The Blue Jumper

Adela opened the bottom drawer looking for a receipt and found six years of things she had agreed to keep.

Envelopes of photographs. A roll of ribbon. Three place cards in Sennen’s handwriting, saved from a birthday meal because nobody else had thought to take them. Beneath everything lay a blue jumper with a tiny repair at the wrist.

The receipt was not there.

She sat back on her heels. Thursday afternoon, one collection cancelled, an hour she had intended to spend catching up. The drawer had developed the density of a badly stuffed cushion. Every time she opened it, she added something small and closed it before it could become a job.

Now the ribbon had caught round the runner. She pulled gently. A place card slid out and landed face down on the floor.

She turned it over. Her own name, in Sennen’s impatient capitals, with a star above the final letter because she had run out of space for a proper flourish.

Adela smiled. Then her eyes filled, which seemed excessive for a piece of card until she remembered how many times she had been surprised by exactly this sort of excess.

She stayed on the floor and emptied the drawer.

There were useful things in it. A photograph Rhoswen wanted scanned. A list of addresses that was now partly wrong. A spare button wrapped in tissue, belonging to nothing she could identify. Some things were hers because she loved them. Some were hers because she had once been the person standing nearest when somebody said, Could you?

She made two piles and immediately found a third category: things she did not want, but felt she would be accused of not loving if she let them go.

The blue jumper did not belong in that pile. She drew it out and held it against her. Soft wool, one elbow thinner than the other, the colour of a clear evening rather than anything the catalogue that sold it would have called blue. She had worn it until she was afraid of wearing it out, then stored it with the photographs and gradually begun treating it like one.

She pulled it over her head.

There. Still a jumper. Still warm.

When Oswin rang the bell at half past five, she answered with a strand of ribbon clinging to her sleeve.

“You’ve caught something,” he said.

“A complicated afternoon. Come in.”

He followed her into the front room. The contents of the drawer covered the rug.

“I can come back.”

“I didn’t say it was contagious.”

“You look occupied.”

“I am. I’d like company while I’m occupied.”

He took off his jacket. She was beginning to recognise the moment when he decided to believe an invitation rather than improve it by offering to leave.

“Tea?” he asked.

“Please.”

He went to the kitchen. Adela sat on the sofa, moving a packet of photographs away from the cushion beside her. He returned with two mugs and chose the cleared place without asking whether it was all right.

“What’s the system?”

“Things I want. Things I promised to do something with. Things I’m afraid to throw away.”

“That’s an unpleasant system.”

“It’s an unpleasant drawer.”

He looked at the place card in her hand. “I remember those.”

“Her thirtieth. She made them because she didn’t trust us to sit in interesting combinations.”

“I was put next to a man who thought engines were a matter of opinion.”

“She told me you sulked.”

“I asked him which kind of ferry he preferred to travel on. The one that floated or the theoretical one.”

Adela laughed. “You were always more patient in her account.”

“She edited me.”

The sentence might have hurt. Instead she heard affection in it, and irritation, and the pleasure of remembering a particular evening rather than the fact that evenings had ended.

She put the card on the pile she wanted to keep.

“She bought me this,” she said, touching the blue sleeve.

Oswin looked at it properly. “I haven’t seen you wear it.”

“I haven’t, for a while. She found it in a second-hand shop for my thirtieth. Said I dressed like somebody who had come to collect an overdue account.”

“That sounds like her.”

“I was annoyed. I’d bought myself a black cardigan that morning.”

“Of course you had.”

“I thought it was practical.”

He reached out and touched the cuff with one finger. “This seems practical.”

“There was a hole here. She tried to mend it before she gave it to me.”

The repair was terrible. A dense little knot of stitches where two or three would have done, pulled tight enough to pucker the wool. Adela had never redone it. It was the only repair in her possession she would defend on grounds unrelated to workmanship.

“She wouldn’t let me open it until she’d explained the hole,” she said. “As if I’d demand a refund from her. Then she took me to lunch and announced she was going to improve my business.”

“Was that welcome?”

“No. I had my notebook with me. She found a page where I’d charged a friend almost nothing for two days’ work. She was furious.”

“With the friend?”

“With me. With the notebook. With the entire idea of people paying for things only if I made them feel comfortable about it.”

Adela could see the café table, the little red pen Sennen had borrowed from a waitress, the unanswerable force of someone who had decided love required a practical intervention.

“She crossed out three prices. Told me if I couldn’t bear asking for the right amount, I should put it on a card and point. I said it didn’t work like that. She said it could if I’d stop explaining everything.”

Oswin smiled. “Did you?”

“Eventually. But that wasn’t the bit I remembered today. She brought a footstool to the workshop the next week. Said she wanted it done properly, not fitted in after everybody else’s. When I gave her the old price, she left the new amount in an envelope under my mug.”

She looked at the bad repair on her wrist.

“She could be so bossy that you missed what she was trying to do.”

Oswin was quiet. Then he said, “I didn’t know that story.”

“No reason you would. It was after.”

After the separation. She did not need to say the rest. They had spent enough time building those dates into something neither could misunderstand.

“I remember her being very certain about what I ought to want,” he said. “It’s good to remember it wasn’t always about her getting it.”

Adela nodded. “Sometimes it was about me getting something I wouldn’t ask for. Sometimes she was wrong about what that was. Both.”

He took her hand, turning the mended cuff gently between his fingers.

“I’m glad you’ve kept it.”

She leaned against him. Not because he had given permission, but because he had heard her love someone else without making it a problem between them.

They sat for a few minutes with the drawer emptied around their feet. Then Adela reached for the ribbon.

“This can go.”

“Was it hers?”

“No. It’s from a parcel. I thought it might be useful.”

“That seems less complicated.”

“You’d think.”

· · ·Scene break

They did not finish everything. Adela put the photographs that needed scanning in a labelled envelope and set one afternoon in her diary, three weeks away. She threw out the obsolete address list after checking she had the current details elsewhere. The button went into her sewing tin, where unidentified buttons were allowed to be unidentified buttons.

The place cards stayed. So did the photograph of the dreadful boots, which she had printed from Rhoswen’s message. She put it on the bookcase, leaning against a pot she had never liked enough to display by itself.

Oswin watched her arrange it.

“My thumb,” he said.

She looked at the obscured corner. “I wondered.”

“She said I’d done it deliberately to spoil her evidence.”

“Had you?”

“No. I’m just a poor photographer.”

Adela smiled. In the picture, Sennen’s face was turned towards the person taking it. Laughing at him, with him, at herself; no photograph could quite separate those things. It did not need to.

When the drawer was half full again, Adela closed it with one hand. No pressure from her knee. No ribbon trapped at the edge.

“Look at that,” she said.

“Moves like a drawer.”

“Don’t be dismissive. This is progress.”

He stood behind her and put his hands lightly at her waist. She leaned back against him, tipped her head and let him kiss the side of her neck.

“This all right?” he asked, softer now.

“Yes. But you should know I’m still wearing the evidence of a terrible repair.”

“I’ll try not to look directly at it.”

She turned in his arms. Kissed him, then rested her forehead against his chest. The evening had changed from something she needed to survive into something she had lived through with company. She could feel the difference in the unhurried way his hand moved over her back.

Later, after he had gone home to collect clothes for an early shift, she took a photograph of the jumper’s cuff and sent it to Rhoswen.

Wearing this today. I remembered the notebook and her red pen.

She put the phone aside. This was not a request for absolution, nor a disguised inquiry about whether they could start walking again. It was a memory offered to the person who would know it.

The reply arrived while she was washing her mug.

She borrowed that pen. Never gave it back. I found three like it in her bag.

Adela laughed. She sent back, A very determined stationery policy.

No answer came to that. She did not send another message.

She wore the jumper for the rest of the evening. When she took it off, she folded it into the drawer with her ordinary clothes, where she would find it the next time she was cold.