Two Cups

Oswin opened the door holding a tea towel with a black mark through its middle.

“Supper’s changed.”

Adela looked past him. “Has it become something we ought to report?”

“Only the bread.”

He took her coat, hung it on the end of the banister and kissed her before she had decided what sort of greeting would be reasonable. A brief kiss, his free hand open beside her shoulder, with time enough for her to turn towards it.

She did. Put her fingers in the front of his shirt and kept him for another.

“Hello,” she said when he drew back.

“Hello.”

He looked happier than a man holding a burnt tea towel had any right to look.

His house was one of the narrow terraces on the other side of town. The front room contained a sofa, a large radio and a book lying face down beside a mug. There were shoes under the radiator. Adela had prepared herself for the wrong things: a place empty of life, or full of a life she had helped him lose. Instead somebody lived here. Somebody who read instructions until he no longer needed them and then left the book where he had been sitting.

“Can I see the damage?”

“I’ve put it outside. For identification later.”

“You’re making a great many jokes about bread.”

“I wanted the first meal to go better.”

That stopped her. He looked down at the towel, then folded the black mark inside it.

“The stew’s fine. I know you don’t like ginger. There isn’t any.”

“There doesn’t have to be anything impressive.”

“I was aiming for edible.”

She followed him into the kitchen. Three of the familiar cord-seated chairs stood around a square table; the fourth, the one she had sanded, was beneath the window. There were two places set and a pan on the stove. Not a blue glass in sight.

He ladled food into bowls. Adela reached for a drawer and stopped with her hand in the air.

“What?” he said.

“I was going to find spoons.”

“They’re on the table.”

“Of course they are.”

She sat down. It felt slightly rude, sitting there while he carried things. She tried it anyway.

The stew was good. Beans, tomatoes, something smoky, enough chilli to warm her mouth. He watched her first spoonful with an expression that would have made it difficult to dislike even if she had.

“You can eat yours,” she said. “I’m not marking it.”

“I was checking you weren’t being polite.”

“I can be both polite and hungry. It’s a sophisticated combination.”

He brought over the pan and sat opposite her. They ate with the window open to a neighbour’s radio. Adela told him about a customer who wanted a chair repaired but not improved because her husband would notice if it became comfortable. Oswin asked whether this was a service she advertised.

“Discreet discomfort. Yes. Very popular.”

“I’d put that on the van.”

“I haven’t got a van.”

“All the more reason. Buy one, put it on there, nobody will suspect upholstery.”

She laughed with her spoon halfway to her mouth. She had not thought of what to say next since she arrived. It was only when she noticed that she became nervous again.

He saw her glance at the fourth chair.

“That’s yours for the evening if you want it.”

“I’m quite comfortable on this one.”

“Good. It doesn’t have to commemorate anything.”

She looked at him.

He put his spoon down. “Sorry. That sounded—“

“No. I was thinking it would be pleasant if we could let a chair be a chair.”

“Ambitious. In this town.”

She shook her head at him, smiling, then ran her finger along a scratch in the table. “That empty place. The first time, we hadn’t decided to do it. I set the table and realised I’d counted her.”

Oswin was quiet.

“Rhoswen saw it. I couldn’t take the things away while she was looking. Then the next year, she brought the glass out before I started.”

“You don’t have to explain it to me.”

“I think I want to. There’s a difference.”

He nodded and waited.

“I was glad it was there, at first. Glad she wasn’t gone from every part of the evening. Then it began to feel as if taking it away would be something I did to her.”

The chair by the window stood in a square of fading light. Adela could see the patch she had smoothed. Such a small repair, the kind she usually forgot before the end of a working day.

“There were other places you could sit on Saturday,” she said. “You chose beside me.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

He looked down at his bowl, then back up. “You’d asked me what I wanted. I tried telling you.”

She felt the answer low in her chest.

“Were you ever angry with her?” she asked.

He did not pretend not to know who she meant. “Often. When we were together.”

“Afterwards.”

“Yes.”

The neighbour’s radio changed station with a crackle. Adela waited. She had asked him a question she had never allowed herself to hear answered.

“I wasn’t angry that she wanted to go,” he said. “At first I liked it. She could make a railway map sound like a reasonable thing to build a life round.”

Adela could see Sennen doing it, hand flat on the paper, already impatient with the journey not taken.

“Then she wanted you to come.”

“I said I might. For much too long. I thought if I made the answer smaller every time, she’d work out I meant no. Six months became six weeks. Six weeks became a holiday when I could get leave.”

“She said you kept moving it.”

“I did.”

Adela sat back. She had expected an injustice he could expose, an account she could place beside Sennen’s and use to make herself less ashamed of the kiss. He was giving her no such thing.

“Why didn’t you tell her?”

“Because she’d have left.”

“But you left her.”

“Eventually. After making her ask the same question until she hated the sound of it.”

He pushed his bowl away. Not far. An inch, perhaps, giving his hands something to finish.

“I wanted this,” he said. “Work I knew, a house I could come back to. I thought wanting less made me reasonable. It didn’t. It made me want a different life. She thought if I loved her enough I’d want hers. I thought if she loved me enough she’d stop asking.”

There had been no way to put that on a side. Adela had done it anyway.

“She was miserable afterwards.”

“I know.”

“I need to be able to say that.”

“You can.”

He did not look away from her.

“So was I,” he said. “Some days. Some days I was relieved. That’s the part I haven’t said to anyone who knew her.”

Adela’s eyes went to his hands. She wanted to cover one with hers and tell him it was all right. It did not seem all right, precisely. It seemed true, and true was more difficult to offer comfort for.

“When she was ill,” Adela said, “there were days I wished my phone would break.”

Oswin did not move.

“I loved her. I went every time she asked. But I’d be halfway through something, something ordinary, and it would ring and I’d be angry before I remembered I wasn’t supposed to be.”

Her voice had become matter-of-fact, the voice she used to explain that a fabric could not be saved. She hated hearing it here.

“Did you ever tell her?” he asked.

“No.”

“Then you’ve said something to me too.”

That was all he gave her. No forgiveness on behalf of someone who could not speak. No claim that exhaustion meant she had loved better than anybody. Adela put her hand on the table between them. He put his beside it, close enough for her to choose.

She linked their fingers.

· · ·Scene break

They washed up together because she asked to. Afterwards they took tea into the front room, where the sofa had a spring Adela noticed before she sat down.

“Don’t,” he said.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You looked employed.”

She sat at the comfortable end. “There. Off duty.”

He sat beside her, leaving room until she moved towards him. Their cups stood on the little table. She could hear the clock in the hall and a car reversing outside. An evening, still only an evening. They had said difficult things and there was time left for pleasure.

Adela turned to him. “I’d like you to kiss me now.”

“I’ve been trying not to look as if I was waiting for permission to stop talking.”

“You can stop talking.”

He smiled as he kissed her. She felt it, and the pleasure of making him smile went through her with a force she had not expected. His hand rested against her face. She turned into it before finding his mouth again.

There was no cold stone wall this time, no coat between his arm and her back. She could feel the warmth of him through her thin blouse. When she leaned closer, his fingers spread at her waist, holding her with enough certainty that she could stop holding herself quite so carefully.

She broke the kiss to breathe and found she did not want to move away. Oswin touched his forehead to her temple.

“This all right?”

“Very.”

She slid her hand beneath the open edge of his collar, over the warm skin at his shoulder. He went still for a moment, then kissed her again, less gently now. She liked that too. Liked discovering he could want with something sharper than patience.

“Come closer,” he said.

She did, tucking one leg beneath her. Her knee pressed against his thigh; his arm came round her. She could stay like this, she thought, and knew even as she thought it that she wanted more than staying like this.

She drew back enough to see him.

“I want to stay tonight.”

His hand remained still against her back. “I want that.”

“But?”

“I don’t want to spend months pretending we’re only friends when we step outside.”

Adela let her hand fall to his chest. “I haven’t asked you to.”

“No. I’m telling you before you do. I was very bad at that last time.”

She could hear what it cost him to put the words where the kiss had been. There was a part of her that wanted to reassure him quickly, make a promise, keep his hand where it was. That part of her had promised Rhoswen anything she needed.

“I haven’t told her about Tuesday,” she said.

“I didn’t expect you to have announced two kisses.”

“There were three.”

“I was counting the important ones.”

She almost smiled. “They were all important.”

“Yes,” he said. “They were.”

She looked towards the two cups. Tea cooling, an ordinary little waste. Nobody was forcing her to leave. He had told her what he could not live with; the rest was hers to answer.

“I don’t want our first night to be something I have to remove from an account of my week.”

“Neither do I.”

“Then I’ll tell Rhoswen before I stay. Or you stay with me. I mean it as something I’m choosing, not a test you have to set.”

He nodded slowly. “All right.”

“I need tonight to think about how.”

“Take tonight.”

He did not move his arm until she sat up. Then he reached for her cold tea and offered it with such seriousness that she laughed.

“The hospitality’s deteriorated,” she said.

“Started with the bread. Been downhill ever since.”

They drank it anyway. Talked about Saturday’s ferry rota and a chair she was collecting in the morning. He walked her to the door and kissed her there, warmly, with no disappointment she had to repair.

On the pavement Adela turned back. “Thursday was a good idea.”

“Yes.”

He stayed at the door until she reached the corner. She could have asked him to walk her home. Instead she let them end the evening where they had chosen, with something still wanted and a promise she had made for herself.