The Afternoons

James retired on a Friday and felt, genuinely, good about it.

He had expected the ambivalence — had been warned by colleagues who had retired before him, who described a specific grief that arrived in the second month. He had prepared for the grief. He had not prepared for the discovery that his preferences had become, in the thirty years of a working life, difficult to locate.

The mornings were fine. He had always been a morning person — it was not a preference so much as a constitution — and coffee before seven, the news, a walk when the weather permitted: these arrived easily. They had always been his.

The afternoons were the question.

He was not bored. He had projects: the garden, the reading he had deferred, a trip he and Margaret had planned for years. He moved through these with a competence that had served him well for three decades. He was good at doing things. What he was discovering was that being good at doing things was not the same as knowing which things to do.

He would stand in his study at two o'clock on a Tuesday and not know what he wanted to do next. Not in a distressed way. In a genuinely puzzled way. He had been filling the two o'clock slot for thirty years with the requirements of his work, and now the slot was open, and he was reaching for the thing that was actually his, and his hand kept closing on air.

He had raised two children, and he had been, he thought, a good father — present, attentive to their preferences, careful to let them become the people they were rather than the people he might have imagined. He had spent years attending to their preferences, and Margaret's preferences, and his company's requirements, and his clients' needs, and somewhere in the accumulation of other people's requirements his own had become, not forgotten, but a lower resolution. Recognisable in outline. Harder to see up close.

He tried things. He took a pottery class that he liked well enough but did not love. He read three books he'd been meaning to read for years and found that two of them were things he'd meant to read because they were the kind of books a person like him was supposed to read, which was different from wanting to read them.

The third one he stayed up until one in the morning finishing, and when he closed it he thought: there you are.

It was a novel about a man walking across a country he'd never visited for reasons he couldn't fully explain. James had no interest in the country and could not have articulated why the book moved him the way it did.

He ordered three more books by the same author.

He was fifty-seven. He was, apparently, still being introduced to himself.

He thought about the two o'clock slot on Tuesdays. He thought about all the two o'clocks he had not known what to do with and had filled with what was required instead.

He thought: I should have asked this question earlier.

Then he thought: or this is exactly when it needed to be asked.

He was not sure which was true. He suspected both were.