Chapter Four #3
"The hire market is the launch weeks, and the launch weeks are the agency's to source. Her contract makes every wheel of it our problem and none of it hers. That is why there are no caps, Adrian. She read that strike vote the same three weeks I did, and then she had Whitcombe draft around it."
"So my dinner."
"Your dinner didn't harden her terms. It confirmed them."
"The tape measure watches the nine o'clock news."
"Every woman I admire does. And Preston does not watch the news. He watches Sabrina. He looks at his telephone and smiles, and the country could vote to stop every wheel in it turning and he would learn about it from a client's lawyer."
She turned her glass once and set it down.
"I have sat beside him at that television every evening for three weeks, watching him not watch it. His own appetite bought his blindness, Adrian. All I did was choose an idea that needed him to have been paying attention."
Adrian took his glasses off, which she had learned was what he did when he wanted a moment behind something, and put them down, and looked at her, and the look had changed registers entirely, the lawyer's appraisal gone out of it and something older and far less governed come up underneath, and it moved over her like heat off the fire.
"Half my life," he said, "I have sat across desks thinking I knew how that mind of yours worked."
"You knew the half I showed you."
"Evidently I shall have to reopen the file.
" It came out lower than banter, and neither of them moved, and the fire had gotten louder, or the room had gotten smaller, and she became very exactly aware of the distance between her chair and his, which was two feet and shrinking by some means neither of them was admitting to, and his eyes went, for a quarter of a second, to her mouth.
She stood up to refill a glass that did not need it. He coughed, and reached for the contract folder, and squared its edges with tremendous diligence.
"One kindness," he said, to the folder, in his working voice, or most of it. "For my conscience. Bridget Halloran did nothing to you, and half a county of shopkeepers is waiting on those openings."
"Bridget gets her spring." Cordelia came back to the arm of the chair, and the room resumed its ordinary size, mostly.
"The idea is real, you said so yourself.
I've had our transport people at the broadcasting side sound out two carrier groups from outside the region, priced, willing, and holding their capacity on a quiet Hargrove option, and there's a rail and local hire fallback behind them, costed, sitting in a drawer. "
"You built the rescue before you built the wreck."
"The campaign is insured, Adrian. It simply isn't insured for him." She paused. "A rescue exists, and it will arrive precisely when the man who needs rescuing is no longer the man who owns the agency."
"And you won't offer it to him. Not even when the water's at his chin."
"I will offer him nothing. You showed him the door tonight, landscape, not advice, and he looked at it, and his pride shut it.
" She said it the way her father used to close a meeting.
"But he knows where it is now. When clause twelve stops being wallpaper he will remember that door all by himself, and he will come and ask me to open it, and he will believe to his dying day that the whole thing was his own idea.
I don't lay traps for Preston. I arrange furniture, and he walks. "
"Sunday," he said, rising, gathering his coat, and the shift back to business was itself a kind of tenderness, a man putting a fragile thing safely away. "Maureen and Sabrina, to lunch. You're still sure about one table?"
"If there's appetite under all that kindness, a warm room and a long lunch will bring it out. That was your prescription, if I remember."
"Then watch her hands, not her mouth. Maureen's whole life is a performance of money. Get her pricing what other people are worth, and she forgets she's performing."
She walked him out. At the door he turned to hand her the signed contract for the study safe, and she reached for it, and for a moment they held it together, one folder, four hands' worth of history on two, and neither of them let go, and the hall was very quiet, and then he released it with the care of a man setting down someone else's glass, and stepped back into the night air.
"The vote closes on the twentieth," he said, from the bottom step. "And then?"
"Then the drivers are out by the first of the month. Bridget's first shop opens on the eighth of it, and there's a new town every week from there until Christmas."
She came down one step, into the night air, and finished the arithmetic for him.
"Launch vans book two weeks ahead, Adrian. He will be ringing round to hire them in the exact week there is nothing left in this region to hire, with a penalty clause compounding behind him for every Saturday a town stands waiting."
Adrian stood at the bottom of the steps a moment longer, and she watched the whole calendar assemble itself behind his eyes, the twentieth, the first, the eighth, the long weekly drumbeat of openings marching into winter with no wheels under any of them.
"Plenty of time," said Cordelia, "for everyone to sign everything."