, and the morning went on around the thing that had almost been said and very nearly was.
He found the isolator valve in under a minute. "That's sound," he said, and put the torch back in the box, and then he stayed crouched there a moment longer than the job required, looking at the underside of the stairs and not at her. When he rose, he rose slowly, and he came up closer than he needed to, so that when she stepped back from the cupboard door his chest was a hand's width from her shoulder blade.
She turned her head away and held the belt at her waist. He did not move for a second or two. Then his hand came up, and one finger, the calloused pad of his index finger, touched her at the base of the neck, just under the collar of the housecoat, and drew down. Slowly. Following the line of her spine through the cotton, down between her shoulder blades, down the shallow curve of her back, all the way to the belt.
Danielle stopped breathing. Her hand was still on the knot and his finger stopped just above her hand and rested there.
"What are you doing?" Her voice came out almost nothing.
"Something I shouldn't." He said it flatly, no apology in it. "Tell me to stop and I'll stop. I'll go to the van and Thursday I'll fit the pump and that'll be the end of it."
She should have said it. Twenty years of not saying yes had trained her mouth for that one word, and it sat ready on her tongue. Instead she stood in the cold draught from the open cupboard with his finger one inch from the belt and her heart going so hard she could hear it in her ears.
"I'm married," she said.
"I know." The finger moved. It went sideways, along the belt, not under it, tracing the cotton where it crossed her back. "That's why you're shaking. If you weren't married you'd have told me to stop already and not thought twice."
"That isn't true."
"It's near enough true." He was standing directly behind her now and she could feel the heat off him through her housecoat. He did not press against her. He let her feel the closeness without taking it. "I've done twenty years in people's houses, Mrs. Davison. I know when a woman wants me to leave and I know when she's stood in the hall holding the door open with her face. You've been holding the door since I came in."
"That's not," she started, and could not finish it, because his hand had come up again and was on her back properly now, the whole palm, flat, wide and warm through the thin cotton, moving down the curve of her spine again, slow, and this time she felt every vertebra he crossed. Her knees went soft. She gripped the cupboard frame.
"Say stop," he said quietly. "Just once, and mean it, and this ends."
She said nothing. The rain filled the silence for both of them.
His other hand came to her shoulder and turned her, gently, and she let herself be turned, her eyes on the second button of his t-shirt because she could not look higher. He hooked one finger under her chin and lifted, unhurried, until she had to look at him. His eyes were dark and patient and there was nothing soft in them, only attention.
"Richard's away till Sunday," he said. It was not a question and not quite a taunt. It was a man checking the arithmetic.
"Yes."
"And I'm here now, and you asked me in."
"You were wet," she whispered, and it was the most honest thing she had said all morning, and the absurdity of it, that she had let this begin over a wet jacket, made her flush scarlet from the throat up.
"Yes, I was." He almost smiled. Then he leaned down and kissed her.
It was not gentle. She had expected gentle, expected to be treated like a fragile old thing, and instead his mouth took hers firmly, his hand sliding up into her unbrushed black hair, holding her head, and the kiss went on and deepened until she made a sound into it that embarrassed her, a small helpless noise she had not made in years. Her hands came up against his chest without her deciding it, the wet cotton of his t-shirt, the solid wall of him, and she did not push. She held.
He broke the kiss an inch away. "Good?"
"Yes," she said, and it came out ragged. "Yes. God forgive me. Yes."
"Then upstairs," he said, "or here on this floor, but one or the other, because I'm not standing in your hall kissing you like a teenager till Richard comes home."
She stared at him. Twenty years of the same bed, the same man, the same careful lights-out routine, and here was a stranger in her kitchen telling her where he would have her, and her body answered before her conscience could, a pull low in her belly so strong it was nearly pain.
"Upstairs," she heard herself say. "The bedroom's upstairs."
She led him and he followed, one hand at the small of her back the whole way, the palm wide and hot through the cotton, guiding her up the stairs in the blue morning light. At the top she hesitated at the bedroom door, the bed she had shared with Richard for twenty years just visible beyond it, and Josef's hand slid around from her back to her waist and drew her in against him, her back to his chest, and she felt him hard through his work trousers, pressing into the curve of her backside, unmistakable.
"You keep looking back," he said into her ear. "Don't. He's not here. I am."
He walked her through the door and turned her and sat her on the edge of the bed, and then he knelt in front of her, this big tradesman on his knees on her bedroom carpet, and put his hands on the belt at her waist.
"This," he said, tugging the knot loose with one pull, practiced, "is coming off."
Her hands flew to the collar. "The light. Could we, it's early, I'd rather."
"No." He looked up at her, calm as ever. "I want to see you. All of you. You've been wrapped in that coat since I walked in and I've been wondering the whole time. Sit still."
The belt came free. The cotton fell open down the middle and she sat there in her plain white bra and knickers, skin flushed and goosefleshed in the cool air, and his breath went out of him slowly.
"Well," he said, and his eyes were on her chest, on the heavy full weight of her in the plain cups, the deep valley between, "that coat's been hiding the best thing in this house."
"Josef." Her voice shook.
"Take the bra off for me," he said. "Slowly."
Her fingers went to the clasp between her breasts. They trembled and missed it once. He waited, patient, kneeling, watching her hands, and she felt more exposed watching him watch than she had felt in thirty years of marriage, and it was terrible, and she wanted it more than she had wanted anything in twenty years.
She unclasped it. The straps slid down her arms. Her breasts came free, heavy and soft with her age, the nipples dark and already stiff, and she heard him say one low word under his breath, and then his mouth was on her.
His mouth closed over her nipple, hot and wet, and Danielle's hand flew to the back of his head, half to push, half to hold. He sucked, slow and hard, drawing the stiff dark flesh deep, and her back arched off the edge of the mattress without her permission. A sound came out of her, low and shameless.
"Wait," she managed. "Josef, wait, I don't, we shouldn't."
He didn't lift his mouth. He moved to the other breast, licking a slow circle around the nipple before taking it in, and his hands were on her ribs, steadying her, thumbs tracing the soft undersides where her skin was thinnest. When he finally raised his head, her nipples were slick and shining in the grey light.
"Your mouth says one thing," he said. "This says another." His palm slid down over her stomach, flat and warm, and came to rest between her thighs through the cotton of the knickers. He pressed, just slightly, and she was soaked, the fabric clinging, her own heat rising to meet his hand. She made a small strangled noise and turned her face away.
"Don't," she whispered. "Please. Not like that. Don't touch me there like, I can't."
"You can." He rubbed her through the cotton once, slow, deliberate, and her hips jerked. "Twenty years, Mrs. Davison. You're wet through. Your body's been waiting longer than you have."
"It's wrong." Her voice cracked on the word. Her hand was still on his head and she still hadn't pulled it away. "I'm married. Twenty years and I've never, not once, I've never let anyone."
"I know." He stood up between her knees, took her wrists in his scarred hands, and drew her arms away from where she'd started to cross them over her chest. He held them at her sides, not hard, just holding, and looked down at her, at the heavy bare breasts and the flushed face and the long black hair loose over her shoulders. "And you're going to sit there and tell me no with your legs open."
She looked down and realised she was sitting exactly as he said, knees apart around his hips, without having decided it. The shame of it went through her like cold water and the heat went through her right after.
"Please," she said again, and this time neither of them knew what she was asking for.
He knelt again and hooked his thumbs into the waist of her knickers. "Up," he said, and she lifted her hips off the bed, and the cotton slid down over the curve of her backside, down her thighs, off her feet, and she was naked in her own bedroom in the morning light with a stranger between her legs. She went to close her knees and his hands stopped them, flat on her soft inner thighs, pushing them wide.
"Look at you," he said. The trimmed dark hair, the flesh beneath it, already glistening. He ran one finger up the length of her, outer lips first, then between, and she shuddered hard enough that her teeth clicked. "So wet. For a thing that's wrong."
"Stop saying that."
"Why? It's what's making you drip." He did it again, slower, the pad of his finger finding the top of her cleft, circling the swollen bud there, and Danielle gasped and grabbed the duvet in both fists. He circled her clit with two fingers, unhurried, and she began, helplessly, to rock against his hand.
"I can't," she panted. "I can't, I've never, oh God, oh God, don't stop, don't stop."
"There she is." He worked her, steady, and she came apart fast, faster than she had in years, her thighs clamping on his wrist, her hips stuttering, a cry breaking out of her that she swallowed with the back of her own hand. She sagged back on the bed, chest heaving, breasts trembling.
He stood and pulled his t-shirt over his head. She watched through half-open eyes as he unbuttoned the work trousers and pushed them down with his shorts, and his cock came out thick and hard, dark at the head, standing up against his belly. She had seen only one man's in twenty years and this one was bigger, and her mouth went dry, and between her legs she clenched on nothing.
"I can't do that," she said. "I couldn't put that in my mouth, I've never, Richard doesn't, we don't."
"Then don't." He took her ankles and turned her, and she let herself be turned, until she lay lengthways on the bed, on the side Richard slept on, and he climbed over her and lowered himself down on his forearms. His cock pressed against her opening through nothing at all, bare, and she stiffened.
"Condom," she breathed. "Please, there's nothing, I'm past, but still, please."
"I've nothing on me." He nudged forward, the head sliding up and down her slick lips, catching at her entrance. "You're sixty, I'm clean, I've not been with anyone in longer than I'll admit to you. You tell me."
She should have insisted. She lay under him with her breasts crushed soft against his chest and her thighs falling open around his hips and she could not make the word come.
"Just be careful," she whispered. "Slow. It's been, it's been a while since it was, since it was proper."
He pushed in. The head spread her open and she cried out, hands flying to his arms, gripping the hard muscle there. He was slow, she'd asked and he was slow, an inch, another, the thick shaft dragging against every nerve in her until her eyes rolled back and her mouth stayed open. He bottomed out against her, his balls resting on her backside, and held there.
"Christ," he said through his teeth. "You're tight for a married woman."
"It's too much," she gasped, but her heels had come up to hook behind his thighs, her body taking him deeper while her mouth still protested. "Move, oh, please, move."
He drew out nearly all the way and drove back in, and she grunted like something struck. He set a rhythm, steady and deep, the headboard ticking against the wall in the old familiar sound that had only ever been Richard's sound, and Danielle lay there and let it happen to her, let a stranger fuck her in her own marriage bed, and discovered with the third stroke that she was moaning for it, loud, unguarded, the way she had never once dared to be in this room.
"Like that," she heard herself say. "Harder. Please, harder."
"Twenty years of missionary in the dark," he said, pounding her now, her whole body shoving up the mattress with each thrust, breasts swaying, "and you've wanted it like this the whole time."
"Yes." It was torn out of her. "Yes, yes, don't stop, I'm close, I'm so close, don't you dare stop."
He reached between them and pressed her clit with two fingers, rubbing in time with his cock, and her orgasm came up from somewhere deep, her back arching, her nails raking down his shoulders, her cry breaking into ragged pieces. He groaned above her, felt her grip him, and pulled out suddenly at the last moment, spending hot across her belly and the soft underside of her breasts, thick ropes of it in the grey morning light.
They lay there breathing. Rain on the window. The pump ticking as it cooled.
"I'm sorry," she said at last, to the ceiling, meaning it and not meaning it at all.
"Thursday," he said into her neck. "I'll be back for the pump. He'll be home Sunday."
She did not answer him. She lay on her back with her eyes fixed on the ceiling, where the plaster rose in a small medallion Richard had hated and she had loved, and she said nothing at all.
Josef lifted his head from her neck after a moment. He watched her profile, the closed mouth, the pulse ticking fast at her jaw, and he waited for the apology to be finished or taken back. It was not finished and it was not taken back. She stared at the ceiling in silence and her chest rose and fell with his seed cooling on her skin.
He got up from the bed without speaking. She heard him in the bathroom, the tap running, and then he came back with a flannel in his hand, wet and warm, and knelt on the bed beside her. He cleaned her belly in slow strokes, over the soft underside of her breasts, down the crease of her hip, working the cloth methodically while she lay still under his hands like a woman being ministered to.
"You're not going to say anything, are you," he said.
"I don't know what there is to say." Her voice was flat and small. She still did not look at him. The flannel moved down her sternum and she watched the ceiling and thought, absurdly, of the medallion, of the day the plasterer had finished it, of Richard's young hands on her waist as they'd stood together and looked up. The room smelled of him now. It would smell of him for hours, maybe days, and she would have to sleep in it.
Josef set the flannel on the bedside table, Richard's side, and sat back on his heels. "I've done this before," he said. "Women alone in big houses. It goes one of two ways after. There's the kind that wants to talk it into being small, and there's the kind that wants to talk it into being terrible. You're neither, I think. You just want it quiet."
"I want my husband not to come home to a different bed." Now she looked at him. Her eyes were dry, which surprised her. "I want twenty minutes ago not to have happened. And I can't want that, because I did happen it. I said upstairs. I said harder. He'll ask me, when he's home, he'll put his arm round me in the kitchen and ask me if I was all right on my own with the boiler, and I'll stand there and lie to his face."
"Or you won't lie. You'll just not be asked the right question." He reached for his t-shirt and pulled it on, and the domesticity of the movement was somehow worse than anything else he had done. "Mrs. Davison. Danielle. Sit up. This is the part where you decide what this was."
She sat up slowly, holding the duvet against her chest. Her hair had come loose over her shoulders and she pushed it back with one hand, and her hands were steady now, which felt like betrayal of a different kind.
"Thursday," she said. "You said Thursday, for the pump."
"That's the job. The job's the job. I come, I fit the pump, I invoice your husband, I shake his hand on the doorstep if he's there." He stood and stepped into his trousers, buttoning them, tucking in the grey shirt. "But the other thing, that's a different animal, and it doesn't get to just go on because we didn't stop it in time. It only goes on if you tell me it goes on."
"And if I tell you nothing?"
"Then nothing. And it stays where it happened, and you don't hear from me except about plumbing." He picked up the canvas jacket from the bedpost where he'd hung it, or she supposed he had hung it, sometime in the last hour she had lost track of, and he looked at her across the room, at her sitting in the bed she had shared for twenty years with the duvet clutched to her breasts.
"The rain's stopped," he said.
It had. The window showed grey and clean, the street glistening, the light coming up properly now, and she realised it was past seven, maybe past half past, that an hour and more of her ordinary Thursday had been spent here. The house made its quiet sounds around them. The fridge hummed. The boiler ticked, cooling, its dying pump not yet banging.
"I won't tell you it goes on," she said. "I can't say that out loud. I'd never sleep again if I said that out loud."
"No," he agreed. "You wouldn't. You're not built for saying it. You're built for standing in doorways with the chain on."
She flushed at that, and hated that she flushed, sixty years old with another man's drying spend on her skin and her face still going red at a plain observation. He shouldered the tool bag. At the bedroom door he stopped with his hand on the frame.
"One thing," he said. "You didn't do anything wrong you need to carry around like a stone. You wanted something and it was in the house. That's the whole of it."
Then he was gone down the stairs. She heard him in the kitchen, the clink of his mug set in the sink, the click of the cupboard door going back on its hinge, and then the front door opened and closed with the soft, final sound of a door that had been closed properly, courteously, by a man who worked in other people's houses for a living.
Danielle sat in the bed until she heard the van pull away. Then she went to the bathroom and stood a long time under the shower, scrubbing the smell of him out of her skin, and it would not entirely go. In the kitchen afterward she washed his mug and dried it and put it back in the cupboard, and she stood with her hand on the cupboard door, looking at the mugs in their row, and caught herself counting the days until Thursday.
Two. Two days, and one of them was almost gone.
The Wednesday passed in small treacheries. She ironed his shirts and folded them and thought of hands. She vacuumed the hall and knelt at the cupboard under the stairs and pressed the latch that had caught, over and over, until her thumb ached. Richard rang from Berlin at nine and she sat with the phone against her ear and told him the boiler was sorted, the man had diagnosed it, the part was coming, and her voice held so perfectly that she frightened herself.
"He said to tell you he'll be at the house Thursday morning," Richard said. "I told him to bill me direct."
"I'll be here."
"You sound tired, love."
"I was up early. I'm always up early."
She hung up and stood in the hall with her hand on the banister. He would shake Josef's hand on the doorstep in a month or a year and neither of them would know. The thought sat in her stomach like a swallowed stone, and underneath it, lower, was the other thing, the thing she had not let herself name, which was that Sunday was four days away and Thursday was tomorrow.
She did not sleep well. In the morning she washed her hair and dried it properly and put on the grey dress, the good one, and then stood looking at herself in the mirror and took it off and put on jeans and a blue jumper like any ordinary woman waiting for a plumber. It was a performance of ordinariness and she knew it and did it anyway.
The van came at ten past eight. Three knocks, the same unhurried knocks.
"Morning." He had the pump part in a cardboard box, his jacket dry this time, the morning bright after rain. He looked at the jeans and the jumper and something moved in his face, quick, gone. "You'll want the water off before I start. There's a stopcock in the hall cupboard, I saw it Tuesday."
"Yes. I know where it is."
She led him to the kitchen. He laid a dust sheet down from the van, spread it, set out his tools in a neat row, and got to work. He talked while he worked this time, easy, about the supplier in town, about a flooded cellar over on Marsh Lane, and she made coffee and answered in the right places and the whole thing was so ordinary it was unbearable. Twenty minutes. Half an hour. The new pump went in with four pipe nuts and two screws.
"That's her done." He wiped his hands on a rag and stood up. "Quieter than the old one. You'll hear the difference tonight."
"Thank you." She took the invoice he held out and read it without seeing it. Her hands were steady. She had practised being steady for two days. "Josef."
He looked up from the tool bag.
"I made a cake," she said, and the idiocy of it hit her as she said it. "It's Richard's favourite, and there's too much, and it'll go stale if nobody eats it."
He didn't smile, but something in him settled, like a man who had been waiting for a door and heard the bolt draw back. "I'll have a slice, then."
He sat in the chair by the window. She cut the cake and brought it over and poured the coffee, and they ate, and she watched his hands, and neither of them said one word about Tuesday.
When the plate was empty he stood, and she stood, and the kitchen was very quiet with the new pump not ticking.
"The invoice," he said. "Leave it on the mat, he'll post the cheque." He picked up the bag. He was going. He had said the job's the job and he was doing it, walking to the hall with his back to her, and she understood suddenly that this was the last door, the one she would have to open herself.
"Josef."
He stopped. Turned.
"I can't say it out loud. I told you."
"I remember."
"I said I'd never sleep again." Her voice was low and her heart was going like a girl's. "I slept Tuesday night. Eight hours. First time in a year I've slept through till the alarm."
He set the bag back down on the mat. "Is that right."
"Don't make me say more than that. Please."
He came back down the hall. Not fast. He stopped close, the way he had stopped by the cupboard, and took her chin in those scarred fingers and tipped her face up. "You've done your hair."
"Don't." She flushed. "Don't notice things."
"Too late." He kissed her then, and it was different from Tuesday, slower, and her mouth opened under his and her hands found the front of his jacket and gripped it. When he lifted his head she was breathing hard against his jaw.
"Upstairs again?" he asked.
"No." She said it before she could lose the nerve. "Not the bed. Not that bed, not again."
He looked at her and understood it exactly, whatever it was worth to him, and nodded once. "Where?"
She took his hand. She led him past the stairs, past the cupboard, to the sitting room she had cleaned for twenty years, and she did not turn the lamps on because the light through the nets was bright enough, grey and clean, the day fully up.
He unzipped the jacket and dropped it over the arm of the sofa. "How do you want it?"
The question went through her like current. Nobody had asked her that in her life. "I don't," she started, and stopped, and made herself finish. "I do. There's a way. From behind. Richard never, we never did it more than, it doesn't matter. From behind."
"Good girl," he said, and the words should have offended her and instead her knees loosened.
He pulled the blue jumper up over her head, careful of her hair, and she stood in her bra while he unbuttoned the jeans and pushed them down over her hips with her knickers, and she stepped out of them, naked in her own sitting room at nine in the morning with the curtains open. He turned her to face the back of the sofa and she gripped it, the old floral fabric under her palms, and he bent her forward gently with a hand flat between her shoulder blades.
"Legs wider. There." His fingers found her from behind and she was already wet, had been wet since the mat, and he worked two of them into her, slow, curling, and she groaned and pushed back against his hand like an animal.
"You're not shy today."
"Shut up." She heard herself say it and gasped. "Sorry. Don't stop."
He laughed, low, and she heard his trousers come down behind her. The head of him pressed at her entrance and slid in, one long stroke, bottoming out, and she cried out and dropped her head between her shoulders.
"Christ, you're soaked." He gripped her hips and began to move, deep, harder than Tuesday, the sofa shifting on the floorboards with each thrust, and she braced and pushed back to meet him and found the rhythm herself, greedy for it, moaning his name out loud for the first time.
"Harder. Oh God, Josef, harder, yes, there, there."
He drove into her, one hand leaving her hip to reach round and press her clit, and the orgasm came fast and huge, her thighs shaking, her cry breaking against the sofa cushion, and he kept going through it until she was limp and sobbing and then he pulled out, spent across her backside in hot pulses, his hand splayed on the small of her back.
They stayed there. Her cheek on the sofa back, his breath on her shoulder, the clock on the mantel ticking the ordinary morning along.
"Thursday's next week as well," he said at last. "The service contract. Annual check. I'll be booking it in."
She straightened up slowly, her legs unsteady, and looked at him over her shoulder. She was smiling. She could feel it on her face and could not stop it.
"Book it in the afternoon," she said. "Mornings he sometimes rings."