The Birthday Plate

Hugo had invited three people to his birthday before admitting that he wanted to spend it with one.

The admission came in the queue at the greengrocer’s, where Lavinia was considering peaches and he was describing a meal so inclusive that it would require several tables and leave him no opportunity to speak to anyone properly.

“Do you want a party?” she asked.

“Forty seems an occasion for seeing people.”

“It is also an age. People have them without a seating plan.”

He picked up a peach and put it down again. He had no idea how to tell whether it was ripe, and wanted something to do with his hands.

“I thought it would be ungracious to choose.”

“You have seven days in a week.”

“Several of them contain work.”

“Then an astonishing number of weeks after that.”

The man ahead of them moved to the till. Lavinia shifted her basket without taking over the conversation, and Hugo recognised that she was leaving him time to say the personal sentence first.

“I want to spend the day with you.”

She smiled so promptly that he felt foolish for having buried it beneath catering.

“I’d like that.”

“But I’ve already asked—”

“Then ask them for another day. Before they buy party hats.”

“I doubt there were going to be hats.”

“You don’t know. Bertram might have been waiting years.”

He laughed. They bought the peaches. That evening he made the calls himself, explaining that he wanted a quiet birthday and would enjoy a friends’ meal the following week. One friend could not make the alternative and proposed coffee another time. Bertram said he would attend provided Hugo did not cook anything that required a demonstration. Nobody accused him of abandoning them.

The lack of protest relieved him. He was less pleased to discover that part of him had wanted someone to protest, so that choosing Lavinia could be a more admirable difficulty than a simple preference.

· · ·Scene break

On his birthday she arrived at eleven carrying a shallow paper bag and wearing a blue dress he had not seen before. He opened the door and forgot the greeting he had prepared.

“You can say happy birthday to yourself later,” she said. “Shall I come in?”

“Please.”

He kissed her as she crossed the threshold. Her free hand closed around the back of his neck; the paper bag crackled between them. He drew away only when she laughed.

“There’s a fragile object in here.”

“I apologise to it.”

She gave him the bag. Inside was a single plate, second-hand, dark blue with a narrow cream edge. He had mentioned that his favourite breakfast plate at the house had been blue. This was not an attempt to reproduce it: the wrong pattern, the wrong size, a tiny mark in the glaze. She had chosen something she thought he would like now.

“For bread,” she said. “Since you own a strategic reserve.”

He ran a thumb around the rim. “Thank you.”

“You don’t have to make it your favourite.”

“I know.”

He set it on the shelf where he would see it, then took her hand again because he could. Their first two months together had produced this unaccountable pleasure in small freedoms. Nobody had forbidden him to hold her now; he still sometimes paused with surprise before doing it.

They spent the morning in town. Lavinia had asked what he wanted to do and had accepted his undistinguished answer: browse the bookshop, eat lunch somewhere without a reservation, walk home before it became too hot. She did not improve it into a day trip.

In the bookshop he found a used copy of a novel he had lent away years ago. She watched him open it in the middle.

“How do you know that’s where you want to start?”

“I’m checking whether I still like it.”

“And?”

He handed her the book. She read a paragraph, frowned, then read it again.

“I can see why you would.”

“That is your polite voice.”

“It takes a long time to put somebody on a train.”

“He is thinking about leaving.”

“He could think on the train.”

Hugo laughed and bought the book. She chose a paperback for herself. At lunch they read a few pages side by side, each occasionally making an objection the other refused to endorse. He found the companionship so restful that he stopped trying to label it as a special birthday pleasure. It was possible they might do this on any Saturday.

They returned to his rooms in the late afternoon. He had planned to cook a vegetable tart and had mistaken familiarity with its ingredients for familiarity with pastry. Lavinia stood beside him while he looked at the wet centre with increasing suspicion.

“We could call it something else,” she suggested.

“I don’t think a name will support it.”

“A spoon will.”

They ate it from bowls, with the crispest edges divided fairly. He was embarrassed for three minutes, until she asked for more and said she meant the filling. The peaches proved good enough to justify all the time they had spent choosing them. Juice ran down her wrist; she caught it with a napkin and looked up to find him watching.

“What?”

“I wanted this.”

“The disastrous tart?”

“The day.”

Her expression grew quiet. She put down the napkin.

“I’m glad you said so.”

They washed up together because the small kitchen required it: one person at the sink, one drying, both turning sideways to change places. He caught her wrist gently when she reached past him for the towel, waited for her questioning smile, then kissed her. She left the towel where it was and came closer.

Her fingers were cool from the water. The contrast with her warm mouth made him shiver. She noticed and smiled against him, pleased without becoming triumphant. He kissed her again, a hand at her waist, the familiar room reduced to the particular person choosing to stand with him in it.

“The plates can drip,” she said.

“An excellent domestic philosophy.”

In the sitting room she put on music. She chose the wrong track first and defended it for half a minute before conceding that it would be difficult to dance to. He held out a hand anyway.

“We have never established that we can dance to anything.”

“That’s true.”

They tried. His room allowed three steps before a collision with the table, and neither could agree which three they ought to be. Lavinia laughed so hard he had to stop moving and hold her while she recovered. She rested her forehead against his chest.

He had thought being wanted without a task might feel empty. Instead he was acutely present: the weight of her leaning by choice, the shape of her smile when she looked up, the unimportant music continuing while they stopped pretending to dance.

“Stay here a minute,” she said.

“Gladly.”

He held her. She moved her arms around him more closely and grew still. The embrace was neither a consolation nor a promise of something they had chosen to postpone. It was something they could have now, and they gave it time.

When she went home at the end of the evening, he was happy enough to miss her openly.

“I’d like another day like this,” he said.

“We’ll have to ruin another meal.”

“I have a range of abilities.”

She kissed him goodbye and took a peach for tomorrow. He ate the last one from the blue plate after she left.

· · ·Scene break

The next week’s friends’ meal was louder and no less enjoyable for being separate. Bertram arrived without a hat. He and Lavinia met, disagreed about the tart Hugo had described and spent ten minutes comparing the ways a person could fail at pastry. Hugo listened with pleasure to people he loved discovering that they did not need him to conduct the conversation.

Two days later Neroli asked whether he would help coordinate a late-summer expansion of the centre’s adult volunteer programme. It involved rotas, training afternoons, people who needed someone patient enough to help them find a useful place. She thought he would do it well.

He read her message twice. The invitation pleased him in a different way from the birthday had: it described a person he knew how to be, with a task that would tell him whether he had succeeded.

He wrote back asking for the dates. Then he put the phone down and went to work, already imagining how he would arrange the room.