The Long Way

Lavinia expected Hugo to tell her he was leaving. It was an embarrassing expectation to bring to a public path beside the bowling green, particularly when they had met there by chance and he had only asked whether she was walking towards town.

She had finished a long day at the bus depot. He had come from an appointment he did not explain. Their separate errands should have made the encounter easier, but she was conscious of every person who passed: not afraid of being seen, more afraid of how much she enjoyed walking beside him in full view.

“The long way or the short?” he asked at the fork.

“Long. My evening is outrageously empty.”

“Mine isn’t. I have half an hour.”

“That’ll keep us from becoming interesting.”

“We could attempt it quickly.”

She liked the dry answer. She liked his brown jumper, a perfectly ordinary thing she would have found forgettable on anybody else. He walked without crowding her, matching her pace after the first few steps. She wished that minor adjustment did not make her feel so distinctly accompanied.

The blossom along the path was beginning to loosen. She stepped over a patch of fallen petals, an instinct left over from trying to keep pale shoes clean, then remembered she was wearing boots.

“I keep doing that,” she said.

“What?”

“Behaving as if I’ve dressed differently.”

He looked down at her boots. “They seem capable.”

“They are. It’s their owner who worries me.”

He smiled, but his mind was elsewhere. She had spent enough time near him now to notice the difference between reserve and absence. Once she would have filled it with a question he could answer readily. How was the centre? How was work? Could she be of use?

“What were you thinking?” she asked instead.

He took several steps before replying.

“About breakfast.”

She looked at him.

“Not very interesting after all,” he said.

“Try me.”

“This morning someone was already making tea when I came down. Someone else was complaining about the paper. I didn’t join in. I was pleased they were there.”

“And you might not have that.”

“No.”

The word took the anticipation out of her. She had been ready to be brave about a declaration, careful about what she promised in return. She had not prepared to hear him miss a kitchen she would never occupy.

He paused by a bench. “Would you mind sitting a minute?”

“No.”

They sat at opposite ends, comfortably within conversation. Across the green a groundsman pushed a roller in precise lines. Hugo watched until the man turned, then looked at his own hands.

“There are people awake before breakfast. Not because they need me. Not because I’ve arranged to see them. They’re there.”

She could say he would still have friends. She could say ordinary life was full of mornings. Either answer would be true and irritating, the kind of truth offered because the speaker disliked being helpless.

“That sounds lovely,” she said.

“It is.”

For a moment she resented him for agreeing. Then she resented herself for wanting his old life to be inadequate enough to make her possible.

“I don’t have a useful thing to say.”

“I wasn’t hoping you would.”

She looked at him, and he met her eyes without demanding that she make this easier. It was the first time she had understood that his confidence in her might take the form of leaving her with a feeling she could not improve.

She stayed.

The groundsman reached the far edge and shut off the roller. Birds resumed a conversation neither of them had noticed stopping. She let the silence continue until Hugo rubbed his palm once over his knee and gave her a small, tired smile.

“Thank you.”

“For not saying people have breakfast in flats?”

“Among other things.”

“It was a close thing. I nearly offered you a kettle.”

He laughed. She felt the sound loosen something without repairing it.

They began walking again. At the next gate he held it, waited for her to pass, then let it fall shut. She could have ended the conversation there. Instead she heard herself speak into the ordinary click of the latch.

“When I ended my engagement, everybody said it was sensible.”

He stayed beside her. “Did that help?”

“Enormously. It meant nobody had to say it was sad.”

She had been thirty-two. The man she had agreed to marry had been thirty-five, considerate and fond of her. There had been no wicked discovery, no dramatic departure with a suitcase. Over dinner in her own flat they had finally admitted that they liked how reasonable the arrangement looked more than they wanted the days inside it.

“We kept being pleased with how little trouble we gave each other,” she said. “I thought that must be what being grown up felt like.”

Hugo did not offer a verdict on the engagement. He asked, “What did you want?”

She nearly said she had wanted too much. The answer had become a well-used way of stopping questions.

“To be missed on an ordinary Tuesday. Not dramatically. I wanted him to wish I’d stayed when I went home.”

She could not look at Hugo while saying it. That, more than the content of the confession, told her how much had changed.

“Did you tell him?”

“Not in words he could have done anything with. I said I didn’t want to be one of those couples who did everything together. Which was true. It just wasn’t all of it.”

“I know that sort of true.”

“Yes,” she said. “I suspect you do.”

His smile accepted the point without congratulating her on it.

“I’ve liked living alone since,” she added. “I still like it.”

“I believe you.”

“You’re not going to say I haven’t met the right person?”

“That would be a considerable claim on my own behalf.”

She laughed, surprised into looking at him. There he was, wanting something and allowing it to make him less stately. She could have touched his arm with the ease of friendship; she wanted to do it for another reason, and kept her hands in her pockets.

At the town end of the park his road turned left and hers went straight. He checked the time, then put his watch out of view under his sleeve. She had expected that gesture to hurt. Instead she was grateful he had not pretended he could stay indefinitely.

“You have to go.”

“In a minute.”

They stood by the gate for that minute. She did not fill it. He did not apologise for the morning he would miss, or offer her a consoling future in its place.

When they said goodbye, she continued to her flat and made supper for one. She enjoyed her own choice of food, her own chair, the sound of the neighbour’s radio through the wall. Nothing about her home had become insufficient.

Still, when she reached for a second plate by mistake, she did not put it down at once. Wanting room for him was not the same as having an empty life. She stood with the plate in her hand long enough to let herself know the difference.