Rhoswen took one look at Oswin and put the lemon bowl into Adela’s hands.
“Oh, thank goodness. You found each other.”
Six lemons rolled against the painted sides. Adela had asked for ice.
“You might have told me I was expecting him.”
“I did tell—“ Rhoswen stopped. Her hand was still on the bowl. “No. I told him.”
Behind Adela, Oswin said nothing.
It would have been easy to laugh. They all knew Rhoswen; of course she had forgotten; somebody would find more potatoes. Adela felt the familiar little push towards making an accident comfortable for the person who had caused it.
“He thought I knew.”
Rhoswen looked past her. “I’m sorry, Oswin. That was a rotten position to put you in.”
“It wasn’t ideal.”
“And you.” She squeezed Adela’s wrist. “I should have asked, not told you. Even if I’d remembered to tell you.”
Adela looked down at the lemons. An apology that did not require her to insist nothing had happened. Two in one evening might be more than her kitchen could bear.
“He’s staying,” she said.
“Good.”
Rhoswen unbuttoned her red coat and went to hang it on the hook she always used. Under it she wore the navy blouse Adela had helped her choose for her sixty-second birthday. One cuff was turned inside out. Adela reached to straighten it, then found herself touching the back of the older woman’s hand instead.
“All right?”
“Mostly.”
That was their honest answer. Three years had taught them the pointlessness of yes.
Rhoswen took her hand away gently. “What’s happened to your table?”
Seven places. Oswin’s chair beside Adela’s, the blue glass at the empty setting, a serving dish waiting on a mat that had once fitted easily between the plates.
“We’ve had to make room.”
Rhoswen went to Sennen’s place and adjusted the knife until it lay parallel to the fork. Then she glanced at the new chair.
“She would have hated that seat. It leaves marks.”
“Only if you sit on it without any trousers,” Oswin said.
For an appalling second, nobody moved.
Then Rhoswen laughed, a startled sound that caught on its way out. She covered her mouth. Adela looked at Oswin and saw him braced for having got it wrong.
“That was exactly her complaint,” Rhoswen said. “Did she complain to you as well?”
“At length.”
“She told me you’d bought it to spite her.”
“I bought four. It was an ambitious campaign.”
Adela set the lemons on the counter before she dropped them. She could remember Sennen on that chair in a summer dress, inspecting the backs of her legs with outrage. She had been twenty-eight then, certain that all household objects should arrange themselves around her comfort, equally certain she could persuade everyone else’s to do the same. Adela had loved that about her until the day it became inconvenient, and then loved her anyway.
“You’ve kept them,” Rhoswen said.
“They work.”
There was something in his voice that made Adela turn towards the oven. Not grief alone. A man explaining why he still owned his own chairs.
The other three guests arrived together, bringing ice after all and a loaf nobody would need. They saw Oswin and paused in a muddle of coats. Adela took the bread from the woman nearest the door.
“There’s room for everything except that. You can take it home again.”
The woman laughed uncertainly. Someone asked Oswin about the ferry. He answered. Nobody asked him why he was there, which was a kindness until it began to feel like a question they had all agreed to keep asking silently.
Adela carried the potatoes through. Oswin held the door and went to the borrowed chair. Beside him, her own place waited with its clean knife and folded napkin.
She sat down before remembering the gravy.
“I’ll get it,” said the friend opposite.
Adela almost explained which jug. There was only one jug on the counter. She left the woman to discover it.
For the first ten minutes they spoke about the town. A grocer had moved, the seafront railings were being painted the wrong green, the ferry timetable had changed by an amount that offended everybody except Oswin. Rhoswen asked for the salt. Adela passed it across the empty place, careful of the blue glass.
Then one of the guests mentioned a sale at a shoe shop, and Rhoswen said, “Oh, those boots. Do you remember the silver ones?”
“They were not silver,” Adela said. “They were the colour of the inside of a crisp packet.”
“Sennen called them pewter.”
“Sennen called anything a bargain if it was a little too small.”
Oswin was looking at his plate. Adela could see the smile he had chosen not to contribute.
“You had to carry them,” she said to him.
He looked up.
“From the station. In the rain. She told me.”
“One of them.”
“What happened to the other?”
“She kept it on to prove the first one was defective.”
Rhoswen put down her fork.
“She walked home in one boot?”
“For nearly a hundred yards. Then she asked me to fetch the car.”
“And did you?” asked the man at the end.
“Of course I did. She was holding a wet boot. I wasn’t going to win.”
They laughed. All six of them, untidily, one person beginning again when the rest had stopped. Adela felt Oswin’s arm against hers as he reached for his glass, an ordinary accident made extraordinary by the fact that she did not move away.
“She rang me from the car,” Adela said. “Told me you’d taken the long way round on purpose.”
“There was a one-way system.”
“I know. I agreed you were very difficult.”
“That sounds right.”
He said it lightly. She heard the fact under it. So many afternoons of hearing one half of an argument and accepting the job of confirming it.
Rhoswen reached for another potato. “I miss having to tell her that something was her own fault.”
The laughter went gently out of the room.
“She wasn’t keen on hearing it,” Adela said.
“No. But she’d ring again the next day.”
Adela looked at the blue glass. It was ridiculous what could undo her. Not the anniversary, not the meal she had spent all day making. The knowledge that Sennen had sometimes rung again simply to continue an argument, and that Adela would give almost anything to be interrupted that way now.
Oswin’s elbow was warm beside hers. He did not touch her or turn the conversation into a comfort he could give. He let Rhoswen tell them about the last shoes she had taken back on her daughter’s behalf. When the gravy came round again, he passed it to Adela with the handle turned towards her.
She ate while it was still hot.
Scene break
The pears were praised. Adela had custard by itself and nobody noticed except Oswin, whose mouth moved when she set the bowl down.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“It’s a perfectly respectable pudding.”
“Didn’t say it wasn’t.”
Rhoswen wanted the tent story. Oswin told it, including his certainty that he could repair a broken pole with a spoon and tape. Sennen had been right about the ditch. He said so before anybody could supply that part for him.
By half past ten, the guests were standing in the hall and remembering things they should have said while seated. Rhoswen lingered beside the kitchen door. Adela knew the tilt of her head: there was something else.
“I brought the album pages,” she said. “The loose ones. We could sort them now, if you weren’t too tired.”
Adela could see the bag under her coat. Photographs in envelopes, dates written on backs, the hopeful disorder of a project that would take them past midnight. They had started it in July. Whenever they met there seemed to be a different envelope.
“Not tonight.”
The words came out before she had arranged an alternative around them.
“Oh.” Rhoswen looked towards the table. “Of course. You’ve done all this.”
“I would like to look at them. Another day.”
“Our walk tomorrow? We could sit down afterwards.”
Adela wanted tomorrow morning. The sea, a coat with deep pockets, Rhoswen grumbling about the people who fed gulls beside the sign asking them not to. She did not want photographs after it, tea before it, a whole day quietly annexed to being useful.
“Just the walk tomorrow.”
Rhoswen’s expression changed, not into anger, but into the small calculation of someone rearranging an expectation. Adela nearly said she would find an hour.
“All right,” Rhoswen said. “Ten, then.”
At the door she hugged Adela hard. She thanked Oswin for coming and for remembering the spoon. He said goodnight to her without a promise to come again.
When the front door closed, Adela stood with her hand on the latch. A good evening. Not easy, not ruined. She would ordinarily begin cleaning before thinking about whether she had enjoyed it.
Water ran in the kitchen.
Oswin had stacked the plates by the sink. His sleeves were rolled higher now; one hand was submerged in the washing-up bowl.
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I used them.”
“One of them.”
“I can stop after one if you’re keeping an account.”
She took a tea towel from the drawer. They fitted into the little space without discussion, he washing and she drying, passing plates from his hand to hers. She liked the weight of them arriving clean. She liked that he left the chipped one on the draining board instead of asking whether she knew about it.
“You didn’t have to tell the tent story,” she said.
“I wanted to by then.”
“Did you mind being asked?”
He washed the same fork for longer than a fork needed.
“A bit. Before I came.”
“You could have said no.”
“So could you. About tonight.”
She put the plate in its stack. “Yes.”
He looked at her, then at the bowl. “I was angry for a while. After her message yesterday. Thought perhaps I’d been left long enough to become a decent story.”
Adela turned the towel to its dry half. No reply she could make would improve that sentence. She had helped make it true.
“I was cruel in that voice message,” she said.
“You were angry.”
“Both, then.”
He let a little water out, added more from the hot tap. “Both.”
She was grateful he had not forgiven her on instruction.
“I don’t think I can talk properly about it tonight.”
“Then don’t.”
The last plate passed between them. His wet fingers brushed the side of her hand. Adela looked up too quickly and found him already looking at her.
He did not retreat. He did not come closer.
There were things she wanted that had nothing to do with apology. She could feel how readily she might confuse them if she let the night run on: invite him to sit down, make tea, confess just enough to keep him until she had worked out why she wanted to.
“I need the house to myself now,” she said.
He nodded. “All right.”
He dried his hands. She walked with him as far as the table, where he picked up his chair.
“You’ll need that,” she said.
“I’ve got three others. For my enemies.”
She laughed. It hurt a little, the ease of it after all this time.
At the front door, he rested the chair on one leg while he put his jacket on. Adela fetched her phone from the shelf.
“You can have my number again. If you want it.”
He took his phone out without a joke.
She said the digits, watched him save them. He typed something and her own phone sounded in her hand.
Oswin. With the chair.
“So I don’t confuse you with the other one?”
“Happens constantly.”
She opened the door for him. The air smelled of wet pavement and someone’s late toast. He carried the chair towards his car, its legs pointing at the sky, and she watched until he had worked out how to fit it in.
Back inside, the empty place remained. She took away the blue glass and put it in the cupboard. She shook the crumbs from the cloth Rhoswen had lent her, folded it around the stained part, and left it by the washing machine.
Her phone lay on the table beside her own used plate.
She sat down to write to him.