Chapter 16
She asked him for it on the twelfth of June, in one line, and she did not route it through Lydia.
I want the whole truth about the seven weeks. Not an apology. The actual reason. Thursday, my place, whenever you can get here.
He wrote back in four minutes.
Yes. I’ll be there at seven. I’d like to say one thing first so it’s not a surprise: I’m going to be worse in this conversation than you are expecting, and I’d rather you knew that before you opened the door.
She read that four times.
* * *
Her parents had come up on the Monday and taken a room at an inn two streets over, because Celia had said, and meant, that four hundred and ten square feet was not going to hold five people and a folding chair.
Her father spent Tuesday putting a shelf up that she did not need, because he had gone quietly out of his mind with nothing to do, and on the Wednesday he brought the thing from the garage.
It was a crib.
He had made it out of cherry and had sanded it, by her mother’s count, six times, and he carried it up the outside staircase himself in two pieces and would not let anybody help, and then he put it together in the corner of the bedroom in about forty minutes with his own screwdriver.
“It’s not much,” Ellis said.
Celia stood in a doorway with her hand over her mouth.
“Dad.”
“There’s a bit on the back where the grain went wrong. I’d have started again but your mother said there wasn’t time.”
“There wasn’t,” said Roberta, from the kitchen.
“So there’s a bit on the back.”
Celia got down — carefully, with a hand on the frame — and looked at the back of it, and found the place where the grain went wrong, and put her thumb on it.
“It’s the best thing anyone’s ever given me,” she said.
Her father went slightly red and said something about the varnish.
That was Wednesday. On Thursday at six o’clock her mother said, “We’ll be at the inn,” in a voice that was not asking a single question, and took Ellis away, and Celia was alone at seven when Lawrence knocked.
* * *
He looked terrible again — not thin now, he had stopped losing it, but grayed out, like a man who had not been sleeping and had stopped pretending otherwise.
He came in. He saw the crib through the bedroom door, because it was four rooms and there was nowhere for it not to be, and he stopped for a second and then made himself keep going, and did not say anything about it, and sat down at the table by the good windows.
“Do you want anything?”
“No. Thank you.”
“All right.” Celia sat down across from him. “Then go.”
* * *
“Sienna asked me questions,” Lawrence said.
He said it looking at the table, and then he made himself look up, and he kept looking at her for the rest of it, which she had not expected and which was much worse.
“That’s it. That’s the whole of it and I’ve had eight months to find something better underneath and there isn’t anything. She asked me questions and she was interested in the answers, and I liked being a man who had answers.”
“Go on.”
“You have to understand what I was by then.” His hands were flat on the wood.
“I was forty-five years old and I had a company that ran itself and a father who thought I was a disappointment in a way he’d never say out loud, and I had a wife who was better than me at every single thing that mattered and who had stopped—”
He stopped.
“Say it,” Celia said.
“Who had stopped asking me anything,” he said.
The room was very quiet.
“That’s not an accusation. I want to be extremely clear, because I know how it sounds and I know what it sounded like on a recording.
” His jaw was tight. “You stopped asking me things because for about four years I’d been answering you badly.
You’d ask about the deal and I’d say it’s boring, and you’d ask about my father and I’d change the subject, and you did that maybe two hundred times and then, quite reasonably, you stopped.
I trained you out of it. And then I stood in my own kitchen and experienced the silence I had built as something that was happening to me. ”
Celia sat with her hands in her lap and did not say anything.
“So she asked me things,” Lawrence said.
“About the deal, about my father, about the company. And it was the easiest thing in the world, because there was no history in it. She didn’t know what I was like at thirty.
She hadn’t watched me be wrong about anything.
I could be interesting for an hour a night at no cost.” He turned his hands over.
“That’s what it was. It wasn’t desire and it wasn’t love and I never wanted her, and I have thought about that a great deal because it would honestly be a better story if I had.
It was vanity. Seven weeks of vanity at two in the morning. ”
“And the word.”
“Yes.”
“Say why.”
He took a breath.
“Because saying I settled made it sound like I’d chosen,” Lawrence said.
Celia went completely still.
“That’s the answer,” he said. “That’s the ugly one and it took me until about February to get to it.
I have been the man who married Celia Keswick for nine years.
Everybody in every room we have ever walked into has known that you were the interesting one and I was the money.
Your buildings, your eye, the way three hundred people go oh in a garden — I have watched people work out where the value was in that marriage since about 2018, and I have watched them be very careful not to say it. ”
He stopped and made himself go on.
“So at two in the morning, to a woman who didn’t know anything, I told her I settled.
Because a man who settled is a man who chose down.
It made me the one with the power.” His voice went, slightly, and he brought it back.
“I made myself sound like I’d condescended to marry you, in order to sound like the one who’d had options. And then she pressed record.”
Celia found that her hands had gone entirely numb.
“That’s the truth,” Lawrence said. “There isn’t a version underneath it. I wasn’t unhappy, I wasn’t neglected, you hadn’t done anything. I was a small man in a big house being flattered by a stranger and I paid for it with the only currency I had, which was you.”
* * *
“Now the nine years,” he said.
“I didn’t ask for—”
“I know. I’m doing it anyway, and then I’ll go.
” He put his hands flat again. “Your birthday, two years ago. I came in at nine and there were two plates on the table and I said is that today. I remember it. I’ve remembered it the entire time.
I told myself for two years that you weren’t bothered because you said it didn’t matter, and I knew when you said it that it wasn’t true, and I let you say it because it cost me nothing to let you. ”
“Lawrence—”
“The Denham party. You stood at the window by the terrace doors for two hours and I went past you three times. I don’t remember it.
That’s the thing I want to say about that one: I have gone looking, and it isn’t there, and the fact that it isn’t there is the whole indictment.
” He did not blink. “You were in a room where I could see you for two hours and it did not make an impression on me. There’s no forgiving that. I’m not asking you to.”
Celia’s eyes were streaming and she did not wipe them.
“The nights you waited up,” he said. “You used to turn the light off before I came in. I knew you were awake. I’ve known that for about six years.
” His mouth twisted. “I let you do it because if the light was off I didn’t have to have the conversation.
Every single night that happened, I chose it.
I want that said out loud in a room by the person who did it, once, so it isn’t something you’re carrying on your own. ”
“Stop.”
“Do you want me to stop?”
“No,” Celia said.
“Then the studio.” He took a breath. “Rockport. You called and said you were pushing the site visit because of Lisbon, and I said great, and I have thought about that phone call more than anything else in nine years.” He looked down at his hands for the first time.
“Because I could have said don’t. One word.
I could have said don’t push it, go, I’ll go to Lisbon on my own or we’ll go in March.
And I didn’t say it, and I’ve had eight months to work out why, and the answer is that I liked the version of us where I was the reason. ”
The apartment was so quiet she could hear the refrigerator.
“I didn’t take it from you,” he said. “You’ve been very fair about that and you’re right and I want to be more precise than you’ve been. I didn’t take it. I just made sure it was always slightly easier for you to give it up, and I did that for years, and I let you believe you were choosing.”
* * *
“There’s one I have to do properly,” he said, “and then I’ll stop, and it’s the one you didn’t put on your list.”
Celia waited.
“The nine minutes at the end of the file.”
“Don’t.”
“You asked for the whole truth.”
“I asked about the seven weeks.” Her voice came out thinner than she wanted. “That one I’ve done. I did that one on a bathroom floor in April and I don’t need—”
“I know what I did with the bank,” Lawrence said.
She stopped.
“You told me that in the dark in 2018 and it took you about four minutes to get it out and you never said it again.” He was very white.
“And I gave it away at half past one in the morning because it was the best thing I had. That’s the accurate word.
Not the funniest, not the fondest — the best. It was the most valuable thing in the room and I spent it, and I knew exactly what it was worth, which is why I picked it. ”
Celia had her hand over her mouth.
“That’s what I’d been doing for nine years,” he said.
“Not that night. All of it. Every dinner where I told a story about you and everybody laughed and you smiled at your plate. My father does that. I watched him do it to my mother for thirty years at that table and I would have told you, absolutely sincerely, that I was nothing like him, and the whole time I was doing the identical thing with better manners.”
“Margaret said that.”
“Margaret’s said it to me twice.” His mouth moved. “She’s braver than both of us.”
Celia looked at the table for a long moment.
“You understand there’s no answer to that,” she said. “There’s no thing you can say that puts it back. She’s in Ohio. Somebody in Ohio knows.”
“Yes.”
“You don’t get to fix that one.”
“No,” Lawrence said. “That one I just have to have done.”
* * *
“I’m not going to apologize,” Lawrence said.
Celia looked up.
“I’ve written about forty of them. There’s a drawer in that gatehouse full of them.
” He almost smiled and it did not work. “And I worked out in about March that an apology is a thing you hand somebody and then stand there waiting for them to accept, and that I’d be doing it for me.
So I’m not going to. You know what I did.
Now you know why. That’s all I actually have that’s worth anything. ”
He stood up.
“Wait—”
“There’s one more thing and then I’m going, because I’m about four minutes from asking you for something and I’d like to leave before I do.
” He picked his coat up off the back of the chair.
“You’ll hear about the trust. You already have.
You’ll hear about the boathouse and the foundation and Marty and my father, and people will tell you those things for the rest of your life because they’re the kind of thing people tell. ”
“Lawrence.”
“None of it was for you.” He said it evenly.
“I want that on the record in this room, tonight, from me, because if I don’t say it now then in ten years it becomes a thing I did for you and you owe me for.
I did all of it because I sat in a small house for six months and worked out that I was the fourth generation of a family who does this, and that my mother died in that house in Rhinebeck, and that if I didn’t take a hammer to the whole arrangement I would do it again to somebody else.
Probably to a daughter.” His voice went and this time he let it.
“I did it so I could stand it. Not so you’d come back.
You were never coming back. I’ve known that since October and I’ve made my peace with it and I’d rather you never felt one ounce of obligation about a single thing I’ve done since. ”
He put his coat over his arm.
“That’s it,” he said. “That’s the whole truth and there isn’t any more of it. Thank you for letting me say it in a room instead of on a recording.”
And he went to the door.
* * *
“Sit down,” Celia said.
He stopped with his hand on the latch.
“Celia—”
“Sit down, Lawrence.” She was crying and her voice was completely steady, which she would think about later. “You don’t get to do that. You don’t get to say all of that and then decide the conversation’s over because you’ve finished the part you rehearsed.”
He turned around.
“You’ve just spent forty minutes telling me the truth,” she said, “and I have wanted that for nine years and I did not get it once, not once, not even at the end, and you’ve just done it standing in my kitchen while I’m twelve days from having your daughter and you were going to walk out of the door as if you’d delivered a package. ”
“I didn’t want to—”
“I know what you didn’t want. You didn’t want to ask me for anything.
You’ve been extremely careful about that for eight months and it’s the single reason I’m still in this room.
” She put both hands flat on the table. “But there’s a difference between not asking and not staying, and you’ve just done the second one, and I’d like you to sit down. ”
He sat down.
He sat down and put his hands on the table and did not say anything, and looked at her, and waited.
And Celia sat in a rented room above a hardware store on the twelfth of June with the light going outside and understood, with total and terrifying clarity, that she had a choice now.
Not an obligation. Not a pull. Not a habit, not exhaustion, not a baby twelve days out, not nine years of being trained to make things easier.
A choice — an actual one, between two whole lives, both of which she could see all the way to the end of, and both of which were good.
That was what he had given her by telling the truth. He had taken away every reason she had left to say no that wasn’t just no.
“I’m not going to answer you tonight,” she said.
“I haven’t asked you anything.”
“No,” Celia said. “You haven’t. That’s exactly what I’m going to have to think about.”