The Front Step

Adela brought the tablecloth to Rhoswen’s door with the mended corner on top.

Rhoswen took it from her and touched the darn. “I’d forgotten that. Sennen caught it on her bracelet.”

“You used green thread.”

“It was what I had. Nobody was meant to inspect it.”

She stepped aside. Adela entered the house where she knew how every cupboard opened and where she had never had to ask whether she was welcome. The cloth went on the hall table, still folded, beside a bowl of keys.

“Tea?”

“In a minute. Can we sit down first?”

Rhoswen looked at her. “I rang the others. About the suppers.”

“Thank you.”

“I told them I got ahead of myself. Nobody’s bought a turkey.”

Adela almost smiled. Rhoswen was offering her a way back into their familiar manner, the small complaint made harmless by being made funny. She wanted to take it. Wanted to sit at the kitchen table and let yesterday become one of those things they could refer to lightly in a year.

They went into the front room instead. Rhoswen sat in the armchair by the window; Adela took the sofa. Between them stood a low table bearing two coasters and the television guide, open at a programme Rhoswen had missed.

“I wasn’t trying to take over your winter,” Rhoswen said.

“I know you weren’t thinking of it like that.”

“It sounds rather bad when you put it like that.”

“It would have been a lot of evenings.”

Rhoswen rubbed the arm of her chair. “Yes. I suppose it would. I thought if people came here sometimes, and there sometimes—“

“That could be something you arrange. If people want it. I can’t be responsible for making it happen.”

The older woman nodded, once. She looked tired. Adela could see the place at the cuff where she had repaired the cardigan Rhoswen wore, a patch they had both pretended was almost invisible.

“Is the work all right?” Rhoswen asked. “You’d tell me if there was a problem?”

“The work’s all right.”

“Then you need time for yourself. I can understand that. You should have said before.”

There it was: a way to leave with something achieved. Her calendar returned, the friendship intact, Oswin waiting outside the account of her life. Adela put her hands flat on her knees.

“There is something I should have said before,” she said. “I’m seeing Oswin. I want to keep seeing him.”

Rhoswen stared at her.

“Seeing him.”

“We went for a walk on Tuesday. I had supper at his house on Thursday. He came to mine last night.”

She stopped. A list would not make it kinder.

“I want him, Rhoswen. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

The television guide slid an inch as Rhoswen’s foot touched the table. She caught it and put it back, precisely where it had been.

“Since Saturday?”

“Since Saturday.”

“And you didn’t think to tell me when we walked on Sunday?”

“Nothing had happened then. I didn’t know what I was going to do.”

“But something has happened now.”

“Yes.”

Adela would not describe the kisses in this room. They belonged to her and Oswin. She could tell the truth without putting every private part of it on the table for examination.

Rhoswen looked towards the window. Outside, a neighbour was wrestling a folded clothes airer through a doorway too narrow for it. The normality made Adela feel briefly unreal, as if the conversation had happened only inside her and she might yet prevent it.

“I invited him to remember her,” Rhoswen said. “I didn’t know I was inviting you to begin.”

“Neither did I.”

“You promised her.”

Adela had expected the words. They still hurt.

“I did.”

“You said he’d never sit at your table again. She told me. She was so relieved someone was angry for her.”

“I was angry.”

“What changed?”

There were answers she could borrow. Time. Perspective. Things she now understood about a breakup she had not been part of. Each would make Oswin into an argument she might win if she brought enough evidence.

“I sat beside him,” she said. “I enjoyed talking to him. I asked to see him again.”

“That’s all?”

“No. But it’s how it started.”

Rhoswen folded her arms. The repaired cuff disappeared beneath her hand.

“She loved him.”

“I know.”

“He hurt her.”

“I know that too.”

Adela could have said that Sennen had hurt him. She could have recited the journey they had never agreed to take and his confession of relief. The privacy of his kitchen was suddenly a thing she could spend to make this room easier.

She kept it.

“I’m not asking you to think her pain was less than it was,” she said.

“Then what are you asking?”

“I’m telling you what’s happening. Because you matter to me, and I don’t want to lie when you ask how I’ve spent my day.”

Rhoswen stood up. For a moment Adela thought she would ask her to leave. Instead she went to the fireplace and moved a card away from the edge.

“You waited until after you’d decided.”

“I couldn’t ask you to decide for me.”

“No. Apparently not.”

Adela felt the sharpness and let it pass without making it evidence that she no longer owed this woman care. Rhoswen had heard something painful in a room where she had expected to discuss a tablecloth.

“Are you in love with him?”

“I don’t know yet.”

Rhoswen turned. “Then why would you risk this?”

This. The word held the Sunday walks and Christmas mornings, the spare key in the bowl, the way Rhoswen knew to buy the biscuits Adela liked and pretended she had bought them for herself. It held Sennen too, though it was not fair to put her there as something that could now be taken away.

“Because I want to find out,” Adela said.

Rhoswen sat down again, more heavily than before. Her eyes were wet. Adela’s were too. Neither reached for the tissues beside the chair.

“I don’t know how to be pleased for you.”

“I’m not asking you to be pleased today.”

“Don’t make me sound unreasonable.”

“I wasn’t trying to.”

“You’ve had a week to make this sound reasonable. I’ve had five minutes.”

Adela looked down at her hands. She had rehearsed the argument, the refusals, the possible forgiveness. She had not rehearsed leaving room for someone to say the thing badly before they could say it better.

“You’re right,” she said. “You have.”

For a while they sat without speaking. A pipe ticked somewhere in the wall. Rhoswen took a tissue at last, folded it, unfolded it, and wiped her eyes.

“If I asked you to stop?”

Adela looked up.

“I wouldn’t promise to.”

It was the hardest sentence she had said. Harder than naming him, because there was no relief in it yet. Only a woman she loved hearing that her hurt could not settle everything.

Rhoswen pressed the tissue into her palm. “I thought you might say that.”

“I’m sorry it hurts you.”

“But you’re going to do it.”

“I want to. Yes.”

Rhoswen nodded, not in agreement. More as though she were keeping a fact in place long enough to understand it.

“I don’t want our walk tomorrow.”

“All right.”

“I don’t mean ever again. I don’t know what I mean about ever again. Just tomorrow.”

Adela’s throat ached. “You don’t have to know yet.”

“And I can’t have you ring this evening to see if I’ve got over it.”

“I won’t.”

She stayed a moment longer, making sure the silence was not an unfinished request. Then she stood.

At the door, Rhoswen picked up the folded cloth. For one terrible second Adela thought she would give it back, refuse the return as if everything they had lent each other must now be divided.

Instead Rhoswen put it in the cupboard where it belonged.

“Thank you for washing it,” she said.

“Of course.”

They did not hug. Rhoswen opened the door and Adela stepped outside. The neighbour had got the airer into the house. Nothing else in the street had changed.

· · ·Scene break

Adela walked past the turning for home and went down to the sea.

She was not ready to call Oswin. She had promised to tell him what happened; she had not promised to deliver it while she could barely keep her voice level. At the low wall she sat with both feet planted on the pavement and let herself cry.

It was not an attractive, redeeming cry. Her nose ran. A strand of hair stuck to her cheek. She was angry with Rhoswen for making love sound like a theft, and then ashamed of being angry, and then tired of the shame following every feeling she could not immediately make generous.

The water moved below her. Nobody came to tell her she had done the right thing.

After a while she took out her phone. There was a message from a customer about fabric and one from Oswin, sent before ten.

I’m home this afternoon. No need to rush.

She rang him.

“Hello,” he said.

“I told her.”

“All right.”

“It wasn’t all right.”

“I meant I’m listening.”

She closed her eyes. “Sorry.”

“You don’t have to be.”

Adela told him where she was. She told him about the cancelled walk, Rhoswen needing space, the question of whether she would stop. She did not repeat every painful sentence. He did not need a recording of what it felt like to be unwelcome.

“What did you say?” he asked.

“That I wouldn’t promise to. That I want to keep seeing you.”

For a moment there was only the sound of him breathing.

“I want that too,” he said.

She pressed her fingers against her forehead. “I know. It’s why this wasn’t only terrible.”

“Can I come to you?”

“Not yet. I need to sit here a bit.”

“All right.”

“I still want tonight.”

“Tonight can be supper. It can be another day. You don’t owe me anything because you told her.”

She looked down at the wet mark her hand had left on the stone. “I know that too. I want supper. At mine. Six?”

“Six.”

He asked whether she had food and accepted that she did. Then he let her end the call.

Adela sat until she stopped expecting the phone to ring with Rhoswen’s voice on the other end. She knew that voice in a dozen moods. It might be a long time before she heard the familiar one again. Telling the truth had not made the friendship less precious. It had made its absence possible.

She went home by the shops and bought bread.

· · ·Scene break

At six, Oswin stood on her doorstep empty-handed.

“No chair?” she said.

“Taking a chance.”

She stepped into his arms before he could ask. He held her while she put her face against his shoulder, and did not turn the embrace into a kiss until she lifted her head and kissed him first.

“Come in.”

The afternoon had been practical in the way she needed: a shower, clean sheets because she wanted clean sheets, a pan of soup made from the remaining tomatoes. She had cried once more while changing the pillowcases, which had annoyed her enough to stop. Now the table had two places and the bread was warm.

Oswin looked at her. “How are you?”

“Sad. Hungry. Glad you’re here. It’s a crowded answer.”

“There’s room.”

He hung up his own jacket. She watched him do it and thought of all the little ways she had tried to keep visitors dependent on her permission: where to put a coat, when to sit, what to say about Sennen. Oswin knew where the hook was. She let him use it.

Over supper he told her about an argument over a missing spanner that had turned out to be in the complainant’s pocket. She accused him of stealing her glove story. He said hers had more props. She laughed, and the laugh did not erase the morning.

Later she took his hand across the small table.

“I’d like you to stay tonight.”

He looked at her for long enough that she knew he was listening to the whole sentence.

“I’d like to stay.”

“I’m still upset about her. That isn’t why I’m asking.”

“You can be both.”

“Yes. I can.”

She squeezed his hand. She would not make happiness wait until every other feeling had left the room. Nor would she make his presence prove she had been right.

They cleared the table slowly. Oswin put the soup in the fridge while she wiped crumbs into her palm. At the foot of the stairs he waited, and she went back to him, took his face between her hands and kissed him because she could.

When she stepped away, she kept one of his hands in hers.

“Come with me,” she said.

He came.