7. Dulcie
DULCIE
My father opens the door holding a lampshade.
“Don’t ask,” he says.
“I wasn’t going to.”
“Your mother says it makes the room yellow. I’ve explained that the room is yellow.”
From the kitchen, Mom calls, “It makes it more yellow.”
Dad looks at me with solemn resignation. I laugh before I can help it, and the laugh catches in my throat halfway out.
He puts the lampshade down.
My father, Giles, is a man who likes to have something useful in his hands. A screwdriver, a cup of coffee he can offer, the handle of a bag somebody else is struggling to carry. He takes my school bag now without asking why I have brought it on a day I am not working.
“Come in, sweetheart.”
I fill most of their narrow entryway. Dad waits while I turn and shut the door. He does not hurry me. That small absence of pressure makes my eyes burn.
Mom is making soup. She switches off the heat when she sees my face.
“Sit down. Tea?”
“Water, please.”
She brings it, then pulls out the chair beside mine. Dad sits across from us with his hands empty on the table.
I had prepared a sensible beginning on the way over. Something about needing to look at my options, something that would keep them from thinking the worst before I could explain.
Instead I say, “I don’t know how to keep living there.”
Mom’s face changes. She doesn’t look surprised enough, and that hurts in a different place.
“What happened?” Dad asks.
I start with the cup, although Mom has heard some of it already. Benedict, Cressida’s father. Magnus approving it. The assistant waiting for Cressida’s instructions. I tell them about the book and have to stop twice before I get through the second time he put it on the shelf.
Dad shifts his chair back a little. He has not stood up, but I can see him wanting to.
Then I tell them about the school.
“He did what?”
“The director checked with me. I still have my job.”
“You shouldn’t have had to defend it.”
“I know.”
I say the words easily enough here. At home, every certainty seems to require evidence Magnus can reject.
When I explain the rooms and the visiting hours, Mom sets her cup down very carefully.
“Did you ask him to stop?” she says.
“Yes.”
“What did he say?”
“That I’d appreciate it afterward.”
Neither of them answers for a moment.
The refrigerator hums. Outside, somebody starts a lawn mower, stops it, tries again. The ordinary sounds make the things I am saying seem both more terrible and easier to believe.
“I still love him,” I say.
I am looking at Dad because I am more afraid of disappointing him. He was worried when Magnus and I got engaged. He asked me whether I felt free to tell a man like that no. I said he didn’t know Magnus as I did.
Dad reaches across the table and covers my hand.
“I know you do.”
“You don’t have to tell me you were right.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
Mom pulls a tissue from the box by the window and puts it beside my glass. She doesn’t push it into my hand.
“You can stay here,” she says. “For as long as you need.”
“You haven’t got room for all the baby things.”
“We can move things.”
“I don’t want you both climbing over a crib to get to the washing machine.”
Dad considers this. “We’d probably stop doing laundry. Might be a relief.”
I wipe my face. The laugh hurts less this time.
“I want to know I could manage,” I say. “If I had to leave properly. I want somewhere that’s mine.”
“There’s a small place two streets over,” Dad says. “The owner’s been getting it ready between tenants. I saw her carrying a box out yesterday.”
Mom looks at him. “The one with the blue door?”
“Yes.”
They talk about a house I could live in with the same practical attention they gave the lampshade. They understand what I would be losing, but the loss does not make a place for me impossible.
I open the figures on my phone.
We look at my savings, the wages I will still receive before leave, the return I have confirmed with the school. Dad gets a piece of paper. Mom refuses to let me call a temporary contribution from them a disaster.
“You’d do it for us,” she says.
“That’s different.”
“Only because you’re the one who needs it this time.”
An hour later, we walk over to see the house.
It is small enough that I can understand it from the doorway. Living room, kitchen beyond, stairs against one wall. Upstairs, a bedroom for me and a little room that will take a crib and a chair if I am careful.
There is no marble. The paint on the banister has worn smooth where other hands have used it. When I open the bedroom window, I hear a bus pass on the next street.
Dad stands behind me. “What do you think?”
“I could put the crib in there.”
“Yes.”
“And keep a little basket beside my bed for the things I need at night.”
“Of course.”
Nobody mentions where Cressida would sit.
The owner talks through the deposit and start date downstairs. I ask her to repeat the amount so I can write it down. It takes most of the courage I have left to say that I want the place.
We agree on a start after Dorothea’s family lunch next week. I can stay with my parents for the few days between if I need to. The reservation is made in my name.
On the way back, Dad asks where I’d put a lamp in the living room.
“Beside the chair, I think.”
“Then I’ll find you a table that fits.”
I have to stop walking.
“What is it?” he asks.
“Nothing. Give me a second.”
He stands beside me until I can move again.
Arthur calls while I am still at my parents’ house.
Magnus’s grandfather always asks whether it is a good time, and always sounds slightly suspicious when I say yes. He has the habit of a man who knows people rearrange themselves around him and would rather they admitted it.
“How’s the family book?”
“We’ve got three cats so far. Two drawn larger than the parents.”
“Sensible priorities.”
“One grandmother’s getting a page of her own.”
“Quite right. Perhaps I should apply.”
I smile down at my glass. I told him about the project on our last call, and he has remembered the part that mattered to me.
He asks after Giles. They sat together at the wedding, and Arthur has asked about him on every call since, as if a man who argues with lampshades is the relative worth keeping track of.
Then he asks after the baby. I tell him six weeks to go.
He says his own birthday will be a noisier occasion this year if I bring a new great-grandson to it.
“Dorothea’s already discussing lunch arrangements,” he adds. “Apparently the house needs doing over whenever I get older.”
“Not your house?”
“She likes to host the family gatherings. I’m allowed to turn up.”
He lives separately, in a house I have visited for tea, where he complains about his television and remembers to ask me about things other than pregnancy.
After Magnus’s father died, he let Dorothea, his son’s widow, take over the family foundation.
He has never sounded sorry to be free of the meetings.
I could tell him something now. I could ask him to speak to Magnus.
But I don’t want another person asking my husband to let me decide what happens in my own life.
“We’ll talk nearer the time,” I say.
“Good. Look after yourself, Dulcie.”
After the call, Mom notices the page still open in my notebook. Beneath the figures for the rental is my baby-name list.
Kit is at the top.
It was her father’s name. His real name, on his birth certificate, not short for Christopher or anything grander. I remember him teaching me to whistle through a gap in my front teeth and pretending not to notice that mostly I sprayed him with spit.
Mom touches the edge of the notebook. She says nothing.
“Don’t,” I whisper. “I’ll start crying again.”
She squeezes my shoulder instead.
Back at the brownstone, I take a green picture book from my shelf. A duck in too-large rain boots looks solemnly out at me from the cover. I bought it for my baby with money from my own account, and nobody else knows how many times I have read it aloud to my belly.
I put it in a tote bag with my notebook.
There is one more conversation I want to try with my husband before I use the address written inside it. I leave the bag where I can reach it.