Across the Negotiating Table

Ludmila recognises the handwriting on the other side's folder before she reads the name on the table plan. It is a heavy cardboard folder held shut with a rubber band, in the old way, and only one person she knows still prepares for a negotiation like that. Walter taught her the trade fifteen years ago, when she was a ward nurse with a grievance and he was the union's lead organiser. Now he sits on the hospital's side of the table, grey at the temples, in a suit that fits him better than any of his old ones.

Neither of them mentions it. They shake hands with the slightly excessive correctness of people who have both decided to be professional. The first session passes in the language of the work: staffing ratios on the medical wards, a pay offer that the union calls inadequate and the hospital calls responsible, the overnight roster. Ludmila notices that Walter taps his pen twice before every figure he does not believe, a habit he once told her to train out of herself. She uses it, shamelessly, to decide which of his numbers to push.

On the second day he does the same to her. Halfway through a speech about safe staffing she realises that he knows she will not walk out over the pay clause. Years ago, at a bad conference dinner, she told him she would never trade a ward's safety for money. It is a strange sensation to be read by the man who taught her to read. Had she been facing a stranger, she wonders, would she have found it easier, or merely colder?

It is the roster, in the end, that breaks the deadlock. By the fourth evening the two sides have reduced the dispute to an exchange that neither wants. The hospital will accept binding minimum staffing on its two busiest wards, which is what her members have demanded since the spring. In return the union will take the pay rise in two stages and drop the claim for back pay. Not until she has said yes does she see how many nurses' Decembers that last concession represents.

Walter has given something up as well, and she knows it. His board wanted the right to move staff between wards at short notice, and he has traded it away to keep the ratios in the contract. Judging by the colour of his face, the board will not thank him. Having signed, he sits back and looks at the folder for a long moment, as though checking it for something he left inside.

She says nothing about it. The room fills with the small noises of an ending, chairs, zips, someone asking about the car park, and the photographer arrives to ask both sides to stand closer together than either would choose. Ludmila smiles with the half of her face that is allowed to, and holds her pen until the flash has gone.

They meet by the lifts afterwards, once the signatories' names have been taken down.

"You still press your left thumb on the table when you're about to concede," Walter says.

"You taught me to hide it," Ludmila says.

"I taught you to notice mine." He holds the lift door for her with one hand, the old folder under the other arm, and does not say whether he let her see it.