We Agreed on Roleplay. We Did Not Agree on the Genre

At 8.03 on Saturday, my husband appeared in the hotel bar wearing a tailored navy suit and carrying a slim leather folder. He looked successful, available and capable of explaining depreciation without checking his phone.

I was wearing a velvet cape.

We saw each other across the room. Ben stopped. I stopped. A waiter passed between us holding two perfectly ordinary drinks, apparently unaware that a major creative disagreement had occurred.

For our eighth anniversary, we'd agreed to try meeting as fictional strangers. We were both forty-six, familiar with each other's actual stories and willing to be a little silly in private. There had been a clear conversation about what we liked, what we didn't and the fact that either of us could drop the game whenever we wanted.

What we had not discussed was genre.

Ben walked over. 'Hi.'

'Mortal,' I said, because I had prepared that word and was reluctant to waste it.

He looked at the cape. I looked at the folder.

'Are you here for a conference?' I asked.

'Are you here to inherit the building?'

We both broke immediately.

He held out a chair. I sat, arranging a quantity of velvet that made the chair seem inadequately briefed. He put the folder on the table. Inside, I would later learn, was a blank notebook. He had brought stationery to suggest authority.

'Out of character,' I said.

'Absolutely.'

We ordered drinks in our own names. This seemed a sensible place to begin rebuilding the evening.

Our waiter returned with the drinks and asked whether we were waiting for anyone else. Ben said no at exactly the moment I looked down at the quantity of fabric occupying the spare chair.

'Just us,' I added. 'And the outerwear.'

The waiter smiled politely and left us to it. I was grateful. The cape had already received enough professional attention.

Ben opened the folder so I could see the blank notebook. A very good pen was clipped inside. He had borrowed it from his own desk, where it normally signed birthday cards with a level of ceremony disproportionate to the task.

'You brought the pen.'

'It suits the character.'

'What happened to the cheap one?'

'Mysterious strangers don't use a pen with our plumber's number on it.'

I laughed, then admitted my cape still had the shop tag tucked inside because I hadn't decided whether it counted as clothing or a one-evening lapse in judgement.

He asked whether I liked wearing it. I did, rather. It was warm and pleasantly dramatic. It made sitting down more complicated, but so did several perfectly ordinary skirts I owned.

'Keep it, then,' he said.

'For what?'

'You could develop a reputation at the cinema.'

That helped. The mismatch had briefly made me feel as though I had misunderstood something obvious, when actually we had both taken the same short message and built entirely reasonable nonsense around it.

Ben reached across the table and touched my hand. He looked a little relieved too. I realised he had probably experienced the same second of uncertainty when he saw me, wondering whether his carefully chosen suit had somehow failed an instruction he hadn't known was there.

We could laugh now because neither of us needed the other to have got it wrong.

The message that had caused the trouble was mine: Let's meet somewhere elegant. You're a mysterious stranger with a proposition, and I'm not sure whether to trust you.

I had read mysterious stranger and constructed a wealthy visitor from an unspecified century. Ben had read proposition and imagined a charismatic businessperson who had just sold a company. I had prepared a complicated family curse. He had practised saying he was only in town for one night.

'One night is good,' I said. 'My people generally prefer nights.'

'Your people?'

'I've done background work.'

He laughed into his drink.

There was nothing wrong with his interpretation. That was the irritating part. He looked excellent in the suit. I had simply imagined him owning a crumbling estate rather than a diversified portfolio.

'And you?' he asked. 'Who are you?'

'A widow with a contested inheritance.'

'Of course you are.'

'You're very accepting of my marital situation.'

'I'm trying not to take it personally.'

I removed the cape and put it over the back of the chair. Underneath was a dark dress that worked perfectly well in the present century. Ben loosened his tie. We looked like ourselves again, which was a useful development considering we were the people who actually fancied each other.

He admitted he'd nearly brought a second phone as a prop. I admitted I'd written the names of three imaginary ancestors in the notes app.

'What were you planning to do with them?'

'I hoped the conversation would provide an opening.'

He asked to hear the names. By the third one, neither of us could maintain a straight face. My youngest fictional uncle sounded like an expensive biscuit.

Around us, the bar carried on. A couple celebrated something with sparkling wine. A woman read a novel near the window. Nobody cared about our failed casting process. The privacy of being unimportant to strangers was unexpectedly comforting.

'We could just have our anniversary,' Ben said.

'We could.'

I thought about it. There was no prize for following through. But underneath the nonsense, I still liked the idea of surprising him. I liked seeing him make an effort that wasn't about school forms or the bathroom grout, even though we had neither children nor a particularly complicated bathroom. Life found paperwork regardless.

'I'd like another go,' I said. 'With an actual shared premise.'

He nodded. 'Something neither of us can turn into a quarterly earnings call.'

We took the notebook from his folder. It felt only fair that the stationery should contribute something after its journey.

We wrote a few simple lines. Two strangers at a railway hotel. Both travelling tomorrow. Neither secretly married, supernatural or trying to acquire the other's business. We could use our own names. We could laugh. The conversation would remain quiet and ordinary enough that nobody around us became an unwilling participant.

'Occupation?' Ben asked.

'Irrelevant.'

'An excellent occupation.'

I crossed out a sentence about a lost letter. He crossed out a sentence about the reason for his travel. We were reducing our fictional lives to the part we actually wanted: paying each other fresh attention.

We briefly considered a shared version involving a wealthy stranger and a contested estate. Ben asked who owned the estate. I gave him a name. He asked whether there were legal documents. I pointed at the notebook.

'You're doing it again,' I said.

'I'm trying to understand the proposition.'

'You're trying to conduct due diligence on my haunted property.'

He conceded the point and crossed out estate. We considered a gallery opening. Then a bookshop. Then I remembered that both of us would spend a fictional bookshop meeting asking for the real title of whatever the other claimed to be reading.

The railway hotel survived because it required almost no explanation. We were here. We were leaving tomorrow. We were interested in the person at the other end of the table. Everything else could remain unbuilt.

Ben drew a small box around those three facts. I wrote no elaborate backstory beneath them. Then I added that we didn't have to pretend not to recognise a joke from our real life.

'Otherwise you'll waste the first ten minutes trying not to mention the cape,' I said.

'I was already developing a strategy.'

We agreed that laughter didn't end the game unless we wanted it to. Neither did asking an ordinary question. We could move in and out of the premise without announcing that the evening had failed a continuity check.

There was something unexpectedly intimate about doing that together. We weren't merely planning imaginary strangers. We were telling each other what would make the idea comfortable enough to enjoy.

Ben put the pen away, then took it out again to add one last line: no investment opportunities.

I approved it and added no curses affecting immediate family.

He studied the page. 'This is a remarkably healthy fictional situation.'

'We've both been married long enough to value a clear brief.'

He closed the notebook. I folded the cape neatly so the adjacent chair was available again. Around us, conversations rose and fell. Nobody had been recruited into the plot. We had arrived with props capable of overwhelming the evening and reduced them to a few shared details that might actually serve it.

Then Ben got up, walked to the window and came back.

'Is this seat taken?'

'Only by a cape with strong opinions.'

He smiled. 'Can I buy you a drink?'

'Yes. You can ask what I like first.'

He did. I answered. It was astonishing how pleasant a familiar question became when neither of us assumed we already knew the answer.

We talked. Sometimes we stayed in the premise. Sometimes we slipped into memories. He told me I looked beautiful, and I believed he meant the woman in front of him, not an outfit successfully performing a role.

He asked where I would travel if I genuinely had a train to catch tomorrow. I nearly gave the answer he already knew, the trip we'd discussed for years. Instead I thought about it.

'A small town where I don't know anybody,' I said. 'Somewhere with a good bakery. No complicated itinerary.'

'What would you do there?'

'Walk. Read. Buy something I don't need because it's made locally.'

'Ceramics?'

'Possibly a bowl with a troubling price.'

He smiled. 'I'd like to meet that woman.'

I asked him the same question. He wanted a city he'd never visited, somewhere he could spend a morning getting lost without feeling he was wasting the day. I hadn't heard him describe a holiday that way before. Usually he was the one checking routes and booking times because someone had to.

We talked for a while about those two trips. The imaginary station had opened a small real conversation. I found myself looking at him with fresh interest, which was precisely what we'd wanted before the folder and the cape had staged their disagreement.

When he reached for my hand, he paused just long enough for me to meet him halfway. It was a tiny gesture. It did more for the evening than all three of my carefully named ancestors combined.

I asked what had made him come over.

'You looked like you had a story,' he said.

'I have three uncles and an unresolved inheritance.'

'Perhaps we save those for the second drink.'

Later, in the lift, I put the cape around both our shoulders because the air-conditioning was enthusiastic. He carried the folder under one arm.

'We make a strange team,' he said.

'We always have.'

Upstairs, we left the props on a chair. The rest of the evening needed no supporting cast.

At checkout the next morning, the receptionist asked if we'd enjoyed our anniversary. Ben said yes. I said very much.

Outside, he offered me his arm with a small, theatrical bow.

'Madam, your carriage.'

It was our slightly dusty hatchback.

'At last,' I said. 'Someone has read the brief.'