Chapter Ten #2
There was no driver anymore. It was Sabrina's own car in the drive and Sabrina's own heels dripping in the front hall, and Oliver shot past the whole assembly at a run, peeled his coat onto the floor by feel, and was gone up the stairs without a word to anyone.
"Coat, Oliver," Sabrina called after him, and got nothing, not even ceremony.
She stood holding the small defeated garment with rain in her hair, and she looked reduced, the dress last winter's, the famous warmth running on its understudy, and Cordelia took the coat from her and did the only hospitable thing there was to do, which was also the most useful.
"You're soaked through. Come in and have a glass with us before you drive back. Maureen's here for dinner."
She watched Sabrina hear the name and weigh the wet drive home against an hour in a room with her, and lose either way, and come in.
The garden room received them with its kind lamps.
Maureen presented a cheek without rising.
And it took precisely one glass of sherry for the evening to produce its first collision, because Oliver, upstairs, chose that moment to conduct something along the landing that ended in a crash and no apology, only footsteps thundering on unrepentant.
"You hear that." Sabrina set her glass down.
Something had been riding her all day, that was plain, and here, in front of family, in the warm room, it got loose.
"That's him now, all day, every day. Cordelia.
He told the woman at the bakery this morning that her shop smelled like feet.
And when I corrected him, he looked me in the eye, and do you know what he said?
He said, you're not the boss of me either. "
"Either," said Cordelia, mildly, and sipped.
"He's five. Where does a five year old learn either?
" Sabrina leaned forward, urgent, and entirely sincere for possibly the first time in their acquaintance.
"I'm saying this with love. He's running wild.
He needs a firm hand, someone who'll hold a line with him, and you used to be so wonderfully strict, and lately it's all gone soft, and he's not improving. He needs his mother back."
"She's right," said Maureen, from the best chair, flat as a till drawer. "I've held my tongue about it for weeks. The boy's turned into a little savage. In my day he'd have been put straight fast enough, and no committee about it. You're the mother. Do the job."
There it was, and from both barrels, and Cordelia looked from the mistress to the matriarch, the two women who had spent five years teaching Oliver that his father's warmth was love and his mother's rules were coldness, now sitting in her garden room demanding the rules back, and she gave the knife one small turn built for the pair of them.
"Do you know, Preston said the very opposite to me for years.
Let the boy be a boy. Don't crush his spirit.
And you both always backed him, every Sunday of it, all that lovely easy warmth while I held the line alone and was called a Victorian for it.
" She smiled, remembering it fondly for all three of them.
"So I've surrendered. He's being raised the Boyd way now, spirit entirely uncrushed.
I'd have thought you'd both be pleased. It's what you voted for. "
Sabrina's mouth opened, and closed. Cordelia watched her stand in the trap and feel the walls of it, the doting auntie who could not, without explaining why the job was hers, take up the rod her own act had spent five years mocking, and beside her Maureen's rings went tap, tap on the chair's arm, a woman declining to pursue a point she had just lost track of the safe side of.
"I only meant," Sabrina said, and her thumbnail worked the glass, "a mother's discipline is different. He needs yours."
"That's so sweet. But no, I've been converted, I'm all warmth now." Cordelia refilled her glass, hospitality itself. "You do look tired, darling. Is it the house? I went looking for your lovely page this week, I wanted the recipe you'd posted, the lemon thing, and it had all simply vanished."
The glass stopped an inch from Sabrina's mouth.
"Preston thought it best." The sugar stayed in her voice and something hard came up under it, sucked thin. "The account. Appearances. Everything dark until the troubles pass." A breath. "He thought it best, and then the man didn't ring me for eleven days."
The room went quiet in a very specific way, the way of a room in which one person too many has heard a thing.
In the corner of Cordelia's eye Maureen's rings stopped tapping.
The pale eyes came up and fixed on Sabrina, not with sympathy and not with confusion but with the flat warden's look, the look that said not here, you fool, the same channel Cordelia had watched carry a warning across her own lunch table in October, and Sabrina received it and dropped her eyes and drank.
Eleven days, Cordelia noted, behind her warmest face. And in front of his mother. The nest is biting itself.
Sabrina left soon after, air kisses at the door, the scent fainter than it used to be, and from the stairs Oliver leaned over the rail and shouted down, "You forgot to say goodbye to ME," in pure accusation, and Sabrina looked up at her own son with her whole tired heart in her face for one unguarded second, and said goodnight, and got the top of a head in reply, and went out alone into the rain.
Cordelia stood a moment with her hand on the shut door.
She had built this evening, every wire of it, and it was running better than the drawing, and what sat where the satisfaction should have sat was something more complicated, because the woman driving home in last winter's dress had stolen five years of her life, and had also, tonight, been the only person in this house to say one true word about the boy they were both pretending not to love.
She gave the complication one breath. Then she went back to her remaining guest.
Preston came home at half past six, wet and hearty, kissed his mother's cheek, poured himself the good sherry with the smallest hesitation over the decanter, a man consulting an invisible price list, and dinner was lamb, by cruel coincidence.
Maureen was magnificent through the soup, which was how Cordelia knew the ask was coming with the meat.
"I ran into Deborah Aldridge on Thursday." She laid it into the middle of the table like a card. "She'd heard this family's cutting back. Heard it somewhere, she wouldn't say where. I told her nonsense, and I heard myself saying it, and I sounded like a woman covering."
"The Aldridges talk about everyone's money," Preston said, into his wine. "It's their sport."
"And you're giving them the material." She turned on her son so fast the candle flames leaned.
"Look at yourself. You married a Hargrove woman, Preston.
A Hargrove. And you're letting the whole town watch the household count pennies, the club, the cars, the parcels, all of it, and who do you think that lands on?
Not on you. Nobody expects anything of a Boyd.
" She said it flat, no shame in it, a fact off a shelf.
"It lands on her. On her family. People are starting to say the Hargroves have gone stingy, and her poor father built that name up from nothing but good faith, and his daughter's own husband is letting it be talked about in shops. You should be ashamed."
It was, Cordelia thought, watching over her glass, a beautiful machine. Every word aimed at Preston, every word built for her, the purse behind the family honor never named and never anything else. Loyalty on the outside. A crowbar underneath.
"Maureen's not wrong, darling," she said, warmly, and watched her husband's head come up in disbelief at the flank attack.
"Appearances do matter. Though in fairness, it isn't all Preston's doing.
Since everything routes through my desk, the trustees audit every line, and I will say," she let a small trouble cross her face, candid, confiding, "they keep finding old spendings they can't account for.
Standing payments going back years that nobody wrote down the reason for.
They circle them in red and ask me what they were, and I keep having to say, I'm sure it was something the family needed. "
The table went briefly, beautifully still.
Preston developed an interest in the mint sauce.
Maureen's rings stopped on the stem of her glass, and for one whole second the pale eyes did the arithmetic of exactly which payments, going back exactly which years, a committee of strangers might be circling in red.
"Well," said Maureen, recovering, setting down the glass, and abandoning the scenic route as her son had at breakfast in another house, in another negotiation, blood telling.
"Since we're being frank at this table, I'll be frank.
The monthly help, dear. It came through Preston's accounts for years and now it's stopped, three months stopped, and I've managed, a person manages, but I have standing arrangements, and a woman my age can't have her arrangements bouncing about while accountants find their feet.
I'm asking you straight. Woman to woman. Make it regular again."
"And while we're all being frank," Preston came in on the current, seizing the open water, "the club fee's still sitting in a tray somewhere, three weeks now, and a man in a waistcoat chases me across the bar in front of—"
"The club." His mother did not even turn her head. "She's talking about arrangements and you bring up your bar bill."
"It's not the bill, it's the standing—"
"Darlings." Cordelia raised one hand, gently, and got silence, which was itself a pleasure of a very particular kind. "Let me be as frank back, because you both deserve it."
She folded her napkin and gave them the truth, plainly, in the voice she used for reading numbers aloud.