The Third Chair

Selwyn had chosen a table with three chairs and put his coat on the third. Tressa noticed before she reached him, then wished she had not. There were a dozen innocent reasons to put a coat on a chair.

“You found it,” he said.

“I do know where the bus station is.”

“They’ve moved the entrance.”

“Only six yards. I persevered.”

He smiled and stood to kiss her cheek. She sat opposite, keeping her bag on the floor instead of offering it to the spare chair. The café was busy with people eating lunch before they had finished taking off their coats. Nobody appeared to have come for an important conversation. She was grateful to them.

Selwyn pushed a menu towards her.

“The soup’s good.”

“Have you already eaten?”

“Last week.”

“Ah. I thought you were issuing instructions.”

“Would they work?”

“You have thirty-nine years of evidence.”

He laughed properly then. It sounded so much like an ordinary lunch that she almost asked about Elian’s walk. The impulse was absurd: she would spoil the thing she wanted by checking whether it was real.

She ordered soup. He ordered a sandwich, and when the server had gone they spent several minutes discussing the washing machine. The repair had involved a part with a name neither of them could remember. Selwyn drew its approximate shape on the paper napkin.

“That looks like a whistle,” she said.

“It might as well have been. It cost enough to announce something.”

She had missed this, the slight extravagance of his complaints when he knew he had an audience who would not take them too seriously. Elian’s complaints were different. He tended to mean them until somebody made him laugh. She stopped comparing. Her son did not need to become a set of qualities she could contrast with another man’s.

Their food arrived. Selwyn moved the napkin diagram to make space, then folded it until the part disappeared.

“How was the coast?” he asked.

Tressa put her spoon down.

“Do you want to know?”

“I’ve asked.”

“I don’t mean that unkindly. I don’t know how much you want.”

He looked at his sandwich. “The normal amount. Where you went. Whether the weather was all right.”

She told him about the bay and the wrong turning, the hotel tea, the path through a row of gardens which had turned out to be a public footpath despite looking like trespass. She did not substitute we for every I, or Elian’s name for every pronoun, but she did not remove him from the account either.

Selwyn listened. Once his mouth tightened. Once he asked a question about the road. When she finished he said he knew the junction she meant.

“The arrows are painted too late,” he said. “You only see them when somebody’s parked on them.”

“Thank you. I’ve been waiting nearly a week for a witness.”

“You’d still have taken the wrong lane.”

“Almost certainly.”

They ate. Tressa could have let the whole meal pass in this careful ordinary way. It would have been a defensible choice; he had asked for time. But he kept picking up his glass without drinking, and she knew the gesture well enough to stop performing ease.

“Is there something you want to ask me?”

“Lots of things I don’t want to ask you.”

“All right.”

“That sounded worse than I meant.”

“It sounded uncomfortable. We are uncomfortable.”

He sat back. Behind him a woman shook rain from an umbrella although the rain had stopped before Tressa left home. Water scattered across the mat. Selwyn watched her, then looked at his mother again.

“When I phoned him before,” he said, “I didn’t have to wonder whether you were in the room.”

Tressa felt the answer rising: he would say if she was. An assurance about somebody else’s behaviour, offered before she could possibly know every occasion on which it would be required.

“You can ask whether he’s free to talk privately,” she said instead.

“That’s not quite the same.”

“No.”

“I don’t want every phone call to start with a sort of security question.”

She nodded. He was right; the boundary might be manageable and still be a loss.

“And I don’t want to find out afterwards that something I said has become a conversation between you.”

“I don’t want that either.”

“You didn’t want it on the path when you asked him about me?”

The question landed where she had left it vulnerable.

“I did want information then,” she said. “I called it concern. It was concern, but it didn’t entitle me to his answer.”

He glanced up, as if he had expected a correction to the charge rather than an admission.

“I told you because you needed to know I’d done it,” she said. “Not because confessing made it harmless.”

Selwyn ran a finger round the edge of his plate. She waited, although waiting felt much less generous when she could not control what came after it.

“I used to complain to him when you did that,” he said.

“Asked questions?”

“Arranged everything until there was no decent reason to say no.”

She stared at him.

“I don’t do that all the time.”

“I didn’t say all the time.”

She put her hands in her lap. The soup had cooled, and she was grateful for the excuse not to eat it.

There had been a holiday after her divorce, a long weekend he had taken off work because she had said the cottage was already booked and it would be silly to waste the second bedroom. She had wanted him there. She had not said she wanted him there; she had made the vacancy his problem. He had been twenty-eight, kind and tired, and she had treated the fact that he could come as proof he wished to.

“The cottage,” she said.

He looked surprised. “What?”

“After the divorce. I shouldn’t have presented it as an empty bed you had to justify leaving empty.”

Selwyn’s face changed. “I wanted to come for some of it.”

“For some of it. Yes.”

“Mum, I wasn’t asking for an audit of the last twelve years.”

“I know. I’m trying to hear you without arguing that you chose a bad example.”

The server approached with a pot of tea and two cups. Tressa had ordered it when they arrived, automatically choosing the larger pot. She almost apologised for that too, then stopped. Tea was still allowed to be tea.

She poured his first. He passed her the milk.

“I don’t think you’re a terrible mother,” he said.

“I didn’t think you did.”

“You looked as if you might.”

“I was thinking of something I wish I’d done differently. It isn’t the same.”

He drank, then put down the cup with more force than it needed.

“I don’t want him to become the person who tells you what I meant.”

“He won’t get that job from me.”

“And I don’t want you explaining me to him.”

“I can promise what I will do. If I start guessing aloud, I can stop. I can’t promise never to think about you when I’m with him.”

“I’m not asking you never to mention my name.”

“Good. That would make this conversation very difficult to describe.”

He gave her a quick, startled look. Then she shook her head.

“I won’t describe it. That was a poor joke.”

“No,” he said after a moment. “It wasn’t. I just wasn’t ready.”

She let him have that too.

They drank the tea. It was not quite strong enough; she left the pot alone instead of fussing with it. Selwyn unfolded the napkin and smoothed the drawing with his palm.

“I miss having him to phone without thinking,” he said.

“I’m sorry.”

He nodded. She did not add but. She was sorry, and she was not offering to end her relationship. Both facts were present at the table without needing to fight for the last word.

After a while he asked whether she was still going to her painting group on Fridays. She said yes, although the pears had begun to feel like a subject with unusually limited prospects.

“Paint the washing-machine part,” he said, sliding the napkin towards her.

“Will it sit still?”

“It had better.”

She laughed, and this time the sound did not arrive as evidence she needed to preserve. They talked about the library’s reduced opening hours, his train home from work, the neighbour whose new hedge had already exceeded the height he had promised. She found herself disagreeing with Selwyn about the hedge and enjoying his disbelief. They were not reconciled to everything. They could still think each other ridiculous about a shrub.

When they stood, he took his coat from the third chair.

“This was all right,” he said.

“Yes.”

“I’d like to do it again. Not necessarily here. Their bread’s impossible.”

“You chose the sandwich.”

“I was protecting you.”

She put the folded napkin in her bag. He noticed and smiled without asking why.

Outside they walked towards their different stops. At the crossing Selwyn turned and hugged her, longer than he had at the house. She held him without congratulating herself or mentioning anybody else.

“Ring me about the hedge,” he said as they parted. “If it reaches the upstairs windows.”

“You’ll be the first.”

She watched him go until the bus shelter hid him. Then she turned towards her own stop.

· · ·Scene break

Elian came over that evening carrying a loaf and a packet of dates he said had seemed a good idea in the shop. She kissed him at the door. The simple pleasure of his mouth on hers surprised her after an afternoon spent believing pleasure would need to be earned again.

In the kitchen he saw the napkin beside her painting things.

“New subject?”

“Possibly. A very expensive one.”

He did not ask whose drawing it was. She put it beneath a clean sheet of paper while he found a knife for the bread.

“Lunch was good,” she said.

“I’m glad.”

She waited for his next question. It did not come.

“We talked,” she added, then heard the invitation she was laying out. She could tell him that Selwyn missed him. It would be kind. It would also be using her son’s most unguarded sentence as a gift to another person.

Elian looked up. “You don’t have to make it a sign for us.”

She nodded, relieved and a little ashamed that he had recognised the temptation.

“I’d like to talk about something else.”

“These dates,” he said. “Do they belong in a cupboard or the fridge?”

“That is a smaller subject than I anticipated.”

“Give it time. We can disagree.”

She took the packet from him and read the back, leaning against his arm. The bread lay between them, unsliced. For a moment neither moved to do anything useful with it.

Then she put the dates in the cupboard, turned in his arms and kissed him again, choosing the man in front of her without bringing him proof that somebody else might soon make it easier.