Chapter Six #2
The trust papers took four minutes. Vivian signed the way she did everything, in one stroke, mid-sentence, without appearing to read a word of documents she had plainly memorized, and pushed them back at Adrian with the cap of her pen.
"There. The charitable portion of the afternoon is concluded.
" She settled back into her chair and turned the whole of her attention on Cordelia like a lamp. "Now. You. Sit where I can see you."
Cordelia sat.
"Seven years," said Vivian, "of checks."
"Vivian."
"Beautiful checks. Punctual. Generous. Signed by a girl I taught to waltz, who used to sit at my right hand and tell me which of my guests were bores, and who then married and evaporated, and sent checks."
The old eyes did not waver.
"I assumed the husband. Men like that prefer their wives portable and their wives' friends elderly and far away. I said nothing, because wives never thank you for it, and I am telling you now only because you have finally had the manners to come and be scolded in person."
She reached over and took Cordelia's chin in two ringed fingers, and turned her face to the light, and studied it, and whatever she found there she filed without comment.
"Well. You're here. That's something. Pour, Adrian, you know where everything is."
He did know where everything was, which Cordelia noted, and poured, and Vivian took her cup and dispatched the business of the visit with the speed of a woman who had smelled it coming from the hall.
"The benefit. You're bringing the husband, who I will endure, and you want something."
"I'm bringing family, Vivian. Preston's very proud. And I thought I'd bring my sister-in-law as my guest, Clark's widow, Sabrina." Cordelia stirred her tea. "She's been so eager to meet everyone."
The teacup paused at the old lips.
"Eager," said Vivian Pembroke, who had been watching eagerness climb her staircase for forty years, and the word came out weighed, priced, and shelved.
"So eager."
Their eyes met over the china for one held breath, and nothing further was needed. Cordelia watched four decades of ballroom jurisprudence take the case under advisement.
"Bring your eager creature," said Vivian, setting down the cup.
"My rooms have excellent digestion." She turned to the window a moment, dismissing the entire matter, and then turned back with the air of a woman getting to the part of the afternoon she had actually kept them for.
"Now that's settled, I'll have my pleasure.
I want to look at the two of you sitting on my sofa like furniture, and I want to say what I say every time I see it, which the pair of you conspire never to let me say by never appearing together. "
"Vivian," Adrian said, with a note in his voice Cordelia had never heard before, and which she would spend some time afterward identifying as dread.
"It offends me," Vivian continued, serene, unstoppable, "to this day. Your fathers had this matched, you know. Formally. In those two chairs."
She pointed with one ringed finger, unhurried, at two wing chairs by the fireplace, and Cordelia felt the afternoon tilt gently off its rails.
"Edmund Vale and Charles Hargrove, over my brandy, the autumn you turned fifteen, miss. Working out the whole thing like a treaty. The families, the firms, the estates."
Nobody at the tea table moved.
"Charles said, and I quote him exactly, 'the boy's the only one I'd trust with either.' With the firm and with you, he meant. They drank on it. In my house."
She picked her cup back up, entirely pleased with herself.
"And then you grew up and went and married the salesman, and Edmund's boy here never said one word, because Edmund's boy has never once in his life said the word that mattered, and I have had to sit at forty dinners watching the two of you pass each other the salt."
The clock on the mantel ticked into a silence with three people in it.
"That's," said Adrian, and stopped. Cordelia had never, in the whole of her life, heard Adrian Vale fail to finish a sentence.
His ears had gone faintly red at the rims. He was looking at a point on the carpet approximately equidistant from both women, with the fixed attention of a man declining to be present.
"Vivian. That was two old men and a bottle of brandy. "
"It was two old men who were right," said Vivian placidly, "and a very good brandy."
"I never knew that," Cordelia said, and was surprised to hear that her own voice had gone somewhere strange, higher than she kept it, younger. "Nobody ever, Father never said a word to me."
"Of course he didn't. You were fifteen and fierce, you'd have married a dock worker that week just to spite him." Vivian waved it off. "And then he died too soon, and Edmund followed him, and the treaty lapsed for want of signatures. These things happen in families."
She refilled her own cup, taking her time about it, with the precision of a woman firing a rifle she had cleaned that morning.
"I only bring it up because it makes me laugh, what the pair of you did instead. He took the account. You took the salesman."
"Vivian." Adrian's voice had dropped a register.
"And every quarter for ten years, Edmund's boy has come to this room and signed my papers and told me nothing. And twice a year I dine at some function and watch you two talk to each other like the last two sensible people at the party, and I think, there they sit. The treaty. Passing the salt."
And Cordelia turned to Adrian to share the joke, because that was what she did, that was what they had always done, thirty rooms a year, catching each other's eye across other people's noise, and the joke was not where she had left it.
What was there instead was a man.