Without Guests

Adela had written Christmas Eve in her diary six weeks earlier, and still felt surprised when it arrived without anyone else in it.

No collection to squeeze in before lunch. No supper guests. No last-minute trip to find a pudding somebody remembered too late. She closed the workshop at two, came home and stood in her kitchen listening to the silence she had arranged.

Oswin was due at six. There were things she could make complicated before then. She considered three of them, including a sauce requiring ingredients she did not own, and decided to have a bath instead.

At six he rang the bell carrying a bag and wearing the jumper with the hole his workmate had mentioned at the harbour rooms.

“You look very festive,” she said.

He looked down. “It’s the only one that wasn’t drying.”

“I wasn’t being sarcastic. You look like yourself.”

“That can be arranged more often.”

She kissed him before taking the bag. Inside were potatoes, a book he wanted to lend her and the small overnight collection that still moved between their houses. Toothbrush, clean shirt, spare socks. None of it made him a tenant. All of it meant she could expect him at breakfast.

She put the bag beside the stairs and drew him into the kitchen.

“I’ve done very little.”

“Excellent. We’ll be evenly matched.”

They cooked together. Nothing that required concentration beyond their reach: a pie, potatoes, green beans because she liked them and he said he had no principled objection. There was no pudding. At seven she briefly panicked about that and found two biscuits in a tin. Oswin said he would try to endure the deprivation.

While the food cooked, he handed her a small paper parcel.

“It’s not an obligation,” he said. “Before you start rummaging for something you can pretend you meant to give me.”

“I have got you something.”

“Then we’re both being difficult.”

She opened his parcel. A second-hand paperback about walking routes, with a folded map inside. He had put a pencil mark beside the path beyond the allotments.

“So we can get lost somewhere different,” he said.

Adela ran her thumb over the spine. The cover was creased. He had bought her something to use rather than protect.

“I love it.”

“Good.”

She fetched his present from the cupboard: a small reading lamp that clipped to a headboard, chosen after he had tried to finish a book without turning on the light beside her.

He opened it and looked at her.

“For your house,” she said. “Or here. Wherever you’re reading.”

He turned the lamp in his hands, testing its hinge. “Thank you.”

Such unremarkable presents. A route somewhere neither had been; permission to remain awake beside someone who needed sleep. Adela felt more exposed giving him the lamp than she would have felt buying something expensive and obvious.

They ate at the small table. Oswin put his feet against hers beneath it and she left them there. They talked about the year without attempting to judge it, about a ferry that needed servicing in January and a customer who had ordered fabric after being told three times it would not arrive before Christmas.

Rhoswen had invited Adela for tea on Boxing Day. She mentioned it when they were discussing plans, and Oswin asked what time. She said three. He told her he would be fixing a friend’s garden gate if the weather held.

Neither supplied the other with a certificate of being reasonable. It was only a conversation, and after November that ordinariness felt earned.

When they finished, he carried the plates to the sink. Adela caught his hand before he turned on the tap.

“Leave them.”

He looked at the plates, then at her. “Are you sure?”

“They’re plates. They’ll wait.”

“I’ll make a note of that for future use.”

She drew him towards her. The first kiss tasted faintly of dinner, warm and familiar. His hands settled at her waist; hers slid beneath the edge of his jumper, finding the shirt underneath. She wanted to get closer than the kitchen, the evening, the layers of wool would let her.

Oswin lifted his head. “What would you like?”

“You. Upstairs. No noble offers to finish washing up first.”

His smile did something thoroughly unreasonable to her knees.

“No danger of that.”

She took his hand and led him out of the kitchen, leaving the plates exactly where they were.

· · ·Scene break

The little lamp worked. They tried it on the headboard while sitting on the bed, and Oswin shone it directly into his own face before finding the switch.

“An accomplished gift,” he said, blinking.

Adela took it from him and clipped it in place. “There. Now you can study curtain headings through the night.”

“I’ve advanced to hems.”

She laughed, and he kissed her while she was still laughing. By the time he drew back, she was no longer interested in the lamp.

He touched the edge of her sleeve. “This is new.”

“It’s old. I kept it for going somewhere.”

“Where are you going?”

“Here, apparently.”

He looked at her in the soft light, at the blouse she had put on for nobody else’s inspection. “I’m glad.”

She unbuttoned his shirt slowly, not because she thought slowness was required, but because she liked seeing him let her. He watched her hands, then her face. When she slipped the fabric from his shoulders, he caught her fingers and kissed them before drawing her towards him.

Adela settled close against him. The heat of his skin, the familiar roughness at his jaw, the way he turned to find her mouth: these things no longer startled her by being possible. They startled her by continuing to matter.

“You can tell me to stop looking so pleased,” he said.

“I won’t.”

“Good. I’m not sure I’d manage it.”

She kissed the side of his neck and felt the joke leave him. Felt his arm tighten, then ease enough to let her choose how close. She drew nearer and heard the sound he made, unguarded, hers to answer without having to own it.

They moved together into the comfortable disorder of the bed. His hand traced her shoulder, paused when she caught it, then continued where she guided it. He asked a quiet question against her cheek. She answered him clearly and kissed him again.

It was the answering she liked most. The way wanting could become something said aloud, heard, changed. She did not have to guess what would please him and then disappear into providing it. She could ask for the kiss again, for his hand to stay, for a slower moment because the warmth of it was something she wanted to feel fully.

Oswin listened. When she smiled with her eyes closed, he asked what he had missed, and she opened them to show him it was nothing he had missed at all.

The night held laughter, a spilled glass of water, the sudden tenderness of his hand at her face when she said his name. Ordinary mishaps did not break the closeness. They gave them something to laugh about while reaching for each other again.

Later, Adela lay against his shoulder while he drew a slow, absent line over the back of her hand. The room was quiet. A car passed outside, music briefly audible through its closed windows, then gone.

She could have fallen asleep. Instead a familiar thought came through the happiness and found the one place in it that was still tender.

Oswin felt her move.

“What is it?”

She considered saying nothing. He had not earned another evening of Sennen simply by lying beside her. But he had asked, and she no longer wanted to use silence as a way of looking uncomplicated.

“Sometimes I still feel disloyal,” she said.

His fingers paused, then rested against hers.

“To her?”

“Yes. Not because I think we’re doing something wrong. It arrives before I can think anything. I was happy a moment ago and then I remembered there was a time she’d have been the person I told.”

Oswin looked towards the ceiling. She felt the small shift of his breathing beneath her cheek.

“Is that hard to hear?” she asked.

“A little.”

She lifted her head. He turned towards her.

“I used to think if you were happy enough with me, the other feeling would stop,” he said. “That’s rather a lot to ask of happiness.”

“It doesn’t mean I want you less.”

“I believe you.”

He said it without trying to make the belief sound effortless. Adela loved him for the effort too.

“I don’t need you to tell me what she would have wanted,” she said.

“I wouldn’t know. She surprised me often enough when I could ask.”

Adela laughed softly. “Yes.”

“Do you want to talk about her?”

She thought about it. “No. I wanted to tell you the feeling was there without making it the whole night.”

“Then come back here.”

He opened his arm, an invitation she could take. She settled against him and kissed the warm place beneath his jaw.

They did not have to begin the evening again. It had held a difficult minute and was still theirs. When he turned towards her, asking with his hand and the look in his face, she answered with a smile and a kiss that had nothing apologetic in it.

The lamp stayed on until she reached up and switched it off herself.

· · ·Scene break

In the morning, the plates were still in the sink.

Oswin looked at them with satisfaction. “You were right.”

“About?”

“They waited.”

Adela put the kettle on. Outside, the street was unusually quiet. She wore the blue jumper over her nightshirt and had no intention of choosing proper clothes until after breakfast.

He washed while she made toast. She dried three plates, left the rest on the rack and sat down because the toast was ready.

The change was so small he did not remark on it. She was grateful. Not every recovered minute needed a witness.

They spread the new map across the clean end of the table and chose a walk neither had done. Four miles, probably muddy, a café marked at the halfway point that might or might not be open on Christmas Day.

“We should take food,” Oswin said.

“We have two biscuits.”

“An expedition well supplied.”

She leaned across the table and kissed him. He caught her hand before she sat back, held it for a moment, then let her have it to finish her toast.

They left the house at eleven with the map folded badly in his pocket and the biscuits in hers. Adela locked the door behind them, knowing they had made no invitation to anyone else and that the day ahead did not have to earn its place in her life.