A Leg from Somewhere Else

The split ran from the bolt hole almost halfway down the leg. Arthur could see now that the old wood had been giving up for years.

He had made it worse with the wrench.

He stood in Eddie’s workshop on Thursday morning, holding the leg in the light from the open door. Behind him, the kettle boiled with a whistle so shrill it seemed to belong to a larger emergency.

“Can you glue it?” Eddie asked.

“Not and trust it.”

“Brace it?”

“Could. Wouldn’t be right.”

Eddie poured water into a teapot. He didn’t argue, which Arthur found easier to respect than he had expected.

“I’ve some ash out the back. Been there a while.”

“Won’t match.”

“No.”

Clara came in carrying toast on a plate. She had put three pieces down and kept the fourth between her teeth. It was a thing Helen used to complain about, then do herself when running late.

“What won’t match?”

Arthur showed her the leg.

“Oh.” She took the toast out of her mouth. “Was that me? Getting it into the van?”

“No. Me. Getting it apart.”

“Can you fix it?”

“Replace it.”

“With what?”

“Ash, apparently.”

She looked from him to Eddie.

“Why do you sound offended by a tree?”

“It’ll look different.”

“So?”

“It’ll always look different.”

“Arthur, the top has a burn from my GCSE art project and a dog drawn underneath. It’s not going to be invited to a museum.”

He ate his toast.

Eddie brought in the timber. It was sound, straight and more than adequate. Arthur put it on the bench and measured the old leg.

“How long?” Clara asked.

“Depends.”

“On?”

“Whether somebody keeps asking me how long.”

She set the plate out of his way.

“Right. What can I do?”

He almost said nothing. Then he handed her a pencil.

“Mark that measurement on all four sides. Here. Not on the knot.”

She did it carefully. He checked without redoing it.

By ten, they had a shape. By eleven, Clara was sanding while Arthur prepared the fixing. Eddie had gone to help a neighbour with a gate, apparently satisfied that leaving them in possession of his workshop did not threaten his standing as a father.

Clara blew dust from her fingers.

“Don’t,” Arthur said. “Brush it.”

She brushed it.

“Do you remember when Mum painted the kitchen?” she asked. “Yellow. The terrible yellow.”

“Custard.”

“More like the stuff on chips.”

“Piccalilli.”

“That’s it.”

He remembered. Helen had chosen from a small square on a card and then spent a week insisting that the room looked cheerful before asking him to paint it white while she was at work.

“She said it would be easier if she didn’t have to watch you being pleased with yourself,” Clara said.

“I wasn’t pleased.”

“You were magnificently pleased.”

He considered this.

“A bit.”

Clara put down the sandpaper.

“She wasn’t very good at that, was she?”

“Painting?”

“Being wrong.”

“No.”

“Everyone talks about her now as though she was impossibly kind all the time.”

“She could be bloody difficult.”

Clara looked at him. Then she laughed, and the laugh broke halfway through. She put one dusty hand over her eyes.

Arthur stood still. He wanted to find a clean cloth, fetch water, identify a task. Instead he pulled the stool closer to her with his foot.

She sat.

“I miss having somebody to be annoyed with,” she said.

“I’m here.”

She laughed again, more successfully.

He sat on the edge of the bench, keeping the tools between them because he still needed something to do with his hands. He turned a washer over with his thumb.

“She hated the chair I made her,” he said.

“The little one?”

“Rocking chair. For her fiftieth. She said it was beautiful, but she never sat in it. I kept moving it to where she liked to sit. She kept moving it back.”

“Did she tell you why?”

“In the end. Said I appeared to be trying to retire her from standing up.”

Clara wiped her face with the clean side of her sleeve.

“She told me it made her seasick.”

“She didn’t tell me that.”

“Didn’t want to hurt your feelings.”

“Being called an ageist furniture manufacturer was apparently all right.”

Clara smiled at the floor. He let her.

When Eddie came back, they were fitting the new leg. He held the table steady while Arthur tightened the last bolt. Clara crouched with a pencil and wrote a small number five underneath.

“There are four,” Arthur pointed out.

“This one’s new.”

“No one will understand that.”

“I will.”

They turned the table upright. The ash leg was paler than the others, less decorated, plainly from somewhere else. Arthur pressed down on each corner. Nothing moved.

Clara ran her hand across the top.

“That’s it,” she said.

He reached for a piece of sandpaper, then put it down.

At the gate, Eddie hugged Clara and shook Arthur’s hand. Neither man attempted to say anything large enough to damage the small improvement between them.

“Send me a picture when it’s in,” Eddie told her.

Clara looked away for half a second.

Arthur noticed.