Psychological horror · 4 min read ·
The Long Table in the Garden
Every summer evening my mother sets a long table in the garden for the neighbours who have moved away, and after the first year I stopped asking who they were, because the chairs are always filled by the time the candles are lit.
- perspective: first
My mother is eighty-three and lives alone in the bungalow at the end of Kestrel Lane. She has done so since my father died, and she has always said she likes the quiet. She is a practical woman, a retired schoolteacher, not given to fancies. So I was surprised, last summer, when I came to visit on a Thursday evening and found the garden table laid for twelve.
It was a long trestle table, borrowed years ago from the church hall and never returned, set out under the apple tree with a white cloth and a row of tall glass candles. There were plates and cups, a basket of bread rolls, a jug of cold lemonade with mint in it. Twelve places, six a side. Mum was in the kitchen, arranging a dish of sliced tomatoes.
"Who's coming?" I asked her.
"The Ashbys," she said. "And the Morrises, and the girl from number nine."
I knew the Ashbys. They had moved to Scotland when I was a teenager. The Morrises had died in a flood in the eighties, a sad business, the whole family swept off the Croft Road bridge in a single night. And the girl from number nine was a child who had gone missing in the same summer I was born, and whose photograph still hung in the parish hall.
I did not say any of this. I helped carry out the rest of the food and sat down at the table, and at half past seven, as the sun went down behind the hedge, the chairs began to fill.
They were quiet, polite, a little shy, the way people are when they have been invited somewhere they are not sure they belong. Mrs Ashby, a thin, grey-haired woman in a fawn cardigan, sat beside me and asked after my job. Mr Morris, a large man with a red face and a tie, told a long story about the bowls club in 1972. The girl from number nine sat across from me, very still, her hands in her lap, and when I looked at her she smiled, a small private smile, and I saw she had the same freckle on her left cheek as the photograph in the hall.
Mum poured the lemonade. Nobody ate much. They talked about the street, and the weather, and the new bus route, and everybody laughed at the right places. But I noticed that every time someone looked away from the table, when a moth flew into the candle or a car went past in the lane, the place they had been sitting in was a little emptier, the chair a little further back, as though they had quietly stepped out of the moment and left something of themselves behind.
When the candles were guttering, Mum stood up and said it was time. The guests rose, one by one, and thanked her, and walked out through the gate into the lane, and each of them turned back at the end of the path to wave. I waved back. The girl from number nine waved last. Then the gate closed and the lane was empty and the chairs were empty and I was alone with my mother under the apple tree.
"They always come back," she said, clearing the plates. "That's the good thing about this table. It keeps people in the right order."
I asked her how long she had been doing it. She said since the year of the flood. She said she had not known what else to do, and that the table had seemed like a kindness, and that nobody had ever asked her to stop.
I have come every Thursday since. I always help her lay the table, and I always sit down, and by half past seven the chairs are full. The Morrises still argue about the bowls. The girl still smiles. And at the end of each evening I feel my own place slipping a little further back from the table, as if I am the one who is being gently moved out, the way a family moves a child from the front of the photograph to the back, so that the new one can have a clear view.