On the first warm Saturday of spring, Nell carried a library book to the lake in a bread bag. The bag had once held a loaf with seeds on its crust, and a few of the seeds remained in the corners. She had meant to shake them out, but the bus came early, and now they traveled with the book as if they belonged to it. At the shore she took the volume out carefully, leaving the bag on the bench beside her.
The lake was still mostly the color of old cutlery. At its edge, where a thin shelf of water lay over the sand, it showed a pale brown bottom scattered with twigs. Someone had made a small fort of stones near the public steps, and overnight the waves had rearranged its lowest wall. A child in a yellow coat crouched there, moving stones back into place. Each time she completed a section she sat on her heels and looked out across the water, as though waiting for an opinion.
Nell opened her book to the ribbon of receipt she had left between its pages. It was a novel about a house with too many rooms and a family that insisted on staying in it. She had renewed it twice. At home there were dishes and messages and a ceiling stain whose shape had changed during the winter; whenever she sat down to read, one of these things seemed to clear its throat. Here the only task she had brought was the book. She was irritated to discover that the task still took effort.
A gull landed on the rail behind her and made a noise like a rusty hinge. Nell read the same paragraph three times. In it, a woman was trying to persuade her brother to sell the house. He kept offering her tea. Nell knew something about that sort of conversation. Since January she and her father had been discussing whether he ought to leave his apartment, with its narrow stairs and the bathroom door that stuck. Every time she raised the subject, he told her where she could buy the cheapest oranges.
She had come to the lake partly to avoid calling him. There was a message on her phone saying that the landlord would show the empty ground-floor apartment on Monday, if they were interested. Her father had agreed to look at it, then said yesterday that he did not see the point. Nell had replied too quickly, and they had both ended the call with a politeness worse than shouting.
The child abandoned her fort to chase a feather. A wave reached it and slipped through the gaps, leaving the stones where they were. Nell read on. The woman in the novel finally asked her brother why he would not sell. He said he could not bear the thought of strangers opening the kitchen drawers. Nell put her finger in the book. She had imagined her father objecting to the trouble of a move, or to the expense. She had not asked what he liked about the apartment itself.
That did not mean the brother in the novel was right. He might have been making an excuse, just as the woman might have wanted the sale for reasons she had not admitted. Nell turned back several pages, looking for a detail she had missed. In an earlier scene the brother had repaired a drawer runner with a strip of tin. At the time she had taken it for the kind of detail a novelist puts in to furnish a room. Now she wondered if he had been keeping count of everything he had fixed.
She called her father. He answered on the fourth ring, sounding breathless, and she had to sit through a brief account of a newspaper advertisement before she could ask whether he had been climbing the stairs. He had, he said; he had gone down for the newspaper. Then he said, with a touch of triumph, that the oranges were cheaper again.
“What would you miss?” Nell asked.
There was a pause long enough for her to hear a cupboard close. “My window,” he said. “The one in the kitchen. I can see the baker switch his lights on.” He went on to explain that he was usually awake before six and that the first light came on in the back room, then the second above the counter. Sometimes the baker waved with a floury hand. Nell had visited the apartment for years and had never been there early enough to see it.
They did not settle the question. They agreed to look at the ground-floor place on Monday, and her father asked if there was a window in its kitchen. Nell did not know. She wrote the question on the back of her receipt before returning it to the book. When she looked up, the child had found a stick and was using it to draw a road around the fort. The lake advanced over the first bend, erasing it without disturbing the stones.
Along the river
Farther inland, where a river passed beneath a railway bridge, a man named Darius kept a paperback in the pocket of his work coat. He repaired bicycles in a shop two streets from the water. On his lunch break he crossed the road with a sandwich and sat on the low wall above the towpath, his boots braced against the bricks. Barges passed slowly enough for him to make out the washing hung on their decks: socks, towels, a pair of overalls with one leg caught on a line.
The paperback was a field guide to birds, bought from a box outside a charity shop for fifty pence. Its cover had curled away from the spine. Darius had chosen it because his nephew had begun asking the names of everything with wings, and “bird” no longer satisfied him. The guide gave the birds measured descriptions: length, plumage, call, habitat. It also gave each a small painted portrait, in which the bird stood with the composure of somebody having a photograph taken.
Darius found that real birds did not hold their poses. A small brown one appeared in the reeds and was gone before he could find the right page. Another showed him its back from a branch, then flew directly into the sun. He began to make notes on the endpaper instead: white flash on wing; tail moved up and down; by the green bin. His nephew, when shown the notes, wanted to know what the bird had been doing by the bin. Darius had to admit that he had been too busy looking at its tail to see.
One Tuesday an elderly woman stopped beside his wall with a terrier on a red lead. She saw the open guide and asked whether he had found the kingfisher. Darius said he had not known there was one. The woman pointed beneath the bridge, where the water passed between dark stone supports, and told him to watch the low branch of a willow. She did not promise anything. The terrier pulled at the lead, and she went on, apologizing to it for the delay.
The next day Darius took his sandwich to the bridge. He waited with the book closed in his lap. A cyclist rang a bell behind him; a train went overhead and shook a fine dust from the ironwork. The willow branch dipped and rose in the breeze. He saw no kingfisher, though he did see a plastic bottle caught against a piling and a water rat swimming with a reed in its mouth. When his lunch hour ended he had mustard on his thumb and a crick in his neck.
He returned on Thursday and again on Friday. On Friday the woman with the terrier appeared and asked how he was getting on. “I’ve learned where the rats live,” he said. She laughed and told him that was useful too. Then she sat beside him for five minutes, until the dog began to make a soft, determined whining noise. Before leaving, she pointed out an untidy nest in a gap in the masonry. Darius had looked at that stretch of wall several times without noticing it.
The kingfisher appeared the following week, on a day when Darius had forgotten the book. It crossed the river low and fast, a blue stroke against the brown water, and vanished into the bank. He could not have described its bill or feet. He stood up so quickly that half his sandwich fell onto the towpath. A passing woman gave him an alarmed look, and he said, “Sorry,” though he was not sure which part of the incident he was apologizing for.
That evening he showed his nephew the painted kingfisher in the guide. The boy studied it and asked if the real one had looked exactly like that. Darius said he had seen the color more clearly than anything else. His nephew seemed disappointed, so they went back to the river on Sunday with a flask of tea and the book. They did not see the kingfisher. They saw a feather caught on a nettle and a fish rise once near the bank. On the way home the boy asked whether fish could see the sky from underwater, and Darius said they would have to find another book.
At the sea wall
At the coast, in a town where the sea wall curved behind a row of shuttered amusement stalls, Estelle read aloud to her mother on Wednesday afternoons. Her mother, Jo, lived in a flat above a bakery and disliked being told that she ought to get out more. Estelle had stopped saying it. Instead she arrived with a thermos, two folding chairs, and whichever book they were reading, and asked whether Jo felt like tea by the sea. Jo generally said she had nothing better to do.
They had begun with mysteries, because Jo liked to guess the culprit before the detective did. After a while she found it harder to follow the separate threads, especially when there were many people with similar names. Estelle tried slowing down. She tried giving each character a different voice, which made Jo laugh so hard at an alleged solicitor that the woman on the next bench moved away. Then they tried a book of short pieces about gardens, each one complete in a few pages.
On a windy afternoon in September, Estelle opened to an account of a gardener who had planted beans too early. The pages snapped against her fingers. Behind the wall, waves struck the shingle with a long dragging sound, lifting and dropping the stones. She read about the beans turning black in a late frost, and Jo said, “That’s because he didn’t listen to his mother.”
“His mother isn’t in it,” Estelle said.
“She would have told him to wait.”
Estelle kept reading. In the book, the gardener sowed a second crop and put jars over the seedlings at night. Jo interrupted again to say that jars were a nuisance, that they steamed up, that a sheet of old net curtain was better against birds. Estelle knew very little about beans, although she remembered their back garden when she was small: the damp string tied to bamboo poles, the yellow flowers on the courgettes, the smell of tomato leaves on her hands. She had not thought to ask who had taught Jo to grow them.
Jo said her mother had learned from a neighbor who kept hens. The neighbor, Mrs. Bell, had a thumb missing to the first joint. Jo could not remember what had happened to it. At last she said it had probably been a door, and Estelle said that was a disappointing ending.
The tea had gone lukewarm by the time Estelle returned to the book. She poured it anyway. Out on the water a fishing boat was heading toward the harbor, its cabin windows briefly bright as it turned. Jo asked her to read the bit about the jars again. Estelle found the place and read it, and this time Jo listened without interrupting. When she finished, Jo said, “I suppose jars would do if that’s what you had.”
Later, packing the chairs into the car, Estelle found sand inside the fold of her mother’s cardigan. Jo had dipped a hand over the wall to let the wind carry the grains, a few at a time. Some had gone into the pocket instead. She tipped them out onto the pavement and stood watching while they gathered in the crack beside the curb. Estelle waited with the book under her arm. There was no hurry; the bakery below the flat would still be open when they got back.
The following Wednesday it rained, so they stayed upstairs and sat by the kitchen window. Estelle brought the garden book again. A little grit fell from its pages onto Jo’s table when she opened it. Jo brushed the grains into her palm and asked for the story about the beans. Estelle found the page, set the book between them, and began.
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