Chapter Four #2
They listened to the front door, and the car, and then the house settled around the two of them and the signed contract on the table, and the fire ticked.
"You may laugh now," Cordelia said.
He did. Quietly, helplessly, with his head tipped back against the chair, the laugh he had been holding since the telephone, and it was such a rare and unguarded thing to see on him, all that composure lying briefly on its back, that she found she was grinning at him like a girl and had to put her wine to her mouth to stop it.
"I'm so sorry to disturb your evening," he repeated, in a wicked small imitation of her helpless-wife voice. "You could have gone on the stage. It's a genuine loss to the theater, what your father did, raising you respectable."
"I had an excellent scene partner. 'It's thorough.'" She gave him back his own graveled deadpan. "'Also thorough.' I watched him age a year between those two."
"That was not performance, that was professional restraint.
Every clause in that document is a small masterpiece.
" He sat forward, and the humor banked down into something warmer and more curious.
"You've frightened me twice this week, you know.
I've been frightened of you, on and off, since you were nine years old and the orangery window got broken and somehow, by dinner, the entire household believed Theo had done it.
With his cricket bat. Which you had borrowed. "
"He got two puddings out of Cook for the injustice once it came out. Everyone profited."
"You were nine, and you constructed a scapegoat with a paper trail." He shook his head slowly, and the firelight moved on him. "I should have gone to your father then and there and told him, sir, the wrong child is being groomed for the board."
It should have been a joke about Theo. It landed somewhere else, somewhere older and sorer, and he saw it land, and his face changed, and the room got a degree quieter.
"That was careless of me. I'm sorry."
"Don't be. You're the one person who can say his name to me without the temperature dropping." She turned her glass by the stem. "Credit where it's due, though. Your dinner did half the work this week. Tell me about the dinner."
"Ah. The dinner." The deadpan came back up like a curtain rising.
"Whitcombe. Her counsel. We were at school together, terrible fisherman, lovely wife.
We talked about trout, and his daughter's wedding, and somewhere in the second bottle he asked what I made of Boyd Creative, since his client was about to hand it her whole expansion. "
He examined the ceiling with enormous innocence.
"I said the shop had real talent and a gifted front man, and that Mr. Boyd had a salesman's optimism about operations, and if I were papering a deal with an optimist I would want my liabilities written in stone, because optimists sign anything."
"You said that. Over trout."
"I was being a good citizen. Whitcombe thanked me for it. He said I'd confirmed his own reading exactly."
"Good job," she said, and meant it so plainly that it came out warmer than she had dressed it, and he glanced up at the tone, and she let him see it anyway. "Genuinely, Adrian. That was the exact right whisper in the exact right ear."
"It cost me an evening of trout stories. I'll invoice you." He turned his glass a quarter and left it. "Though I'll confess the terms came back harder than even I expected. No caps at all is savage, even for her."
"That isn't your dinner. That's the strike."
The fire ticked twice in the silence.
"Say that again."
"The launch weeks run on hired carriers. Six or eight extra vans per town, the drumbeat, the part Bridget liked best." She set the board papers aside, unhurried. "The regional haulage association has had a strike vote running for three weeks, Adrian. The drivers vote on the twentieth."
He had gone very still.
"If it passes, and everyone who follows it says it passes, every van for hire in this region parks by the end of the month. At any price. In anyone's colors. It has been on the evening news since the first, every night, at nine."
Adrian set his glass down without a sound. She watched him take the whole shape of it in, the plan inside the plan, the blade inside the gift, and it was a better audience than any theater.
"Her own fleet drives that region," he said slowly, the lawyer in him arriving first. "She'll know about the vote. She reads everything. Why in God's name would she sign a campaign that's about to lose its wheels?"
"Because her wheels aren't in it. Bridget's drivers are her own people, on her own payroll, twenty years of profit shares, they'd strike against their own pension. The association is the hire market, the owner operators, the contract fleets. Her vans keep driving through any strike in the country."
Cordelia let him have the last piece slowly, because he had earned the whole picture.