28. Dulcie
DULCIE
Dad turns off the engine and leaves the keys in his hand.
“Same arrangement?”
“If I say I want to go, we go.”
“Fine.”
He doesn’t ask me to explain why I have chosen to come. We did that twelve days ago, with the complete guest list open between us. Now we are outside Dorothea’s house, and Kit is making a determined attempt to get his fingers out of his sleeve.
I turn in my seat to look at him before opening my door.
Magnus is waiting on the front steps. He comes down when he sees us, greets Dad, and asks whether I want him to carry the bag. I give it to him. Dad gets the door while I lift Kit from the car seat.
Inside, the hall smells of flowers and furniture polish.
For a moment my body forgets that I have come in my father’s car. That Kit is in my arms. That there is nothing left for me to discover about the promises Magnus made.
I stop by the coat table and unfasten one button slowly.
Magnus stays beside me without touching me.
“Arthur’s in the sitting room.”
“I’ll be there in a minute.”
He nods and takes the bag ahead.
Dad waits while I hand over my coat. Then we go in together.
“There you are,” Arthur says.
He is sitting by the window with a cousin beside him. When he begins to rise, I shake my head and cross to him.
“Stay there. We’ve brought the youngest guest to you.”
“Excellent. I approve of guests who come with their own transport.”
Kit looks at him.
Arthur holds out a finger. My son catches it, then tries to eat it.
“A generous assessment,” Arthur says. “At least I seem useful.”
Dad takes the chair offered beside him. Within minutes they are discussing the irritating height at which someone has mounted Arthur’s television. Magnus stands behind me, and I feel him trying not to laugh when Dad asks who agreed to that.
“Apparently I did,” Arthur says. “An error I won’t repeat.”
I sit on the sofa with Kit and let the conversation go around me.
A cousin asks about my return to teaching. I tell her the family book is finished. She wants to know whether the children all managed to fit into it, and I describe the page which unfolds into two homes. Arthur listens, still allowing Kit possession of his finger.
“Did the grandmother get her page?”
“She did.”
“Good. I’ve been concerned.”
Someone brings water. Someone else asks Dad if he would like coffee. For a few minutes there is no test hidden inside being here.
Arthur asks Dad about the crib he assembled. Dad tells him there was one piece the instructions appeared to have mistaken for another, and I correct him because I remember being right about it.
Magnus asks which piece. The conversation becomes absurdly detailed. I listen with Kit against me, pleased by how ordinary my father’s voice sounds in this room when nobody is trying to make him feel grateful for entering it.
Magnus takes the chair beside the sofa when it becomes free. Kit turns at his voice. We both notice, then look at each other with the same foolish pleasure.
Dorothea enters before either of us speaks.
“So this is our visitor.”
She looks down at Kit. It is the first time she has seen him in person. Her gaze moves over his face with an intentness I recognize from Magnus’s first visit, but she does not ask me how I am.
“He has the Ludlow eyes.”
“He has his own,” Dad says pleasantly.
Arthur laughs.
Dorothea’s mouth tightens. Then she greets another guest, and the little pressure in the room disperses.
Cressida is near the far doorway.
I saw her when we came in. She saw me see her. Neither of us has approached. Now she crosses to wish Arthur happy birthday, bending to kiss his cheek before taking the place beside Dorothea.
She wears a soft gray dress, beautifully cut. I notice it as I might notice a painting I don’t want in my home. The old impulse to measure myself against her has less room while Kit is trying to rub his face against my sleeve.
I take him upstairs to the quiet room Magnus showed me on a previous family visit. Dad carries the bag and waits in the hall. I feed Kit, change him, and spend a few minutes alone with the ordinary work of being his mother.
When we return, the guests have begun moving toward the larger drawing room.
A photographer stands by the windows adjusting a light.
“Family photographs before lunch,” Dorothea announces. “While everyone is still together.”
I look at Magnus. He moves toward me from the other side of the room.
Arthur is placed in a chair first. He makes a joke about having been arranged often enough today, and a few people laugh. The photographer takes a picture of him alone, then one with two relatives who have come from out of town.
I stay near Dad, Kit against my shoulder.
Dorothea beckons Magnus closer.
“One of the younger generation now. Cressida, beside him.”
Cressida steps forward immediately.
The photographer glances from her to Magnus, then toward me. I feel the room narrowing to the distance between my arms and theirs.
“Give Magnus the baby, Dulcie,” Dorothea says. “Then move over here.”
She points beside the light stand, out of the frame.
“No.”
Magnus moves at the same time I speak. He steps between Cressida and the camera, his hand raised toward the photographer.
“Stop. Lower it.”
The camera comes down before the man takes a picture.
Kit shifts against me. I support his head and stay where I am. Nobody has touched him. Nobody is going to.
Dorothea looks at Magnus with open disbelief.
“It’s a photograph of the Ludlow heir with the family.”
“Then you shouldn’t be asking his mother to step aside,” I say.
“You can remain his mother without insisting on a place you cannot fill.”
The contempt is familiar enough to make my face hot before I can answer. Behind me, Dad sets the baby bag on a chair. He stands at my shoulder.
Magnus turns toward his mother. “She doesn’t have to justify her place to you.”
“Oh, please,” Cressida says. “We all know who was supposed to be standing here.”
Her hand goes to Magnus’s sleeve. He steps away before she can take hold.
She looks at the space he has made, then at me.
“A few difficult months don’t erase years, Dulcie.”
“I know exactly what he promised you.”
“Then you know this isn’t something I invented.”
“I know you agreed to a future which required me not to know about it.”
Her cheeks color. The photographer lowers his light a little and looks toward Dorothea, waiting for instructions he clearly no longer wants.
Magnus tells him there will be no more photographs involving us. The man turns the camera off.
Cressida takes her phone from the small bag at her wrist.
“He doesn’t get to tell a different story now because you’re here.”
She touches the screen with a precise, angry movement. I recognize the thread when she turns it outward. The dates. The short block of words I read at my kitchen table.
My stomach contracts, although there is nothing in her hand that I haven’t already seen.
“Let them hear it,” she says to Magnus. “Let your family hear what you told me.”
He looks at the phone.
Then he looks at her.
“All right.”