The Long Walk

Adela left the piece of paper at home and arrived at Oswin’s door with nothing to read from.

He was ready, coat on, shoes tied, the work bag gone from the table behind him.

“Morning,” he said.

“Morning.”

They kissed. Neither tried to make it say they had already settled everything.

He locked the door and they walked uphill towards the allotments. Their first visit had ended at a gate with a sign saying the public path continued in a direction neither had believed. This time they knew to go through the narrow gap beside the shed and follow the wall.

The ground was wet. Adela had worn sensible boots, which gave her one small thing she could be pleased about before they began.

“I know why I was going to take the cover,” Oswin said.

She looked at him.

“So I wouldn’t have to wait for you to come back. If I wasn’t here, it wouldn’t matter whether you wanted to.”

Adela stepped over a puddle. It was easier to hear the sentence while looking at a path than it would have been across his kitchen table.

“It would still have mattered.”

“I know. I’d have been angry sixty miles away instead. Very efficient.”

She almost smiled. “You could have saved the fuel.”

“Yes.”

They walked a few more yards.

“I’m sorry I said you’d prefer it,” he said. “That made it your arrangement. It was mine.”

“Thank you.”

“And I’m sorry I made Friday sound as if you had to choose which of us to hurt less. I was afraid that seeing her would become a place where I stopped existing. You told me it wouldn’t. I kept asking you to prove it anyway.”

Adela looked across the allotments. A man was rolling up netting beside a shed, working it into a bundle that resisted every attempt. She envied him a problem with edges he could hold.

“I can promise I won’t lie about you,” she said. “I can’t promise she’ll want you in her house.”

“I know.”

“And I won’t go on giving you a report of what I said every time I see her. I wouldn’t like us that way.”

Oswin nodded, then took a little time before answering.

“Neither would I. I don’t want to become another person you have to keep comfortable before you can have an afternoon.”

She felt the force of that in the small space beneath her ribs. It was what she had wanted to write, the sentence she had kept crossing out because it sounded too much like an accusation.

“I wasn’t fair on Thursday,” she said. “I asked if it was all right when what I wanted was for you to say I was doing the right thing. Then I used her grief as if being hurt by the invitation meant you didn’t understand it.”

He looked at her. “That part was hard.”

“I know. I’m sorry. You knew Sennen too. You lost her too, in your own way. I don’t get to decide which feelings you can have because I was the one at the appointments.”

They reached the gate and stopped while Oswin lifted the stiff latch. Adela went through first and held it for him. Such ordinary cooperation, available even here.

Beyond the wall, the path crossed an open field. They could see the sea between two roofs, bright under a break in the cloud.

“I still don’t like being unwelcome,” he said.

“I wouldn’t expect you to.”

“I don’t think I can make it stop hurting by Friday.”

“You don’t have to.”

He let out a breath. “That’s better than you telling me it shouldn’t.”

“Remind me if I start.”

“I will.”

She took his hand. He held it, warm inside the pocket of his coat when the wind sharpened, and they walked without talking until the path reached a bench with no inscription on it.

Adela examined the wet seat.

“An ordinary bench,” she said. “No emotional responsibilities.”

“Except a damp backside.”

“We could stand beside it respectfully.”

They did, shoulders touching, looking down towards town. From here the harbour rooms were a square of pale roof, his street a row of chimneys, Rhoswen’s house hidden beyond the rise. Her life was not divided into two neat directions. It never had been.

“Would you like to come to mine on Friday evening?” Oswin asked.

Adela turned. “Are you asking because you want me there?”

“Yes. I’ve got a meal I want to try. It might involve bread, which you’ve been warned about.”

She smiled. “Then yes. At seven?”

“Seven.”

“If lunch is difficult, I might want to tell you. I might not.”

“All right.”

“You can tell me if the day has been difficult for you too.”

“Even if I’ve spent it arguing with a pump?”

“Especially then. I understand a difficult piece of furniture.”

His smile came slowly, reaching his eyes. She rose on her toes and kissed him, a brief kiss in a cold field with nobody around to interpret it.

They did not spend the rest of the walk checking that the apology had worked. They took the wrong fork beyond the bench and ended up near the cemetery wall, argued mildly about whose suggestion it had been and found the road home by following a woman carrying empty flowerpots.

At his house, Oswin made the call about the cover while Adela filled the kettle.

“I can’t do next weekend,” she heard him say. “I’ve got plans.”

There was a pause. He laughed at something, said no, this was not permission to volunteer him for the following one, and ended the call.

Adela looked over. “Plans?”

“Friday supper. Saturday I’d like to do something with you, if you’re free.”

“I am.”

“Good. Then I haven’t lied.”

She brought him tea and sat at the table.

“We should talk about Christmas before one of us agrees to an entire month,” she said.

He looked alarmed enough to make her laugh.

“I’ve always spent part of it with Rhoswen. I don’t know whether she’ll ask me this year. I want time with you too. I don’t want to wait and allocate what’s left.”

“Christmas Eve,” he said. “I’d like that with you. A whole evening, no visits we’re supposed to fit round.”

“Here or mine?”

“Yours. You have the better oven.”

“That isn’t why your bread burnt.”

“An unproven allegation.”

They chose Christmas Eve at hers, a walk on Christmas morning and separate room for invitations neither could yet predict. It was a modest plan. They wrote it down anyway, her diary beside his phone, giving their own wishes the same practical status as work.

· · ·Scene break

On Friday, Adela went to Rhoswen’s at one carrying nothing.

It had taken effort. She had passed a bakery and nearly bought a loaf, then remembered being asked not to. Arriving empty-handed felt more trusting than arriving useful.

Rhoswen opened the door wearing the navy blouse from the supper. Both cuffs were straight.

“You’re on time.”

“I try.”

“I know. Come in.”

There were two places at the kitchen table. Two bowls, two spoons, ordinary glasses. A framed photograph stood on the windowsill, Sennen laughing beneath a hat too large for her head. No empty setting.

Adela put her coat on the hook. Rhoswen served soup and cut the bread herself. They ate while speaking about the workshop and a tree that had been cut down at the end of the road. It was stiff at first, every ordinary question carrying the risk of an answer they had not agreed how to hear.

Then Rhoswen said, “She would have bought herself something ridiculous today.”

“A hat,” Adela said, looking towards the photograph.

“Two hats. She’d have told me one was practical.”

They laughed. The sound brought tears to Rhoswen’s eyes and then to Adela’s, and for a moment neither could eat. Rhoswen passed the bread instead of apologising. Adela took a piece she did not want and kept it beside her bowl until she did.

Afterwards they looked at the photographs that had already been sorted. Not a job, not a pile waiting for Adela to make it manageable. Rhoswen had chosen twelve and put them in an album, one to a page, with dates where she knew them and blank spaces where she did not.

Adela supplied one missing month. She left the others blank.

At half past three, Rhoswen asked whether she wanted another cup of tea.

“I’d like one,” Adela said. “Then I should go.”

Rhoswen nodded. “Work?”

The question was automatic, a bridge laid towards the easiest answer. Adela could say she had things to do. She did have things to do: go home, change, decide whether to wear the blue jumper. None of those answers would be a lie by itself.

“I’m going to Oswin’s for supper,” she said.

Rhoswen’s hand paused on the kettle.

“I see.”

Adela waited. She would not make an announcement of it, but she would not take it back.

“We said today wasn’t going to be about him,” Rhoswen said.

“It hasn’t been. You asked where I was going.”

The kettle began to rattle. Rhoswen looked at it rather than at her.

“I asked if it was work.”

“I know.”

Rhoswen poured the water. Put the kettle down, picked it up again to add a little more to Adela’s mug. Small, precise movements while she decided what to do with her face.

“I don’t know what to say,” she admitted.

“You don’t have to say anything particular.”

They carried the mugs back to the table. The last half-hour was less easy than the one before it. Adela stayed for it, drank the tea she had accepted, asked about the tree. Rhoswen answered. They managed an ordinary conversation without either pretending the other one had changed her mind.

At the door they hugged. Briefly, awkwardly, with more care than ease. Adela felt the bones of Rhoswen’s shoulder beneath the familiar blouse and wanted fiercely for this not to be something she could lose.

She could not guarantee it by staying longer.

“Thank you for lunch,” she said.

“Thank you for coming.”

The door closed behind her. She went home to change.

· · ·Scene break

Oswin had not burnt the bread. He displayed it on a board with an expression so solemn that Adela laughed before she had taken her coat off.

“A breakthrough,” she said.

“Photograph it. There may be no second example.”

She kissed him, then looked at the table. Two bowls, a pot of something fragrant, the window dark beyond it. He was here because he had chosen to be, and she had come because she wanted him. Nobody had arranged either of them out of the way.

“How was today?” he asked.

“Some of it was lovely. Some of it hurt. I’ll tell you more later, if that’s all right.”

“Of course.”

“How was yours?”

“I thought about taking the cover again at lunchtime. Then I remembered I’d have to explain the excellent loaf going to waste.”

She put her hand on his arm. “I’m glad you stayed.”

“So am I.”

They ate. The meal was good, a fact he accepted with pleasure rather than suspicion. Adela told him one of the hat stories from lunch; he told her about the pump, which had behaved badly enough to justify the work of three people and then resumed functioning as if none of them had mattered.

Later, at the sink, he turned towards her with a wet plate in his hand.

“Where’s the towel?”

“I’ve got it.”

He glanced down at her hands. She was holding it against her waist, caught in a thought she had not prepared.

“Adela?”

“I love you,” she said.

The plate remained between them. He looked at her, the water running from its edge onto the floor.

“I love you too.”

She took the plate before he dropped it. Set it in the rack, put the towel down and went into his arms.

There was nothing neat about the kiss. His hands were wet, her sleeve caught on a drawer knob, and both of them were smiling too much to do it properly at first. Adela had not planned a better moment. She had meant this one.