3. Magnus
MAGNUS
The supplier’s proposal for our manufacturing plants is three weeks late and twelve percent over the figure I approved.
I ask which part of that he expects me to accept.
Across the conference table, he begins explaining the difficulty of coordinating deliveries. I let him finish. Then I move the schedule back toward him and point to the dates his own people supplied.
“Choose what you can commit to,” I say. “Then honor it.”
By eleven, we have a workable agreement.
I leave the office irritated that the simplest decisions at home take longer.
Dulcie was gone before I came downstairs this morning. Her usual cup was drying beside the sink. The guest-room door stood open, the bed made so neatly that she might never have used it. She answered my message about dinner with a short assurance that she would be home.
Nothing about last night.
She can maintain the silence if she wants to. I am not going to apologize for a gift.
The silver cup is in its box on the seat beside me. I brought it out of the house rather than leave it where she could send it back. My mother can keep it until Dulcie has stopped treating the engraving as an assault.
At the Brookline house, Cressida’s car is already outside.
She is waiting in the drawing room with my mother, one leg crossed over the other, her phone resting on her knee. She looks at the box before she looks at me.
“She refused to keep it?”
“She hasn’t returned it.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
I set it on the low table. “Mother will keep it for now.”
My mother lifts the lid and checks the cup. Dorothea Ludlow rarely lets an opportunity pass to inspect how someone else has handled what belongs to the family.
“It’s a pity,” she says. “Such a lovely gesture, spoiled.”
Cressida doesn’t take the offered consolation.
“You said this would be settled.”
“It is settled.”
“Then why am I looking at it here?”
I remove my coat and lay it across the back of a chair. “Because my wife is thirty-two weeks pregnant and has decided that objecting to you is an assertion of independence.”
“Is that what you think it is?”
“What else would it be?”
She holds my gaze. She has always been good at refusing the easy answer when she wants something more expensive.
“I have been asking you for a year, Magnus.”
“And the child isn’t born.”
“Which is why there was supposed to be something definite by now.”
My mother puts the cup back in the box, leaving the lid open. The name catches the light between us.
Cressida and I ended what we had before I asked Dulcie to dinner the first time. I have not taken her to bed since. Whatever she is waiting for, it isn’t that.
I know what I said to her. I said it before the wedding, and I meant it, and the timing of it was always mine to decide. I’m not going over it now, with the cup on the table between us.
“Nothing has changed,” I tell Cressida.
“You enjoy being married to her.”
“I didn’t choose someone I would dislike living with.”
My mother makes a small approving sound. “Dulcie has many useful qualities.”
She does. She fills the house with conversation, remembers what I eat when I’m working late, reaches for me in bed without making me guess whether I am wanted.
She looks pleased when I come home. The pleasure of that is difficult to replace, and I have no reason to hurry while the existing arrangement suits me.
Cressida knows enough of this to be impatient. She doesn’t know all of it.
“Useful,” she repeats. “Then perhaps she could remember that the rest of us have been accommodating her too.”
“She doesn’t know what you’re waiting for.”
“No. Because you haven’t told her.”
“I’ll tell her when the time is right.”
“When you decide she can bear it?”
“When I decide it’s necessary.”
Cressida uncrosses her legs. “I kept your messages, Magnus. All of them. I don’t need you to explain what you meant before the wedding. I need you to do it.”
I know the messages she means. I wrote them to reassure her while I was asking another woman to marry me. They were explicit enough that she has never needed to ask whether I promised her a future. Her questions are always about when she gets it.
“Dulcie will not decide what happens between us,” I say.
Cressida studies my face. Then she reaches for her phone.
“The book is ready.”
“What book?” my mother asks, although I know she has seen the drawings.
“The one for Benedict.” Cressida turns the screen toward her. “The dedication came out beautifully.”
A personalized storybook. His name on the cover, Cressida’s place in his life on the opening page. It was her next request after the cup. The name for her father, then a formal relationship with my son while she waits.
She wants evidence that the promise is becoming a life.
“When do you intend to give it to her?” I ask.
“To both of you. Next week.”
“Dulcie won’t like it.”
“Then I suggest you explain that your son can have a godmother without her permission.”
My mother sets down her cup. “If every family decision waits for Dulcie to feel comfortable, nothing will happen. She’s accustomed to a much smaller world. She needs to learn how to live in this one.”
There is no reason to turn a dedication into another week of argument.
“Bring it,” I tell Cressida.
“And it stays?”
“It stays.”
She sends me the delivery notice while I am still standing in front of her. My phone vibrates in my pocket.
For the first time since I arrived, she smiles.
I put the lid back on the cup’s box. “Keep this somewhere safe.”
My mother takes it. Cressida looks down at her screen, already choosing the time she will come to my house.