The Invitation

Adela wrote six invitations before she managed one she could send.

The first sounded like a meeting. The second apologised for a decision she had not yet stated. The third mentioned Sennen twice in four lines and somehow made dinner sound like an obligation to prove they still loved her.

She deleted that one too.

It was late August. The workshop door stood open to let out the heat, and a strip of blue fabric hung from her pocket because she had forgotten she put it there. In a little over a week it would be four years since Sennen died. The tablecloth was Rhoswen’s; the table was hers. Adela had been confusing those kinds of ownership for a long time.

Oswin rang at lunchtime.

“Have you eaten?”

“Yes.”

“Was it a biscuit?”

“A sandwich. I’m becoming alarmingly competent.”

“I thought you were already competent.”

“Only for other people.”

He laughed. She could hear the ferry terminal behind him, a voice calling something about a delivery, the low clatter of work going on while he stepped out of it to speak to her.

“I’ve been writing the invitation,” she said.

“How’s it going?”

“I’ve offered an apology, a committee and a memorial service. Nothing with food yet.”

“What do you want to invite them to?”

She looked at the latest unsent message. “Dinner. At our—at my table. With you.”

“You can say that.”

“I know. I was hoping there was a version nobody could dislike.”

“There might be. It wouldn’t be yours.”

He had become more willing to say things she could argue with. She liked it, except when she wanted to argue.

“Thank you for that deeply inconvenient observation.”

“Any time. I’ve got to go. See you tonight?”

“Seven.”

“Seven.”

After the call she put the phone down and finished the chair she had been working on. It was a small repair. The customer would probably not notice the stitching unless she pointed it out, which was how the work should be. She had spent all morning trying to achieve that same invisibility with a choice that needed to be seen.

At four she sent the three friends a plain invitation to dinner the following Saturday. Seven o’clock. Oswin would be there. No contribution needed unless they wanted something particular to drink.

Then she rang Rhoswen.

· · ·Scene break

They met the next afternoon in Rhoswen’s kitchen. There had been walks again during the year, some easy, some shortened by a sentence neither knew how to leave alone. Adela had stopped arriving with a task she could complete as an explanation for being welcome. Rhoswen had stopped asking every time whether she was busy with work later.

They were still careful. Careful could be kindness; it could also be exhausting.

Now Rhoswen set down two cups and said, “About next Saturday.”

Adela nodded. “I want to have dinner. But I don’t want to keep the empty place this year.”

Rhoswen sat down without picking up her tea.

“Why?”

It was a real question. Adela gave it a real answer.

“Because I don’t want every time we sit round that table to be arranged around somebody who can’t sit with us. I want to be able to talk about her without leaving a plate untouched.”

“It wasn’t every time. It was one evening a year.”

“I know. It started with me setting one place too many. Then it became something I felt I couldn’t change. I need to change it.”

Rhoswen looked at her cup. “You could have just done it. Waited until I arrived.”

“I didn’t want to do that to you.”

“But you’re doing it.”

“Yes.”

The word was small and bare. Adela let it stand without putting an offer after it.

“What about the meal?” Rhoswen asked.

“I’m making something else. I’m not asking everybody to tell a story. If we want to talk about Sennen, we can. I hope we will. But I don’t want to host a fixed memorial supper every September anymore.”

Rhoswen pushed her cup an inch away, then brought it back. Adela watched the movement instead of pretending not to see that her hands were shaking.

“You make it sound like a duty,” Rhoswen said.

“It became one. It wasn’t only one. There were lovely evenings.”

“Last year was lovely.”

“Parts of it were.”

Rhoswen looked up at that, and Adela understood too late how it might sound. “I mean I was tired. I spent most of the day making food I hadn’t chosen and worrying whether everyone would be all right. That wasn’t your fault alone. I kept doing it.”

“Nobody made you.”

“No. That’s why I’m telling you I’m stopping.”

For a while neither spoke. Outside, somebody cut a hedge in short bursts, the machine starting and stopping whenever the blade met something it could not easily cut.

“He’ll be there,” Rhoswen said.

“Yes.”

“In her place?”

Adela felt the question like a hand closing around something tender.

“No. In his own. Beside me.”

Rhoswen looked away. “I don’t know how to see that.”

“I can’t make you see it. But it matters that it’s true.”

Adela could have listed the year they had lived: Christmas, a wet weekend away in March, a hundred ordinary meals, his bad jokes arriving by message while she waited for glue to dry. None of it would persuade Rhoswen by volume. She would have to meet the fact in her own time, or continue not to.

“You are welcome,” Adela said. “I want you there. I won’t pretend the evening will be the same as it used to be.”

Rhoswen pressed her lips together. “Then I don’t think I can come.”

Adela had known it was possible. She had imagined herself accepting it with calm, which turned out to be different from sitting in the kitchen and feeling it happen.

“All right.”

“Don’t say it like that.”

“Like what?”

“As though you’d expected nothing else.”

Adela looked at her. “I hoped you’d come. I’m sad that you won’t. I don’t know a better way to say it.”

Rhoswen’s eyes filled. “Neither do I.”

They drank their tea after it had grown cool. Rhoswen asked whether the repaired chair had been collected. Adela said it had. The conversation did not recover, but neither abandoned it halfway through.

Before she left, Adela stood by the cupboard where the tablecloth was kept.

“I don’t need to borrow it this time,” she said.

“I hadn’t put it out.”

“Right.”

Such a small exchange. It made the whole decision hurt again.

Rhoswen walked her to the door. They hugged with the hesitant care that had become familiar, and Adela went home without offering to host another supper to make up for the one she had changed.

· · ·Scene break

Oswin arrived at seven. She told him before he took his jacket off.

“She isn’t coming.”

He stopped with his hand on the zip. “I’m sorry.”

“So am I.”

He came to her. Adela put her arms round him and let herself be held without trying to explain why the decision was still right. It could be right and hurt. They had learned that much during the year, though knowing it had not made the feeling familiar enough to be easy.

“Do you want to change the evening?” he asked after a while.

She drew back. “What do you mean?”

“Another day. Different people. No dinner at all. Whatever you actually want.”

“Not you going away so she’ll come?”

“No. I wasn’t offering that.”

She looked at him. He let her look.

“Good,” she said. “I don’t want to change it. I want her to want to come. Those aren’t the same thing.”

“No.”

They went into the kitchen. Two of the friends had accepted; the third had other plans and had sent a kind message Adela was trying to take at its word. Four diners now. A number so manageable it almost made her angry, as though the ease of cooking for them might prove she had wanted less company all along.

“I was going to make too much,” she admitted.

“We can eat it on Sunday.”

“You could tell me to buy less.”

“Would you?”

“Probably not.”

“Then I’ll prepare for a large Sunday.”

She laughed, and he smiled with relief he did not conceal.

After supper, they brought her dining chairs out from the wall to check whether any needed attention. Not a ceremony. One had a loose screw, another a piece of felt missing beneath a leg. Adela fixed the screw while Oswin found the felt in the tin she pointed to.

The seventh chair, the one he had carried through her door a year ago, was still at his house. They did not need it. There were six good chairs here and only four people coming.

Adela opened the cupboard above the counter and took down the blue glass.

Oswin watched her turn it in her hands.

“Do you want it put away somewhere else?” he asked.

“No. I think I want to use it.”

“All right.”

She held it to the light. A small bubble sat inside the rim, a flaw she had noticed a hundred times while making sure nobody drank from it.

“It’s a lovely glass.”

“It is.”

She put it with the other drinking glasses, within reach of anyone who opened the cupboard.

Later, after Oswin had gone home to water his plants and collect what he needed for work, Adela sat at the table with the final invitation on her phone. Four people. Food she wanted to make. A woman she loved who would not be there.

She did not delete the invitation. She opened a shopping list and began with lemons.