CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Wren
The dress arrives Friday at six with a man in a van who does not make eye contact.
"I look like a lamp," I say.
"You look incredible and you know you look incredible," Mari says through a mouthful of pins. "Turn."
"Why does it have to be a dress, why can't I go in what I—"
"Because you're not going to a meeting, you're going to a court, and courts run on theatre." She spits the pins into her hand. "You've done a hundred funerals, Wren. Same rules. Look like you belong and nobody asks who invited you."
She does my hair up off my neck, which I object to, and she says "that's the point, mahal, you're showing them a claim, you don't hide the throat," and I sit down on the edge of the bath because my legs have gone.
"Hey." She crouches in front of me. "Hey. Look at me."
"I'm fine."
"You're grey."
"I'm fine, I'm — Mari, ten days ago the worst thing in my life was the van insurance."
"I know."
"And now I'm putting on a cocktail dress to go into a basement and be looked at by eleven—" My voice goes. I put my hands over my mouth and breathe through it and Mari holds my knees and waits, because she knows exactly how long it takes and she never once tries to shorten it.
"Okay," I say eventually.
"Okay?"
"Okay." I wipe under my eyes with the side of my thumb. "How's the eyeliner?"
"Perfect. You're a monument." She stands up and pulls me with her. "One thing."
"What?"
"When you're down there." Her face has gone completely serious. "Whatever they offer you — and somebody's going to offer you something, because you're the only thing in the room they all want — you say I'll have to ask Cassius."
"I'm not going to say I'll have to ask a man—"
"You're going to say it exactly like that, in that voice, like it's beneath you to even think about it.
" Mari straightens my shoulder seam. "Because the second they think you can be bought separately from him, you're not claimed, you're available.
" She pats my arm. "Also it'll drive him insane and I want that for him. "
◆ ◆ ◆
Cassius is waiting at the bottom of the stairs in a black suit with no tie, and when I come down he looks up, and stops.
Just stops. Whole body. Like a machine with the power cut.
"Don't," I say.
"I haven't said anything."
"You did a thing."
"I did not do a thing."
"You did a huge thing, you did an enormous silent thing—" and I have to stop, because he's crossed the hall and he's standing in front of me, close enough that I can feel how much colder than a person he is, and he lifts one hand and doesn't touch me with it.
"May I?" he says.
I nod.
He tucks a loose bit of my hair back behind my ear. That's all. Two fingers, cold, careful as a man handling paper, and then his hand comes away.
"There's a bruise on your wrist," he says quietly. "Don't cover it."
"Right."
"They'll all look at it. Everyone in that room will look at your wrist within four seconds of you coming through the door, and I want them to see a healing one, because it means it's been done and it's been done carefully." His eyes come up to mine. "Can you be furious with me down there?"
"What?"
"If they think you're frightened of me, they'll think you're coerced, and a coerced claim can be voided by petition." He almost smiles. "If they think you're irritated by me, they'll think it's real. Nobody in that room has ever seen a coerced woman roll her eyes."
"Cassius, I can absolutely be irritated by you, that's not going to be the hard part of tonight—"
"Good."
"—that's my baseline—"
"Good," he says again, and opens the door.
◆ ◆ ◆
The drive in takes forty minutes and neither of us can find anything to say for the first thirty.
"Talk to me," I say eventually. "About anything. About the road."
"There was a toll gate where that roundabout is."
"When?"
"1911. A man called Purnell ran it and everybody hated him.
" He takes the turn onto Fenner. "There's been a bakery on this street since 1868.
Three different families. It burned down in 1902 and the man who owned it rebuilt it four feet to the left because he'd always wanted a bigger back room and the fire gave him an excuse. "
"How do you know that?"
"Because I have been walking past it for a hundred and forty years," Cassius says, "and I have never been inside, and I have never once known what it smelled like until three weeks ago."
We stop at the lights. There are people out — it's nine on a Friday, and there's a queue outside a place with a neon sign, and two women in coats arguing cheerfully about a taxi.
"Do you ever want it back?" I say. "Not the — I mean that. Being one of them. Standing in a queue."
He's quiet for a moment.
"Every day for the first hundred years," he says. "Then it stopped, which was worse, and then about six weeks ago it started again, which is the single most inconvenient thing that has ever happened to me."
The lights change.
"Wren."
"Mm."
"In about nine minutes you're going to walk into a room with eight people in it who all believe they're a different order of creature from you.
" He doesn't look over. "They're not. Halloway drinks and does his filing.
Ravensdale has been trying to get a posting to Lisbon since 1974 because he's cold.
Sylvie hasn't left her flat in twenty-eight years and everybody pretends not to notice. They're a committee."
"Is that meant to be reassuring?"
"It's meant to be accurate," he says. "You've spent four years walking into rooms full of frightened people and being the one who's still working. That's all this is. Same job. Worse carpet."
◆ ◆ ◆
The Custom House was built in 1811 by men who wanted to impress other men with money, and it shows. Granite, columns, a clock that stopped in the Depression. The public half is a museum nobody visits.
The other half goes down.
We come in through the harbour door at nine. My heels on the stone. My heart is doing a hundred and six and I know that because Cassius tells me, quietly, on the second landing, and then says, "That's lower than mine would be," which is the single kindest lie anybody has ever told me.
"Rules," he says, going down.
"Don't sit unless you sit. Don't accept a drink. Don't say yes to anything, even small things, especially small things. Don't go through a door with anyone but you."
"And?"
"And if you tell me to leave the room, I leave the room, I don't argue, I don't come back for you." My jaw sets. "I still hate that one."
"I know."
"I want it minuted."
"It's minuted," he says, and the stair turns, and we're there.
The lower hall is the old bonded warehouse: sixty feet of brick vault, iron rings still in the walls where the barrels were chained, gas mantles converted to electricity in 1927 and never touched since.
It's warm, which surprises me. He told me on the drive that she keeps it warm on purpose, and that it's one of the ways she finds out things about you, and I have been thinking about that sentence for forty minutes.
Eight of the eleven are here.
They all turn.
I have walked into a lot of rooms in four years. I have walked into rooms where somebody died three weeks ago and rooms where a family is standing in the hall waiting for me to say something true. I have never walked into a room and had every head in it come round like a field of sunflowers.
Somebody, near the back, breathes in.
And I want to say what that does, because everyone assumes it's fear, and it isn't. It's shame.
For about a second and a half I am the most looked-at object in the world and my whole body wants to fold in on itself and get smaller and apologise, and the thing that saves me is four years of standing in doorways with a clipboard while people who have just lost someone stare at me like I'm the undertaker.
You do the same thing every time. You put your shoulders down and you say the first sentence.
"Cassius," says a small woman in a leather chair, before I can.
She's five foot nothing, white hair cropped like a nun's, a grey cardigan, and a cup of tea steaming on the arm of a chair that's older than the building.
"Matriarch."
"You've brought a guest to a Friday."
"I've brought a claim to a Friday."
And I step up level with him. Not behind.
We didn't discuss it. It's the best thing I do all night.