Adela had invited Oswin for a walk and was now trying to choose a coat that did not make the walk an apology.
The good grey one looked deliberate. The waterproof looked as though she expected him to repair a boat. She put on the grey one and left the house before she could change it.
Tuesday evening, six o’clock, by the low wall above the harbour. Her message had named the time and place with the efficiency she brought to arranging a collection of furniture. Then she had added, Just us. Nothing needs carrying.
His answer had arrived while she was still sitting at the supper table.
I’d like that.
She had reread it on Sunday after her walk with Rhoswen, and again on Monday while waiting for glue to set. There was very little room for interpretation in three words. She had found some anyway.
Oswin was at the wall before her, holding a paper bag. He wore a dark jumper and had shaved. She noticed both things with an attention she usually reserved for damage a customer had tried to conceal beneath a cushion.
“You brought something.”
“Chips. Do they count as carrying?”
“Depends how far you expect me to take them.”
He opened the bag. Two cartons, wooden forks, salt folded into a little paper twist.
“I didn’t know whether you’d eaten.”
“It’s six o’clock.”
“I don’t know what time you eat when nobody’s coming.”
She could not have answered that without making something up. Sometimes at five, over the workshop sink. Sometimes at nine because a chair needed delivering and the supermarket was on the way. She had found it convenient that hunger was less troublesome than a disappointed customer.
“Now will do.”
They sat on the wall facing the harbour. He set the bag between them and gave her the salt. Below, the last ferry of the afternoon moved slowly across the mouth of the inlet. She looked from it to him.
“Do you spend all your free time watching that?”
“Only when I’m hoping somebody else will have to fix it.”
“Comforting.”
“It runs beautifully. That’s why I’m off at five.”
She ate a chip. Hot enough to make her stop pretending to be composed.
“You could have warned me.”
“I thought the steam was doing it.”
They ate in silence for a little while. A gull watched from a bollard with professional disappointment. Adela liked having her hands occupied. She could look at Oswin without appearing to wait for something, and the view was sufficient excuse to look away again.
On Sunday, Rhoswen had talked about the supper. How good it had been to hear the old stories without feeling she had demanded them. Adela had said yes, it had. She had not mentioned this walk. At that point it had still been possible to say there was nothing to mention.
“Did you have a decent Sunday?” Oswin asked.
“Walked. Then repaired a footstool.”
“Yours?”
“No.”
“The stool lives another week.”
She looked at him. “You remember that?”
“I was there on Saturday.”
“People often forget what I tell them about furniture.”
“You didn’t tell me about furniture. You defended a stool. Different thing.”
She smiled into the carton. It was the distinction she had made without knowing she was making it, her right to have something imperfect and inconvenient in a room she otherwise kept ready for inspection.
“What did you do?”
“Went fishing. Didn’t catch anything. Had an argument about whether that was the point.”
“What side were you on?”
“The losing one. He’d brought a frying pan.”
There was a friend in that sentence, a Sunday she knew nothing about. She had imagined Oswin’s life as the space outside theirs for so long that ordinary details startled her. He had meals, arguments, people who expected him. The walk was an addition to his life. It did not repair the whole of it.
She put her fork down.
“I didn’t ask you here because I feel sorry for you.”
He swallowed, looked out at the water. “Good. It’s a long walk for that.”
“I know I’ve given you reason to think—“
“Adela. Let me eat this chip before we sort out four years.”
She laughed, then pressed her lips together. “Sorry.”
“And that one.”
He ate it slowly, looking at her with such deliberate seriousness that she had to look away. By the time he folded his carton, she had stopped rehearsing the speech she had meant to give.
“What would you like this evening to be?” he asked.
There was no clever answer available. She could make one, but then she would have to spend the walk living inside it.
“An evening I asked you to spend with me.”
“All right.”
“Because I enjoyed you being there on Saturday.”
His gaze stayed on her. “I enjoyed being beside you.”
Adela felt the words in the part of her that had not settled since his hand rested in hers. He had not said he enjoyed being welcome, or seeing everybody again. She picked up a piece of salt from the wall and rubbed it between her fingers.
“I wasn’t very easy company.”
“You were company I wanted.”
The gull made an ugly, demanding noise.
“He’s not convinced,” she said.
“He’s waiting for you to give him the rest of your supper.”
She ate the last chip herself.
They walked along the upper path, where the houses backed onto the harbour and plants escaped between the railings. Oswin took the side nearest the water until Adela moved there to look down at a small boat with an improbable amount of washing hung across it. He let her, without rearranging them.
“I’d lose all my socks,” she said.
“That’s how they get you. Cheap mooring, ruinous sock bill.”
“You could peg them together.”
“Then you lose two at once.”
She stopped beside a gate so she could laugh properly. He stood in front of her, hands in his pockets, smiling as if the laugh were a thing he had been curious to see and was pleased to find still possible.
Adela had forgotten how she laughed when she did not first check who might need her. There was no table here. Nobody’s glass to fill. Oswin was perfectly capable of having an evening without her and had chosen this one.
She became aware of the distance between them: a foot of paving, the front of his jumper, the place at his throat where the collar did not quite meet. She wanted to put her hand there. Not to remove a splinter. Not to show him anything.
He saw her look. His smile changed, less easy now, and he took one hand from his pocket.
“Shall we keep walking?” he asked.
She could hear the other possibility in it.
“A little further.”
They went as far as the old steps beyond the harbour office. The path widened into a quiet patch of paving with another low wall and a view of the open sea. No grand sunset; the light was a thin, ordinary silver. Adela was glad. She did not want to owe what she did next to a view.
She put her hand on the wall. The stone held a trace of the afternoon’s warmth.
“On Saturday,” she said, “when I was taking the splinter out.”
He turned towards her.
“I didn’t need to keep your hand that long.”
“I know.”
“You could have said.”
“I didn’t want my hand back.”
There it was. No fog around it now. Adela’s pulse made a heavy, inconvenient beat at the base of her throat.
“I’ve wanted to kiss you since that kitchen.”
Oswin let out a breath, looking at her mouth and then her eyes. “I’ve been hoping you might.”
“I still don’t know how to explain it.”
“You don’t have to explain it before you do it. You do have to want to.”
“I do.”
She stepped close enough that her coat touched his jumper. Set her hand on his shoulder. He waited while she found her balance, which was a kindness she would have resented if he had looked kind. He looked intent, and a little unsteady himself.
Adela kissed him.
For a moment it was only the astonishing fact of his mouth against hers, warm and real after three days of trying not to imagine it. Then his hand settled lightly at her waist, and she felt the question there and answered by moving closer.
She had thought wanting would make her rush. Instead she noticed everything: the roughness at his jaw, his thumb still against her coat, the small sound he made when she tilted her face to his. He kissed her back without hurry. Gave her time to feel that he was doing it because he wanted her, too.
When she drew away, her hand was gripping his shoulder.
“That wasn’t an apology,” she said.
His eyes opened. “I was fairly sure.”
She laughed against his collar. He held her there, neither claiming the laugh as an invitation nor taking his hand away as if they had done something regrettable.
“May I have another?” he asked.
“Yes. You may.”
This time he bent to her. Adela slid her hand from his shoulder to the back of his neck, felt him breathe in, and lost the small satisfaction of being able to unsettle him in the larger pleasure of being kissed. His arm came round her only as she leaned into him. The wall was behind her hand; the evening was open on every side. She could have stepped away. She stayed.
When they stopped, she rested her forehead against his for a few seconds. It was unfamiliar work, allowing a good thing to finish without immediately explaining what it would cost.
“Are you all right?” he said.
“I’m trying not to make a list.”
“Of what?”
“Everything.”
He smiled, but did not tell her there was nothing to worry about. “We can walk back slowly.”
“I’d like that.”
They went by the same path. At the harbour office she took his hand. He looked down, then folded his fingers through hers.
A woman walking a dog passed them without interest. Adela felt a moment of relief so sharp it embarrassed her. She did not remove her hand. She would have to understand that relief, but she did not want to spend the rest of the evening interrogating herself beside a man she had just kissed.
At the place where their roads divided, he stopped.
“Can I see you on Thursday?”
“Yes.”
“My house? I can make something.”
“Something is rather a broad menu.”
“I can narrow it down by Thursday.”
She liked the thought of his house. A room where she would not know which cupboard held the plates, where she would have to let him decide what she needed to do and perhaps discover it was nothing. She was frightened of how much she liked it.
“I’d like supper,” she said. “And to see you. Both.”
“Both, then. Seven?”
“Seven.”
He gave her his address, though she knew the street. They kissed once more, briefly this time, with people going about their business at the far end of the pavement. She did not pretend it was a goodbye between old friends.
Adela walked home alone. Her mouth felt changed. Her coat was the same grey coat she had worn to collect a re-covered armchair the previous week, but now she knew what Oswin’s hand felt like through it.
At home, there were messages from a customer, the parcel company and Rhoswen. Rhoswen had found another photograph of Sennen in the boots. One on, one off. You were right.
Adela opened the photograph. Sennen stood on a wet pavement, laughing, one bare foot balanced on the other boot. Someone’s thumb obscured a corner. Oswin’s, perhaps. A life they had actually had, with irritating shoes and bad weather and pleasure that had been real before it ended.
She sent Rhoswen a heart. Then she set the phone down and stood in her kitchen, letting that love and the kiss exist in the same room.