The Kitchen Table

Fenna answered while I was still watching the kitchen doorway through which Gethin had gone.

“Have you left something at the hall?”

“No. Can you talk?”

“Of course. Is the printing ready? I can come earlier on Monday if it helps.”

A tap ran at her end. I knew the pause that followed: she was balancing the phone against her shoulder while she filled the kettle. We had made half our arrangements to the sound of that tap.

“The printing can wait.”

“What’s happened?”

I pressed my free palm against the table. I had asked Gethin to give me privacy. He was in the sitting room, close enough that I could ask him to come back, far enough away that I could not make him do this with me.

“I told you something untrue this afternoon. About Gethin and the sound. I haven’t asked him to help. I’m inviting him because he’s the man I’m seeing.”

The tap stopped.

“I wondered,” she said.

That hurt more than surprise.

“I’m sorry.”

“About which part?”

“Making it sound like an arrangement for the event. Letting you think that all evening.”

“But not bringing him.”

“No. I want to bring him.”

A cup touched down on her counter. I knew the cupboard it came from. I had chosen its replacement handle with her when the old one broke, holding two brass samples against the door while she argued for the cheaper one. The intimacy of knowing her kitchen made it harder to bear this from mine.

“When you say you’re inviting him,” she asked, “is that you as the host or you as my friend?”

“Both. I can’t separate them neatly.”

“Convenient.”

“It doesn’t feel convenient.”

“No. I suppose it wouldn’t.”

I deserved her anger. I did not know how to listen to it without either defending myself or making promises I would resent tomorrow.

“He’s coming as my guest under the same arrangement as anybody else’s,” I said. “I shouldn’t have invented another reason.”

“He isn’t anybody else.”

“I know.”

“Do you? You and I stood at that door for months smiling at people who thought we’d done something awful. Some of them had never even been. He wrote one sentence, and we had to live in it.”

I looked towards the doorway. I had asked for privacy, and now I wanted a witness to the fact that this was difficult. I kept my eyes on the table.

“I haven’t forgotten.”

“Then what am I supposed to do when he comes in? Pretend I’m pleased?”

“No. Be civil. I hope you can be civil. You don’t have to welcome him as your friend.”

“And if someone asks me why?”

“Tell them I invited him. You don’t have to supply a reason that makes everyone comfortable.”

There was a long silence. I heard the kettle begin, a low grumble rising between us.

“You told me it was one dance,” she said.

“It was, then. I told you about the coffee. And Sunday.”

“You didn’t tell me this.”

“I didn’t know what it was going to be.”

“And now you do?”

The question was not entirely hostile. Under it was my friend, who would once have asked it over tea, leaning towards me with interest.

“I know I want to find out,” I said. “I like him, Fenna. I like being with him.”

Saying it to her made my happiness sound unbearably fragile. I wanted to protect it from the silence that followed, and refused myself the protection of a joke.

“I wish it were somebody else,” she said.

“I know.”

“That isn’t a kind thing to say.”

“It’s what you feel.”

“It’s not all I feel.”

I closed my eyes. There was room for that, though I had been bracing myself as if only one of us could be complicated.

When she spoke again her voice was firmer.

“I don’t know if I can host the anniversary with you like this.”

There was the thing I had named to Gethin in the abstract. Spoken by her, it had a weight and a place: my chair beside hers, my hand on the lights at the first tune, the little glance we exchanged when the room was full.

“Do you mean you don’t want to?” I asked.

“I mean I don’t know if every decision we make will turn into this. Whether a table is near the door, whether a dance is included. Whether I’m allowed to be annoyed without you thinking it’s about him.”

It was a fair concern. It was also a way of telling me she no longer trusted something she had trusted yesterday.

“The committee should talk about it,” I said.

“I’ve already been thinking that.”

“Then bring it to them. I won’t ask you not to because we’re friends.”

I gripped the edge of the table after I said it. I had not offered to stand down. I still wanted the evening I had helped make. But I could not claim both the right to choose and the right to prevent anyone else responding.

“Tuesday?” she asked.

“Tuesday. I’ll tell them what I told you. Including the sound.”

“You needn’t turn it into a trial.”

“No. But I needn’t make you explain my part for me.”

The kettle clicked off. Neither of us mentioned tea.

“Is he there now?”

“Yes. In the other room.”

“Right.”

I wanted to tell her he had not demanded this, that he had offered another evening, that he had listened while I made a mess of the invitation. Those were good things. Using them now would ask her to feel better on a schedule I had chosen.

“I can talk longer,” I said. “If you want.”

“Not tonight.”

“All right.”

“I’ll collect the programmes on Monday.”

“Yes.”

She paused. “Have you eaten?”

My eyes filled at last. I had held out through the rest and was undone by the question she had asked me a thousand times.

“Your roll. Thank you.”

“That was hours ago.”

“I’ll make something.”

“Goodnight, Coralia.”

“Goodnight.”

I sat with the silent phone in my hand. The call had not restored us. It had not ruined us beyond repair, either. I did not yet know the shape of what I had done.

· · ·Scene break

Gethin was on the sofa with one of my cookbooks open on his knee. When I came in he shut it without marking the place.

“She’ll ask the committee to discuss who hosts,” I said. “On Tuesday. I told her why I want you there.”

“How are you?”

I sat at the other end of the sofa. “Hungry, apparently.”

He waited.

“She asked if I’d eaten.”

His face softened. “That’s hard.”

“Yes.”

I put the phone down. He did not ask whether he was forgiven, whether the invitation was secure, whether I had explained him well enough. I could feel how easily I might have made the evening about reassuring him and been grateful for the occupation.

“I haven’t fixed it,” I said.

“I didn’t think you would.”

“I haven’t told her about your lunch, or anything you said here.”

“Thank you.”

“I wanted to. It would have been evidence. I could have told her something that made you easier to like.”

He looked down at the closed book.

“You might have made it very hard to come back here.”

“I know.”

He moved the cookbook to the table, then held out his hand. I went to sit beside him. This time there was no kitchen table between us and no task requiring either of our hands.

I leaned against him. He put his arm round me only after I settled there, and for several minutes we said nothing. My cheek rested against his jumper. I could hear the quiet movement of his breath.

“Are you still cross?” I asked.

“A little.”

“Me too. With myself. With everybody, to be honest.”

“That’s quite a list.”

“I’ve been thorough.”

He laughed gently. I could feel it before I heard it.

“I’m also glad you’re here,” I said.

“So am I.”

I turned my face towards his. He touched my cheek and waited, and I kissed him. His mouth was familiar now. I had missed it during the long conversation across the table, and liked discovering that I could come back to it while some things between us were still unsettled.

The kiss deepened when I moved closer. His hand lay warm at my back; I felt the care in its steadiness, and the desire in the way he drew breath when I kissed the corner of his mouth. I liked that I could make him lose the next sentence. I liked that he did not rush to recover it.

I drew away and touched his forehead with mine.

“I’d like an ordinary evening,” I said. “Whatever’s left of one.”

“Toast?”

“You know how to tempt me.”

“I have references.”

We made it together. He asked where things lived instead of opening every cupboard. I put the butter on the table and found the marmalade, which I generally saved for breakfast as if pleasure had a correct hour. We ate standing beside the counter until I remembered the chairs and pulled one out.

He sat opposite me. We shared the last slice because neither of us wanted a whole one, an arrangement so minor and agreeable that I nearly laughed again.

“Next Thursday,” he said. “Would you come to mine?”

“What will you cook?”

“I was thinking of cold tart.”

“Then no.”

“Something warm and unable to support its own weight.”

“Better.”

He reached across the table and brushed a crumb from the edge of my thumb. I turned my hand to catch his.

“Yes,” I said. “I’d like to.”

The committee met on Tuesday. Whatever happened there, Thursday was something I could choose now. I put it in my phone while he watched, without surrounding it with errands.

When he left, I walked down to the front door with him. The street was quiet. He kissed me once under the porch light, then once more because I asked, and took his coat from my arm.

Upstairs, I put the remaining biscuits away and left the anniversary papers on my desk. My name was still beside Fenna’s at the top. I did not rub it out or underline it. Tuesday would come.

On my kitchen table were two used plates, crumbs, the knife lying across the marmalade lid. I stood there for a moment before washing them, pleased by the small amount of clearing up he had left me.