Page 114 of Bare
'Where you see it first thing. Where it's just us.'
'And the sofa?'
'Where else? It was made for a wall. Specifically a wall in a home. Specifically our home.'
When Neil looked at him, Rory looked back. Green eyes, steady, the half-smile absent. The serious register.
'Yes,' Neil said.
His parents' house was the same house.
The front door stayed shut in his mind for a long time.
It opened now.
Diane was already in it. Apron, not the Christmas one, a weekday apron with an old tomato stain on the pocket. She haddone something to her hair. Brushed it for a Sunday lunch, and the brushing was visible, and she did it anyway.
'Come in, love. Come in, Rory.'
Rory. First name. First time.
Rory inclined his head, the small formal register of walking into a house where his ease was not going to help him. 'Thanks, Mrs Ashworth.'
In the hall: lamb in the oven. The hallway clock Neil heard ticking his whole childhood, still set two minutes fast because Malcolm believed being exactly on time was a failure of character. The photograph of Neil's graduation on the telephone table.
Malcolm came out of the sitting room.
He was wearing a tie. Navy. The Sunday shirt, the one he wore for church when Neil's grandmother was still alive and for nothing else. Malcolm had not worn a tie to a Sunday lunch in his own house as long as Neil could remember.
'Mr Cavanaugh,' Malcolm said. He extended his hand. 'Malcolm.'
'Rory, not Mr please.' Rory took the hand. The paint was worked into the knuckles as it always was, and Neil watched his father's eyes register it and not flinch.
'Come through. Diane's done the lamb.'
Into the dining room. The table that had held Neil's school reports and his university offer letters and the divorce papers he'd signed with a black pen before bringing a copy here so his parents could know from him and not from Gemma's mother. Four settings. Freddie was in the good room with the whale book and a plate of sandwiches and strict instructions not to come up until pudding.
They sat.
'Mr Cavanaugh, could you pass the...'
'Rory.'
It was Rory. Quiet. No challenge. A correction with a half-smile under it, the half-smile that had arrived in the staff room at the end of October and never left.
'Yes. Right. Rory. Could you pass the mint sauce.'
'Of course.'
The mint sauce in its small blue jug moved from Rory's hand to Malcolm's hand without incident. Diane watched the transaction with the intensity of a border-control officer watching a passport go through a scanner. When it arrived safely, she served the potatoes.
For the first forty minutes, Malcolm managedMr Cavanaughthree more times before catching himself. Each time, he corrected. Each time, his lips thinned and the correction cost him and the cost was visible and nobody said anything about it.
Rory called him Malcolm without fail.
The asymmetry hung in the room like a wrong note in a hymn.
At minute forty-one, Malcolm put his fork down beside his plate. The forks at Malcolm's table always went down parallel to the plate edge; it was from this man that Neil had learnt to align his utensils. He laid the fork down now and looked at the tablecloth and then, with a small lift of the chin Neil had seen exactly twice before in his life, the lift Malcolm used when he had decided to do a difficult thing and would not be ashamed of doing it, looked across the table at Rory.
