15. Magnus
MAGNUS
Cressida asks for a date before she asks why I called.
“I’ve given you six days to sort out whatever she told you.”
“You went to her house.”
“Yes. We’ve established that.”
“Without speaking to me.”
“I spoke to your mother. She thought someone should explain that walking out doesn’t change everything.”
I stand at the office window. Below, two people are trying to carry an enormous framed picture through a revolving door. One of them steps backward each time the other steps forward. Neither seems willing to put it down.
“What did you expect to accomplish?” I ask.
“I told her the truth.”
“You told her what you wanted.”
“What you promised.”
I say nothing.
Dulcie asked me the same thing after the visit. I told her I would decide what happened, that Cressida had no business conducting negotiations at her house. When she asked how my mother had the address, I admitted giving it to her. I had wanted another person to see how inadequate the place was.
Dulcie said, “You wanted her to agree with you about my home.”
Then she ended the call.
I have received only short practical answers since. An appointment went well. She is still working the agreed days before leave. Yes, she has what she needs. No, she does not want anything brought over.
“She’s thirty-seven weeks now,” Cressida says. “We are running out of reasons to postpone the conversation.”
“The pregnancy is not a deadline you set.”
“You set it. I’m asking you to honor it.”
“I’m not discussing a date today.”
“Then when?”
“There are other things to resolve.”
“Such as getting her back into your bed?”
My hand closes around the phone. “Be careful.”
“I have been careful. You told me to be patient, so I watched her become your wife. I asked for something definite, and you gave me a name on a cup. Now she’s gone and you’re still asking me to wait.”
“I didn’t ask you to go to her.”
“No. You prefer everyone to wait in the rooms you put them in.”
I turn away from the window.
“She won’t be discussing this with you again,” I say.
“Then you need to discuss it with me.”
I end the call before she can ask the same question another way. There is no answer I want to give her.
At my desk, an amended proposal waits for my signature. Someone has attached the wrong image to a specification sheet. A part intended for one of our production lines is illustrated with a photograph of a garden gnome.
Beneath it is the proof for the foundation’s next program. My name sits under my mother’s, with a blank where the paragraph about my father’s work should be. The administrator has asked for it twice. I put the proposal on top of it.
I reach for my phone.
Dulcie would ask whether it came with its own safety hat. She would invent a history for it while I told her I was trying to work. By the time I hung up, I would be smiling in spite of myself.
Her message thread opens beneath my thumb.
I have what I need. Thank you.
I look at the photograph I was about to send. I can imagine her showing it to Giles. Laughing with him in the little kitchen I inspected as though nobody could be happy there.
She could have a good afternoon, and I would not know.
I put the phone down without sending anything.
The proposal receives its signature. The next meeting starts on time.
A man across the table tries to explain a delay with the same explanation he used last month, and I stop him before he finishes.
Nothing about the work has become more difficult.
I simply find myself looking at the door after he leaves.
There is nobody I want to tell about any of it.
At home, the refrigerator contains food I have not asked for and cannot remember choosing.
Dulcie used to put things at the front that needed eating. She would tell me the yogurt was conducting a long experiment in optimism. I would tell her to throw it out, and she would ask why I thought everything with a difficult personality needed to be removed.
I close the door.
The kitchen is clean. The house is running. My shirts appear in the closet. Dinner can arrive with one call. Every practical thing I thought she would miss is still here, doing nothing to make me want to stay in the room.
In the sitting room, the gaps on the shelves are more disturbing than an empty shelf would be. I remember her standing with a novel open, reading something aloud because she wanted me to dislike the same sentence she disliked. I told her I was busy. She read it anyway.
I had an opinion. We argued about it for ten minutes. She called me impossible and sat beside me with her feet tucked beneath her.
I want that argument.
I want to know whether the cardboard houses survived, whether the child who wouldn’t draw his family has started, whether her back hurts this evening. Not a report from her mother. Her voice, taking time over something because she expects me to listen.
My phone rings. Cressida again.
I answer because avoiding her will not make this simpler.
“My mother’s friends are having dinner next month,” she says. “We should go together.”
“The baby could be here by then.”
“Yes. That’s rather the point. We can stop behaving as though being seen together is some new development nobody could have anticipated.”
I picture it. Cressida beside me in a room of people who know the history we have chosen to tell. Dulcie somewhere else with our son. A car bringing him between houses. My life continuing in the form I had once considered sensible.
I can barely breathe through the force of not wanting it.
“Magnus?”
“I’m not agreeing to dinner.”
“It’s dinner.”
“I heard you.”
Her silence sharpens. “You need to decide what you want.”
After she hangs up, I remain standing beside the sofa.
I know what I want. The knowledge has been growing through every room I have entered since Dulcie left, and I have kept trying to call it something I could fix with an address or a schedule.
I love her.
The thought gives me no relief. It arrives with the exact image of her putting down the wedding band, working it over her swollen knuckle while I told her she was upset.
She was leaving the man who had asked her to build a family with him. I was still explaining the arrangements.
I sit where she sat that night after the jeweler. I remember her hand closing in my shirt. How easily I could make her lean toward me. I had mistaken her wanting me for something that would always be there when I needed it.
She can stop. She can have our son, return to her school, tell her father the things that make her laugh. There is no part of that life which requires her to love me.
I cannot accept becoming a visitor to it.
I open her thread and write that I need to speak to her. Then I erase need and ask when I can come.
Her answer takes twenty minutes.
The afternoon after tomorrow. Just you.
Yes.
I read the exchange again. She has agreed to see me. This time I will give her the answer she has been asking for. This time she will know I want the marriage too.