Aimée sat silently looking out the window until the server—finally—retreated into the kitchen. With no sense of his having been inattentive, Rennie took out his Moleskin notebook and began to sketch for her a little Welsh stick chair that he’d noticed while poking around in some antique stores earlier that week. He told her that the legs, arms and spindles of these rustic chairs were traditionally made from the greenwood of ash, beech or oak which was split into billets and then bodged using simple tools. Rennie’s hand touched hers as, rubbing a pencil with some sugar that had spilled on the table, he showed her how the bodger would have used wood shavings, rather than sandpaper, to burnish the legs and spindles before leaving them to dry for several months. (Aimée found his enthusiasm, free from pretense or innuendo, boyish and charming.) The seat was usually made from a single plank, with the grain running from back to front. Originally, Rennie explained—and he was quite certain that the chair he had seen was no exception—these distinctively wide yet shallow seats would be made of elm. That was, of course, before the arrival of Dutch elm disease. (She remembered, as a little girl, walking to school along a pathway puddled with the shadows cast by a long line of great elms.)
