The Cold Supper

By the time Gethin rang my bell on Thursday, I had made enough supper to suggest that he was bringing the Sunday Assembly with him.

There was a tart, a bowl of potato salad, two kinds of bread and a dish of tomatoes I had cut and then regretted because the juice was going everywhere. I had planned a cold meal so we could walk first. It appeared I had interpreted cold as unlimited.

He stood outside with the biscuit tub and a bunch of parsley wrapped in damp kitchen paper.

“I don’t know what we’re eating,” he said. “But this was outgrowing the pot.”

“You brought me an obligation.”

“You may throw it away. I’ve no way of checking.”

I took it from him. “Come in.”

He followed me up the stairs. At the top I turned too abruptly and found him close, his hand resting on the banister below mine. We had exchanged messages since Sunday: a time, a joke about the biscuits, a photograph of an exceptionally ugly blue chair he had seen in a shop window. None had prepared me for having him here.

“Hello,” I said, though we had done that downstairs.

“Hello.”

I put the parsley on the windowsill and reached for him.

He met me halfway. The kiss was brief because I smiled, and he smiled, and I had to admit that we were not going to recover our dignity by trying harder.

“I’ve wanted to do that since you opened the door,” he said.

“You were holding produce. It inhibited you.”

“Next time I’ll arrive empty-handed.”

I liked the next time so much that I almost missed the rest.

He set the biscuits beside the tart. His glance moved over the bowls.

“Were you hungry when you shopped?”

“This is a perfectly ordinary supper.”

“For how many ordinary people?”

“We are going for a walk.”

“We are.”

He did not start moving dishes or telling me to sit down. He waited while I covered the tomatoes, found my keys, lost them under a tea towel and found them again. When we went out he held the door, and I was grateful for a kindness small enough not to require an answer.

We walked along the path above the recreation ground. A man was winding up the cord of a mower. Two women sat on a bench eating chips from the same paper. It was an evening I would usually have spent correcting Friday’s email and thinking about going out.

Gethin took my hand when the path widened. I held his readily, then saw a woman from Friday walking towards us with a shopping trolley.

My fingers stiffened.

He felt it. He did not tighten his hold or release me on my behalf.

The woman greeted me, glanced at him and said, “Oh, hello. Haven’t seen you for a while.”

“Hello,” he said. “How are you?”

“All right. Can’t complain. Well, I can, but I won’t keep you.”

She wheeled the trolley past us. Nothing had happened except that somebody knew.

I was still holding his hand.

“That was rather undramatic,” I said.

“Should I fetch her back?”

“Don’t you dare.”

He rubbed his thumb once over my knuckles. I looked across the grass, feeling both ridiculous and relieved. I had allowed the whole Friday room to occupy my head at once. In person it was often one woman with potatoes to get home.

At the far gate I asked him whether he had plans for the weekend.

“Sunday, obviously. Possibly lunch on Saturday.”

“Possibly?”

“An invitation I haven’t answered.”

He said it in the tone he had used for Tuesday and Thursday at the depot, as if it were a minor problem of scheduling. I could hear that it wasn’t, but I had no right to every unfinished thing in him.

“Will there be potato salad?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Then take some of mine. It might secure the invitation.”

“I thought we’d established I didn’t need to bring equipment.”

“Food is different.”

He looked at me. I disliked how neatly I had walked into that.

· · ·Scene break

The tart had been designed to be eaten cold. This was information I had trusted without sufficient evidence.

Gethin cut into his slice and paused.

“Is it all right?” I asked.

“It’s very firm.”

“It said it would hold its shape.”

“It has ambitions beyond that.”

I tried mine. The pastry resisted the knife, then broke with a small, final crack.

We looked at each other. He pressed his lips together.

“You can laugh,” I said.

“I was waiting for permission to chew.”

I laughed so hard that I had to put down my fork. All the effort of the afternoon was in that horrible tart: leaving work early, following the instructions, setting the timer, looking at the clock while it cooled. I wanted him to have a good evening, and I had offered him building material.

He reached for the bread.

“This is good.”

“I bought it.”

“Excellent judgement.”

I gave him the butter. We made plates of bread, tomatoes and potatoes. He tore some of his parsley into the salad after asking, and the fact that it helped annoyed me enough to make him laugh again.

I rose to fetch smaller plates for the remains of the tart.

“Could you leave it?” he asked.

“It will only take a moment.”

“I know. I’d like to eat with you.”

I stood holding the dish. He was not telling me that I worked too hard, an observation that usually meant someone needed me to work in a more cheerful way. He had his plate; he wanted the person across from it.

“I want to move it,” I said. “Then I can stop looking at it.”

“Fair enough.”

I put it on the counter and came back. He waited until I sat before lifting his fork. We ate slowly. The supper was better once I stopped trying to rescue it.

Afterwards he showed me the invitation.

He did not announce a confession. He took out his phone, found the message and laid it beside his plate, turned towards me.

The woman who had nodded to him at the fundraiser had asked him to Saturday lunch. Nothing grand, she wrote. Soup, if the weather stayed like this. It would be good to catch up.

The message was more than a week old.

“You could say yes,” I said.

“I could.”

“Are you worried she’ll want to talk about Fridays?”

“She will talk about Fridays. That’s where her friends are.”

“Some of them were yours.”

He nodded. He had told me already that he missed her. The thing he had not said was here in my kitchen, in the unanswered courtesy on the screen.

“What if she tells me it’s going well?” he asked.

I put down my glass.

“Would that be so terrible?”

“It shouldn’t be.”

“That wasn’t what I asked.”

His smile was brief and unamused. “I know.”

The refrigerator clicked off. From the flat below came the muffled sound of a television, somebody winning something to applause.

“I’d like to think my leaving made a difference,” he said. “Not that it ruined anything. But a difference.”

I let him go on.

“If they’re all perfectly happy, I don’t know where to put the eighteen months I’ve spent being right.”

He looked embarrassed as soon as he had said it. I wanted to touch him, but I thought he might need to see that I could bear hearing an unattractive truth without rushing to cover it.

“It wasn’t all being right,” I said. “You built something people enjoy. I enjoyed it.”

“You also found someone sitting alone.”

“Yes. You don’t get to stop looking. Neither do we.”

He took his phone back, held it, set it down.

I could have told him who was unhappy at Friday, supplied names, proved that he had left a hole. It would have comforted him and betrayed people who had trusted me with a difficult evening. I could also have told Fenna about this conversation and bought back some of her ease with me.

“I’m not going to tell her you said this,” I told him.

He looked up.

“Fenna. Or the woman who invited you. You can have said something here without me taking it to a meeting.”

His shoulders lowered. Until then I had not noticed how still he was holding them.

“Thank you.”

“But you do need to answer her. Even if it’s no.”

“Now?”

“Whenever you decide. I’m not setting a deadline.”

He considered the phone. Then he typed with one finger, slowly, correcting something twice. When he put it away, he did not show me the reply.

“Saturday,” he said. “I asked what time.”

I reached across the table. He turned his hand beneath mine and held it. There was no triumph in the gesture. I was glad of that.

“I sometimes dread Friday,” I said.

The words surprised me less than the relief after them.

He did not smile.

“Going?”

“The hour before. Wondering who won’t come and who will need something and whether Fenna is tired. By the time the music starts, I’ve used up the part of me that wanted it.”

“Do you ever tell her?”

“I tell her I’m tired. Then she says she is too, and we make tea.”

His fingers moved against mine.

“I don’t dread all of it,” I said. “There are weeks when it’s the best thing I do.”

“I believe you.”

I had expected advice. The absence of it left me exposed, but pleasantly, like taking off shoes that had been hurting without my permission to notice.

We sat a while longer. Then I packed him bread and the potato salad he had actually asked to take, leaving the tart out of the arrangement. He dried the two plates while I washed them. I could enjoy doing a thing beside him when it did not have to stand for everything I was worth.

At the door he put the bag down before he kissed me.

I held his face between my hands. The warmth of his cheek, the faint roughness at his jaw, the way he leaned into the touch made the quiet flat feel different. I wanted to pull him back through it. Instead I let the kiss lengthen, and when we parted I rested my forehead against his.

“This is enough tonight,” I said. “A very good enough.”

“It has been for me.”

He kissed my palm before I lowered it. I stood in the doorway while he went down the stairs with the bag of food, and felt no need to call after him with one last useful instruction.

The anniversary seating sheet lay on my desk. I had left eighty blank places on it, grouped in small tables, with a space near the door where Fenna and I usually sat between jobs.

For the first time I imagined coming in with him. Leaving my coat on the back of a chair beside his. Having someone ask who he was there with and answering without explanation.

I picked up the pencil, then put it down. I wanted to ask him before I made him a place on paper.