Adela Peverell put her hand over Oswin Trevan’s on the empty chair and wanted, for one disgraceful second, to leave it there. She had promised her best friend that he would never sit at her table again.
“That one’s taken,” she said.
He looked at the place setting. A plate, a folded napkin, the little blue glass that nobody would drink from.
“I remember.”
Of course he remembered. He had bought the glass for Sennen. Adela took her hand away and discovered that she had been pressing hard enough to leave a pale mark across his knuckles.
“Sorry.”
“For the hand or the chair?”
The hand. The chair. Opening her own front door without looking through the window first. She had expected someone bringing ice.
Oswin stood in her kitchen with a dining chair under his other arm, rain darkening one shoulder of his shirt. Four years since she had let him through this door, and he had brought furniture. It was the sort of thing that ought to have made him easier to dismiss.
“You can’t just turn up.”
“I didn’t.”
He set down the chair, took his phone from his pocket and offered it. The message was from Rhoswen.
Saturday, seven, Adela’s. Come a bit early if you can. She never sits down. Bring a chair.
Yesterday afternoon. While Adela had been stripping varnish from a customer’s footstool, Sennen’s mother had been arranging this with a text and a furniture request.
Adela read it again. Perhaps it would improve.
“She didn’t tell you,” he said.
“No.”
“Right.”
He put the phone away. No argument that an invitation was an invitation. He picked up the chair.
That annoyed her more than the message. He was thirty-seven, a grown man with a home and a job and, presumably, other places to eat supper. He should have looked offended. Instead he was giving her the tidy version: an unfortunate misunderstanding, no harm done, no need for anyone to be unkind.
“Wait.”
He waited.
She wished he would put the chair down. A person holding furniture always looked as though somebody ought to help.
“Has she spoken to you before this?”
“A few times. At the shops. She asked me about the holiday with the tent.”
Adela knew the holiday. A week of rain and a collapsed roof, Sennen insisting that Oswin was trying to peg them into a ditch. She had told it wonderfully. By the end, even Oswin used to laugh.
“She wants you to tell it tonight.”
“I think so.”
From the oven came a small, wet hiss. Adela turned, dragged the tray out and moved the potatoes that had dropped into the bottom. When she straightened, Oswin was still there.
The kitchen felt too small. It was not a small kitchen. Six people could stand in it while she cooked and offer advice she had not requested.
“You could have called me.”
“I don’t have your number any more.”
She had asked him to delete it. A voice message, furious on Sennen’s behalf, sent thirteen months before Sennen died. At thirty-four, Adela could remember every word of that message and could not remember where she had put the oven gloves she was wearing.
She opened the wrong drawer with a padded hand. Oswin nodded towards it.
“If you’re looking for the gloves—“
She looked down. Both padded mitts were still on.
“I knew that.”
“You were looking in the drawer.”
“I sometimes keep other things in it.”
“Right.”
There was the start of a smile at one corner of his mouth. She did not give him hers. She took the gloves off and hung them on their hook, where they could stay until somebody had to take a hot thing out of an oven and they mysteriously vanished again.
Sennen had been thirty-two when she died. Three years of these suppers now. Three Septembers, the Saturday closest to the anniversary that everybody could manage. Adela made Sennen’s favourite food. They told the stories. Someone cried in the downstairs loo and she pretended not to hear while finding a fresh box of tissues.
It mattered. There were fewer places now where she could say Sennen’s name without watching people wonder how long she was going to need.
Oswin looked past her at the table.
“Where do you sit?”
“What?”
He counted with a movement of his chin. “Six chairs. One’s hers. If I stay—“
There would be six of them now. She had already given him her chair in her head.
“I bring in the stool.”
“The one with the wobble?”
“It has character.”
“It had character four years ago.”
“I mend upholstery, Oswin. I’m allowed one bad stool.”
He lowered the chair at last. It was plain, with a curved wooden back and a seat woven from cord. A small splinter stood up near one of the joints. Her eyes went to it before she could stop herself.
“Sorry,” he said. “It’s from my kitchen. I checked it for everything except what you’d notice.”
Adela went to the drawer and fetched her little tin of tools.
“You should go home,” she said, taking out sandpaper.
He did not reach for the chair this time.
“Is that what you want?”
The question was irritatingly simple. Sennen had wanted him gone. Adela had wanted Sennen to sleep through a night without ringing at two to ask why a man who loved her would rather live by the sea than travel with her. Those were old wants. Neither belonged to this kitchen with the potatoes almost done.
“I don’t know what I want.”
He glanced at the oven clock. “You’ve got eleven minutes before she gets here to explain her system.”
Adela laughed. It escaped before she could tidy it away.
Rhoswen’s system involved having a thought, acting on it and assuming that everybody else had been present for both stages. Sennen had inherited it, along with her mother’s small feet and absolute belief that a restaurant could always find one more chair.
Adela turned the new chair towards the light.
“Would you stay if I asked you?”
“Yes.”
“It might be awkward.”
“It already is.”
She looked up. He held her gaze, and there was no helpful smile now, nothing she could borrow to make asking easier.
“Stay, then. I want you to.”
His fingers loosened on the chair back.
“All right.”
She bent over the rough joint. It needed only a little attention. That was one of the pleasures of her work: sometimes the thing wrong with an object was right in front of you and could be removed in thirty seconds.
“You’ve got one too,” she said.
He looked at his thumb. “Apparently.”
“How far did you carry this?”
“From the car. I didn’t bring it overland.”
She found the tweezers in the tin and held out her hand. He moved towards her, then stopped.
“It’s nothing.”
“Good. I’ll charge accordingly.”
His mouth curved. She had forgotten he could look like that. Or she had remembered and stored it somewhere she had not expected to need again.
“May I?” she asked.
He gave her his hand.
The splinter was shallow. She should have had it out immediately, but the kitchen light was behind him and she had to draw him closer to see. His wrist rested against her fingers. He smelled faintly of soap and rain, and she could see a white thread caught in the edge of his rolled sleeve.
“Don’t move.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
She pulled the splinter free and set it on the lid of the tin.
That was all. There was no reason to keep his hand.
She kept it for a moment anyway. Felt his fingers change against hers, not closing, not escaping. Waiting for her to decide what she meant.
Adela let go.
He stepped back without comment, and she was grateful and disappointed in amounts she did not want to examine.
“Sink’s there,” she said.
“I remember that too.”
While he washed his hands, she put the tools away. She had touched people all her life without behaving like an idiot afterwards. She could take a pin out of a hem while its owner was wearing it. Once she had spent twenty minutes holding a stranger’s hand in a railway carriage because he was afraid of tunnels.
Oswin dried his hands on the towel and turned. She looked at the potatoes.
“What can I do?”
“Nothing.”
“Fair enough.”
He leaned against the counter. She found she liked that better than she would have liked him taking the serving spoon out of her hand. Nobody ever accepted nothing. They went on asking until she found them a job and then she had to remember to thank them for it.
His gaze moved to the pudding cooling beside the window.
“Still the pears.”
“Her favourite.”
“I know.”
Twelve pear halves sat in their shallow brown syrup. She had bought seven, eaten the best one over the sink and thought of that as a private extravagance.
“Do you want me to say something about Sennen tonight?” he asked.
“If you want to.”
“That’s a different question.”
It was. She sat on the edge of the stool, which objected.
“I don’t want you to feel you have to earn your supper.”
He looked down at his hands. His thumbnail rubbed the place where the splinter had been.
“Thank you.”
She had not expected those two words to make her feel anything. She stood again.
“There’s custard in the fridge.”
“You still don’t like them, do you?”
“The pears?”
“With the ginger.”
She stared at him.
“I like pears.”
“You used to scrape the sauce off. When she wasn’t looking.”
She had. At Sennen’s flat, at the Sunday lunches where the pudding appeared triumphant in its white dish and everybody praised it because Sennen had made something that needed a timer. Adela had smuggled the ginger towards the edge of her plate under her spoon.
“I thought nobody noticed.”
“I noticed.”
Outside, a car passed slowly, tyres whispering over the wet road. In the brief quiet after it, she could hear the clock over the kitchen door.
“I could make something else next year,” she said.
“You could.”
He didn’t say she should. He didn’t tell her what Sennen would have wanted. Everybody knew what Sennen would have wanted, even people who had struggled to choose her a birthday present when she was alive.
Oswin had known her well enough to leave her. Adela had never forgiven him for that. It occurred to her, with the unwelcome force of a cupboard opening over her head, that she had never asked him what it cost.
She was not going to ask over a tray of potatoes. She was not going to make him give her a satisfactory account of himself before allowing him to eat.
“Where would you like to sit?”
He looked towards the dining room.
“Wherever works.”
“That isn’t a place.”
He looked back at her, and she watched him understand that she was asking him to choose.
“Beside you.”
The words were quiet. Nothing in his face made a joke of them.
She could put him beside her at the far end, with Rhoswen between them and the empty place. She could spend the evening serving, standing, fetching, and let the choice mean nothing more than an arrangement of plates.
Or she could sit down.
Adela carried the borrowed chair to the table. She moved her own plate from the corner, found another glass and set a knife and fork beside it. The room looked different with seven places. Less orderly. They would have to ask each other to move their elbows.
She put her hand on the chair back, on the patch she had sanded smooth.
“Here,” she said.
Oswin came to stand beside her. Close enough that she knew she could reach for his hand again if she chose. He said nothing, and for once she did not rush to fill the silence with an offer of something to drink.
Then the doorbell rang.
Through the patterned glass she could see Rhoswen’s red coat. Adela knew the first thing she would do: count the places, look at the food, say her daughter’s name.
She left Oswin beside her chair and went to let Sennen’s mother in.