The Girl In Socks

1

She held the small compass lightly in her fingers for the last time. It was barely more than an inch across, manufactured in 1879 by Francis Barker & Sons, London. Blued steel needle with gold letters, pivoting above a sunburst dial.

She placed the small piece of paper on top of the glass, then clipped the brass lid back into place. She did not think in modern terms about what she was doing, that it might have been the hardest thing she had ever done. Yet, undoubtedly it was.

She placed the compass on the bench, let her fingers rest on it for another few seconds, and then stood up abruptly.

‘We should go,’ she said to the girl, who was playing at the side of a fountain.

The girl looked over and pointed at the bench.

‘Mummy, you left your box.’

Marianna took the girl’s hand and found that she could not speak. They walked quickly down Avenue Gardens and out of Regent’s Park.

Φ

Marianna had been drinking in the same café for five years, ever since she had arrived in London. A small shop close to Charing Cross Road, but far enough away and round a corner so that the tourists never came. Close to St-Giles-in-the Fields, where the drunks were, and the middle aged men shot up; but none of them paid her any attention, sensing her melancholy, fearing that it might be infectious.

She abruptly changed her routine when the café decided to bring itself into the 21st century. She had loved it for its simplicity. Coffee and tea, croissants and pain au chocolat. A Parisian chic she imagined, although she had never been to Paris. Every morning she would find herself spending at least half an hour longer than she intended; and her own shop would be opened half an hour late.

One Monday morning, in the spring of 2003, she arrived slightly earlier than usual; there was a menu board behind the counter. Frappachino and latte and decaf. The two members of staff wore the same uniform. A small piece of card on each table promised the latest in café sophistication, wifi connectivity.

She looked for him, but he wasn’t there, and she instantly assumed he had gone with the makeover. Making a quick and panicked decision, she turned and walked out.

Elyot returned from the bathroom eleven seconds later. Checked to see if Marianna was there, but she wasn’t due for another ten or fifteen minutes. He felt the draught of cold air, of someone having just left the shop, but the same customers were in as had been a few minutes earlier.

One of them had finished his coffee and Elyot walked over to see if he wanted a refill.

*

For years Marianna never knew why her mother hated her, then suddenly one day it seemed obvious and she felt stupid for not having known. She could have hated her in return, but felt nothing. At the moment of realisation, she went home, packed a bag and left.

Her grandparents had been caught up in the persecution at the start of the war. They had hidden for a while, pretended to be people they weren’t, a religion they weren’t. They hadn’t liked denying their culture, but the young Jacob Zieliński had recognised the danger. Eventually they had been betrayed and the young couple had been taken from the outskirts of Gdańsk and sent to the camps. However, they had managed to leave Marianna’s father with a neighbour, the baby born into tragedy.

Always strong enough to work, Jacob had gone from Stutthof to Majdanek to Auschwitz, somehow surviving the final death march to Buchenwald, to be liberated by the Americans. He had returned to Gdańsk, where his son waited for the stranger to come home. Jacob’s wife never arrived, an early victim of the gassing vans in Chelmno.

Jacob, having escaped the persecution of the Nazis, did not escape the persecution of his fellow Poles. He never did get his son back, he never did get to live the miserable austere life of his fellow countrymen under the Soviets. They asked how he had survived all that time, some had screamed collaboration! Jacob was hounded and killed. Marianna’s father grew up with strangers, the Jew in him was lost.

He moved to Warsaw when he was seventeen.

*

Elyot waited all morning. Slowly he came to realise what must have happened. She had come in while he’d been at the bathroom; the place had changed, the other two waiters were new, Elyot had not been there, her equilibrium had been lost, and she had instantly left.

If only Harrison had been there he could have said something to Marianna, or at least to Elyot when he’d returned. But Harrison was gone, too old for the modern coffee shop, and the two waiters in uniformed attendance had not known the woman who sat every morning with her coffee, reading Gazeta Wyborcza.

She never spoke to him, just listened and sometimes smiled. He presumed that she didn’t speak English, or was embarrassed to speak it. Maybe she didn’t speak at all. They had enjoyed the spirit of it, the one-way conversations every weekday morning. The longing had gone unspoken, but in other ways Elyot had found his voice. And Marianna felt that he understood her and that she had gone beyond speech.

That evening, when realisation had settled upon him and he knew for sure that she would not be back, Elyot removed his new uniform and resigned. The next morning he returned to Charing Cross Road and began methodically searching other coffee houses in the area; plain coffee houses with neither latte nor wifi.

Four times the next day Elyot walked past Marianna’s shop and he never noticed. She catered to a niche market, had no reason to try to tempt in the random passerby.

Each time Elyot walked past her invisible shop front, she was sitting at the back in her little workshop area, her head down over a Georgian gimbaled marine compass, dating from the 1820’s. The pointer was missing, but she had spares of the right size and vintage. The dry card was pristine, thirty-two cardinal and inter-cardinal points, a large Fleur de lis for North. The mahogany bowl was slightly damaged, the brass gimbal dented. She would repair the imperfections. She was in no hurry. Business wasn’t good, but it was adequate. Over time, the right people had come to know her and to trust her work.

2

The compass was picked up ten minutes later by a small boy. He didn’t even try to open it; maybe he didn’t realise that it could be opened. He hit it a couple of times and then threw it into the grass.

Φ

Her father arrived in Warsaw in 1957. The city had been rebuilt, the Palace of Culture & Science was temporarily the tallest building in Europe, and Poland was under the domain of the Soviet Union. He got a job working construction, he met and married Ania Rutkowska. He thought they would have children, but nothing happened for a very long time. They had their moments of light, but generally they had given up, they were unhappy, they lived a bleak life among people who queued for food and had never recovered.

When Ania fell pregnant it was the first time they had made love in two and a half years, a vodka-fuelled fumble on the sofa which Ania would have called rape had she wanted to call it anything. Marianna was born on a beautifully warm June morning in 1980. Her father celebrated in drink.

He worked in construction, Marianna’s mother brought up the baby and queued for food.

One snowy night in December 1988, when the city of Warsaw was quiet, her father came to Marianna’s bedroom for the first time. She was eight and a half. He called it their secret. Somehow the words stuck. Even after puberty, even when she was a more enlightened teenager, she still thought of it as their secret. Their dreadful secret.

*

Elyot had only known her for six months, and even at that it was a stretch to say that he’d known her at all. But once she was gone, London suddenly seemed tired. He saw the same faces in amongst the millions; he had done the galleries, he had walked the Mall, he’d had days of ethnic culture, he had embraced the city, its size and its diversity. Yet, suddenly, without the presence of this woman who had never spoken a word to him, it seemed empty, bereft of life.

He took a job as a researcher in maritime history at the University of Bath. It didn’t pay much, and there he was, not long turned thirty-two, living in amongst students, being drawn into their lives. Soon found himself in a relationship with a nineteen year-old Chinese mathematics student; frantic, exciting sex and strange boredom which he didn’t understand.

*

Marianna was working on an old 3” box compass, which she’d picked up on a trip to Massachusetts. She could tell the man was watching her, but she generally didn’t engage the customers unless they gave her no choice. It would have been preferable to work behind a door with no shop front, but her accountant had told her often enough that she had to take all the business she could get.

‘What’s that you’re working on?’

She didn’t look up. The conversation would be forced. She had lost the art of it, the day she had realised why her mother hated her. The day she’d realised that the secret she shared with her father, wasn’t a secret.

Her mother hadn’t confronted her, hadn’t walked in on them, there had been no uncomfortable family revelation. Marianna had been sitting in a small café on Aleje Jerozolimskie near the centre of town, nursing a slow cup of coffee, watching the cars. From nowhere, suddenly it was obvious. Her mother had known all along. She could not begin to fathom why she had not said anything, why she had thought so little of her daughter that she had not put a stop to it, but at that moment she knew why her mother hated her.

She went home, she packed a bag. Her father was still at the factory, her mother was in the kitchen chopping vegetables. Marianna stood in the doorway for a few seconds, coat on, her bag in her hand. Her mother stared blankly. ‘Wyjeźdźam,’ she said. Her mother did not reply.

You let this happen to me all these years.

You stole my husband.

She turned and walked quickly from the house. She never saw or heard from her mother again. That night her father was distraught. The next morning he was dead.

The man in the shop looked like her father. But then, so did everyone.

‘It is a Wilcox Crittenden,’ she said. She caught his eye, but only briefly. ‘Early 1920’s. If you have heard of them, it is probably because of their toilets.’

‘They make toilets?’

‘Marine toilets.’

‘What do you do, exactly?’

She looked up, slightly curious why he continued to make an effort. He smiled. He had dimples, white teeth. His eyes smiled too. She might have wondered if she knew him, but she didn’t know anybody.

‘I...,’ she began, unsure whether he was actually interested, ‘it depends. Sometimes, if the piece works, I do not like to do anything. Some customers want the wear and tear, they want the compass to look as if it has sailed around the world.’

‘I like that,’ he said. ‘A salty old relic that looks as if it’s sailed the seven seas, as if it’s seen action on the Spanish Main and once went down in the Baltic with a Russian cargo vessel, before washing up on the Suffolk coast.’

She continued, not wanting to be swept up by the romance of his voice. ‘Sometimes, if the piece obviously is not working, if the needle needs replaced, or the fluid, if the card is missing, I will repair that.’ She talked quickly, drily, not allowing him to interrupt. ‘Although obviously you want the piece to retain as much of its original detail as possible.’

She looked up, expecting him to still be staring at her. He was holding a Sherwood & Co. WW1 military pocket watch compass. It was in pristine condition. She’d liked the simplicity of it, had liked the military arrow denoting that it was War Department issue.

‘This, for example,’ he said, ‘much too clean.’

Such assurance in speech.

3

The compass lay in the grass for a few days. The next thing to go anywhere near it was a lawn mower. It swept past, no more than six inches away. About to swing the mower around, the gardener noticed the brass, dull in amongst the grass. He bent down, inspected the small box, slipped it into his pocket and forgot about it.

Φ

Burke was amused by her discomfort, had her down as borderline Asberger’s. The lower end of the scale, largely manifesting itself in a general discomfort with other people. Which explained why she so rarely met his eye. However, he had managed to progress beyond the conversation on compasses, to tempt her away from her workshop and away from her one bedroomed flat off the King’s Road.

He had chosen the wine and the food without looking at the menu.

‘You’re a tough nut to crack,’ he said mundanely, as the waiter poured; his words suggesting the root of his interest; that she represented competition. ‘Why is a beautiful young Polish woman repairing antique compasses in a shop in London?’

Marianna had never been called beautiful before; she had long since stopped thinking of herself as being young. She blushed slightly, decided to hide behind the story of her grandfather.

‘My grandparents, and the generations before them, as far back as I know, lived in Gdańsk.’

‘Shipyards?’ he asked, using all his knowledge.

‘Yes. But it goes back much further. We have a long seafaring tradition. A nautical tradition.’

‘Poland?’

She caught his eye quickly, looked away.

‘It is not just the British who build boats.’

‘Of course.’

‘My family were never seafaring, but they worked in the yards, builders and merchantmen.’

‘You grew up in Gdańsk?’

He made the effort to try to pronounce the name the Polish way, the soft n, and she smiled. He recognised the beauty of her lips, the sadness in her eyes, obscured by her dark hair.

‘Warsaw. But we visited Gdańsk every year. I loved the docks, the museum, the old shops.’

The duck arrived, hugging the centre of the enormous plate, as if the outer edges had negotiated a deal to be food-free.

That night she went back to his apartment and had sex for the first time with someone other than her father.

4

‘What have you been spending your money on now?’

Morgan looked over the top of the Mirror,

‘What are you talking about?’

He had forgotten about the small brass box. His wife fished it out of his pocket, turned it over in her fingers. She opened it, read the note.

The words were on her lips, but she stopped herself. Morgan had gone back to reading the paper. She slipped the note back inside the compass and closed the lid.

Φ

Elyot was aware of wanting something he couldn’t have, of desire sharpened by the impossible. How often is the ordinary, the acceptable and successful ordinary, cast aside in search of the different and the new? Like so many, he longed for someone who was gone. Yet he liked the notion of a lost love, the impossibility of doomed romance, the eternal lovers who were never meant to be. It seemed suitably tragic for him, for he was a poet at heart, if a poet who did not write.

Every Friday he took the train to Paddington, the Bakerloo to Oxford Circus, then walked along Oxford Street to the junction of Tottenham Court Road and Charing Cross Road. At the time when he knew Marianna would be drinking coffee and slowly eating a pain au chocolat, never getting pastry on her lips, he would walk from tea shop to coffee house, searching in vain. An endless romantic search.

He even found himself in a small Polish delicatessen, describing the object of his desire and feeling foolish. The shopkeeper had smiled, had said that yes, he did have a customer - or two, or three - who met that description. Elyot formulated a plan to spend an entire week sitting in the café across the road, waiting for her to appear, although the plan did not happen.

Eventually he missed a Friday, and although he berated himself and made sure that the following week he was back on Charing Cross Road, it was not long before he missed another. As the months turned into a year, more Friday’s than not Elyot would not take the train.

If he had known that every morning Marianna now took coffee at a small café around the corner from her apartment, before taking the train to work, then he would likely not have walked up and down Charing Cross Road at all.

Once, every couple of months or so, Marianna would go back to their café on the off chance that Elyot would be there. One day they even missed each other by a little less than twenty minutes. But that was the type of relationship they had.

*

She wore socks in bed despite everything that he said. Burke told himself that the woman he had first encountered, huddled over a small compass in a small shop, had been sexy and vibrant and alive. In truth, he had found someone who would marry him, that was all. She had been the very essence of her employment; intricate, fascinating, intelligent, rewarding to greater study and interest; but no one had ever thought of Marianna as sexy, and neither had Burke. His memory changed to suit his needs, to create excuses; in this instance, it was the need he had to stay out late, to spend as little time with his wife and daughter as he could; to have other women.

He bought Marianna flimsy night clothes so that he could be annoyed when she never wore them. And when he crawled into bed, smelling of another woman’s shower gel, and his feet touched hers, he would pull away and think dismal thoughts about how unattractive his wife was that she wore socks in bed.

*

Elyot was drinking coffee, his life conducted around it. Jiao was beseeching him. He felt dreadfully uncomfortable, his head low. His spoon tapped occasionally against the saucer.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘You’re a practical person, you live in the real world. There’s no one. There’s no magical one. There are nearly seven billion people out there. How can there be a one?’

Their relationship had dragged on longer than intended. A fun night had become a long weekend, then a month, then the next. Trapped by eastern lovemaking he said to his colleagues, who couldn’t understand why he didn’t just leave. He lied to Jiao every Friday.

Finally he had forced the conversation.

‘I didn’t say that,’ he said. He couldn’t look up. The waitress watched the breakup from behind the counter.

‘Well, what then?’

Jiao imagined she could change his mind. As if feelings could be manipulated and shaped by badgering and coercion.

Everyone says I love you. Everyone says I’ll always love you. And they usually mean it. And perhaps the feeling lasts forever, and perhaps the feeling dies. What does anyone think when they address the partner who is walking away? Everyone who ever pleaded? Everyone who ever wrote a song, imploring their love not to go? What were they thinking? That you can recreate the passion and the ardour and the love by guilt and desperation?

Elyot had never told Jiao that he loved her in the first place. Nevertheless his insides had curled into a tortured ball. He hated where he was, sitting in a small café, breaking up with the girl, seemingly the one who was at fault, his every word open to the closest inspection. Every single word.

He was about to crack when she stood up and stormed out of the café. Relief embraced him like a long lost love. The waitress waited what she considered to be a decent interval before appearing at his table.

‘Can I get you another coffee?’ she asked

Elyot looked up into the what were, without doubt, beautiful and seductive brown eyes.

5

Morgan’s wife allowed herself many bitter thoughts. A handwritten note placed inside an antique compass.  The words themselves were not important, even she could see the impossible romance of it. If only there had been a time and a place she could have gone there and found her husband with the other woman. But there was nothing. Just five words written in pencil.

She had a hundred confrontational conversations in her head with her husband but none of them turned out well.

Several weeks later she threw the compass into the river near Battersea power station.

Φ

‘Would you like another coffee?’

Marianna looked up. Elyot had just come on duty, his first day on the job, and was clearing up the few deserted tables. He had watched Marianna for a second, her head bowed over the foreign newspaper.

When he spoke, she looked up, surprised. Her eyes were beautiful, welcoming him in from his reserve. Full of depth and sadness. He felt a peculiar moment of shock, but did not recognise in her curious expression that she felt the same, that she saw the same in his eyes.

She shook her head, held his gaze for another enthralling few seconds, a moment that trapped them both in a silent world, and then suddenly she snapped from the trance and looked back at the newspaper.

Elyot hesitated, wondering what to do with the moment, then he turned with his tray and returned behind the counter, forgetting to lift her cup. The other waiter, Harrison, was waiting for him.

‘She only ever has one cup. Same every day. Cup of coffee, pain au chocolat. Reads the newspaper. She’s Polish.’

That night Elyot thought about Marianna and she thought about him. Lying in bed, the city of London between them. Wondering what was going on and if they would see each other the following day.

Elyot started early and was ready with her coffee and pain au chocolat. She seemed surprised. She smiled, but never spoke. He said a few words, friendly, mundane words that he would come to repeat. They both saw the beauty in it, the unspoken attraction.

He thought he could say something more significant the following day, yet the following day never came. None of the conversations he had in his head ever crossed the threshold of his lips. All the things he wanted to say.

And so they developed a relationship of thought and unspoken intention, plus a few words from Elyot on the weather or the coffee or the pastries. They could sense moods, they created histories, they imagined telepathy.

Some days Elyot accepted his inability to break out from small words; some days it depressed him, so that he took the depression home with him. Some nights he lay tortured in bed, unable to sleep. The next day his mood would be grim, she sensed the anger in him, didn’t quite understand it. It was as if he was annoyed at her, and it reminded her of her mother.

Those days passed unhappily for them both. Eventually Elyot’s mood would go, the smile and the enjoyment of the elusive romance would return. Marianna came and went with Elyot’s moods and tried to understand.

When Malcolm started talking about giving the café a makeover, Elyot instantly objected. He didn’t care what the café looked like, he didn’t care how the business went, he no longer even needed to work there, having picked up some steady research work from a professor at the Greenwich Maritime Institute.

‘You’ll ruin the aesthetic,’ said Elyot, desperately.

Malcolm barked a laugh.

‘So will closing the place down,’ he said.

‘You don’t need the money,’ said Elyot, moderating his tone. ‘You’re this gentleman café owner. You do this for the love of it.’

‘Very perceptive for a waiter,’ said Malcolm. ‘Aesthetics are fine, but so are customers.’

‘We have customers,’ said Elyot, with no conviction.

‘For the love of God,’ said Malcolm. Harrison glanced at Elyot; he knew which customer he was worried about. But Harrison would be leaving anyway. ‘My friends,’ Malcolm went on, ‘we are lost without connectivity.’

The Friday before the changes, Elyot was determined to talk to Marianna; but when it came to it, he knew he could defer the conversation to the Monday. He talked about the newspapers and Marianna nodded behind beautiful eyes.

As she was leaving she turned and looked back at the counter. Elyot lifted his head from the coffee machine. They exchanged a look, which somehow seemed to have more significance than usual. As if their funny little romance was coming to an end. She smiled awkwardly, an embarrassed smile, and left the café.

They did not see each other again for seventeen months and seventeen days.

6

The compass did not sink. It was small, light, there was air trapped inside. It floated down river, very slowly with the movement of the water. Dwarfed by the river and the city, an unnoticeable object floating slowly away, past the Houses of Parliament, the London Eye, the landmarks of civilisation. Some days it washed up on the stones. Some days it bobbled against river walls. The compass was taking its time.

Φ

Once Jiao had gone, Elyot was able to relax about going to London. No longer having to lie, he set himself the task of finding Marianna in a city of seven million. He felt he had fate on his side, an inevitability that the impossible romance would happen.

He took to going to London twice a week. He knew the time she took coffee in the morning, knew that she was a woman of habit. He made a directory of every café, every coffee shop, every tea room in London. He would search them all if he had to.

In the catalogue of near misses that was their relationship, he quickly glanced into the coffee shop on the Kings Road that was her new home. But now she was drinking coffee half an hour earlier than previously, as she was taking breakfast before travelling to work. He had not included this in his calculations.

So when they found each other, at a small auction house in Bath, it was completely by accident and a moment for which neither of them had prepared. Suddenly, drifting through a market, searching for an old compass, they found themselves standing at the same table.

Elyot had lifted a Francis Barker & Son, manufactured in the late 19th century. Little more than an inch in diameter, blued steel needle, sunburst dial, brass case. There was a small sign saying Do Not Touch. Elyot removed the lid and was holding the compass much more delicately than was required.

He felt the presence beside him and turned quickly. She was standing four feet away, her eyes on his fingers. She had been looking at him, but lowered her gaze before he turned. He stared at her lips. Pale and soft, slightly parted. His breath caught in his throat. Slowly she raised her eyes.

It was somehow an impossible moment. She couldn’t speak, was not even going to try. She felt the briefest, most glorious moment of wonderful, blazing warmth. A moment of perfection, a moment when nothing else mattered, a blissful instant in time. At home she would have called it a momentu absolutnego szczęścia.

Then slowly, something made him lower his gaze. He was not observant, he did not notice detail, not with anyone else he had ever known. But Marianna was different. And those long, slender fingers, the ones which he knew would be creative and technical, the ones which he had stared at and imagined running softly all over his body, now had a ring around the fourth finger; a ring with two large stones, stones which sparkled in the dim light of the hall.

She dropped her gaze to her fingers, their eyes stayed on the ring that Burke had bought the previous month. Elyot felt a peculiar sensation. Everything breaking down and melting away. All hope lost, and with it his body.

‘You find what you’re looking for?’

Marianna dropped her eyes farther at Burke’s approach, feeling her face redden. Elyot quickly glanced at him. Every piece of his clothing cried of wealth, and Elyot instantly placed the compass back on the table and turned away.

He was lost in the crowd and Marianna did not even feel that she could watch him go. It was over. The moment she had dreamed about, the moment on which she had focused so much of her emotional energy for so long. It should have been a Big Bang moment, an instant in time from which so much could grow and develop. Instead, the object of that moment was already disappearing into the crowd, walking out the door.

Burke noticed that she was flushed but was not going to create any awkwardness by mentioning it. Everyone has ghosts, he thought, and he wasn’t about to resurrect any of Marianna’s.

He touched her arm, she shook her head to bring herself back to the present. She lifted the compass, so that her fingers were touching the very same thing that Elyot’s fingers had been touching a few seconds previously.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘This is... it is a Francis Barker. A nice piece.’

‘Fantastic,’ said Burke. ‘Come on, let’s go and get a drink before the whole thing kicks off.’

She placed the compass back on the table. She would get it now, it didn’t matter the price. Even if someone else wanted it as much as she did, she would have Burke sitting beside her. Even though he might have sensed something of what had just transpired over this simple compass, he would do her bidding.

As they walked back through the crowd she turned and looked at the compass on the table. In her mind it was already inexorably linked to Elyot, this small, circular brass box. At last she would have something that had been his, and some infinitesimal part of her life was complete.

7

For a time the compass was lost. Lost from human knowledge, at least, if not lost in itself. How can a compass ever be lost?

Φ

They never fought. In the place where they had gone, there was no need. They slept in the same bed; they shared in decisions regarding Ella; they ate dinner together on occasion, sometimes they went to the theatre. He didn’t often take her to work events as he thought she might be awkward and clumsy socially. She had long ago given up wanting to be asked.

It had been three years and seven months since they’d made love; more than six years since they’d shared any intimacy of conversation. Marianna wasn’t counting. But she could measure in days the only two things that were important to her. It was four years, three months and seventeen days since Ella had been born; five years, ten months and two days since the day that Burke had paid too much for the Francis Barker.

She presumed that he’d forgotten which compass he’d bought for her that day, but Burke knew exactly which compass it was, he knew that she was never going to sell it. He had seen the look on Elyot’s face, Marianna’s flush. One day he intended finding the compass and casually tossing it into a London bin. However, as with so many of his intentions regarding Marianna, it was something that he had never bothered doing, because he’d never cared enough.

*

Elyot gave up for a while after the meeting at the auction house in Bath. He had seen the ring and the man, he thought he could not compete. Too close to the situation to recognise that Marianna had been overcome with the same shock of excitement and desire that he’d felt. Could not see in her what he’d felt himself; it was only Burke, the detached one, who had noticed everything.

Elyot moved back to London, although he travelled often. Drowned in maritime research, freelance work, wherever it came. He gained a name for himself, work came easily.

Sometimes women seduced him, but Elyot was detached. They recognised the sadness in him and it made him more attractive. But sex was always lonely and dispassionate, and every single woman that seduced him eventually acknowledged to herself that she had failed. Elyot, the man within, was far out of reach.

Depression and frustration came and went, but as he grew older he became more accepting. He drank less alcohol, he spent his evenings like he spent his days, and gradually he became indispensable to those for whom he worked.

Eventually time allowed him to rekindle hope. He gave up on coffee, switched to antiques. He searched the directories, he searched on-line. The first time he visited Marianna’s shop it was closed. He travelled around the country; Kings Lynn, Plymouth, as far north as Eyemouth. Small shops selling antique compasses. He would arrive with no hope and no expectation; he might find something that would help with his work, but that would be an unlikely and unnecessary accident. He would usually buy a compass. The world of antique compasses was not so big; if he had met Marianna once, it could happen again. He felt bound to her by it.

He walked past her shop seventeen times in three years; all the while she was at home with Ella. He found himself walking past the shop more and more often. A shop that never opened, but which never closed down. A mystery which drew him in, convincing him that Marianna would be at the heart of it.

For two years he visited the shop every other day, waiting for it to open. Every now and again he would see some sign that there had been someone inside. He could see the mail had been lifted from behind the glass door. The few compasses in the window did not grow dusty.

Gradually he visited the shop less and less.

8

Marianna returned to work when Ella was four and a half and started school. On the first day she went to the old café, looking for Elyot. Despite the fact that it no longer looked like the place where they had met, she liked the thought that he might be there. She took to going every day. She had the compass in her pocket, and the sense of him in a place they had once known.

A few months later she had not tired of the idea; she enjoyed the café, despite the fact that it might as well have been a Starbucks or Café Nero. She sat at the same table, when it was free, and she imagined Elyot still there, serving her coffee. And all the time her melancholy grew.

Eventually, she decided to set the compass free, to let it go and look for him. She knew the notion was absurd, but somehow she thought that it would find him. It had brought them back together once before and it would do so again.

She wrote a few words on a small piece of paper, placed it inside the compass, and left the compass sitting on a park bench. The next day she sat in the café at the usual time and waited for Elyot to arrive.

That evening she received a call from Poland telling her that her mother had died. The next day, walking away from Elyot and the compass and her impossible romance, she took Ella to Poland to visit the land of her birth. They stayed for six months.

*

When Marianna and Ella returned from Poland, Burke had given up on them and had moved his things from the house. Marianna did not weep, Ella did not notice. The next day Ella went back to school, Marianna went to Burke’s office.

She felt strangely uplifted, and she didn’t know why. She had thought herself so disinterested in Burke that she would not even have been pleased by his leaving.

‘Are we getting a divorce?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know yet,’ said Burke. ‘I lost you so long ago, it doesn’t seem to matter whether we’re still married.’

They had never spoken about it, but she understood. She had been lost to him, as sure as if she had disappeared one day at the shop, never to return. The marriage had been her mistake.

As she left his office she put her hand in her pocket to touch the compass, something she did several times a day; but it was gone, because six months earlier she had left it sitting on a park bench.

*

Elyot had his feet propped on a desk, eating a maple and pecan Danish. The night before he’d had dinner with a fellow researcher. Same age, same interests, it had been very easy. Sex had been inevitable. She had left his apartment at 12.36. He was currently sitting in as relaxed a pose as possible to try to look cool when she came in. He’d never slept with a colleague before and wasn’t sure how he should be arranged at his desk.

He had arrived early so that he would already be in position, looking nonchalant, when she arrived. Felt vaguely ridiculous; wondered if she would want to see him again that evening. Would be worried if she did; slightly offended if she didn’t.

At 8:37 that morning, as he placed the last of the maple and pecan in his mouth, the compass found its way to his desk.

‘Did you see this?’ said Larkin. ‘How’d it go last night, by the way?’ he added, walking over to his own desk, flipping the Guardian to the back sports page.

Elyot stared at the compass. Little more than an inch across, brass case, slightly discoloured by floating on the river and lying on the banks for a few months, before floating up to the banks of the Royal Naval College at Greenwich.

‘Where?’ was all he managed.

‘Jorkiss, you know, the security guy. Said it was in the river, right up against the bank. Just out there. Says it’s a compass. Might be quite old, take a look.’

Elyot’s fingers were already resting on it. A compass in a small brass box. It could have been any compass in the world, but he knew which one it was. He eased the lid off with his thumbnail, a small piece of paper fell onto the desk.

He glanced over his shoulder. Jane was walking in, trying not to look at him. A minute earlier he would have been over-analysing her awkward glances. Now he looked right through her. Turned back to the compass, took in the simple beauty of the needle and the sunburst dial, then he opened the small piece of paper.

He stared at it for a few moments then looked quickly up at the clock. There was still time. Maybe it was months too late, or years too late, but he knew it wouldn’t be. He stood quickly, lifted the compass.

‘I’ll be back later,’ he said, and without waiting ran quickly from the office.

Jane watched him go, curious as to why she’d had that much effect on him.

‘God, what’d you do to him last night?’ said Larkin, smiling.

*

She turned at the movement of the door. She wouldn’t usually look around; she wasn’t an observer of life. She never watched people. She was stuck in her own world, where the constants were.

Elyot hesitated at the doorway, until someone muttered at him to stop letting the draught in. He took a step into the café, and then quickly came and sat down across from her at the table. She had been about to leave, hating herself for the six months in Poland, signing forms, clearing up her mother’s affairs.

This time, strangely, there was no elation, no blinding flash. No momentu absolutnego szczęścia. They were sitting across a table from one another, the compass had chosen the moment, and they would be together. For a second they held each other’s gaze, and then together they looked down at the small compass which he had placed on the table.

No one noticed them.

‘I got your note,’ said Elyot.

Marianna smiled. He couldn’t remember seeing her smile like that before. The smile of his memory had been circumspect.

‘Can I get you that coffee?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That would be nice.’

He looked over at the counter, then slowly got to his feet.

‘Have you been looking for me?’ she asked, when he had started to walk away. He stopped and turned.

‘Yes,’ was all he said.

She smiled, her fingers rested on the lid of the compass. And from then on, words engulfed them.