The Winter Glass

Blythe put the mustard on the table and Keir began to laugh before she had taken her hand away.

“It belongs to us,” she said. “I paid for it.”

“An important development.”

“I even kept the receipt, though apparently you intend to question my character for the rest of our lives.”

He stopped laughing just long enough to look at her.

“That sounds like a considerable commitment.”

“I thought you ought to know the terms.”

“I accept.”

She went around the table and kissed him, which delayed breakfast and earned no complaint.

Winter had begun to put a white edge on the garden stones. The smaller blue bed was banked now, its colour allowed to go after Blythe decided she preferred to spend the dark mornings on new glass. She had kept the rose bells active in their own ring and the new amber flower on the kitchen sill, where maintaining them took only a small part of an evening. Some days she missed the blue with an ache that surprised her. Some days she was glad of the empty space.

Both kinds of day had become ordinary.

Keir had made four short running-light pieces. Two pleased him. One had been publicly watched by six people and an indifferent dog, which he considered a sufficiently demanding audience. The fourth had refused to be anything except a thin loop, and he had let it go without giving it another year in which to improve.

The coil lived mostly on a shelf in his workshop. He still reached for his wrist sometimes. When Blythe noticed, she took his hand if he wanted it. Other times she let him look at the empty place without making it about them.

They had not become different people so much as people with more visible habits. He left cups on the windowsill. She moved them when she needed the light, but now put them on his side of the table instead of into a cupboard he never opened. He had learned that her silence at breakfast usually meant she was thinking about glass, not reconsidering love. She had learned that when he said a piece was bad, he did not always want the reassuring lie.

This morning he was quiet because he had burned the toast.

Blythe took the darkest piece.

“I like that one,” she said before he could apologise.

“You would make a dangerous critic.”

“I have excellent taste in some things.”

She looked at him until he smiled.

They had an afternoon to themselves. He had finished the week’s lamp deliveries. She had collected payment for three clear stems and a bowl, ordinary work sold as ordinary work, with no claims about eternal light. There was no exhibition to prepare for and no complete circuit waiting to take the dusk.

The freedom was less dramatic than she had expected. It looked like a cold day on which they might choose to go out or remain at home.

They went out.

· · ·Scene break

At the high conservatory the winter exhibition had opened.

Blythe had known the date for weeks. She had considered avoiding the upper street until spring. Then Nerida sent a ticket with a note: There is a blue branch you will argue with. I should like to hear the argument.

She showed the note to Keir.

“Do you want me to come?” he asked.

“Yes. But I may be poor company.”

“An established speciality of ours.”

Now they stood beneath the high roof, looking at somebody else’s garden on the platform where Blythe had imagined her own.

It was beautiful.

She had hoped, in a part of herself she would never put in a letter, that it might be slightly disappointing. It was not. Silver stems held a winter light so fine that moving closer made it seem to withdraw.

Blythe felt jealousy, admiration and a sudden fierce wish to go home and work.

Keir stood beside her with his hands in his coat pockets.

“I am going to say something unattractive,” she told him.

“Proceed.”

“I wanted mine here.”

“I know.”

“I still want mine here, for a few minutes. Then I remember what having it here would mean now.”

He nodded.

She looked at the silver stems again.

“This one is very good.”

“Yes.”

She was grateful he did not call hers better.

Nerida found them by the blue branch. She and Blythe argued about its lowest curve for nearly ten minutes. Keir wandered to the next piece and let them enjoy disagreeing without him.

Afterward Nerida asked about the clear vessel.

“I have put an unfinished stem in it,” Blythe said.

“Is it beautiful?”

“In one light.”

“That is a beginning.”

Blythe smiled.

“Come and see it. Thursday, if you like. There will be supper.”

Nerida glanced toward Keir, then back at her.

“All right.”

It was not approval of every choice. Blythe no longer needed to turn an invitation into that test.

Outside, she took Keir’s hand.

“Thank you for coming.”

“You did most of the work.”

“I don’t mean for bearing me bravely. I liked having you beside me.”

He smiled, the private one she had learned on the north steps.

“I liked being there. Even while you were insulting the branch.”

“It knew what it had done.”

They went down the hill laughing.

· · ·Scene break

At home, Blythe lit the ordinary lamp and found the room beautiful before any of the small kept colours woke.

The chair stood at its agreed angle. The tailless bird faced the third stem. Keir’s coat hung beside hers. On the table lay a half-finished drawing she had no intention of hiding when Nerida came.

She took off her gloves and reached for him.

He met her in the middle of the kitchen, drawing her close before she could begin telling him where to put the parcel of bread. The kiss surprised a laugh out of her. She put her hands against his face and kissed him back with all the pleasure of knowing she had the rest of the day to keep doing it.

No bell called her to the seventh turn.

No long white road took him elsewhere.

There were still lamps to mend, glass to make, work each loved that the other could not do. Tomorrow would contain some of it. Today she had chosen this.

“What?” he asked when she looked at him.

“I am enjoying being interrupted.”

“I can become tiresome about it.”

“You already are.”

He kissed her again. She held the repaired sleeve in her fingers, feeling the little ridge of her own stitches, and remembered the first exhausted supper, his hand in the warm basin, the way he had thought he needed to be entertaining to deserve a chair at her table.

She wanted to tell him that. Instead she brought him closer and let the memory become part of how she touched him.

Later they sat on the floor beside the lamp, wrapped in a blanket while the room cooled. He read a ridiculous advertisement aloud from the paper that had wrapped the bread. She laughed at the wrong part, and they argued over which part was wrong until neither could speak sensibly.

The laughter subsided. She turned toward him, resting her hand against his chest.

“Stay,” she said.

He looked around the room with exaggerated concern.

“I have moved in. There’s a chair.”

“I know. I mean keep choosing this with me. When it is inconvenient. When the table is at the wrong angle. When you make something you want three evenings alone to finish.”

His expression softened.

“Yes. And when you want the conservatory for a few minutes.”

“Yes.”

“And when you make something I don’t understand at all.”

“That seems likely.”

He laughed and kissed her forehead, then her mouth when she tilted her face up to correct him.

“I am staying,” he said. “With you.”

She leaned into him, letting the plain words do their work.

· · ·Scene break

After supper they walked into the garden.

The rose bells shone softly in their ring. The new amber on the sill cast a warm small patch through the window. Between them lay the open path, pale with cold, leading directly to the gate.

Blythe carried the clear flower that had once held her first captured colour. She had taken it from its old socket that morning. Now she set it on the low wall where the moon could pass through it.

“Will you light it again?” Keir asked.

“Perhaps. Not tonight.”

He nodded.

They sat on the bench with a blanket over their knees. No active running-light came into the kept beds; the old incompatibility remained as real as ever. Their small works would still need separate spaces. Keir tucked the blanket around her cold knee. From the kitchen, their supper lamp shone across the open path.

A real moth, small and late in the season, moved briefly through the lamplight at the window.

Blythe watched it disappear into the dark.

“No mustard,” Keir said.

She laughed and rested her head against his shoulder.

The old golden moth was gone with the course. Blythe could still see its lopsided wings on the brown pot. They had the joke. They had the mustard in the cupboard. They had an evening neither of them needed to preserve in order to trust that another might come.

Blythe turned in his arms and kissed him beneath the clear cold sky.

When they went inside, she left the flower on the wall. In the morning it would hold whatever light arrived.