The Kitchen Light

Tressa put two mugs on the draining board before she left for the pool, then moved them into the cupboard. She was not ashamed of expecting Elian. She simply did not want the mugs to announce how long she had been expecting him.

At the gate he was wearing the green shirt again. She recognised it with an intimacy that made her uneasy: a week ago she would have noticed the colour, and now she remembered the place where the collar had turned against his neck.

“I brought a pound,” he said.

“You’ll be very popular with the locker.”

“I was hoping to extend my appeal.”

She looked at him. He held her gaze, smiling a little, and she stopped pretending her pleasure in seeing him was merely good manners.

“You could start by coming in.”

They paid separately and went to change. In the pool she swam more vigorously than she intended. By the fourth length she realised she was trying to use up the part of herself that kept imagining him in her kitchen.

It did not work.

He was waiting at the wall when she returned.

“Have I offended you?”

“Why?”

“You keep leaving.”

She rested beside him, water moving around her shoulders.

“I come here to swim.”

“Yes. I remember.”

He sounded so amused that she turned on him.

“You aren’t taking this seriously.”

His smile faded, though his eyes stayed warm.

“I am. I don’t know whether that’s what you’d prefer.”

A swimmer passed in the next lane. Tressa waited until the small disturbance of water had gone beyond them.

“It is,” she said.

He nodded once. He did not reward her with a speech.

They swam another two lengths together, neither trying to stay precisely level. At the steps he let her go first, and she found herself disappointed by the absence of his hand at her back. She had told him not to arrange where she stood. He had listened. Apparently she was now required to ask for the other thing she wanted.

Outside, she asked whether he would like to walk to her house while she drove the short distance, or come in the car.

“The car,” he said. “Unless you’d rather I walked.”

“I’d rather you came with me.”

“Then that’s settled.”

It pleased her, that small refusal to complicate an answer she had managed to give plainly.

Her house was seven minutes away. He sat beside her with the wet towel on his knees. She could smell chlorine and the soap he had used after swimming. When she changed gear, the back of her hand almost touched his leg. Almost was beginning to feel like a deliberate occupation.

At home he took off his shoes because hers were already by the mat, then stopped.

“Would you prefer I kept them on?”

“They’re not ceremonial shoes. Do what you like.”

“You say that rather dangerously.”

She put her keys in the bowl and turned to him.

For a second neither of them moved. He was close enough that she could see a small damp patch at the edge of his hair, where the towel had missed it. The hall was narrow. She had stood here with him after ordinary suppers and passed him a coat, a container, a message for Selwyn. Now there was nothing to pass.

The kettle, she thought. She could go and put it on.

“I’d like you to kiss me,” she said.

His expression changed before he moved. The slight effort of keeping himself easy left his face.

“Here?”

She smiled because it was not the question she expected.

“I don’t have a designated area.”

He laughed softly and came closer. She put her hand against his chest. He waited until she tipped her face towards him, then kissed her.

It was gentle at first, almost a question, and then she answered by drawing him nearer. His hand settled at her waist. She felt the warmth of him through the damp-cool cotton of her shirt and the small change in his breathing when she touched the side of his face.

He drew back enough to see her.

“All right?”

“Very.”

She was smiling. She could feel it and could not make it dignified.

“Again,” she said.

This time he did not have to wonder. She put both arms around him, and the kiss became something she could inhabit instead of assess. The hall, the ridiculous bowl of keys, the coat sliding from the hook behind his shoulder: all of it remained, ordinary and undisturbed, while she discovered how much she had wanted this particular weight of a hand at her back.

She ended the kiss herself, keeping her forehead near his cheek.

“I ought to make tea.”

“Ought?”

“No. I would like tea. I need to do something with a kettle.”

He moved aside. “That sounds serious.”

“Don’t laugh.”

“I’m trying not to.”

She could hear that he was happy. The sound steadied her more than solemnity would have done.

In the kitchen she filled the kettle too far, poured some out and took the two mugs down from the cupboard. Elian stood beside the table instead of taking the chair he usually occupied when Selwyn was there.

“Sit wherever you like,” she said.

He chose the chair nearest the window. Not her son’s place, not a point being made. Just a chair where his long legs fitted without having to turn sideways.

She sat opposite after pouring the tea.

The ceiling light was off; only the small lamp on the dresser was lit. In its yellow circle the kitchen seemed arranged for a version of her who did not have to decide how much she was willing to be seen.

“Would you put the big light on?” she asked.

He did, then came back to the table.

No remark about atmosphere. No joke about her wanting to inspect him. She had not asked him to understand everything about the request, and he had let it remain hers.

She looked at his face in the clear light. He looked back.

“I’m sixty-two,” she said.

“I know.”

“I don’t know if you know what that means.”

He took a moment over his answer.

“I know what forty-nine means to me. I don’t think I get to tell you about sixty-two.”

“That sounds very tactful.”

“It isn’t intended to be.”

She put down her cup. “I’m not asking you to flatter me.”

“I haven’t.”

He was right. She had been getting ready to refuse a consolation he had not offered.

“People say things,” she said. “You don’t look it. You’re only as old as you feel. As if the kindest thing is to insist I haven’t arrived where I’ve arrived.”

“You have arrived. I’m here too.”

She looked away. The words were almost too plain to defend herself against.

Elian leaned his forearms on the table.

“I like the woman who argued with me about the sea. I liked kissing her. I would like to do it again. I don’t know all the things it will mean, but I haven’t mistaken you for someone else.”

She could feel tears somewhere out of reach, not sadness precisely. She did not want them to turn the conversation into something he needed to soothe.

“I liked kissing you,” she said.

“I noticed.”

“Then you might have left me a little mystery.”

His smile returned. “I’m sorry. It was quite convincing.”

She laughed, and the tears withdrew without being denied.

They drank tea. Elian asked about the blue bowl on the dresser, and she told him she had bought it on a solitary holiday after the divorce because it would not fit in any cupboard her former husband would have considered sensible. She had carried it home wrapped in a beach towel and spent twelve years putting fruit in it that nobody ate.

“So it was a success,” he said.

“An impractical success.”

“My favourite kind.”

He got up to look at it. She joined him, close enough that their shoulders touched. He did not put his arm around her until she leaned against him, and when he did she let her weight rest there for a moment.

She had not been lonely every day since her marriage ended. There had been wonderful days, busy ones, dull ones, evenings of relief at hearing only her own radio. She disliked stories in which a woman’s life before a man arrived was merely a waiting room.

This was different. Her life had been full. She wanted this in it as well.

“Selwyn doesn’t know,” she said.

Elian’s arm stayed where it was, warm and unclaiming.

“No.”

“We can’t go on having dinners with him and act as if this is something else.”

“I agree.”

“I don’t mean tonight. I don’t want to turn kissing you into an announcement before I’ve had time to enjoy it.”

“Neither do I.”

She turned in the circle of his arm. “But soon.”

“Soon. I need to speak to him myself. About my part.”

She nodded. It was not a promise to seek permission. She understood the difference. Her son had told Elian things in the confidence of a friend who was separate from his family. That separateness had already changed. Pretending otherwise would make a small, wanted happiness depend on somebody else’s ignorance.

“He may be hurt,” she said.

“Yes.”

“You could say it will be fine.”

“I could.”

She was grateful that he did not.

They moved into the front room, where she sat at one end of the sofa and then moved towards the middle because there was no virtue in leaving room for an imaginary guest. Elian sat beside her. She took his hand and laid it where she wanted it, over hers on her knee.

For a while they talked about nothing that required a decision. The neighbour’s unconvincing attempt to grow tomatoes. A programme neither of them had finished. The fact that Selwyn, who could organise a complex railway timetable, still arrived at her house without knowing what day she put the bins out.

They laughed affectionately, and then Tressa grew quiet.

“I don’t want us to make him the joke,” she said.

Elian nodded. “We don’t need him for material. Your tea is much more promising.”

“My tea is excellent.”

“Your swimming-pool tea. A significant distinction.”

She turned towards him and kissed him again, without asking this time because she had leaned close and he had met her there, his hand opening beneath hers. When she drew back, he kept her fingers against his cheek for a moment.

“Saturday,” he said. “Would you come to mine? Supper. Nothing you have to bring.”

“I might bring an opinion.”

“I was counting on it.”

She said yes. They did not decide what else Saturday might contain.

At the door later she gave him his coat and kissed him once more, discovering that goodbye could be an event in its own right. He walked home. She closed the door, returned to the kitchen and left both mugs beside the sink.

For once she did not put the evidence away.