The Chair

Lavinia moved the chair out from between them before she could find a decent reason to leave it there. Hugo had six weeks left in his vows, and she wanted him to know she was waiting for him, not for the washing-up.

He watched her put it against the wall. Then he looked at the two cups he had already dried.

“Those are done,” she said.

“Yes.”

“You can stop doing them.”

He set down the tea towel. In the hall beyond the serving hatch, the last visitors were arguing about whose umbrella was whose. One of them called goodbye; Hugo answered, and Lavinia nearly used the interruption to pick up her coat. At thirty-six she had become extremely good at letting a moment pass and afterwards describing the silence as tact.

“I’ve started listening for you,” she said. “When the side door sticks. I know the noise you make getting it open.”

He glanced towards it. She wished he would look back, and then he did, and the knowledge of having asked for his attention ran hot along her neck.

“It isn’t because you bring the milk.”

“I hadn’t thought it was.”

“You might have let me know that before I mentioned the milk.”

His smile came reluctantly. She loved how unwilling it looked, as if amusement had caught him being solemn and he could do nothing about it. Loved was an alarming word to find lying about in an otherwise serviceable mind. She put it away.

“I’ve finished my work before yours three times since we met,” he said. “I could have left.”

“Four.”

“Four, then.”

That admission was worse than a compliment. The little blue kitchen, with its drying rack and industrial tin of instant coffee, became the place where he had told her he chose to be near her. She could hear a cupboard being shut at the far end of the building. She could hear herself swallow.

“I don’t know how to do this politely,” she said.

“You don’t need to protect me from an awkward sentence.”

“I think you turn awkward sentences into gracious ones. Before anyone can get at them.”

He drew in a breath as if to answer, and then let it go.

“Sometimes.”

The uncomplicated word made her want him more. Not for the role, not for the reassuring patience other people seemed to find in him. She wanted the man who had been caught lingering over four already tidy kitchens. She wanted to find out what he did with his hands when there was no useful object to hold.

She rested hers on the back of the chair she had moved.

They had met eight weeks earlier, volunteers on the same Saturday rota at Harrowmere Community Centre. He had tried to tell her where the spare cups lived. She had been there longer than he had, and had said so; he had accepted the correction without turning her into somebody difficult. Afterwards they had disagreed about whether a damaged table could be made level with folded paper. It had taken them three pieces and neither had won.

Only later had Neroli mentioned the brothers’ house. Hugo did not wear anything that had supplied Lavinia with a warning, and Brother had sounded like an answer to a question she had not known she needed to ask.

He had never been her priest. He was not ordained, and had never been her adviser in anything more significant than the quantity of biscuits a Saturday afternoon could consume. Yet his promise was real. She could not make herself ignorant of it because ignorance would be convenient.

“You said six weeks,” she said.

“Until the end of my present vows. Yes.”

“And then you decide.”

“I have to make the decision before then. Whether to stay and proceed, or finish this term and leave.”

“I don’t want to be something you secretly try first.”

His expression changed. “Neither do I.”

She was relieved enough to be annoyed. There was no graceful way for her to make this sound smaller, and he had not offered one.

“I mean it, Hugo. No little arrangement where we both know what we’re doing and call it friendship because nobody kisses anybody.”

“I understand.”

“Do you?”

“I want to touch you.”

She went still.

He stayed on his side of the empty space. No hand extended; no movement she must either reward or resist. He had said it as a fact he was responsible for, and she could feel it as distinctly as if he had crossed the floor.

“I haven’t been wondering how to borrow a harmless version of that,” he said. “Or I shouldn’t have been. Staying late has been an excuse.”

“A very tidy excuse.”

“Lavinia.”

Her name, without a smile, stopped her.

“You’re right. We can’t make a private relationship out of behaving technically well.”

She looked down at the chair. Its seat was cracked in one corner, mended with grey tape. She had removed a piece of community-centre furniture with all the drama of a woman parting a curtain, and now had to stand in the space she had made.

“I still want to come on Saturdays,” she said.

“So do I.”

“Not to wait for you.”

“I won’t arrange that.”

Neither sounded convinced it would be easy. She preferred that to the instant reassurance she had half expected. There were other volunteers, other rooms, whole ordinary afternoons in which a person could enjoy another person’s company without appointing it a secret future. She would find out whether she could manage those. She could change her shifts if she could not.

“And whatever you decide,” she said, “I don’t want to be consulted as if I’m offering a vacancy.”

His mouth tightened, hurt enough that she wished she had chosen a different word. Then she thought of all the words she had softened in her life, and waited.

“No,” he said. “That would be unfair to both of us.”

“How old are you?”

The question surprised them both. He laughed once, under his breath.

“Thirty-nine. Is that material to the vacancy?”

“There isn’t a vacancy.”

“Quite.”

“I’m thirty-six. I think we’re old enough to make a terrible conversation without somebody rescuing us.”

“I hope so. We’ve made an excellent start.”

She smiled. For several seconds that was all they did, and it was not nothing. He had neither denied her nor reached for her. She had said what she meant and remained someone he could look at warmly.

Neroli appeared at the hatch with a bin bag in each hand. “Either of you still using the kitchen?”

“No,” Lavinia said.

“Splendid. Then go home. I’m fifty-four, I have soup waiting, and I refuse to become the custodian of two clean mugs.”

Hugo took a bag without being asked. Lavinia put the cups away. The conversation became one more thing they had to carry through the practical closing of a building: lights, windows, a bolt that needed lifting before it would slide.

Outside, Hugo turned in the direction of her car.

“Don’t walk me over tonight,” she said.

He stopped. “All right.”

It would have been easy to tell him she had not meant to sound abrupt. He knew. She could see that he knew, and that the understanding did not make him pleased to be sent away.

“Goodnight, Lavinia.”

“Goodnight.”

She went to her car, put her bag on the passenger seat and sat without starting the engine. Across the small car park he waited for Neroli to lock up, then took the road towards the brothers’ house.

She had wanted the truth between them. Now she would have to discover how to stand beside it without turning it into a promise.