Chapter Thirteen
She had told Adrian, in the dark at her own gate, that she meant to have her house back for Christmas. On the last Tuesday before it, over breakfast, the having began.
Cordelia was buttering toast when it started, and she would remember that afterward with a certain professional pleasure, that she had been buttering toast. The dining room was warm, the coffee was good, and across the table her husband was reading the business pages and narrating them, which he believed was conversation.
"Farrander thinks the spring campaign should open in March, not April. Strike early, he says. I'm inclined to agree. Momentum, Cordelia. The whole game now is momentum."
"Mm," said Cordelia, and buttered on.
Ten days ago she had written one sentence to Halloran's auditors, suggesting that the company's asset register really ought to be complete before year's end.
The auditors, being auditors, had completed it.
Somewhere in the city this morning, a letter with a red committee stamp was arriving at a townhouse across the river, and the only thing required of her at this table was toast, and patience, and the face of a woman thinking about Christmas.
"We should decide about the goose," she said. "Nina wants to order it Thursday."
"Goose, yes." Preston turned a page. "Whatever you think. You're the general on the home front."
You have no idea, thought Cordelia, and let the thought sit behind her eyes where it lived now, warming its hands.
The phone rang in the hall at twenty past eight.
They heard Nina answer it, and then they heard Nina stop answering it, because the voice on the other end was coming through the earpiece hard enough to reach the dining room as sound, if not yet as words. Nina appeared in the doorway with the look of a woman holding a live wire.
"It's Mrs. Boyd, madam. The other Mrs. Boyd. She's asking for you. She's..." Nina chose the word with care. "She's very unwell."
Cordelia was still holding the butter knife when she took the call, and Sabrina's voice arrived like weather.
"They're in my house." No greeting. Her breath was going in gulps between the words.
"There are two men in my house, Cordelia, they have clipboards, they let themselves be let in and now they're walking through my rooms writing things down, and they gave me a letter, there's a letter, it has a red stamp on it and it says, hold on, I can't, my hands are...
" A sound of paper fighting somebody. "It says the occupancy ends.
It says the house goes to market. My house.
They're standing in my drawing room counting my chairs. "
Cordelia let one breath of silence spend itself down the line.
"You have to come. Both of you. Now, Cordelia, please, I don't understand what's happening, and nobody here will tell me anything except that it's all in the letter."
"Sabrina." Cordelia put thirty years of calm into the two syllables. "Breathe. We're coming."
She set down the phone and stood for one second with her hand still on it, arranging her face. Behind her, Preston had come out into the hall with his napkin still tucked into his collar, like a bib, which she also intended to remember.
"What. What is it. Who's died?"
"Nobody's died. Get the car brought around." She let the worry show now, measured, wifely. "The committee has found the townhouse."
They crossed the river in eleven minutes, and Preston talked the whole way, which is what he did instead of thinking.
"It's a mistake. Obviously it's a mistake, some clerk, some list. The townhouse is family, it's always been family, it's not an asset, it's, Sab's lived there five years, she's Clark's WIDOW, for heaven's sake. I'll speak to them. I'll simply speak to them and clear it up."
"Of course you will," said Cordelia, and watched the wet streets go by.
The front door stood open to the street, unattended, which told its own story, and nobody greeted them in the hall, because the household that would have done the greeting was busy being dismantled.
The two men in the townhouse hall were exactly what she had paid for without ever paying for them, which was the beauty of the whole machine.
Gray coats, gray manners, clipboards. Requisition men from the audit side, doing an asset verification, polite as undertakers and about as movable.
One of them was counting the hall chairs when they came in. The other was writing down the mirror.
Sabrina was on the stairs in her dressing gown with her hair half up, and the letter was in her hand, crushed and then flattened and then crushed again.
"Preston." Sabrina came down at him like a wave. "Tell them. Tell them it's a mistake."
Preston squared himself and produced his club voice. "Now look here. Whose authority are you men in this house on?"
The older of the two gray men looked at him without unkindness and without anything else either.
"The committee's, sir. The letter is signed by the committee and countersigned for the auditors.
" He said it the way you say a fact of geography.
"This property sits on the company's register.
Every property on the register is being verified before year's end.
We don't make the list, sir. We only check it. "
"Then check it somewhere else. This is my brother's house. My family's house."
"It's the company's house, sir. It has been since it was purchased.
" The man consulted his clipboard, not because he needed to, Cordelia understood, but because paper was his native tongue.
"Five years. The purchase predates our involvement.
The occupancy is the matter at issue. Company property occupied rent free by a private party, while penalties are held in abeyance, is the exact category of thing we're required to flag. It's flagged."
And there it was, laid in the hall like cable, the plain hard line that ran under all of it.
The penalties were still alive. They slept only as long as Halloran's people saw discipline in the books.
Everyone in this family had been told that, and everyone in this family had believed it applied to everyone else.
Preston's mouth worked. She watched the fight go out of him in the order it always went, indignation first, then the club voice, then the shoulders, and what was left at the end was a man doing arithmetic.
If he shouted at the auditors, the auditors would look harder.
If the auditors looked harder, the abeyance died.
If the abeyance died, the penalties landed on the company, and the company was the last thing on earth with his name anywhere near its masthead.
"There'll be a procedure," he said at last, to the carpet. "A proper procedure. We'll follow the procedure."
Sabrina stared at him.
"That's it?" Her voice went up and cracked in the middle. "That's what you came to say? Procedure? They're counting the chairs, Preston. The man wrote down the rocking horse. The one in the little room I keep for Oliver's visits. He wrote it DOWN."
"For the register," said the younger gray man, helpfully. "Everything on the inventory stays with the property or is reconciled against it. There's a schedule in the letter."
"I can't read the letter, I've read it nine times and I can't read it." She thrust it at Preston instead, and Cordelia watched her husband read the committee's prose, and had the strange, satisfying experience of seeing a man mouth the words market rate with his lips, silently, twice.
"It says." He cleared his throat. "It says the occupancy converts on the first of January.
Market rent from the first, or the property is vacated for letting.
And an inventory now, because of the register.
" He folded it, very carefully, along its existing creases, a man tidying a thing he could not fix.
"It's the auditors, Sab. It's the year we've had.
Everything's under the glass, the club was under the glass, my own memberships were under the glass. It's not personal."
"Not personal." Sabrina said each word like she was setting it down on a scale. "I'm your brother's widow, Preston. This house was bought for me the year we buried Clark. You would remember better than anyone alive exactly who arranged th—"
"The company arranged it, madam," said the older gray man from beside the mirror, and went on writing. He did not see the look that crossed between the widow and the husband over his bent gray head. Cordelia saw it entire, and put it away with the rest of her collection.
That was the moment it reached her, all of it, at once.
Cordelia saw it land. Not the rent, the rent was only a number, and Sabrina had never in her life been defeated by a number.
What landed was the architecture underneath, the sudden view straight down through the floor she'd stood on for five years, that none of it had ever been hers, not a chair of it, not a spoon, that she had been living all this time in the company's kindness, and that the kindness had an owner now, and the owner was not the man in front of her.
Her legs went. Cordelia caught her, because Cordelia was nearest, and because it made the picture perfect, the wife holding the mistress up in the hall while the husband stood folding a letter, and while upstairs, in a little room, a man in a gray coat wrote down a child's rocking horse that had waited five years between visits.
"Come and sit down," said Cordelia. "Preston, go and ask the gentlemen to leave the upstairs till last. And tell them to be gentle in the little room. It's a nursery."
Preston went, grateful to be given a task that involved leaving, and she took Sabrina into her own drawing room and sat her down among her own counted furniture and held her hand, and did her comforting, and it was the best work of a very good autumn.