25. Willow
— ? —
Willow
Dee Coffin told me, in the shop, standing between the bread and the paper rack, at a volume that took in four other people and a delivery driver.
“Well,” she said. “You’ll have seen it.”
“Seen what?”
Dee put a hand flat on her own chest.
“You have not seen it.”
“Dee.”
“I am going to enjoy this more than is decent and I want that acknowledged before I start.”
“Dee, there are four people in this shop.”
“There are five,” said Dee Coffin, “and every one of them has already read it, and I am the only one with the nerve to tell you, which I think entitles me to a bit of theater.”
There is a magazine that does the coast in the autumn. Old families, boatyards, a man who makes knives. It is not a serious publication and everybody on that island reads it cover to cover and then says they have not.
There is a piece in it about Folger Maritime.
I have not read the whole thing. I got about halfway and put it face down on Ruth’s table, and then picked it up again, because I am not a saint and never have been.
Pia rang while I was doing it.
“Have you got it in front of you?”
“I’ve got it in front of me.”
“Put it down.”
“Pia.”
“Willow, put it down. I know exactly which paragraph you’re on because I’ve been on it myself for an hour and it’s not worth what it’s taking off you.”
“There’s a phrase in it.”
“There’s a phrase in it,” Pia agreed, “and it’s the sort of phrase people write when they’ve never met anybody, and I would like to point out that the man who wrote it has also described a container yard as sun-drenched.”
It is not about the marriage. That is the first thing. It is a business piece with a photograph of a container yard, and a paragraph about the western route that I could not follow.
And in the middle of it there is a section sourced to a former chief of staff, and it is the kind of writing where nobody is quoted saying anything and everything is attributed to somebody close to the family, and it says that the founder’s son inherited a company he was not ready for, that the board has been managing him since, and that his personal circumstances have been a factor in the decline of the western route.
I am the personal circumstances. I got that on the second read.
I have a clipping in a drawer upstairs, four sentences long, from before Archie was born, about a Nantucket native and an expedited wedding and a mother who cleaned houses.
I have had it so long the creases have gone soft.
This one is longer and better written and there is a man from Antwerp in it, and it is the same sentence underneath, and I have decided I am going to stop keeping them.
“That’s not the good part,” said Dee.
“Dee, I am in a shop.”
“That is not the good part,” Dee Coffin said again, with terrible relish, and told me the good part.
The good part is that you cannot source a piece like that out of your own head.
There are figures in it. There are figures in it that have not been anywhere near a newspaper before, and there are dates, and there is a description of a board discussion that only about nine people in the world sat through, and there is a line about the customs position in Antwerp that was not public when she gave it to them and was extremely not hers to give.
She had it because she had been sitting outside his door with a notebook for a season.
Ackroyd had it by the Tuesday. The lawyers had it by the Wednesday. And it was not a scandal, and it was not a fight, and I have been told by two separate people that the entire thing was handled in emails with a tone of enormous politeness.
She had signed something when she was hired.
Everybody signs something. She had also, on her way off that island in a taxi with two cases in it, taken files that belonged to a company, and the company was able to say precisely which ones and precisely when, because that is what a company like that is for.
Charlie Pell let her go on the Friday.
“Is she still on the island?”
“Not for want of trying.” Dee got a bag out from under the counter and shook it open. “She went and sat in the Rands’ shop on Thursday for the length of a coffee and Marie served her and said nothing at all, which for Marie is a public execution.”
“Marie wouldn’t.”
“Marie didn’t. That’s the point, love. Nobody’s done anything. That’s what’s doing it.” She started ringing my things through. “He’ll have had a call.”
“From Michael?”
“From a lawyer, love. Charlie Pell does not take calls from Michael Folger, he takes calls from people who are paid to ring Charlie Pell.” She put a tin in the bag.
“And he’d have got off that phone and gone straight down that marina and done it in about a minute and a half, because Charlie is a coward, and I have known him since he was seven. ”
I rang Michael from the parking lot.
“Did you do this?”
“I did not do it, I did not ask anybody to do it, and I found out about it at the same time as Ackroyd, which is to say from Ackroyd.” A pause. “I want to say a thing and I’d like to get it out in one go.”
“Go on.”
“I’m not giving you this.”
“What?”
“I’m not handing it to you. It isn’t a gift and I’m not going to let it turn into one.
” His voice was doing the flat thing it does when he has worked something out in advance.
“If she’d walked off with nothing, nothing would have happened.
She took files, and a company noticed, and that is the whole of it, and it would have happened in exactly the same way if you and I had never met. ”
“You could have let me think you’d done it.”
“Yes.”
“You could have let me find out from Dee and just not corrected it. That would have cost you nothing and you’d have got the whole thing for free.”
“I know.”
“Michael, I’ve watched you take credit for a survey.”
“I have taken credit for a survey,” he said, “and I stood in a garden and read it out to you, and you put it under a table leg, and I have thought about that most days since.”
“Most men would have let me believe it.”
“Most men,” said Michael, “have not spent a season finding out what happens when they hand you something.”
She came to the house on the Sunday.
I heard the car and I thought it was Sal, and it was not Sal, and by the time I got the door open she was already halfway up the path with her arms crossed against the wind.
She looked exactly the same. I do not know what I had prepared for and it was not that. I think I had expected her to have got smaller in some visible way, which is a stupid thing to expect of a person and I am putting it down because it is true.
“Willow.”
“You can’t be here.”
“I know.” She stopped where she was, about two lengths off the step, which I noticed. “I’m not staying. I’m off on the first one in the morning.”
“Right.”
“I wanted to say-”
“Krystal, I’m going to save you a journey.
” My heart was going and my voice was not, which is a trick I did not know I had until this season.
“You’re going to tell me it got away from you.
That you talked to somebody at a party and it turned into a piece, and that you never said the words that are in it.
And the thing is, I believe you. I believe every bit of that. ”
She did not say anything.
“That’s what I’ve worked out about you,” I said. “You’ve never once in your life done the thing on purpose. It just keeps happening, and you’re always so sorry, and it is always somebody else’s turn to be understanding about it.”
She looked at me for a moment.
And then she said, “That’s not true.”
“Krystal-”
“No. You’ve said your bit and it was very good and you’ve clearly had it in a drawer for years, and it is not true, and I’m not standing in a garden and being forgiven for the wrong thing.”
The wind came up the lane. I did not move off that step.
“Go on, then.”
“I wanted him,” she said.
She did not say it cruelly. She said it flatly, the way you tell a stranger you want their things.
“I’ve wanted him since we were girls,” Krystal said. “When he was coming to your back door in the winter with a paper bag, and your mother was feeding him at your table, and I was sat on the other side of it. And he never once looked at me, and I took a job with him anyway.”
“You-”
“I applied for that job, Willow. Nobody rang me. There was no headhunter, there was no lovely coincidence, I saw it and I put myself in front of it and I got it because I am extremely good at it, and I did not once, in the whole of that process, mention that I did it to be close to him.”
“You told him you didn’t know.”
“I told him nothing at all.” Her chin went up. “And then I was in it, and he was decent to me, and I made myself indispensable to a man who could not have told you whether his own wife eats. Not one hour of that was an accident.”
I have spent a whole season being reasonable about it, and I could have had this in a hallway in about four seconds if either of us had been honest.
“Say the rest,” I said.
“There isn’t a rest.”
“Krystal, say the rest, because I have had it out of a magazine and I have had it out of Dee Coffin and I am not having the last of it left in your mouth.”
She said, “Cody.”
“Yes.”
“That was the same.” Her voice did not change. “That was exactly the same and I have never once been able to say why, and I worked it out in a rented apartment in the winter. It has never been about a man. Not Cody, not him.”
“Then what?”
“It’s that they’re yours,” Krystal said.
“You had a mother who fed people. You had a boy at the door in the winter. You had that whole island deciding you were the one it liked, and you never had to do a single thing to get any of it, and you have spent your entire life apologizing for it.” She was not crying.
I would have preferred crying. “I have had to be excellent at everything since I was fifteen. You just stood there and it came.”
I did not shout.
“You slept with my boyfriend,” I said, “and then you sat outside my husband’s office with a notebook for a season, and you have just stood in Ruth Folger’s garden and told me it was because I had a mom who did chowder.”
“That’s not-”
“It’s exactly what you said. You’ve dressed it up beautifully and that is what you said.” My voice had gone somewhere flat and I let it stay there. “And here is the bit you’re going to have to take on the ferry with you, and I’m only saying it once.”
“Willow-”
“He forgot.”
She stopped.
“That’s the bit,” I said. “He knew you were my best friend. But he always forgot that you and I had a childhood.”
“That’s not-”
“He apologized, Krystal.” I got a breath. “You are not a woman he did not notice. You are a fact he mislaid.”
She did not say anything.
“He has never wondered about you once,” I said.
“Not one time in a whole season. He never asked why we don’t speak, because it did not occur to him that there was a why, and I have been standing behind that all this time thinking it made him a fool, and it does.
It makes him an absolute fool and I have told him so. ”
“Then why-”
“Because it is also the thing that has kept you safe, and you have used it, and you knew you were using it.” I did not move off that step.
“You have spent your whole life wanting a man who has never once been curious about you. That’s not me winning.
I take absolutely no pleasure in it. It’s just what happened, and you have paid for it, and there is nothing at the end of it. ”
She said, “You could have told him how I took Cody.”
“What?”
“Any time in that whole season. One sentence in that hallway and I’d have been off that island in two weeks and you’d have had him back by Christmas.
” She had her arms crossed against the wind again.
“You didn’t. So don’t stand on that step and be the reasonable one, because you had it the whole time and you sat on it, and I have never once worked out why. ”
“No,” I said. “You wouldn’t understand it and I’m not explaining it in a lane. As much as it hurts, you’re not the entire problem. Yes, you have a habit of taking what’s not yours but he has to work on a lot of things.”
“Willow-”
“Get the boat.”
She went.
That is the entire ending. She stood there for a moment longer and worked out that there was nothing available to her, and walked down that path and got in the car.
Nobody told her to get lost. Nobody made a speech at her in a room full of people. No Folger did one single thing about any of it.
I shut the door and stood with my back against it, and I was shaking, and I was not sad.
My son came out into the hall with the boat in both arms.
“Mama. Wet.”
“What’s wet, baby?”
“Duck wet.”
“Which Duck?”
“Boat Duck.”
“The boat’s meant to be wet, baby. That’s what it’s for.”
And I got down on my knees on Ruth Folger’s floor and put my forehead on the top of his head, and let him wriggle out of it after a second the way he does.
Right, I thought. Now the other thing. The one that’s actually mine.