The Last Saturday

The sixth Saturday began with sunlight on the kitchen floor.

It was a narrow patch, easily overlooked, but Marta noticed it because Otto was lying in it instead of on the velvet chair. He had arranged himself diagonally to make the greatest possible use of the available weather.

She stepped over him with a basket of clean linen.

“Temporary,” she said.

Otto closed his eyes.

On the sideboard in the winter garden lay the cream card on which she had written the six Saturdays. Five had a small mark beside them. The last one had a smear of something at the edge which was almost certainly coffee.

Marta had spent the week looking forward to the evening. She had also spent part of it looking forward to the next Saturday, when she intended to have no idea what was for dinner until quite late in the afternoon.

The two feelings seemed perfectly compatible until she imagined explaining them.

She shook out the tablecloth. It settled over the familiar uneven table, and she bent to check the folded card beneath the leg. Still there. It had lasted the entire series of dinners with very little recognition.

Perhaps she should have invited it properly.

In the kitchen, the potatoes and leeks were ready for a large bake. There would be a green salad, bread and something sweet afterwards. She had considered a more elaborate menu, briefly and with the enthusiasm of a person who had learned nothing. Then she had remembered how the first dinner felt from the kitchen and returned to the potatoes.

By the time the first bell rang, the top of the bake was golden and the room smelled of thyme and warm cheese.

Ruth arrived first.

“What can I carry?” she asked.

“Your coat to the hook.”

“A sensible allocation of work.”

Lena followed with the small glass jug she had borrowed the previous week. Emil brought bread and, after a moment of visible effort, did not announce what else he could have brought. Felix came exactly when he had said he would, with nothing to explain.

The winter garden filled in its usual uneven way. Ruth adjusted her chair. Emil looked at the folded card under the table and shook his head. Lena poured water. Felix stood by the window for a moment, watching the remaining light on the roofs.

“Still daylight,” he said.

“I ordered it,” Marta told him. “For the last one.”

He smiled, and she went to fetch dinner.

When she came back, the bread had been cut, the glasses filled and a clear space made for the hot dish. Someone had put a spoon beside her own plate. She had been in the kitchen for less than a minute.

“Is this all right?” Lena asked, holding the salad bowl.

“Exactly.”

Marta sat.

For a while she was so pleased by how ordinary it felt that she forgot to be concerned about the ending. The dish passed around. Emil took a piece with a particularly crisp edge. Ruth told them about a woman at Café Vesper who had brought an entire jigsaw puzzle to a table intended for two cups of coffee.

“How far had she got?” Lena asked.

“Far enough that nobody dared tell her to move.”

Felix said he admired that degree of commitment to an afternoon. Emil said the café should charge by the piece. Marta nearly choked on her wine.

It was halfway through dinner when Lena mentioned the following week.

“I could bring something next Saturday. Since we've all become so good at finding the kitchen.”

There was a small pause. Marta looked at her plate.

“This is the sixth,” Felix said, gently.

“I know,” Lena replied. “I only thought—if we wanted to.”

“We could take turns,” Emil said. “Not everything would have to be here.”

“There are several perfectly good tables in the village,” Ruth added.

Marta knew they were trying to make it easier. Nobody was asking her to spend the rest of her life feeding them. But the possibilities were already multiplying across the table: whose kitchen, which Saturday, what to bring, who could come. She could feel another little calendar beginning.

“I'd like to leave it at six,” she said.

The words sounded firmer than she intended. Lena put down her fork.

“Of course.”

“I've loved it,” Marta said. “I really have.”

“You don't have to explain,” Ruth told her.

Marta considered that. “I know. But I would like to finish my sentence.”

Ruth inclined her head. “Quite right.”

“I've loved it. And next Saturday I would like to decide what to do on Saturday.”

Felix nodded. Lena smiled a little. Emil looked towards the kitchen, perhaps taking stock of how many evenings he had turned up in somebody else's house and called it generosity.

“Fair enough,” he said.

There was no applause and no sudden agreement about what the winter had meant. For a moment, everyone ate. The room did not become less warm.

Then Ruth said, “If it helps, I have plans next Saturday.”

“You haven't been asked,” Emil said.

“I like to be prepared.”

The conversation found its feet again.

Later they had dessert, and Felix found an old recording on Marta's small speaker. Ruth recognised it before he read out the title. She hummed a few notes, caught herself and carried on. Emil admitted that he had once tried to learn the piano, a revelation that caused Felix to turn towards him with a level of professional interest Emil immediately regretted.

“For three weeks,” he clarified.

“An intensive course,” Ruth said.

Marta watched them from her chair. The window behind Felix held their reflections now. Outside, the last light had gone, but she remembered where it had been when they arrived.

When the coffee cups were empty, she began to stand.

“Stay there,” Lena said. “I'll make another pot.”

Marta sat back down.

From the kitchen came the sound of the correct cupboard opening, followed by the wrong one and a short pause. She nearly called out. Then the correct cupboard opened again.

Beside the radiator, Otto lifted his head as though even this minor disturbance required review. Ruth stretched out a hand, and he leaned towards it without leaving the cushion.

People left gradually. Felix and Emil walked down the hill together. Lena stayed to finish her coffee, then took the book Marta was lending her again. Ruth was last, slowly winding her scarf in the hall.

“It was a lovely thing to do,” she said.

Marta looked through the doorway at the table, the glasses, the jug of branches.

“Yes,” she said. “It was.”

After the door closed, she put the leftovers away and left the rest until morning. In the winter garden, she made the final mark on the cream card.

Six Saturdays, all accounted for.

Then she sat in the chair nearest the window. Across the room, Otto stretched one paw into the space where the sunlight had been.