Dry

She came out into a Saturday so bright it looked retouched.

It was the same street in Bermondsey she had walked down two weeks before, with Bea’s voucher in her pocket like a summons. Someone had rinsed it while she was inside. The old tannery opposite was the colour of a fox.

A man was hosing the pavement outside a bakery. The water ran in a sheet to the gutter and found the drain without hesitation.

Clara stood on the step of Fallow House and watched it go, as if it had been arranged for her.

The door closed behind her on its damper. She did not look back. On the first evening they had told her that some people wanted to, and that was fine, and so was not looking.

Nothing was required of her. That had been the phrase. She had found it irritating for about a day. Then she had stopped finding anything irritating, which was the point.

She remembered very little of the fortnight. They had warned her about that too.

A sense of lying in warm water, though she was fairly sure there had been no water. A soft Northern voice saying there’s nothing you need to do, and the relief of believing it. Sleep: the sleep of a child at her grandmother’s, under blankets that smelled of mothballs.

She had no idea how they did it. On the second or third day she decided not to ask. It was the first time in her adult life she had chosen not to understand how something worked.

There was an ache at the back of her neck, under the hairline, where the headrest had been. She put her hand to it. Not pain. The kind of soreness you notice only when you touch it.

She walked to London Bridge. It was too nice a day for the Tube.

⁂

The flat in Clapton smelled of two weeks shut. The basil on the windowsill had died in a way she could only call deliberate, folded over the rim of its pot like a swimmer off the side of a pool. She felt a great tenderness for it. Then a mild contempt for the tenderness. She put it in the food bin.

A postcard on the mat from her mother, who had been to Ludlow with the Belle Vue Road choir and wanted it known that the castle was overrated and the tea room was not. Hope you are resting, which I know you will hate. Love Mum. Clara put it on the fridge with the others, under the sardine magnet.

Her phone had been handed back at the door in a little linen bag, like a watch at a prison gate. The lock screen said Saturday 28 April 2029. A hundred and forty notifications. She read four.

Bea: Are you out. Are you cured. Are you insufferable now. Drink tonight or are you too pure.

She typed Out. Not cured. Drink. Then she sat on the sofa in the slanting light and was asleep before she had pressed send.

⁂

They met at seven at the Crooked Billet, the last honest pub in E5, according to Bea. Bea was at a bench outside, under the heater, smoking a cigarette she had stopped smoking in January.

“Look at you,” Bea said. “You’ve been to the dry cleaner’s.”

“I’ve been to the dry cleaner’s?”

“Steamed. Pressed. Put on a hanger. Your face has gone back to the shape it was in 2015.”

“It’s sleep. They just let you sleep.”

“Seven thousand pounds’ worth of sleep.”

“You paid for it.”

“I did, thank you for noticing. The alternative was watching you fall off a scaffold.” Bea stubbed the cigarette out as if she had never wanted it. “Was it weird? Everyone says it’s weird.”

Clara considered.

“It wasn’t weird. That’s what’s weird. It’s like a very good anaesthetic. You count back from ten and someone’s asking if you’d like some toast.”

“Would you like some toast?”

“I’d like a gin.”

Bea went in. A boy rode past with no hands, a speaker on his handlebars playing something with a lot of trumpet, and grinned at Clara as though they had agreed on something.

The light was going violet over the reservoirs. She felt very slightly ahead of herself, like a recording out of sync by a fraction of a second. If she kept still, the sound would catch up.

Bea came back with the gin. “You know you came out different.”

“You said. The dry cleaner’s.”

“No. You’ve got a look. Like you’re expecting something.”

“Monday,” Clara said. “I’m expecting Monday.”

⁂

The office was where she had left it, three floors up in a former watch factory on Clerkenwell Road. The radiators knocked. The windows opened a hand’s width, because of a byelaw Simon had once spent a whole lunch trying to find.

Rendle Treadwell Architects: nine staff, two partners. Clara had founded it with Simon Treadwell six years before, on a bet and a loan from her father’s estate. Old buildings failing slowly and expensively: find out why; stop it. Simon brought in the work. Clara did the work. On good days they said so to each other, laughing.

The café below was run by a Portuguese family who had outlasted three landlords. Clara went in at twenty to nine, because she always did. The son, Rui, with a beard like a bird’s nest and a chemistry degree he did not use, looked up from the machine.

“Flat white, extra shot, no lid,” he said. “You’ve been away.”

That was all. Two weeks, and he had remembered. Even the no lid, which she had stopped asking for years ago because people put the lid on anyway.

Clara’s eyes filled. Not a polite brimming: a hot flood, so that the café went to watercolour. She turned to the shelf and read the back of a packet of biscotti. Rui, who had sisters, said nothing at all.

She explained it on the stairs. Tired, still. Lonely, for longer than she had admitted: fourteen months since Adam, an ending so civilised it was practically conveyancing, and nobody since had known how she took her coffee. And spring. She cried at spring. By the third landing her face was dry.

⁂

“She lives,” said Simon.

He was sitting on the edge of her desk, which he knew she hated, in a new jacket the colour of wet slate. He was handsome in a way that seemed to have been negotiated. Clients loved him. She loved him, on and off, the way you love the weather in a city you have chosen.

“Get off my desk.”

He got off. “How was the spa?”

“It’s not a spa.”

“How was the not-spa?”

“Restful. What have I missed?”

Most of it. The Lewbridge framework: three hundred and forty post-war flats in six blocks across Lewisham and Deptford, the biggest contract they had ever won.

Lewbridge’s new head of asset management, Fran Okafor, had sent a nine-page letter about mould in Block C, with photographs. The chapel in Stoke Newington had fallen out with itself over the colour of the vestry. They had lost the appeal on the Islington mews, and Simon, saintly, had not bothered her.

“You should have bothered me.”

“You were in a dark room being told you were a good person.”

“That isn’t what they do.”

“What do they do?”

She opened her mouth and found she didn’t know. “Nothing. That’s the whole idea.”

He laughed. His phone rang. He looked at it and stopped laughing. “I have to take this.”

He went out to the stairwell. His voice dropped to a register she did not know, low and short, a man reading out numbers. Through the reeded glass she could see his shape, one hand on the back of his neck.

She watched a moment longer than she meant to. Then she turned on her computer, which had two hundred emails in it, and began.

⁂

The Block C photographs were the kind that made tenants weep and surveyors yawn. Black mould across bedroom ceilings. A cot against a wall that was visibly wet.

A surveyor from Bromley had concluded, in four confident paragraphs, that the cause was occupier lifestyle, and recommended a leaflet.

Clara read it twice. Then she enlarged the photographs one by one. Her father had taught her that when she was eleven, on a survey of a farmhouse outside Church Stretton: don’t look at the damp, look at where the damp has decided to be.

The mould in Block C had decided. Not in the bathrooms, where lifestyle would put it. A band along the ceiling line of the front bedrooms, on every floor but the top, worst at the ends near the outside walls, in two neat fans.

She pulled the 1960s drawings from the archive and found the section. There it was, plain as a lie.

The concrete balcony slabs ran straight through the external wall and became the bedroom floors and ceilings. One slab, inside and out. Every winter for sixty years the cold had come in along it, and where it met the warm room, the air gave up its water.

A cold bridge. Textbook. The insulation Lewbridge had paid for in 2008 had made it worse. It warmed everything except the bridge, so the bridge was the last cold surface left, and the water went there the way water goes to the lowest corner of a field.

It was not lifestyle. It was the building. Somebody had been telling these people for years that it was them.

She sat back. Ten past one; she had not eaten. She felt the thing she had not felt since before Christmas, perhaps since before Adam. A key going home in a lock you had been told was broken.

She wanted to ring Fran Okafor. She wanted to ring her father, who was dead. She wanted another problem behind this one, and another behind that.

⁂

At four Simon put his head round her door. “Rotterdam.”

“Bless you.”

“There’s a workshop. Delta Waterwerk, the water engineers, and the city, and some EU fund with an acronym. Flood-resilient retrofit of post-war housing. They want a British practice that does social housing at scale.” He leaned on the frame. “I said I’d go.”

“And?”

“And I’m not going.” He smiled the smile. “You are. The fourteenth. Three days. You’re rested and I’m not, and you’re better at the bit where you have to know things.”

There was something in his face she couldn’t read. She could normally read Simon like a planning notice.

“What about Lewbridge? Block C’s a cold bridge. The balcony slabs.” She turned the screen to show him the section. “Bromley’s wrong, and Fran Okafor’s going to find out, and I’d rather she found out from us.”

Simon looked at the screen longer than the drawing deserved. “Write it up. I’ll take it to Fran.”

“I’ll take it to Fran.”

“You’ll be in Rotterdam.”

“On the fourteenth. It’s the twenty-ninth.”

“Thirtieth,” Simon said. “It’s Monday the thirtieth.” He tapped the door frame twice, like a man knocking to leave. “Welcome back, Clara. We missed you.”

⁂

She worked till eight. Clerkenwell Road was loud with buses. She walked to Farringdon in a light rain that came out of a clear sky. She had always found that absurd. Tonight it was almost moving: water from nowhere, falling on everything with total impartiality.

On the train she looked at her phone. Out. Not cured. Drink was still in the box, unsent, though Bea had come, though they had had the drink. She must have typed it again later, she thought, and sent that one. She deleted it.

At home she put the kettle on and stood at the window with her hand on the back of her neck, where the ache was. The pavements were drying in pale patches, like the map of somewhere being discovered.

She thought of the water in three hundred and forty bedrooms going patiently, every night, to the one cold place. She thought of Rotterdam, a city that had been flattened and had come back as something else. I am going to be very busy, she thought. It surprised her how much she wanted to be.

The kettle clicked off. In the quiet after it she could hear her pulse in the ear she had pressed to the cold glass, steady, unhurried, like someone walking towards her down a long corridor.