CHAPTER 6
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I stand with my back to the south glass, because the glass gives me the room without my having to turn my head.
It's fogging from the inside. Seven people breathing in a space built for weather, and the orchard out there has gone soft — forty-one gray smudges before the shapes run into each other. I count them twice. Counting is something I can do while I'm being looked at.
Seventy-six days since I was last in a room with more than two people in it. My body knows the number even when I'd rather it didn't.
Nine years at Halloran and Voss taught me to read a site before I read anybody standing on it. Two exits. One of them I can reach without crossing another person's path. The slate is laid over a heated slab, which is why it's warm through the soles of shoes I bought at a weight I'm not anymore.
The dress is from that weight too. Its waist seam sits an inch above where my waist actually is now, and it will sit there all evening. I've decided to let the inch keep time for me.
In the glass, over my own shoulder, there's a gray Ford in the turning circle with a dented tailgate.
And a man up a stepladder.
Work clothes. A canvas bag hooked on the top step. He has the ceiling plate off above the long window and both hands inside it, and every time he shifts his weight the ladder's rubber feet bark once against the slate. It's the only working sound in a room full of talking.
It's Sunday. My husband has had a contractor drive out here on a Sunday to program a lighting scene for a dinner party.
Every person in this room thinks that's a job.
Julian is in the middle of the floor with a bottle in his hand and no jacket, and he is very good at this.
He's telling the story against himself — the first winter here, when he'd built a house that could see in the dark and then stood outside it in his socks for two hours in November because he'd trusted it.
Marguerite's husband laughs so hard he has to set his glass down.
Julian waits for him, takes the glass, fills it, and hooks a chair over with his foot so the man can sit, because that knee has been bad since spring and Julian remembered.
He asks the one with the beard how his daughter's getting on. Uses her name. Knows what year she's in. The man goes pink with pleasure and starts talking about her exams, and Julian listens the way most people only pretend to.
He doesn't look at me to check whether I saw it. That's the part. He isn't performing. He's just like this, and the whole county has been drinking it for six years.
Somebody asks about the house, because somebody always does.
“AURA, would you show everybody the orchard?” Julian says. “I've been promising it since seven and they're all far too polite to ask me twice.”
The lamps along the south wall step down together and the outside comes up, and forty-one trees light from underneath. Through the fogged glass they're still smudges. Brighter ones. There's a noise from the room like people at a firework.
“Of course, Julian.” Warm. Unhurried. Faintly amused, the way you'd be amused by somebody you're fond of.
The woman from the London office says she'd have that voice in her own kitchen tomorrow if she could.
Earlier he told the table I'd designed a footbridge over a gorge that carries eleven tonnes and looks like a ribbon. He got the tonnage right. He was proud of me out loud, in front of everyone, and it landed somewhere under my collarbone and stayed warm there.
That's the whole problem with him, in one sentence.
He makes me laugh twice before eight o'clock. I want that written down somewhere, because it's the thing nobody will believe afterward.
Then he turns, glass lifted, delighted, and pitches his voice to the room.
“That's Cole Brennan — he built all of this. Come down and have a drink, Cole, you're making the rest of us look idle.”
Every head goes up. The ladder stops barking.
“I'm all right, Mr. Vance. I've got the one scene left.”
It comes out pleasant, and it isn't free. He doesn't come down.
Mr. Vance. Four days ago, in a corridor, he called nobody anything.
Marguerite says something warm about her gutters and how Brennan Systems came out in the rain for them once, and the woman from the London office says isn't that nice, and the room folds it away as generosity.
A man kept at work while the county drinks, and the county thinks it's just been shown kindness.
I'm the only person here who knows this isn't a job.
Julian arrives at my elbow with his hand flat at the small of my back. It isn't warm. It's placed.
“Evelyn's recovering, and she's being extremely patient with the rest of us about it,” he says, to all of them at once. “You'll forgive her if she vanishes on us somewhere before the pudding.”
That's one.
Dr. Aldred comes across the slate in shoes that cost more than the shoes of everybody else combined. Pink scalp under the thin sandy hair. Rimless glasses. A voice so soft you have to lean in, which is its own trick.
“And how are we recovering?” he says.
We.
That's two, and it lands somewhere lower than the first one did.
He asks whether I'm sleeping through. I say I wake at four and then again at six. He asks whether the mornings are getting easier or harder, which is a question with a wrong answer in both directions, so I say they're about level.
Then he asks whether I ever lose the thread of a conversation and have to ask for it back.
“Only at parties, and only when there are more than six of us,” I say.
He doesn't laugh. He doesn't write anything down either, and that's worse, because a man writing something down is a man who might lose the paper.
He holds his glass at the base and doesn't drink from it. The whole time he's talking to my face he's watching my hands, and my hands are doing what they do, which is finding the seam of the dress and running the thread of it between two fingers.
I stop. Which is also information, and he has it now.
The woman from the London office is at the drinks table on her own, so I go to her. I want to know what I still weigh in a room. That's a load test, and you run it on purpose.
“I'm a structural engineer,” I tell her. “Bridges, mostly. Nine years at Halloran and Voss, and I still read a span before I read a room.”
“Oh, that's wonderful, how interesting,” she says. “And you're taking a proper rest now.”
Then she turns to Julian, because Julian has said something about the reservoir, and the conversation goes where it was always going.
So now I know what I am here. I'm a nice fact about somebody else.
I go to the garden-room door for air.
He's at the bottom of the ladder, folding the plate away, packing the bag. Three feet of slate between us and neither of us closes any of it.
“What are you actually doing to the lights?”
“Scene four. Everything drops eight per cent at nine, so the room decides it's later than it is and starts looking for its coat.”
I look at the ceiling plate in his hand. Eight per cent. Nobody would ever feel it. That's the point of eight per cent.
“And that needs a man on a Sunday.”
“It needs a dimmer and somebody who can tell the time.”
There's a laugh under it that he doesn't let out. He winds the cable in loops around his hand, thumb, hand, thumb.
I can't ask it straight. So I take it sideways.
“Is it a difficult house? To keep.”
He doesn't answer at first. He gets the last loop on and pushes it down into the bag and closes the flap, and he doesn't look at me when he says it.
“It's a very good system. It's just pointed the wrong way round. Most houses watch the outside.”
The slab is warm under my feet and my hands have gone cold anyway.
“Ah — here you are, the two most useful people in the building.” Julian in the doorway with a glass for me, pleased, entirely pleased, the way you'd be pleased to find two friends getting on.
“Is that ladder steady enough on the slate?
I've been watching it and worrying.” Then, to me, taking my elbow: “Soup's going cold, my love, and Nora won't forgive either of us for it.”
Nothing in it. He doesn't need anything in it.
I go in, and I don't look back, and that's my decision and not his, and it's a small one, and I take it anyway.
Nora serves the whole meal. Bread, then soup, then the lamb. She's kept this house eleven years and tonight she doesn't look at me once, not when she sets a plate down in front of me, not when I say thank you.
Marguerite Ferris is on my left, three glasses in, silver bob cut to the millimetre. She's the only one at this table who talks to me like a neighbour and not like a subject.
“You're recovering so beautifully, and don't let anybody tell you otherwise,” she says, and pats the back of my hand, and means every word of it.
Three.
I stop counting guests. I start counting the word.
She's telling the table about her spaniel, who is fat and knows it, and she says it the way people say things when they've said them before and the table always laughs.
“I did think of you that night, you know,” she says, mid-story, to me, not to the room.
“He's hopeless in the wet, that dog, absolutely hopeless, so I'd taken him out at half nine while the rain hadn't come in yet, and we got as far as the bend and there were all those lights up at your gate, and I said to my husband, somebody's having a night of it up there. And then the next morning we heard, and I could have bitten my tongue clean out of my head.”
The rain hadn't come in yet. At half nine.
I put my fork down flat on the cloth and I hold the sentence word for word in the front of my head, the way you hold a measurement between the tape and the notebook.
“How are his hips this year?” I say.
And she's off — the vet, the stairs, the ramp her husband built that the dog refuses on principle — and I say the right things in the right places while I keep her sentence intact.
Down the table, Julian is doing his version. He does it beautifully, because he always does.
“She went out in filthy weather because I'd upset her about something I can't even remember. My fault entirely.”
Everybody forgives him. Marguerite's husband says something about all married men and there's laughing, and Julian takes it on the chin with both hands up, and it's charming, and I watch seven people put it away as true.
At nine the lights come down eight per cent, and nobody notices, and everybody notices.
Marguerite's husband says he supposes they ought to think about the road. The woman from the London office looks at the window as though the window told her something. Julian spreads his hands and says, is it that late already, and refills two glasses to prove it isn't.
The room decided it was later than it was, exactly as designed, and there is one person in this house being paid to know that and one person who was told it in a doorway.
At twenty past nine the ladder comes off the slate. The gray Ford is still in the turning circle, and he doesn't leave by the front door. He goes east, into the utility corridor, past the storage rooms, out the far end.
Before any guest. Out the working door.
I know the time because I've stopped counting the word and started watching the clock over the sideboard.
The last car goes at eleven forty. Julian is asleep by half past twelve; he sleeps like a man with nothing on his conscience, and I've never once heard him get up in the night.
There's a drawer in the corridor cupboard where the house manuals live — the boiler, the ovens, the ventilation, four ring binders and a stack of guarantees. Underneath them, a red site notebook, graph-ruled, still shrink-wrapped. I bought a box of twelve nine years ago and this is the last one.
I take it upstairs. I take his pencil off the shelf where it's sat since the corridor, flat and red, brENNAN SYSTEMS stamped along one side, and I sharpen it with my thumbnail because I don't have a knife.
I sit on the floor between the bed and the wall, which is the only place in this room I'm certain of.
First: the door. Two days ago, shut 8:40, opened 10:00. Eighty minutes. Nothing on any log, and my hands were on that handle for the first ten of them.
Second: the tablets. Five days ago the white ones were blue and nobody mentioned it, and I took them, and I want that written in a straight line where I can't argue myself out of it.
Third: Marguerite's sentence, dated, timed, word for word. Half nine. Rain not yet in. Lights at the gate.
Underneath Marguerite's sentence I write one more: C. Brennan, 9:20 — went out by the corridor, not the front door.
I don't know yet what it means. I write it down because it is the only thing that happened all night that nobody performed for me.