The Last Evening

Lavinia had taken off her coat when Hugo asked if she could stay a little longer, and was furious with herself for noticing how quickly she had done it.

The centre was closing early. Neroli had a meeting elsewhere; the last visitors had left in a cheerful dispute about next month’s quiz. There were no cups waiting, no tables to move. Hugo sat in the small courtyard outside the kitchen while Lavinia put her coat over the other chair.

“Ten minutes,” she said. “Then Neroli will lock us out.”

“She said fifteen.”

“You’ve negotiated already.”

“I asked a factual question. She supplied a factual threat.”

She sat. The courtyard held two tubs of herbs and a square of early evening light. He had brought nothing for her, no token she could mistake for an occasion. His hands rested loosely on his knees.

“Tomorrow morning I’m leaving the house,” he said.

She knew. He had told her the date two weeks ago; she had managed to remember it without putting it in a calendar, and had resented how much of her mind had become its own calendar anyway.

“Are you ready?”

“My bags are.”

“That’s not quite the same.”

“No.”

She liked him for refusing an impressive answer. Tonight she would also have liked one. Certainty on his face would have let her be glad without feeling she had taken somebody’s seat at a table.

“We had a meal together yesterday,” he said. “They’ve all known for a while. There was an argument about whether I was entitled to choose the pudding.”

“Were you?”

“Eventually. Bertram argued that leaving was no reason to indulge my preferences.”

“I like him already.”

“You would. He prevailed.”

Hugo smiled at the memory. She could see the people who had given it to him in the way he held it, tenderly and without display. She looked at a bent stem in the nearest tub until she could stop wishing to be uncomplicatedly welcome in his future.

“Are you sorry?” she asked.

“To leave them? Yes.”

“I meant about the decision.”

“I know.” He waited, choosing the next words without polishing them. “I believe it’s the decision I can make honestly. I’m not going to wake tomorrow with all the grief taken out of it.”

She nodded. The answer was fair. Fair answers had an inconvenient tendency to leave a person with the original question.

“My term finishes at the end of today,” he said. “I’ve completed the arrangements with the community. Tomorrow I move into my room. Then, if you’re willing, I’d like to take you to lunch.”

He did not put the invitation in a joke or give it a useful reason. She felt herself sit straighter.

“As a date.”

“Yes.”

For six weeks she had known that he might one day ask. She had pictured herself saying yes with a steadiness that implied she had never doubted her own capacity for happiness. In the courtyard she felt suddenly protective of every ordinary room in her life, every evening whose disappointments she already understood.

“You haven’t spent one day outside yet.”

“No.”

“You might want a month. Or a year.”

“I might discover that I need something I haven’t understood. I don’t think pretending I don’t want to see you would help.”

She rubbed a thumb over a seam in her trousers. He let her think. That was the trouble with being offered a choice plainly: there was nobody to resist.

“What if I say no?”

His face registered the possibility before he answered.

“I’ll be disappointed. I’ll move into my room and start work on Monday.”

“You won’t think you’ve done all this for nothing?”

“I haven’t done all this to obtain a date.”

She looked up quickly. He was not smiling.

“You matter to me,” he said. “That doesn’t make you responsible for the decision.”

“I could make myself responsible anyway.”

“I would rather you didn’t.”

She almost said she was usually very sensible. It would have been a ridiculous defence from a woman who had memorised his footsteps and stood in her kitchen holding an unnecessary plate.

“I think I liked you being unavailable.”

He was quiet.

“Not all of it,” she said. “Not the part where I have to remember I can’t touch you. But I could want you as much as I liked, and the answer to everything was already no. I didn’t have to find out whether I’d be difficult on a wet Tuesday.”

“I expect you would be.”

She stared at him, then laughed, reluctantly and with relief.

“You might have allowed me a moment of dignity.”

“I might be difficult as well.”

“I have begun to suspect it.”

The laughter faded without leaving them further apart. Hugo leaned back, giving her room that was more than the distance between the chairs. He looked tired. He looked like a man about to lose a good deal that she could neither return nor replace.

She wanted his mouth. There was no consoling abstraction into which she could put that wish. She wanted to lean across the small space and find out how the man who spoke so deliberately would kiss her. She wanted him to have to stop speaking for a while.

“I want to kiss you,” she said.

His eyes moved to her mouth and returned to her eyes. He stayed where he was.

“I want that too.”

“Without having to hear a bell and go home.”

“Then ask me when I can answer freely.”

He said it gently, but not as a rebuke. She could see the effort it cost him to remain sitting there, and was glad the effort belonged to him. She would not be temptation he had to survive. They were two adults keeping a boundary they both understood.

“I won’t ask tonight,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“And don’t thank me as if I’m doing it for you.”

His smile returned. “All right.”

Neroli rattled the kitchen keys inside. The ordinary sound told them their fifteen minutes were nearly done, and for once Lavinia did not resent the ending. She needed her own flat, a night without his face in front of her, the chance to make a decision that was not a response to the way he looked at her.

“The café by the river,” she said. “One o’clock tomorrow. I can give you an answer there.”

“I’ll be there.”

“Coming isn’t my answer. I might say I’d rather wait.”

“I understand.”

“Or no.”

He nodded. “I understand that too.”

They stood. She put on her coat without assistance. He waited while she found her bag, and then they went through the kitchen together, saying goodnight to Neroli. Outside, he took the road to the house and she went to her car.

At home she made tea and left it on the table. Her phone remained silent; he did not send a message to improve his chances or reassure himself that she was still thinking about him.

She was.

The invitation had none of the grand certainty she had secretly hoped for. He had offered her a date with a man who might miss his old life afterwards, and who would leave it whether or not she came with him into the new one.

Tomorrow she would have to decide whether she wanted to sit down with that man, while being only herself.