Chapter Five
Sunday arrived golden, and for the first hour of it the charade was so beautiful that Cordelia almost admired her own seven years of blindness.
Maureen came in on a wave of warmth, kissed her on both cheeks, held her out at arm's length like something precious retrieved from a high shelf.
"There she is. The daughter I was owed." She caught Cordelia's hand on the way past and turned it gently to the light, and the old ring caught the sun.
"Your mother's. I think of her whenever I see it, you know.
She'd be proud of the wife you've made." A squeeze, warm as bathwater.
"Now where's my grandson, and where's my clever son, and what is that heavenly smell? "
Lamb, and gravy, and cut flowers kept low, and for a moment, receiving the kisses and the warmth in her own bright garden room, Cordelia let herself feel how convincing it all was.
This was the family she had believed in for seven years.
It had a smell and a sound and a liturgy, and every part of it was excellent theater, and the only thing wrong with it was everything.
They were barely past the coats when Maureen glanced back down the hall, light as anything.
"Your hallway's quite bare today. Usually I'm tripping over your parcels this time of a Sunday." A little laugh, and she moved on to the flowers, and praised them, and it took Cordelia a full half minute of pouring the wine to understand what had just been said to her.
The gifts. The little tributes, scent, gloves, a scarf in the right blue, that she had brought to every family gathering for seven years, chosen with real care, because she had believed she was choosing them for a woman who loved her.
There was no parcel today. There was no parcel because her husband's affair and her stolen son and a forty page contract had eaten the week whole, and buying her mother-in-law a scarf had not survived it, and she had not even noticed the lapse until this moment, and Maureen had noticed it before her coat was off.
She was not sure which displeased her more, the dunning, or how genuinely sorry she had almost felt.
"The week ran away with me," Cordelia said, handing her the glass. "Preston's great triumph. I'm afraid I've been useless."
"As if I count parcels." Maureen patted her hand and turned to the window, and the pat lasted exactly as long as a receipt takes to print.
Sabrina arrived twenty minutes late in a cloud of scent, and Cordelia, turning to greet her, met the strangest experience of the day, which was seeing a woman she had known for five years for the first time.
The dress was silk, the green of money, cut close and cut low, and the heels were the kind you wore to be photographed leaving somewhere, and the mouth was done, and the hair was done, and all of it was several rooms too much for cold lamb with family.
Cordelia stood holding her wine and wondered how many Sundays exactly like this one she had watched and never once seen.
Sabrina had been dressing for someone at this table for years.
The evidence had walked through her front door in heels, over and over, and Cordelia had poured it wine and complimented its tailor.
"Darling." Air kisses, both cheeks, the scent settling over them both. "Sorry, sorry, the traffic was a crime. Oh, you've done the flowers low, how clever, you can actually see people."
You can indeed, thought Cordelia, and smiled, and watched.
What she watched, for the next quarter hour, was a family.
Oliver came down the stairs at a run, past his grandmother's opened arms, past his mother entirely, and launched himself at Sabrina, who caught him under the arms and swung him up high, both of them shrieking, her heels planted like a dancer's.
"There's my best boy. Have you grown? You've grown, I refuse to allow it."
"Put him down before you ruin that dress, it's worth more than he is," said Preston, strolling in from the terrace with his collar open, and Oliver howled with delight, and Preston made a lunge for him, mock furious, "Come here, you traitor, hugging her before your own father," and swung the boy from Sabrina's arms into his own, and Oliver screamed happily and pulled his father's hair, and Maureen sailed in among the three of them like a duchess among her gardens.
"Preston, honestly, you're worse than the child.
Put him down, you'll have the whole dresser over.
" But she was laughing as she said it, one hand on her son's arm, one hand smoothing the boy's wild hair, fond and proprietary and easy, and the four of them stood there in the gold Sunday light, laughing at each other, arranged as if for a portrait.
Cordelia stood at the drinks table with the wine in her hand and could not, for a long moment, find the place in the picture where she fit.
They look like a family. The thought arrived without drama and stood there being true.
The boy in his father's arms, his real mother's lipstick on his cheek, his grandmother orchestrating the fondness, all of them fluent in each other, easy in each other, a closed warm circuit of four.
They looked like a family because they were one.
They had been one for years, in this house and out of it, and the woman watching them from the drinks table was the outsider at her own table, and it was her house, and it was her lamb, and every laughing mouthful of this Sunday would go on her accounts.
She let the wound open, and measured it, and folded it closed. Then she carried the wine tray in to her guests, smiling, because the outsider was also the only person in the room who knew what this autumn was going to cost.
Lunch was called. They arranged themselves down the long table, Oliver beside Sabrina at his own shrieking insistence, and Nina carried in the lamb, and Preston carved it standing, making a small performance of the knife, and for a few minutes the room was all serving spoons and steam and the easy noise of a family being fed.
It was over the carving that Cordelia laid her first wire.
The two dark heads beside her were bent together over some conspiracy involving bread pellets, and she tilted her head at them, fond, idle, exactly the way a mother muses.
"It's the strangest thing. I catch him at certain angles lately and I could swear he favors you, Sabrina. Around the eyes. Something when he laughs." She turned to the head of the family album, warm, inclusive. "Maureen, you must see it."
She had set her chair to read three faces, and the three faces performed.
Sabrina's smile stayed up and everything behind it left the building.
Her hand rose to touch her own hair, the ancient gesture of a woman checking her mask was on.
Preston's fork stopped an inch off his plate, hung there one suspended second, and remembered its errand too carefully.
That much was arithmetic; that much Cordelia had known before she laid the wire.
It was the third face that mattered, and the third face went white around the mouth.
"What an idea." Maureen's laugh arrived a half beat late and a quarter tone high.
"He's a Boyd top to bottom, that's Clark's chin, Preston's chin, their father's chin, all the Boyd men have it.
Eyes." She reached for the mint sauce, and her hand made two small tries at the handle before it caught.
"All small children look like whoever's holding them, my mother used to say. More lamb, Preston, you're not eating."
She should have laughed. Cordelia passed the sauce with a pleasant word and did the accounting behind her face, and the sum came out cold.
A grandmother handed a fond little fancy laughs and says all babies look like everyone, and the subject drifts, and the lamb gets eaten.
She does not go white. She does not misgrab the mint sauce.
She does not put out a fire that no innocent person at this table should be able to see.
Cordelia's heart went down like a stone in a well, and it surprised her, that after everything, there was still enough left in her to sink.
Oliver chose that moment to shove his plate so the lamb slid onto the cloth. "I hate this. I want chips."
In the old life there would have been no chips.
That mother had retired three weeks ago.
Cordelia rang the bell and ordered them, and Oliver celebrated by pushing his carrots off the edge of the plate, one by one, watching the adults while he did it, a small emperor testing the reach of a new constitution.
"You're so relaxed these days, Cordelia.
" Sabrina's voice came out sweet and slow, a woman recovering her footing on someone else's face.
"I envy it, honestly. But a boy that age wants a firmer hand, doesn't he.
If he were mine I'd never let him carry on like this.
" A little laugh, and a sip, and the eyes coming up over the glass.
"But then I suppose mothering isn't really something you can teach. Some women are just born knowing."
The table went very slightly still. Cordelia set down her fork, unhurried, and smiled at her sister-in-law with her whole face.
"You're right, of course. And I've always meant to say, Sabrina, for a woman who never bore a child, you know the most extraordinary amount about raising one." She let it sit for exactly one heartbeat, warm as a compliment, sharp as a filleting knife. "Wherever did you pick it all up?"
Sabrina's glass stopped halfway to her mouth. Across the table Preston developed an intense relationship with his potatoes.
"Girls." Maureen came in over the top, brisk, smoothing the cloth with both hands as though the table itself had misbehaved.
"It's only carrots. Every house has its own way, and Cordelia's been carrying Preston's big week, she's tired, we can't go taking every little thing to heart.
" A fond glance at Cordelia, kindly as a nurse with a difficult patient. "No one doubts you, dear."