After Henry and Clare meet in the library, but before he makes his first trip back to the meadow, he makes many little trips. We see him thrown in the back of a police car from which he vanishes, stealing various sets of clothing from cars and walking around in different clothes, sometimes wrapped in only a blanket. There are, however, two significant trips in this time, and the first one is very difficult to reconcile and not well fixed.
In the future, shortly after Henry has his vasectomy, Henry appears from the past and calls Clare on her cell phone to get a ride. When she retrieves him, he has the long hair he cut the day before the wedding; but he knows her and knows her cell number, so they must already live together in the time from which he left. That puts the departure in this period. It also creates a rather difficult history.
Let's put a date on it. We know that Henry was not married in 1995, and he was by 2003. Let's put this departure shortly before the wedding, which means 1996. We will eventually deduce that Alba is born in 2001, conceived probably in 2000 after several miscarriages. They must have married in 1996 or 1997 at the latest. Thus in 1996 Henry steps out of the world and returns in 2000, and finds the world the way it has developed without him.
Fixed time afficionados will object that because he is going to return, he has already returned. Ah, but what if he arrived in 2000 and was killed by a mugger in an alley? That is, when he leaves from 1996, there is no guarantee he will ever return; it is not until he actually does return that he reenters history in 1996. Thus from Clare's perspective, one day in 1996 Henry vanished, and she had probably despaired of awaiting his return when her cell phone rang one night and it was him, having leapt across four years and appeared now.
We can't guess her reaction. She will be angry, upset, hurt, and at the same time eager to see him. He hasn't aged a day; she might worry that she doesn't look good anymore.
We don't know if they embrace in the car; it does not much matter, because in a few minutes Henry will vanish and return to 1996. That, then, is a trip to the past that changes history: Henry was missing for a short time and returned, as he usually does. Because he has changed history, now the version of him who leaves from 1996 to 2000 will meet the Clare who married him and recently fought with him--the one we see in the movie, more or less. So the problem fixes itself and erases any memory that it was ever a problem, and once again Henry believes he cannot change the past because after it has been changed he cannot know that it was not always thus.
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