Psychological horror · 3 min read ·
The Sunday Lunch for Four
For eleven years I have cooked a roast for four every Sunday, and each week I set the table for the family I lost, until the week I counted the plates and found the fourth chair already pulled out, with a napkin folded on it that I did not fold.
- perspective: first
We had a Sunday lunch in our house for as long as I can remember. My husband, Ray, carved the joint at the head of the table with a knife he had sharpened the night before. The boys sat on either side of me, Tom with his elbows out and Danny with his head down over his plate. I did the potatoes and the gravy and the peas, and I always sat last, when everything was on the table and the steam was rising, so I could look at the three of them and see that they were all there.
Ray died in the spring of the year Danny turned nineteen. Tom moved to Australia two years later for work, and he rings on Sundays now, at the same time we used to sit down, and I tell him what I have made. Danny went in the winter of the same year, a car on the Halden road, on a night when he had promised to come home for his tea.
I have gone on making the Sunday roast every week since. I do not know how to stop. I buy a small joint, enough for two, and I cook it with the same care, and I lay the table for four out of habit, because my hands know the count and will not let me set fewer. The plates go round the table in the same order. The knives sit beside them, with the blades turned in. The chairs stay where they were.
I sit at the end. Nobody else comes.
Last Sunday I was putting out the cutlery and I came to the last place, and I stopped, because the chair was already pulled out. It was on the side nearest the window, where Danny always sat, with his back to the light. It had been moved. I had not touched it. I was sure of that, because I had dusted the table on Saturday and the chairs were all pushed in, square to the wood.
A napkin lay on the seat. It was folded into a neat triangle, the way Ray always folded his, with the corners tucked under. I did not fold it that way. I never fold napkins that way. I had not been in that room since I set the table on Friday.
I stood by the sideboard for a long time with the serving spoon in my hand. The kitchen clock ticked. The joint was resting on the board, and the smell of the rosemary was very strong, and I could hear the wind outside, and the gate, and a child's voice somewhere in the street, calling a name I did not know.
Then I heard a chair scrape, very softly, as if someone were sitting down carefully so as not to disturb the others.
I did not look. I put the spoon down and I cut the meat, the way Ray always cut it, at the head of the table, and I set out the plates, four of them, and I sat down in my own chair at the end. Across from me, on the window side, a napkin was lifted and laid on a lap, very gently, the way a boy does when he is hungry and trying to be polite.
We ate together. Nobody spoke. Once the chair by the window creaked, and I felt something brush my hand under the table, light and warm, and I did not pull away. When I looked up at the end of the meal, the room was empty again, the chairs pushed in square, the napkins folded in neat triangles beside the plates, and the fourth place had been cleared. Only the knife was not put away. It lay on the cloth with the blade turned up, the way a boy leaves it when he has finished and is waiting to be told he can go out and play.