The Apricot Tree on Lark Terrace

The man outside Rosa Bennett's borrowed flat was holding a bowl of apricots as though he had been asked to explain them.

"They're from the tree," he said.

Rosa looked past him into the shared garden. The tree leaned over two mismatched chairs, a folded washing line and a bicycle with no front wheel.

"I was hoping they were from the bicycle."

He looked round, then back at her. "That would solve several problems."

She had been awake since five, driving boxes from the house she no longer shared with her husband. Her aunt Jean had offered the flat for the summer while staying with her daughter. Rosa had arrived determined not to be the recently divorced niece everyone would have to be kind to.

The bowl made that determination inconvenient.

"I'm Daniel. Number four. Jean asked me to show you where things are."

"I'm Rosa. Currently surrounded by them."

He glanced at the boxes behind her and did not ask what had happened. She liked him immediately for an omission that was probably only good manners.

"Bins on Tuesday. Garden gate sticks unless you lift it. Apricots are for everybody. The bowl belongs to Mrs Finch, so don't put it in a box and move to another county."

"Is that a local offence?"

"People have left over less."

He smiled, and the remark lost its edge before she was sure it had one.

After he left, Rosa ate an apricot over the sink. It was softer than she expected. Juice ran down her wrist, and she laughed at the absurdity of having unpacked three boxes of paper without finding a towel.

In the garden, Daniel was turning the bicycle upside down. He looked up at the sound. She lifted the fruit in acknowledgment, a small yellow signal across a space she did not yet know how to inhabit.

Rosa made her living drawing rooms she had never entered for people who wanted them to look lived in. Book jackets, magazine features, the occasional advertising commission that paid for the quieter work. At forty-two, she could usually tell when an editor wanted warmth and when an editor wanted more chairs.

The residency email asked for neither. It offered eight weeks in Bristol, beginning in September, to develop a sequence of drawings for an exhibition. There was a studio, a modest allowance and a deadline for accepting.

She read it three times, then left it open.

Her former husband had called her work portable, which had meant that his work decided where they lived. The offer felt like a room with a door she could close from the inside.

Below her window, Daniel was arguing amiably with Mrs Finch about whether the garden table needed replacing. He wanted to mend a leg. She wanted a table that did not require a spoon under it.

Rosa took down a sheet of cardboard and drew a table with a spoon for each leg.

Mrs Finch laughed so hard that she had to sit on the disputed furniture.

"She can stay," she told Daniel.

"I wasn't holding a vote."

"That's why nothing gets done."

Later, as Rosa carried her mug upstairs, Daniel asked how long she would be there.

"Until the end of August. Jean's been generous."

"Summer, then."

"That's generally what July and August amount to."

He smiled, but she had the impression of a door being pulled almost shut.

In the flat she looked again at the email. She did not owe a neighbour an account of a job she had not yet accepted. Still, she was surprised by how much she wanted to tell him.

On Saturday, Rosa found Daniel in the garden with a sheet of paper weighted by two mugs. He was drawing a small shelf that would fit beside his father's chair.

"He keeps losing the television remote," Daniel said. "Then he rings me to describe the programme he can't change."

"Perhaps he likes describing it to you."

"Last week it was forty minutes about competitive fishing."

She sat opposite him. The drawing was precise, the corners marked with measurements she did not try to improve. He worked as a technical drafter and, unlike Rosa, had to make lines mean something that would still be true when somebody cut a piece of wood.

"What do you draw when nobody asks?" she said.

He turned the paper over. On the back was an untidy sketch of the apricot tree, its branches reaching past the edge.

"That. Badly."

"It's not bad. It's just trying to get away."

She put a finger near the corner without touching the drawing. "Leave it somewhere to go."

He pulled another sheet from the folder and began again, making the tree smaller. She watched him look from paper to branches and back, the concentration taking years off his face without making him seem young.

"Forty-five," he said suddenly.

"What?"

"You were trying to work out my age."

"I was trying to work out whether you were going to draw the washing line."

He looked at the paper. "That too."

They laughed. Mrs Finch opened a window and asked whether anybody intended to make tea or simply discuss it indefinitely.

When Rosa went to fetch the kettle, Daniel moved the spare mug away from the paper so that she could sit closer without catching her sleeve on it. It was such a small adjustment that she nearly missed it. Nearly.

The annual garden supper involved six households, nine contradictory suggestions and a rain forecast nobody trusted. A professional gardener had checked the old tree and dealt with the branch that worried Mrs Finch; the chairs were back in their usual place. Daniel repaired the table leg. Mrs Finch removed the spoon and kept it in her apron as a souvenir of victory.

Rosa drew place cards on leftover paper. She gave each neighbour a different small fruit, except Daniel, who received a bicycle wheel.

"I see how it is," he said.

"You were unavailable in apricot."

He put the card in his shirt pocket instead of leaving it on the table.

At supper, she learned that his daughter Milly was twenty-one and studying in another city, that he had been divorced for seven years and that he visited his father on Sundays. He learned that Rosa disliked being told her freedom was exciting when she was still trying to find where she had packed the tin opener.

"I was going to say brave," he admitted.

"Please don't. I signed a form and hired a van."

"Was the van brave?"

"The van was magnificent."

When everyone else went in, they gathered plates beneath the tree. A small rain began, too light to send them running.

Daniel said, "It's good having you here."

She held a plate against her chest. "It's good being here."

"Even if it's only summer."

There it was again, the almost-closed door.

"Daniel, summer isn't an apology."

He looked at her, surprised.

She handed him the plates and went upstairs before the sentence could turn into a conversation she had not intended to begin in the rain.

The next evening, Daniel knocked without a bowl.

"I owe you something better than that remark."

Rosa leaned against the door. "An entire season?"

"A dinner. Thursday. Not the garden supper, not Mrs Finch's attempt to feed the whole terrace. You and me, somewhere with a table that works."

"Is this a date?"

He took a breath. "Yes."

She had expected the word to be difficult. It made her feel, instead, wonderfully clear.

"Then yes."

"Seven?"

"Half past. I have a call with an editor."

"Half past."

After he went, she opened the residency email and accepted the offer. She did it before Thursday, before a dinner could become a reason to negotiate with herself about wanting the work.

Then she called Jean.

"I'm going to Bristol in September."

"Good. Have you found the towels?"

"Yes."

"Then things are looking up."

Rosa laughed, and Jean asked whether there was anything else.

She told her about Daniel. Jean listened without a triumphant noise, for which Rosa was grateful.

"He's a good neighbour," Jean said. "You'll have to find out the rest yourself."

On Thursday, Rosa changed her blouse twice and then put the first one back on. From the window she saw Daniel lock his door, check his pocket and return for something. When he came out again, the little drawing of the bicycle wheel was still in the breast pocket of his jacket.

She went down to meet him, carrying no explanation for why that detail mattered so much.