Eighty Places

I invited Gethin to the anniversary on a Friday, after I had told Fenna why he would be useful there. The order was my first mistake. Calling it an invitation would be the second.

That afternoon Fenna had come to the print shop at closing time to collect the programme proof. She brought a cheese roll because I had once again failed to eat the lunch I had packed. We stood at the cutting bench while my colleague turned off the lights at the back.

“Eighty places,” she said, running a finger down the page. “Ten years. Remember when we couldn’t fill twelve?”

“Eleven. We counted the caretaker.”

“He danced.”

“Only because you wouldn’t give him his keys.”

She laughed. For a moment we were easy together. The week before, when she had asked about Sunday, I had told her I enjoyed it. She had said she was glad, and we had both behaved as though that finished the subject.

Now she noticed the pencilled mark beside my name.

“Are you bringing someone?”

I had made the mark that morning, intending to ask him that evening. We had been out twice since the cold supper: a walk after work and another Wednesday coffee. At Saturday lunch, he had reported, the soup was good and the woman who made it had complained about the price of fruit. I had asked nothing he hadn’t wanted to tell me. He was beginning to have a place in my week that no committee had allocated.

“Gethin, possibly,” I said.

Fenna’s finger stopped.

I should have waited. I should have allowed her face to be her face without hurrying to mend it.

“He knows the sound system,” I added. “If we need another pair of hands.”

“I thought the hall was supplying someone.”

“They are. It might help to have him.”

Fenna looked at me for long enough that I could still have corrected it.

“If that’s what you’ve arranged,” she said.

“Nothing’s arranged. I’ll ask.”

I took the cheese roll home and ate it standing at my counter. It was good, and that made the conversation harder to put away.

We had agreed to see each other after the Friday dance. Gethin would come to my flat at half past ten; neither of us had an early start on Saturday. I had thought of it all week with a pleasure I kept catching myself trying to reduce to practical details. Tea. Something to eat. A man could come to my kitchen late at night because I wanted him there. It did not require catering, but I had bought biscuits anyway.

At Friday, Fenna and I set out the chairs. I could have spoken then. I thought of the welcome desk opening, the people arriving, the fact that she would have to hold whatever I said through a whole evening.

These were real considerations. They were also wonderfully convenient.

I danced three times and thought of Gethin during all three, which was unfair to my partners. At ten I helped stack the last chairs. Fenna waved away my offer to drive the programmes to her house in the morning; she could collect them on Monday. She was giving me my Saturday. I thanked her and hated the gratitude in my voice.

· · ·Scene break

Gethin arrived at twenty-eight minutes past ten. I knew because I had been looking at the clock.

He carried nothing.

“You remembered,” I said.

“Empty-handed. Quite difficult. I passed a shop.”

I took his coat, hung it on my own hook and drew him towards me by the hand. The kiss at the door was not a greeting I would have given just anyone. I felt him understand that in the way his fingers closed around mine.

“Good evening?” he asked when I let him go.

“Better now.”

I had not meant to say it so plainly. He looked pleased in a way that made me wish I did it more often.

We sat at the kitchen table with tea. He had rolled back his cuffs. I liked seeing him at this hour, a little tired, his hair disturbed where he had pushed a hand through it. I liked that he had used my name in a message at lunchtime for no reason except to say he was looking forward to coming.

I wanted to get the invitation right. It seemed possible that I could repair the earlier conversation by making this one good enough.

“Would you come to the anniversary with me?”

He set down his cup.

“Friday Rooms?”

“A fortnight tonight. Ten years of voluntary suffering. There will be cake.”

“With you?”

“Yes.”

He smiled before he looked doubtful, and I had time to see what the offer meant to him.

“I’d like that. Are you sure?”

“Members can bring guests.”

“That wasn’t my question.”

I reached for the biscuits. “I want you there.”

“Then yes.”

For one clean moment I had what I wanted. He was going to come. I would arrive with him and take his hand in front of people who had known me for years. The thought was so pleasurable that I let it carry me into the next sentence.

“You might need to be there early. For the sound.”

His smile went.

“What sound?”

I put down the biscuit packet.

“I told Fenna you might help.”

“Did she ask?”

“No.”

He waited. He was very good at waiting when I wanted him to supply the easier question.

“She asked whether I was bringing someone. I said your name. Then I said you knew the system.”

“So she thinks I’m coming to do that.”

“She may.”

“Coralia.”

I felt the small injustice of being required to say aloud something I had already admitted badly enough.

“Yes,” I said. “That’s what I let her think.”

He leaned back. It was not a theatrical withdrawal, but I felt the increased distance across the table.

“I won’t do the sound.”

“You wouldn’t have to do much.”

As soon as I heard myself, I wanted the words back. I could make a task smaller; I could not make it an invitation by reducing the hours.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “That wasn’t fair. You don’t have to do any of it.”

He looked down at his cup.

“I want to come with you,” he said. “I don’t want a job that makes it all right.”

There was no cruelty in his voice to quarrel with. I would have found cruelty much easier.

“She has reason to be hurt.”

“I know.”

“You haven’t had to stand beside her every Friday since.”

“No.”

“And I can’t make what you said stop mattering because we’ve had a nice supper.”

“I’m not asking you to.”

He pushed the cup a little away, then stopped moving it.

“I thought you wanted me beside you,” he said. “If you need more time before that includes your friends, tell me. I can hear it. But don’t send me in carrying a cable and ask me to guess when I can put it down.”

I looked at his hands. At the fundraiser I had told him I didn’t want to spend the evening pretending he was useful. I had enjoyed my own courage. Apparently it was much easier to be brave after Fenna had already let me go.

“I did the very thing,” I said.

“Yes.”

I expected him to soften it. He didn’t. He had let my refusal stand in the café; I owed him at least the same.

From the street came the sound of someone wheeling a bin over the paving. I heard each bump with unnecessary clarity.

“I wasn’t ashamed of you,” I said.

He took time before answering.

“I believe that. I still don’t want to be introduced as the equipment.”

I laughed once, miserably. “You make it sound awful.”

“It wasn’t my invention.”

That stung. He saw it.

“I’m cross,” he said. “I’m trying not to make it worse.”

“You may be cross. I don’t enjoy it.”

“Neither do I.”

We sat with that. No one got up to leave. I began to understand how much I had relied on either escape or immediate reassurance in the few relationships I had attempted. This was more uncomfortable, and there was more room in it.

“We could go somewhere else that night,” he said eventually. “If you weren’t hosting. Or the next evening, if you are. I meant yes to being with you. The anniversary isn’t a test you have to pass.”

It would be an honest option. I could correct what I had told Fenna, tell Gethin the anniversary still belonged to the life I had before him, and see him on Saturday. People did not have to share every room to belong to each other.

But I pictured him waiting outside the edge of my ordinary week, admitted to coffee and my kitchen while I assured everyone else that nothing had changed. Something had changed. I had changed it myself.

“I would mind,” I said.

“If we went somewhere else?”

“If I spent that evening wishing you were there, and then blamed you for not coming. Which I can imagine doing quite persuasively.”

His mouth moved, not quite a smile.

“Thank you for the warning.”

“I want to bring you. I also want her not to be hurt. I keep trying to arrange both without asking either of you.”

“You can ask me.”

I did. Again, with nothing attached.

“Will you come as my guest? To dance with me. You can dislike the cake and leave when you’ve had enough. I can’t promise it won’t be awkward.”

“Yes. I’d like to.”

The answer was quieter this time. I trusted it more.

I moved round the table and sat beside him. I did not reach for a kiss to make the difficult part vanish.

“May I hold your hand?”

He gave it to me.

The warmth of it made my eyes sting. He was still cross, and he was still here. I could want his closeness without requiring him to pretend I had done no damage.

“If Fenna thinks I can’t host it fairly—“ I began.

I stopped. There were five people on the committee, not just Fenna. They had let us run it together for years. I knew where every chair went, whose knee needed a seat by the aisle, which cake knife would cut through icing. I loved standing beside my friend when the room filled. Losing that would not be freedom with a tidy bow on it.

“Then they ought to discuss it,” I finished.

He did not praise me. That helped too.

I checked the clock. Fenna would still be awake; on Fridays she never slept until midnight. I could hear her saying that I might have told her before she spent the evening beside me. She would be right.

“I need to call her,” I said.

“Would you like me to go?”

I held his hand for one more moment, then let it go so I could reach for my phone.

“No. I’d like you to stay. I need to say it myself.”

He nodded and sat back in his chair.

I found Fenna’s name, the same name I called when the printer failed or the hall key went missing. For once I had nothing to ask her to fix.