The First Morning

Hugo woke before Lavinia and discovered that happiness did not tell him whether he was allowed to move his arm.

It had gone numb beneath her pillow. She was asleep on the other side of the bed, no longer touching him, and the predicament was entirely his own creation: at some point in the night he had stretched towards her and then remained there with an unnecessary loyalty to the position.

He withdrew it slowly. Pins and needles arrived with such conviction that he sat up.

Lavinia opened one eye.

“Are you leaving?”

“Only this position.”

“Wise. You’ve been making a face.”

She was awake now, voice low and rough with sleep. He waited until she turned fully towards him, then smiled.

“Good morning.”

“It is, isn’t it?”

She reached for his hand, looked at his exaggeratedly stiff fingers and began to laugh. He had imagined a first morning of extraordinary tenderness. This was extraordinary in a more useful way: his wife laughing at his arm, the curtain admitting too much light, the water glasses left in the wrong place.

When the feeling returned to his hand, she took it and brought it to her cheek.

“Come here.”

He leaned down and kissed her. She answered warmly, then pulled back a little.

“Slowly this morning.”

“Yes.”

“I mean the kisses too. I want time to notice.”

He rested on his side facing her. Nothing in yesterday’s promise supplied knowledge of what she wanted now. She was telling him, which was better than knowledge he had imagined acquiring automatically.

He kissed her once, softly, and waited. She smiled against his mouth and moved closer. Her fingers travelled through his hair, stopping at the back of his neck. He could feel her taking pleasure in the pause, in being allowed to let desire arrive at its own pace instead of keeping up with his.

“Like that,” she said.

He did it again.

The morning grew around them without becoming urgent. He liked the warm weight of her hand on his shoulder, the way she looked at him between kisses as if comparing expectation with a more interesting fact. When his touch pleased her she showed him; when she wanted something different she moved his hand, and he followed without turning the correction into a failure.

He had known, intellectually, that intimacy required conversation. He had not known that the conversation could itself be part of the pleasure. Her quiet instructions made her more present, not less mysterious. This was a person he could spend years learning without needing to turn her into a problem eventually solved.

Afterwards she lay with her head against him and asked whether he was comfortable.

“My arm is strategically placed,” he said.

“How romantic.”

“I have learned from experience.”

She laughed, then went quiet. He let the quiet last before asking if there was anything she needed.

“Nothing you need to fetch.”

“That was rather precisely anticipated.”

“I saw you preparing to become useful.”

He smiled. She put her palm against his chest, keeping him where he was.

“Stay for a bit. I like this part.”

“So do I.”

He did stay. No accomplishment followed. The room was warm enough; the street outside was beginning its Sunday; Lavinia’s breathing was calm against him. He did not have to convert the happiness into proof that his whole life had reached its proper explanation.

Eventually hunger persuaded them out of bed. In the kitchen they attempted breakfast together and discovered that each assumed the other had put the kettle on. Neither had. He burned the first piece of toast while she searched for the butter in a fridge they had organised only days earlier.

“We discussed domestic responsibility for an entire afternoon,” she said.

“We omitted breakfast.”

“A serious oversight.”

They divided the work: she made tea, he watched the second batch of toast as if it were a professional examination. He put his on the blue birthday plate and hers on a white one. She looked at the plate, then at him, pleased that it had become an ordinary object in use.

They ate at the small table by the window. Lavinia was quieter in the morning than he had expected, not unhappy, simply reluctant to supply conversation before her second cup. He found he could enjoy knowing that without treating it as a disappointment.

“Do you want to do anything today?” he asked after a while.

“Very little.”

“A walk later?”

“Later. Not as a way of escaping the flat.”

He looked around at the half-empty boxes, the chairs they had put facing each other at a slight angle, the ugly lamp in its negotiated corner.

“I don’t want to escape it.”

She smiled and held out her foot beneath the table until it touched his. He moved his chair closer by an inch, enough to make her laugh.

They went for the walk in the afternoon. They bought milk on the way home. Married life had begun to contain errands already, and he found the fact reassuring. There was a place for the extraordinary night inside ordinary hours, rather than a requirement to keep those hours extraordinary enough to justify it.

· · ·Scene break

The following Saturday was his scheduled morning at the centre. They had discussed keeping it before the wedding; their few days away from work had ended, and both wanted their existing commitments to remain recognisable.

“Home around one,” he told her over breakfast.

“Would you like lunch here?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll wait to eat.”

He heard the practical consequence and repeated the time. It was not a test she had set. He was the one who needed to remember that an answer altered someone else’s day.

The morning went well until the last half-hour, when a cupboard inventory took longer than expected. The new programme lead, whom Neroli had found after a delay, used a system Hugo would not have chosen. He began explaining a quicker method, then realised the quicker method would require another hour and place him at its centre.

“It works this way,” the woman said, reasonably.

He looked at the labelled shelves. It did. More slowly than his preferred version, perhaps, but it did.

“You’re right,” he said. “I need to finish at half past twelve.”

She nodded and gave him the last box to count. No one asked for an account of whom he was going home to. He counted, put the box away and left at the agreed time.

On the bus he resisted the impulse to send Lavinia a message announcing this modest success. She had asked whether he wanted lunch, not for evidence of moral improvement. He looked out of the window and enjoyed the prospect of seeing her.

He arrived at twelve fifty-five. She was reading in the green chair, wearing a jumper he had seen often at her old flat. For a second the familiarity touched him more deeply than novelty had done all week.

“Hello,” she said, marking her page.

“Hello.”

He hung up his jacket. There was soup on the stove, not yet hot. She had believed the time he gave her and arranged her own morning around it without waiting at the window.

“How was it?”

“Good. Someone else has arranged the cupboard differently.”

“And civilisation?”

“Continues, apparently.”

She laughed. He went to her and bent to kiss her after she tilted her face up. Her hand rested at his neck, holding him for another moment.

“I like you coming home,” she said.

“I like coming.”

They ate, talked, cleared the table. Later she closed her book and came to stand beside his chair.

“Would you come with me?”

The warmth in her voice changed the afternoon. He took her offered hand and rose, wanting her, pleased that she had asked without first turning her desire into something she might apologise for.

Her fingers tightened around his as they crossed the hall. The afternoon was theirs, with no need to hurry before another claim on it arrived. He followed her, wanting the unhurried closeness she had asked for, and the sound of her laughing softly when he stopped to kiss her on the way.