The Missing Leaf

We put the house on the market the following autumn.

The work was finished. The facts that needed to be disclosed were disclosed. There were meetings about money and signatures and matters I delegated whenever I could. I had once believed competence meant doing everything yourself. Tamsin was slowly curing me of that.

I returned for the final inventory on a dry morning. The windows had been opened. Without Mother’s furniture, the rooms were smaller in some places and larger in others.

The dining table remained. It wasn’t valuable enough to justify storing, and no one had wanted it.

In the shed, behind a broken lawnmower, I found the missing leaf.

It had been used as a shelf. There were rings from plant pots on one side and a line of blue paint along the edge. I carried it into the dining room and pulled the table apart.

The runners stuck. I fetched wax from my case, worked it into the wood and tried again. This was work I knew. A thing did not move, and there was a reason. I could find the reason and attend to it.

The leaf fitted. The table had been made to take it.

Louise arrived with Kit a little after eleven. She had asked whether they could collect the last of Kit’s things. We had agreed it would be best to do it together.

My niece was taller. Children continue growing through events adults expect to stop time.

She went straight to the dining room.

“It’s bigger.”

“It always could be.”

“Why didn’t Gran make it bigger?”

“I don’t know.”

I was getting better at saying that without adding an explanation that would please someone.

Kit took the rabbit lamp out to the car. When she came back, she stood beside me for a while, watching me write.

“Dad says you don’t like him any more.”

Louise moved in the doorway. I shook my head slightly. We had talked about questions like this. Kit was allowed to ask them.

“It’s more complicated than that,” I said. “I don’t like what he did. I’m very angry with him.”

“Can I still like him?”

“Yes.”

“He makes the best toast.”

“I know.”

She leaned against the table.

“Mum told me about Auntie Evie. She said she would have liked me.”

I looked at Louise.

“I think she would have,” I said. “She’d probably have taught you things your mum would rather she didn’t.”

“Like swearing?”

“Almost certainly.”

Kit considered this. Then she asked why I was smiling if the story was sad.

“Because she wasn’t only the sad thing.”

I turned my notebook so Kit could see. One extending table. One additional leaf. Surface marked. Structurally sound.

“Are you selling it?”

“I was going to.”

“It’s big enough for your work. At the place with Tamsin.”

It was. It was too big for my flat, but at the workshop it could hold catalogues, photographs, things waiting to be repaired. I wasn’t obliged to hate every object that had witnessed us.

I crossed out the disposal instruction and wrote a collection note.

Kit found a pencil in my case and asked for a sheet of paper. She drew us at the enlarged table. Tamsin was there too, although she wasn’t in the room. There was no sun and no invented dog. Kit gave everyone enormous hands.

“Those are very large,” I said.

“They’re doing things.”

Louise sat down. I sat beside her. The room smelled of wax and the warm dust disturbed by moving furniture.

Kit looked up from her drawing.

“Mum said there was a story about an orange.”

“There is.”

“Tell it properly. She couldn’t remember all of it.”

So I did.

I told her what Evie had said, and what our father had said, and how slowly my sister had peeled that orange. I told her about the pip she had balanced on the end of her tongue, where only I could see it.

This time I did not stop at the part where we got into trouble.