Table Nine

Her sister was married at two o'clock on the Saturday in a room with a hundred and forty people in it, and the cake stood on a table by the window for four hours and was photographed, by Kiki's later count, three hundred and eleven times.

Table nine was empty. Kiki had put nobody at it, and had told her mother it was for a supplier, and had absorbed about forty minutes of comment about that over the course of the afternoon from four different aunts.

She did not check her phone. That is the detail her sister tells, and it is the one Kiki disputes, and the photographic evidence is against her: there is a picture, taken at twenty past four during the speeches, in which the bride's sister is looking under the table at something in her lap with an expression of enormous concentration.

He came at six. He came in through the wrong door, in the same jacket, having been at a hospice since eight in the morning, and he stood at the back of a room containing a hundred and forty strangers and looked for her, and found her, and did not wave, and simply stood there until she saw him.

She crossed the room. It took her about ninety seconds because of four aunts. When she got there she said, "How is he?" — first, before anything else, which is the thing Raff has told approximately everybody he has met since — and he said, "He is having a good day. My sister is with him until ten. He asked me what I was doing standing about and I told him about the car and the cake and the bridge, and he laughed properly for the first time since Tuesday, and then he told me to go, and then he told me twice more."

Kiki said, "So you are here under orders." And Raff Oduya-Kine said, "I am here under orders and I would like that noted, because it is the only reason I have the nerve," and she took him to table nine and sat him down and put a plate in front of him and did not introduce him to a single person for eleven minutes.

Nobody asked him a question. She had said there would be a place at table nine and nobody would ask him a single question, and she had spent Friday evening in a kitchen and Saturday morning in a hairdresser's making entirely certain of it, by telling four specific people the truth in confidence and letting them handle the rest, which is how things are done in that family.

He was in Ardsmuir for eleven more days. She had booked four and stayed nine, and the bakery survived on the strength of a manager called Toyah who has been on a considerably better contract ever since.

Most of it was a hospice. That is what those days were and neither of them has ever prettied it up: mornings in a room with a view of a car park, and his two sisters, and the chaplain who played, and a man of seventy-four running out of time and being extremely funny about it.

Kiki met him twice. The first time was on the Monday, for about eleven minutes, because Raff's older sister rang and said that their father had asked who the baker was and had then asked again, and Raff had come out into the corridor and said, "I am very sorry about this," and Kiki had said, "Do not be ridiculous," and had gone in.

She has never told anybody what was said in those eleven minutes and she is not going to. What is on the record is that she came out and went and sat in a stairwell for twenty minutes, and that when Raff found her she said, "He asked me to make something," and Raff said, "Oh God, I am so sorry," and Kiki said, "No. Listen. He asked me to make something for after, and he told me what, and he was completely clear about it, and it is the easiest thing anybody has ever asked me for and I would like you to not say anything about it until it is time."

His father died on the Thursday morning, eleven days after Raff had got into a hire car at Vellhaven with a stranger and nine kilos of cake.

The funeral was the following Wednesday and there were two hundred and forty people at it, in a town of four thousand, which is what happens when a man has tuned the pianos in eleven schools for forty-one years. The chaplain played. Four of his old pupils, who are in their fifties now, played a thing they had arranged themselves and got wrong in the middle and finished anyway.

And afterwards, in a hall behind the church, there was a table with a great deal of ordinary food on it and, at one end, a very large, very plain, absolutely perfect lemon cake with no decoration on it whatsoever, because that is exactly what he had asked her for on a Monday afternoon eleven days earlier, in detail, including the tin size, on the grounds that his wife had made one every Sunday for thirty-one years and had never once in her life iced anything.

Kiki went home on the Friday. Raff had a house and two sisters and a fortnight of paperwork in a town four hundred kilometres from Ardsmuir and eleven hundred from hers, and they had known each other for nineteen days, of which eleven had been about somebody dying.

They did not have a conversation about it at the station. He said, "I will ring you." She said, "I know." That was the whole of it, and both of them have said that anything more would have been a lie told for the sake of a nice moment on a platform.

He rang that night, and the next night, and then every night, and by the fourth week it was a fixed thing at half past nine that neither of them had proposed, and by the eighth week Kiki's manager Toyah had started saying "your acoustician" in a tone that Kiki declined to engage with.

He came to her town in the September. He stayed four days and spent two of them in the bakery at half past three in the morning learning to shape a bloomer, badly, in an apron that did not fit, and being told off by a nineteen-year-old called Marek, and on the second morning at about five o'clock Kiki looked up from the bench and saw a man of forty-six covered in flour arguing about oven spring with a teenager, and put her hands flat on the table for a second.

She went to him in the October, and again in the November, and in the January they had the only real argument of the whole thing, which was about geography and lasted four days and was resolved by neither of them, and simply stopped being urgent in the way that a great many important arguments do.

What ended it was a school. He does about four a year because it is the only part worth anything, and in the February he was asked to do a music block in a town eleven kilometres from her bakery, and he took it, and it was a nine-month job, and he has never once claimed that this was anything other than exactly what it looked like.

"You took a job you did not want to be near me," Kiki said, in the car, on the way back from the site visit. And Raff Oduya-Kine said, "I took a job I did want, in a place I chose, for a reason I am prepared to say out loud in a car park if you would rather have it that way," and she said that a car park would be fine, and he did, and it was.

The hire agreement with four rules and a phone number on the back of it stayed in the glovebox of a returned hire car for about eleven days and should by rights have been thrown away by a valet at Ardsmuir depot.

It was not, because Raff went back for it. He drove out to the depot on the Tuesday between his father's death and the funeral, at about eight in the morning, on no sleep, and asked a woman on the desk whether anybody had cleared out the returns from the previous Friday, and she looked at him and said that she would go and check.

She came back with it eleven minutes later. It had been in a tray with about forty other things. He has said that he does not know what he would have done if it had not been there, and that this is the only moment in the entire nineteen days when he was actually frightened, and that a woman he has never seen since walked into a back office and found a piece of paper for a man who looked the way he looked that morning.

He gave it to Kiki in the March, framed, which she found mortifying, and which she has never taken down. It hangs in the bakery, in the back, where the staff can see it and customers cannot, and there is a laminated card beside it that Toyah made without asking anybody, and the card says: The rules of the car.

Rule one has been crossed out. Rule two has been crossed out. Rule three — no radio unless both wanted it — is still in force and is, according to everybody who has ever been in a vehicle with the pair of them, enforced with an unreasonable rigour by both parties.

Rule four, no questions about why either of us is going to Ardsmuir, has not been crossed out. It has a note under it in a second hand, added at some point that neither of them will specify, and the note says: Broken four times. All four were the point.

People ask, because people always ask, whether it would have happened if the flight had gone. Kiki's answer is that it would not, that there is no version of that Thursday in which she says a word to a man at a car hire desk if the four o'clock departs on time, and that this does not frighten her in the least. Raff's answer, which he gives less often and rather more slowly, is that his father asked him twice on the last good afternoon of his life who the baker was, and that he has decided to regard eleven hundred kilometres of motorway as a thing that happened for a reason, and that he is aware this is not an argument, and that he does not require it to be one.