Chapter Thirteen #2
"I begged them, you know," she said, low, wife to widow, the two of them alone with the tea things Sabrina's shaking hands couldn't manage.
"In November, when the register question first came up.
I went to the committee myself and asked for an exception for this house.
Family housing, I said. A widow, I said. Have some decency."
She let the pause do its work.
"They refused me in writing, Sabrina. Do you know what the audit man told me? The company is not a charity for the owner's relations. I was mortified. I didn't tell you because I hoped it would die in a file somewhere. And now."
"Then it's real." Sabrina was looking at the middle distance. "It's real, and it's happening, and nobody can."
"Nobody can." Cordelia said it kindly, the way you close a coffin.
"That's the thing I need you to hear, because you'll waste yourself otherwise.
There's no one left to appeal to. I tried, and I'm the one whose name is on the company, and they lectured me about charity.
Preston can't go near them, one word from him about this house and the questions start, whose occupancy, on what terms, since when.
" A breath, delicate as lace. "And the questions would not stop with the house. "
Their eyes met over the teapot, and something passed between them that neither of them named. Five years of Sundays sat in the silence, unsaid, both women looking at it.
"You've been given until the first," Cordelia went on, smooth as pouring.
"So the fight is over, and you never got to fight it.
That's the cruelest kind of losing, and I am sorry.
What's left now is how you leave, and there I can help.
You'll leave with your head up, in your own time, before their deadline, because the alternative is that men in gray coats do it for you in February, in front of the whole street.
You are not going to give this city the pleasure. You're going to leave beautifully."
Sabrina laughed, one note, wet. "Beautifully. On what? Have you seen what rooms cost this side of the river? I have a widow's portion that wouldn't carpet one of those stairs, I have..." She stopped counting out loud, too late, and pressed the back of her hand to her mouth.
"You have family," said Cordelia.
It came out warm and simple and it lay on the table between them like a blade in a napkin, and Cordelia gave it a moment before she unwrapped it the rest of the way.
"Maureen has that whole upstairs doing nothing.
Two rooms and the box room, since the lodger left.
It's not what you're used to, God knows, but it's warm, it's respectable, and it's January, Sabrina.
A roof beats pride in January." She reached across the tea things and squeezed the widow's cold hand, sister to sister, and delivered the line she had carried across the river that morning like a gift wrapped and ribboned at home.
"Maureen said something to me this autumn that I keep coming back to.
Family looks after each other, she said. We're the only family we've got."
Sabrina's face did several things in sequence, and none of them was gratitude, and the last of them, arriving slowly, on a delay, like frost climbing a window, was pure undiluted horror.
"Maureen's," she said.
"Just till spring," said Cordelia, gently, and above their heads the floorboards creaked, one gray man and then the other, moving through the bedrooms, writing everything down.
Preston talked all the way home too, and by the second bridge he had assembled the version he could live in.
"You were wonderful with her. Wonderful.
She takes things so hard, she always has, Clark used to say it, she feels everything at double strength.
" He drove with one hand and conducted himself with the other.
"And it's not as bad as it looks, is it.
It's housing, it's not exile. Mother's got the room.
It'll be economical. Honestly, between the two of us, it might be the making of them, the two of them under one roof, they've never had the chance to get close. "
"No," Cordelia agreed. "They've never had the chance."
"And come spring, when the penalties clear and the glass comes off, we'll sort something proper out for her. I'll see to it personally." He nodded twice, firmly, a man signing a promise to himself in disappearing ink. "You'll talk to Mother? It'll come better from you. She listens to you."
"I'll talk to Maureen," said Cordelia, and looked out at the river, where the gulls were fighting over something small, and let herself have one inch of smile against the glass.
She made the call that afternoon, from the study, with the door open, because there was nothing in this call that needed hiding and quite a lot in it worth being overheard enjoying.
"Absolutely not." Maureen didn't even let the proposal finish standing up. "Under my roof? That woman? You know what she is, Cordelia, everyone knows what she is, she's been what she is all over this city for years."
"She's family, Maureen. Clark's widow."
"She's a squatter with a fur coat, is what she is, and now the fur's going back too, from what you're telling me.
" A satisfied little pause, in which Cordelia could hear her rearranging her parlor furniture into a courtroom.
"The house gone. Well. I won't say I'm surprised.
I will say I always wondered how that arrangement stood on air for five years, and now we know. Air."
"Now we know," said Cordelia. "The two rooms upstairs, Maureen. And the box room for her things."
"The box room has my preserves in it."
"Then the preserves will have company. It's January."
"And I'm sixty-eight, and I've earned a quiet house.
" But the voice had shifted key, from refusal to negotiation, because underneath everything else Maureen Boyd was a woman who had spent forty years unable to refuse an audience, and a daughter-in-law under her roof, in disgrace, needing things, was an audience nailed to its seat. "It would only be till spring."
"Only till spring."
"And she'd keep to the upstairs. My kitchen stays my kitchen. I'm not having her rearranging."
"You'll set the rules of the house," said Cordelia, and heard, distinctly, down the line, the sound of a woman deciding to be magnanimous and already drafting the speech.
"Well," said Maureen. "Family looks after each other. I've always said that. You've heard me say it."
"I've heard you say it," said Cordelia. "I'll bring them Saturday."
She put the phone down and sat a moment in the winter light of the study, tallying the week.
The house coming back to her by letter and by schedule, inventoried, hers.
The mistress, decanted from luxury into the box room kingdom of the one woman in the city who would narrate her fall to her daily, at meals, with relish.
The husband, upstairs somewhere, believing he had personally steadied the family through a difficult morning.
Saturday, she thought, was going to want a good coat and comfortable shoes.
She meant to enjoy every minute of it standing up.