Chapter Fourteen #2
"Enough. God. ENOUGH." He set the table down with a crack and stood over it, chest going, collar dark, and for once in his life the shine was entirely gone and what stood there was just a man in a small hot parlor between his mother and his mistress with everything he had built with his face falling down around him one room at a time.
"I have HAD it. Do either of you understand what this year has been?
Do you? The company on a cliff edge, the auditors in everything, in my club, in my post, and now I spend my Saturday hauling tables so the two of you can fight a war over a DOILY. "
His voice cracked on the word doily, which would have been funny, Cordelia thought, in some other life, and was in fact funny in this one.
"The house is gone. It's GONE. Nobody in this family can do anything about anything anymore, and the sooner everybody in it gets used to that, the..."
He didn't finish. He looked around the parlor as if he'd woken in it, at his mother with her hand pressed to her cardigan, at Sabrina white over the lamp, and at Cordelia, last, his wife, calm in the doorway with the linens in her arms.
"I need air," Preston said, hoarse, and walked out of the house, and they heard the car door, and then nothing, because he did not, in fact, drive anywhere.
He just sat in the car at the curb in the gray afternoon, alone, holding the wheel of a vehicle that was going nowhere, which Cordelia felt was the truest picture of her husband anyone had produced in twenty years.
Into the ringing silence he left behind, she moved the way nurses move.
The linens to the airing cupboard. The kettle on.
The lamp, diplomatically, to the upstairs landing, where it lit the china dog like a shrine, and each woman quietly assured, in separate rooms, in a murmur, that she was in the right and that everyone knew it and that these things always shook down given a fortnight.
Then she put on the good coat, in the hall, unhurried.
"You're not leaving already?" said Maureen, appearing with the ruined tea tray, appalled at the prospect of losing the one witness worth performing for. "You've only just come. Nobody's eaten a thing."
"Oliver's been waiting in the car the better part of an hour, and I promised him quick." Cordelia buttoned the coat, kindness itself. "You're settled now, and it's family time, and I'm in the way. Besides, someone should sit with Preston a moment. He takes things so hard."
She let herself out. At the curb she tapped one knuckle on her husband's car window, and Preston looked up from the wheel with the eyes of a shipwreck, and she gave him, through the glass, her very best smile, the loyal one, the one that had gotten her through seven years of Sundays, and pointed down the street at her own car, and left him to his harbor.
Oliver was asleep against Nina's arm before the second bridge, worn out by verdicts, and Cordelia looked out the window at the river going by, at the little house shrinking away behind them with all three of its prisoners inside, and let the smile finally off its leash, out loud in no language at all, pressed flat against the cold glass where nobody could audit it.
Till spring, she thought. They won't last till February.
Time did what she asked of it, after that. It passed.
January closed over the little house across the river like weather.
The bulletins reached her at dinner, through Preston, who went twice a week to referee and came home each time grayer, older, thinner about the eyes, eating in silence until the silence overflowed.
His mother had instituted a ledger for the milk.
An actual ledger, ruled columns, and Sabrina had responded by buying her own milk and labeling it, and Maureen had responded to that by using it, on the principle that nothing in her house could be forbidden her in her own house, and the resulting engagement had gone, Preston reported, forty minutes.
Sab had taken to eating upstairs. The immersion heater had become the Somme.
Maureen had begun receiving her parlor visitors on Wednesdays specifically at the hour Sabrina took her bath, and narrating the state of the household to them at a volume the pipes carried, and on and on, and Cordelia listened to all of it with her chin on her hand, wearing the face of a woman bearing up wonderfully under her family's difficulties, and inside, where she lived, she took the little war out each night and turned it over like a jewel.
Once, in the middle of the month, Sabrina called her directly, at an hour chosen so carefully that Cordelia could hear the choosing in it, the middle of the morning, Maureen at the shops, the house behind her voice quite silent.
"I'm not asking for myself." That was the overture, rehearsed flat. "But there are small flats this side of the river. Nothing grand. If the committee could see its way to, I don't know, an allowance against the family's, there must be funds that. You know the men. They listen to you."
"They lectured me about charity, Sabrina.
In writing." Cordelia let the regret come through warm and real, and it was real, in its way.
She regretted almost everything about that call except its existence.
"If I go back now asking them to fund a flat for family, after the townhouse, I hand them the exact story they're hunting for.
I'm sorry. I hate saying it. Hold on till spring, that's all.
Everything gets looked at again in the spring. "
There was a silence with arithmetic in it.
"Everyone keeps saying spring," said Sabrina, at last, in a voice from which the overture had entirely gone, "like it's a place," and hung up, and Cordelia sat with the silent phone a moment and awarded the line full marks, and wrote it into the ledger she kept behind her eyes, the one with the date on it in April.
Twice that month, from the study, with the door shut, she spoke to Adrian on the phone, and neither call was about the Boyds at all.
Papers were moving in a courthouse two hours up the coast. A hearing date had been asked for and given.
A file with her son's name in it was traveling, quietly, from desk to desk, the way Adrian moved all his heaviest freight, silently and downhill.
Soon, was all he would say. I'll come for you myself when it's time.
Wear something that says everything you can't.
And then, on the last Tuesday of the month, it was time.
She dressed with more care that morning than she had dressed for her own wedding, and she was aware of the comparison while she did it.
Deep blue, the coat with the standing collar, her grandmother's small pearls, her hair down the way nobody in this city had seen it in a decade.
Armor, but not for a war. She looked in the glass for a long moment at the woman assembled there, and the woman looked back, and neither of them said anything, because there was every chance, they both knew, that today either might cry.
Adrian was at the curb at nine, out of the car, formal, in the dark suit he saved for the mornings that mattered, holding the door like an honor guard of one.
He looked at her for a moment over the top of it, all the way down and all the way back, and whatever he had planned to say he visibly retired it and kept only the essential.
"Ready?"
"Ready," said Cordelia.