The Two Chairs

Lavinia asked Benita to stop adjusting the back of her dress because she was beginning to feel like an item being returned to a shop.

“It was caught,” Benita said.

“It has been uncaught for some time.”

“I’m finding something to do.”

Lavinia turned and took her friend’s hands. Benita looked startled, then laughed at herself.

“There,” Lavinia said. “You can be frightened with me without improving anything.”

They stood together in the small room for a moment. It was late April, more than a year since Hugo had left the community, and longer still since they had met at the centre. The months had contained enough decisions to make the wedding feel both fully chosen and suddenly improbable. She was thirty-seven. She had said yes to a life she wanted, and her fingers were cold.

“Still want to do it?” Benita asked.

“Yes.”

“Good. I didn’t want to assume because of the dress.”

Lavinia laughed. The dress was cream, plain and comfortable enough to sit in, which she had insisted upon to the disappointment of no one who knew her. She had chosen small flowers because she liked them, and shoes in which she could walk without leaning on a husband for structural support.

When she saw Hugo, her fear did not disappear. It changed direction, towards him rather than away from the day. He was looking at her without the composed expression he sometimes used when feeling too much. She saw him take a breath, saw his mouth begin to smile, and knew he was glad she had come.

“Hello,” she said when she reached him.

“Hello.”

“You look nervous.”

“I am.”

“Good.”

He laughed quietly. “I thought you might appreciate company.”

The ceremony had its own words and pace. Lavinia listened instead of trying to store every detail. When it was her turn to make the promise, she looked at Hugo. She did not promise never to be frightened or disappointed. She promised herself into a life in which those feelings would not be an automatic instruction to leave.

His answer was steady, though the hand holding hers was not entirely so. She loved the slight tremor. He was not fulfilling a role at which he could be competent on behalf of everybody. He was marrying her.

Afterwards there were embraces, flowers shifting from hand to hand, somebody unable to find a bag that was on their own shoulder. Bertram hugged Hugo, then Lavinia, with the warmth of a friend joining a celebration. He did not deliver a verdict on whether Hugo’s past had found its proper conclusion.

Neroli told them both to eat something before they began thanking people. Benita found the lost bag. Hugo looked at Lavinia across three conversations, and she felt a private, bodily happiness in knowing she would not go home separately at the end of the day.

At the meal their chairs were not a throne or a display: two places at a table among people they loved. She sat down and discovered that her bouquet occupied the space needed for her water glass. Hugo moved it to the windowsill.

“First domestic achievement,” he said.

“Don’t exhaust yourself.”

They ate. They laughed at a story she had heard before and he told more badly every time. She put her hand on his knee under the table and felt him go quiet in the middle of a sentence. When she looked at him, the desire on his face answered her own so plainly she had to look back at her plate for a moment.

The afternoon did not need to become a blur to be happy. Lavinia remembered the good bread, a dropped fork, Hugo’s hand at her back when they stood, the extraordinary relief of taking off her shoes for ten minutes in an empty side room. He found her there and sat beside her.

“May I join the retreat?”

“If you don’t tell anyone I’ve taken off the respectable shoes.”

“A secret I can honour.”

He kissed her, and she put a hand against his jacket, wanting him nearer. They stopped before the kiss became something they wanted privacy to continue, smiling because privacy was now part of the evening they had planned.

“Ready to go home soon?” he asked.

“Very.”

· · ·Scene break

Their flat was quiet when they arrived. There were two mugs on the kitchen drainer and a box in the hall they had not managed to empty. Lavinia was grateful for the box. It kept the place from looking like a room prepared for someone else’s idea of a wedding night.

Hugo put down their bags. She took off her shoes again and stood on the cool floor, suddenly shy.

“Tea?” he asked.

She laughed. “In a moment.”

“All right.”

He waited by the kitchen door. No one had told her marriage could make a familiar man strange in this particular way, not unfamiliar but newly possible. She had kissed him on sofas, in doorways, under a shop awning while rain ran down the pavement. Now there was no appointed point at which they must gather coats and return to separate rooms.

She went to him and put her hands at his waist.

“I want you,” she said. “I’m also nervous.”

“Both are welcome.”

“That sounded perilously gracious.”

His laugh warmed the space between them. “I want you. And I would be relieved if we could go slowly enough for me to know what you like.”

“That’s better.”

She kissed him. He held her close, gently at first, and then with more certainty as her hands moved up his back. The kiss deepened without haste. She could feel him listening through touch, noticing when she leaned in, when she paused to breathe, when her fingers tightened at his shoulder because something pleased her.

She drew back and looked at him. His hair had lost its careful arrangement. She liked that she had done it.

“Come with me,” she said.

In the bedroom the curtains were still open to the evening. Hugo closed them while she sat on the edge of the bed, then turned back without coming closer until she held out her hand.

“There isn’t anything you owe me tonight,” he said.

“I know. I want to be here.”

He sat beside her. She touched his cheek, then the warm line where his collar had been loosened. He closed his eyes briefly, enjoying it, and she felt a new kind of confidence: not expertise, but the pleasure of seeing a question answered.

They helped one another out of the clothes that had belonged to the public day. An awkward fastening made her swear softly; he laughed, and the laughter broke none of the tenderness. When she became shy again, he let her keep the cover drawn around her shoulders and kissed her hand instead of telling her she had no reason to hide.

“Look at me,” she said after a moment.

He did. She let the cover loosen because she wanted him to see her, not because his reassurance had argued her out of a feeling. His face was so openly moved that she reached for him at once.

“Don’t be too solemn,” she whispered.

“I am trying to remain capable of speech.”

She laughed against his mouth. He kissed the laughter, then the corner of her jaw, stopping when she touched his shoulder.

“A moment.”

He stilled. “Yes.”

Nothing hardened in his face. No disappointment she must hurry to repair. She took a breath and put her forehead against his.

“I wanted to catch up with myself.”

“We have time.”

She stayed like that until the nerves became distinguishable from the desire. Then she kissed him again, slower, showing him by the way she drew him near that she wanted to continue. His hand moved warmly along her back. She told him what felt good, surprised by how intimate the words were, and he answered by listening rather than praising her for saying them.

Their first intimacy was less smooth than imagination had made it and more tender than imagination could manage. The room held small questions, the rustle of linen, an unembarrassed pause while they found a comfortable way to be close. She did not need to perform certainty. He did not need to appear to know everything. Desire survived being spoken about; it grew more particular each time one of them answered honestly.

Later, they lay close beneath the cover, fully awake, his hand resting where she had placed it at her waist. She could hear his breathing slow. Her own body felt warmly unfamiliar, and she liked the fact that he did not ask her to turn what had happened into a verdict.

“Water?” he asked.

“Please.”

He brought two glasses and came back to bed when she lifted the cover for him. She drank, set the glass down and moved into his arms.

“I liked being able to stop,” she said.

He looked at her carefully, without alarm. “I liked knowing you would tell me.”

“I liked starting again too.”

His smile reached her before his kiss did.

They talked a little about the day, which suddenly seemed very far away, then about nothing significant at all. She was hungry. So was he. They went to the kitchen in clothes chosen for comfort and ate bread and cheese from two mismatched plates, laughing when she found a flower petal caught in the cuff of his trousers.

Afterwards they returned to the bedroom together. No one had to leave in order to preserve what they had chosen. Lavinia put her hand in his and brought him closer, enjoying the simple fact that she could ask him to stay without making tomorrow a debt.