30. Magnus
MAGNUS
My name is gone from the foundation program by the following afternoon.
The revised copy arrives from an administrator with a polite note about changes to the speaking order. My mother’s name remains at the top. The place beneath it, where I was expected to speak about my father’s work, belongs to someone else.
I read the name, then the note again.
At the office, nothing has stopped. The manufacturing report is on my desk. Someone needs my answer about a supplier. The money I control hasn’t vanished because my mother has decided I no longer represent the family properly.
It would be easier if the loss were something I could enter in a column.
I call the administrator and confirm that I will not attend in any formal capacity. The funding already committed remains committed. I ask for the outstanding obligations in writing so they can be completed without my continued presence.
She sounds relieved to have a practical answer.
My mother calls before I have put the phone down.
“You seem eager to make this permanent.”
“You removed the role.”
“I gave you a chance to consider what matters.”
I look at the revised program. My father used to keep these things in a drawer.
Invitations, menus, the paper evidence of occasions he had attended and forgotten to describe to anyone at home.
After his death, my mother took over the foundation and I began appearing beside her.
I had treated it as a place which would always exist for me.
“I’ve considered it.”
“You could come to dinner. Alone. We could discuss how to put this right.”
“What would putting it right require?”
“A little loyalty. An acknowledgment that you let an emotional situation get out of hand.”
“Dulcie wasn’t the person who arranged the photograph.”
“You didn’t have to humiliate everyone over it.”
“I should have stopped it without needing years of reasons to do so.”
She falls silent. I can hear a door closing at her end, then the change in her voice when she is certain nobody else is listening.
“Your father wouldn’t have recognized that performance.”
I close my eyes.
The familiar answer is waiting. I could tell her it was badly handled. I could separate the manner from the substance until there is enough apology in the conversation for her to invite me home. I have spent most of my life knowing how little agreement she needs to begin claiming the rest.
“I won’t come to a dinner where Dulcie has to be described as the problem.”
“Then don’t come.”
She ends the call.
On my desk is an invitation to a dinner we used to attend together. I had put it aside for my assistant to confirm. I pick it up, then set it in the tray for a refusal.
There will be an empty place beside my mother, or somebody else will fill it. She will know which story to tell about my absence. For once, I cannot improve that story without letting her turn it into an account of Dulcie’s behavior.
I write that I won’t attend. I don’t ask for a later conversation to discuss whether this can all be less uncomfortable.
I sit until the supplier’s report stops looking like a page in a language I don’t know. Then I answer the question on it. People still need me to do my job, and I can do it while something hurts.
Three days later, a message from my mother arrives with Cressida’s name in the first line.
Cressida deserves a private conversation after the way you encouraged her. You cannot discard a promise simply because you have become sentimental about your wife.
I read it at the brownstone, standing beside a table where I used to leave things for Dulcie to notice.
There are several answers I could send which would sound decisive and conceal the part I don’t want to own. Cressida misunderstood. Cressida pushed too hard. Cressida should have known that having a child would change everything.
None of them is true.
I encouraged her. I made the promise. She knew Dulcie had not agreed to the life we were planning for her. I owe the truth about that promise, not its fulfillment. There will be no private meeting.
My mother reads it. She does not reply.
I put the phone in the kitchen and go upstairs. The drawer beside my bed remains closed. I haven’t brought the rings to a visit or set them somewhere Dulcie might find them. They are not an argument I am entitled to put in her hands.
For a while I stand at the bedroom window.
Then I lay out my clothes for tomorrow.
At the end of the week, at our next scheduled visit, Dulcie is trying to fold a blanket while Kit refuses to lie anywhere but against her.
“He’s had a strong afternoon,” she says.
“I see that.”
I put down my coat and take him when she offers. He settles for half a minute, then starts again, louder.
“It isn’t you,” she says. “He’s been like this since two.”
“Good to know.”
She finishes folding the blanket. I walk with him until he quiets, then sit where he can look at the window without requiring either of us to hold an impossible angle.
Dulcie brings water.
“How are you?”
I could answer about work. She would recognize it as an evasion and perhaps let me have it.
“My mother hasn’t spoken to me since the call about the foundation. She’s stopped including me in the family arrangements she handles.”
“Does that include Arthur?”
“No. I spoke to him yesterday. He enjoyed your visit.”
She smiles. She and Giles took Kit to his house after the birthday, as promised. Arthur told me about the baby and the television. He didn’t offer to mediate.
“I’m sorry it hurts,” Dulcie says.
I look at her. The kindness is almost worse than a refusal would be. There is a part of me which wants to set the whole loss beside her chair and have her tell me it has purchased something.
“It does,” I say. “I’m still not going back on what I said.”
She nods.
Kit lifts his head briefly, then loses interest in holding it there. I shift my hand to support him. Dulcie tells me about the shirt he screamed at this morning, and the afternoon moves on without requiring her to rescue mine.
At the agreed time I return him, collect my coat, and leave.
I drive home without calling anyone.
The house is quiet. I make food instead of letting it wait untouched, eat at the kitchen table, and read the notes from work. Later, I sit in the room where Dulcie used to read aloud and let myself miss her without composing a message which would make that her responsibility.
I want my wife. I want a life in which my son leaves things on this floor. Wanting it doesn’t tell me whether I will get it.
The following week, Dulcie asks about an evening.
Would you like to come for dinner? Kit will stay with Mom and Dad that night.
I read the invitation once, then again, slower.
Yes. What time would you like me there?
She tells me.
There is no promise in the message beyond dinner. I put the time in my calendar exactly as she gives it.