Her Own Table

Tressa’s former colleague looked at the painting of the washing-machine part and said it was an improvement on the pears.

“You don’t know what it is,” Tressa said.

“Neither do you. It’s given you freedom.”

They were sitting at Tressa’s kitchen table on Thursday morning, before the lunch they had arranged weeks ago. Her friend had arrived early with a bag of apples from a tree she complained about every autumn and refused to have cut down. They had worked together for sixteen years and retained the useful habit of disagreeing without issuing a warning first.

Tressa turned the paper towards herself. She had painted from Selwyn’s drawing on Wednesday, adding colour where knowledge failed. The result resembled a machine designed by a person who believed machines should be blue.

“I like it,” her friend said. “You don’t have to earn that by telling me everything wrong with it.”

“I’m providing context.”

“You always are. It’s exhausting.”

Tressa laughed and put the painting on the dresser. The friend had her own tiredness today, visible in the way she kept taking off her glasses and rubbing the bridge of her nose. Tressa asked about it and heard a long, irritated account of a kitchen renovation which had made it impossible to find the tea.

It was a pleasure to listen to a problem she could not possibly be expected to solve. She offered no advice. Her friend noticed.

“Have you run out of suggestions?”

“I’m experimenting.”

“Continue. It’s very restful.”

They walked into town for lunch. Tressa chose a restaurant she liked without asking three times whether the choice was acceptable. Her friend ordered something entirely different and talked about the window fitter. After a while she asked what was new with Tressa.

There was a simple answer. Tressa had practised more complicated ones while getting dressed.

“I’m seeing someone.”

“Good. Do you like him?”

“Immensely. Which has made me rather difficult.”

“You were difficult before. What is he called?”

“Elian.”

She waited. Her friend waited too, but only because she had taken a mouthful of food.

“He’s forty-nine,” Tressa added.

“All right.”

“I’m telling you because—“

“Because you want to know what face I’m going to make.”

Tressa put down her fork. “Am I that obvious?”

“To somebody who watched you explain progressive lenses to a man who wanted all three distances to be the same, yes. You have your difficult-customer expression on.”

The laugh surprised her. For a moment she could see herself at the old counter, trying to preserve dignity on both sides of an impossible request. She had not missed the shop for weeks; now she missed that particular shared absurdity.

“I’m not asking you to approve,” she said.

“Then don’t keep checking. Tell me something about him.”

Tressa told her about the postcards and the unseasoned soup, the way he had looked at the paintings before choosing one. She did not begin with Selwyn. She did not explain why there was a case to answer before she allowed herself to describe the man.

Her friend listened, then asked whether Elian lived nearby. When Tressa said he did, she nodded and returned to her lunch. No announcement had been made to the whole restaurant. Nobody had demanded arithmetic.

“It isn’t all straightforward,” Tressa said.

“Few things worth doing come with assembly instructions.”

“He’s a friend of Selwyn’s. They met through walking. That’s how I met him, a little over a year ago.”

Her friend looked up properly now. “That will take some getting used to.”

“Yes.”

“For you too?”

Tressa considered. She had become so accustomed to treating discomfort as something belonging to other people that the question caught her unprepared.

“For me too. I keep trying to make it easy for everyone and then resenting the work.”

“Have you been appointed?”

“No.”

“Then you could stop turning up for the job.”

It was said with affection and the briskness of somebody whose sink currently sat in a hallway. It did not contain a solution. Tressa was glad of that.

She changed the subject herself. They ordered coffee and argued about a film they had both seen and remembered differently. Her friend liked the ending. Tressa thought the heroine had been too readily persuaded to forgive. Neither of them asked whether they were secretly discussing her life.

At the corner where they parted, her friend said she would like to meet Elian sometime, if Tressa wanted that. Tressa said she would ask him. The small accuracy pleased her: an invitation could remain an invitation until the people in it answered.

She walked home carrying the rest of the apples.

· · ·Scene break

Elian had rung on Wednesday as arranged. They had talked for twenty minutes about work, the painting and a programme he had turned off because he disliked every person in it. He had not asked whether she had used her solitary evening well. She had invited him for Friday supper and said, before she could hide the wish under a menu, that she would like him to stay afterwards.

“Yes,” he had said. “I’d like that.”

Now, on Friday afternoon, she stood at her kitchen table and peeled apples. There was no argument waiting to be resolved by dessert. She had bought enough food for two and left the rest of the evening without a task attached to it.

She went to her painting group first. The room smelled of damp coats and paper. She spent an hour trying to paint a white mug without making it grey, talked to the woman beside her about the price of brushes and came home with a picture she neither loved nor wished to destroy. It was a satisfactory afternoon.

Elian arrived at seven with a clean shirt in a bag and a question about whether she had eaten all the dates.

“Are you checking provisions?”

“I’ve thought of a use for them.”

“How long have you been thinking?”

“Long enough that I’d be disappointed if they were gone.”

She kissed him before answering. He put the bag down and held her, his hands warm through the thin wool of her cardigan. The last kiss on Monday had been kind and a little sad. This one grew until she drew away laughing because they were standing directly in front of the open door.

“Come in,” she said. “The street has had enough of us.”

He closed the door and followed her into the kitchen. She gave him the dates and a knife. He chopped them into a bowl with orange pieces, a dessert she had not requested and was pleased not to have organised. Her apples would keep until tomorrow.

They ate at the table with the painting things pushed to one end. She told him about lunch with her friend, sharing her own pleasure and the invitation without repeating somebody else’s confidences.

“Would you like to meet her?”

“Yes. Will she ask me about the pears?”

“She prefers my machinery.”

He looked at the dresser. “That blue thing?”

“You may offer a more respectful title.”

He got up to look. He studied it for long enough that she began to smile.

“It looks as if it could make a very small quantity of something,” he said.

“Progress. The pears couldn’t do anything.”

He turned back to her. “Neither did they have to.”

She liked him for that, for taking the joke and then leaving the picture with its right to exist. She was not sure she had ever loved somebody’s way of looking before. She had admired faces, relied on hands, learned the patterns of footsteps. This was more particular: his willingness to see something before finding a use for it.

After supper they left the plates in the sink and went to the front room. Elian sat on the rug with his back against the sofa to sort the postcards, because the coffee table was too small. Tressa sat above him, reading the messages as he passed them up.

One sender had disliked everything about a holiday except the eggs. Another had written three lines about a missing suitcase and added, in smaller handwriting, that they were having a wonderful time. The cards belonged to strangers long out of reach of any opinion Tressa could form about them. She found that strangely restful.

Elian leaned his head back against her knee.

“Comfortable?” she asked.

“For now. I’ll make a noise when I stand up.”

“I’ll pretend not to hear.”

“Please don’t. I’d hate to waste it.”

She set down the card and rested her hand in his hair. He closed his eyes. It was a small surrender, one she would have missed if she had been watching for a dramatic proof of forgiveness.

“Come up here,” she said.

He stood, with the promised noise, and sat beside her. She put her hand on his chest and felt his breathing change under it.

“I missed you,” she said.

“I missed you too.”

“Even while I was glad to be alone.”

“Yes.”

He kissed her, slow enough that she felt herself cease preparing the next sentence. She touched his cheek, the corner of his mouth, learning how the evening could become quiet without anybody retreating. When his hand moved beneath the edge of her cardigan she leaned closer, then paused to look at him.

“I want this evening,” she said. “All the part we’re in now.”

“So do I.”

She smiled at the inadequacy and sufficiency of the answer. He did not need to describe what they had survived in order to kiss her again.

Later upstairs, she asked him to leave the curtain a little open where the light from the garden could reach the ceiling. He asked whether she wanted the lamp as well. She said yes. There was no performance in being seen tonight, only the pleasure of not having to disappear for somebody to draw close.

They took their time. She could stop to say what she liked, hear what he liked, laugh when the bed gave an undignified complaint beneath a shift of weight. His face remained dear and visible, desire no longer something she had to translate into a kinder, less frightening word.

Afterwards they lay beneath the quilt and listened to a car pass slowly outside. She traced the seam of the pillow with one finger until he took her hand and put it against his cheek.

“You can leave it there,” he said.

“I was considering it.”

“You looked very busy.”

She laughed softly and left her hand where he had asked for it. Downstairs there were dishes and uneaten apples and a table that belonged to her whether anyone else sat at it or not. Here there was a man who had come because she wanted him, who wanted her in return, with no message to carry and no problem placed between them as the price of staying.

She turned towards him. He met her halfway.