The Red Samples

Rhoswen rang while Adela was choosing between two shades of red that a customer insisted were the same.

She put down the samples and answered before the third ring.

“Hello.”

“Have I caught you working?”

“Yes. I can stop.”

There was a pause. Six weeks of brief messages and one exchange on the pavement, both of them carrying bags, neither able to pretend they had time for the conversation they were avoiding. Rhoswen had given back the brown scarf in a bag hung from her front door. Adela had left a jar of marmalade on the step, then spent a day wondering whether that had been generous or cowardly.

Now it was November. The workshop window steamed at the edges, and customers had begun mentioning Christmas with the tone of people warning her about a natural disaster.

“It’s her birthday next Friday,” Rhoswen said.

“I know.”

“Of course you know.”

Sennen would have been thirty-six. There was no sensible way to picture it. Adela could imagine a coat she might have bought, an opinion she would certainly have had; the face refused to become older than the one in the photographs.

“I wondered if you’d come for lunch,” Rhoswen said. “Just the two of us. I don’t want a gathering.”

Adela sat down on the high stool beside her cutting table. “I’d like that.”

“I haven’t decided what to make.”

“Anything. It doesn’t have to be—“

She stopped herself. It did not have to be Sennen’s favourite meal. Rhoswen knew that. She could make it anyway if she wanted to.

“Soup, probably,” Rhoswen said. “I can’t face doing the pears.”

“Soup would be lovely.”

Another pause. Adela could hear the thought behind it, approaching carefully enough that she almost wished Rhoswen would simply say it.

“I mean you on your own.”

“I understood.”

“I wasn’t sure whether everything had to be both of you now.”

Adela looked at the red samples. One was warmer than the other by the smallest degree. The customer might never notice it once the chairs were in different rooms. She would notice every time she thought of them.

“No,” she said. “Everything doesn’t have to be both of us.”

“Good.”

“Oswin and I do things separately.”

“I don’t need to hear the arrangements.”

The sentence caught them both. Rhoswen made a little sound, a breath checked too late.

“Sorry,” she said. “I only meant I don’t want Friday to be about it.”

“Neither do I.”

“Perhaps when we see each other, we could just leave him out. For now.”

Adela drew a finger along the edge of the sample book. The room was cold despite the heater. She could reach up, open the window, turn the conversation into something practical for a moment.

“What does that mean?”

“It means I miss you. And whenever I think about asking you round, I imagine you telling me where you’ve been with him or something he’s said, and I don’t know what I’m meant to do with my face.”

The honesty hurt more than the sharpness had. Adela had missed that face: its impatience, its pleasure, the way it could tell her she had forgotten something before Rhoswen spoke.

“You don’t have to look pleased about everything I say.”

“You say that now.”

“I mean it now.”

“Could we try one lunch?”

Adela closed the sample book. “Yes. One lunch. I won’t turn her birthday into a discussion about my relationship. But I can’t agree that every time we meet, I remove him from my life first.”

“That isn’t what I said.”

“It’s what I’m afraid we’d end up doing.”

Rhoswen was quiet long enough for Adela to hear somebody pass outside her own workshop, shoes striking the wet paving. A month ago she would have filled the silence with an offer to bring bread, pudding, anything that could make this easier to accept.

“I don’t want to hear about him on her birthday,” Rhoswen said at last.

“I can understand that. I don’t have a speech to make. I want to sit with you and remember her.”

“Then come at one.”

“One.”

“And don’t bring anything. I can still make lunch.”

Adela smiled, unexpectedly close to tears. “I know you can.”

After the call, she sat on the stool for a while. She had agreed to a meal, not a treaty. She was allowed to have a relationship that did not include Oswin in every room. She was also capable of calling an old habit a reasonable compromise when she wanted somebody to stop being hurt.

Both possibilities deserved looking at. Neither was settled by the pleasure of being invited.

She took out her diary and wrote Rhoswen, lunch, one beside the date that already held Sennen’s name.

· · ·Scene break

Oswin came to the workshop at five to walk home with her. In the weeks since September, they had learned the convenience and difficulty of two households. He sometimes had early shifts; she sometimes worked late. They had a shared shelf in each other’s bathroom but no key. The lack of a key was not a statement. They had simply not decided to make it one.

They had eaten twice at the harbour restaurant. The second time, somebody Adela knew stopped to say hello and then recommended the fish. Oswin had looked across the table afterwards and raised his glass of water to the astonishing event of receiving only culinary advice.

There had been easy days. Enough that Adela had stopped counting them as proof.

Now he stood in the doorway with rain on his jacket and a paper bag in his hand.

“What is it?” she asked.

“A bun. I thought you might have remembered lunch. I thought you might not.”

“I did.”

“Then we can share it.”

She locked the workshop and took half. They ate as they walked, which made conversation impractical until the last sticky piece was gone.

“Rhoswen rang,” she said.

Oswin looked at her. “How was she?”

“She asked me to lunch next Friday. For Sennen’s birthday.”

“Right.”

“Just me.”

He nodded. They walked past the grocer’s, where the display had become oranges and early boxes of dates. Adela waited for him to ask something else.

“I said yes,” she added.

“I assumed.”

There was no criticism in the words. There was something in the care with which he had placed them.

“Is that all right?”

He stopped at the crossing. “You don’t need my permission.”

“That wasn’t what I meant.”

“I know.”

The lights changed. They crossed with two other people, too close for the conversation they were trying not to have in public.

At her door, Oswin took his hands out of his pockets and waited while she found the key.

“What did she ask for?” he said.

Adela looked at him. “Lunch.”

“Adela.”

She opened the door and went inside. He followed, closing it gently behind him.

“She asked whether we could leave you out when we saw each other,” Adela said. “I told her I wouldn’t agree to that. I did agree not to make Friday about us.”

“What does leaving me out mean for one Friday?”

“It means I go to lunch with someone who doesn’t want to talk about my relationship on her dead daughter’s birthday.”

He flinched almost imperceptibly. She wished she had not made the sentence a thing he would have to disagree with whole.

“I understand the birthday,” he said.

“I know you do.”

“I’m less sure about being the condition of you getting to see her.”

“I don’t think it’s that simple.”

“Neither do I.”

They stood in the hall with their coats still on. Adela wanted to take his off, offer tea, move them into a room where she knew how to make things easier. She left his jacket alone.

“Are you asking me not to go?”

“No.”

The answer came quickly. He looked unhappy with the question, and with himself for having made it available.

“I don’t want to ask you that.”

“Good. Because I am going.”

Silence followed, heavy with the certainty she had put into the words. They were both capable of being blunt; she was discovering it was less charming when they wanted different things.

Oswin unzipped his jacket. “Can we sit down before we make this worse in the doorway?”

“Yes.”

They went into the kitchen. Adela filled the kettle because she wanted tea, and told herself the reason before she could pretend it was a peace offering. Oswin sat at the table. He did not choose the chair nearest the door.

“I’m glad she rang you,” he said after a while.

She looked over her shoulder.

“I can be glad and not like what she asked.”

“Yes.”

Adela took two mugs from the cupboard. “I don’t like all of it either. I told her that.”

“I know.”

She set his mug in front of him. No agreement had been reached. The tea was still tea; he thanked her and moved his hand away from its heat.

“I’d like a bit of time to think,” he said. “Before I say something I mean only because I’m hurt.”

She sat opposite him. “Here, or at home?”

He considered it. “Here, if you don’t mind me being poor company.”

“I can manage poor company.”

He gave her a small smile. They drank their tea while she told him about the two reds and the customer who would eventually have to choose. It was not pretending the conversation had finished. It was allowing the evening to contain something besides their disagreement.

When he left at nine, he kissed her at the door. Adela held his face for a moment before letting him go.

She went back to her diary. Friday’s lunch remained where she had written it. For the first time since wanting Oswin, choosing her own life had required her to disappoint him too.