5. Dulcie
DULCIE
Cressida brings the book in a white box tied with yellow ribbon.
I am sitting by the window with my feet on a cushion when the doorbell rings. Magnus has been home for twenty minutes, long enough to change his shirt and ask whether there is coffee. He hasn’t mentioned company.
When I hear her voice in the hall, I take my feet down.
My ankles have left shallow hollows in the cushion. I turn it over before I can stop myself.
“There you are,” Cressida says, as though she has been looking for me in a house she knows well.
Dorothea follows her into the sitting room. She carries no gift. Her attention moves over the books, the cushion, the mug on the small table beside me.
Magnus comes in behind them.
“You knew they were coming?” I ask.
“Cressida has something for the baby.”
“I can see that.”
He gives me a look. I recognize the warning before anyone else has even sat down.
It has been a week since the jeweler. A week of careful conversations that become arguments when I refuse to let him choose where they end. I have kept going to work. I have kept sleeping in the guest room. Each morning I wake for a second believing the empty place beside me is an accident.
Cressida sets the box in my lap.
“I thought you might like to open it.”
The ribbon lies bright against my dress. I slide one finger under it and pull. It loosens with a soft whisper.
Inside is a large hardback with a pale blue cover. A little boy in a red boat waves at a woman standing on shore. Above him, gold letters spell out Benedict’s First Adventures.
My fingers stop on the edge of the box.
“Oh,” Dorothea says. “Let me see.”
Cressida lifts the book before I answer and opens it to the dedication.
“For Benedict,” she reads, “with all my love, from your godmother, Cressida. For our first museum, our first seaside adventure, and all the wonderful days we’ll share.”
She turns it toward Magnus. “They put the little sailboat on this page too.”
He looks. “It’s very good.”
I stare at the drawing. The woman’s hair is the same pale color as Cressida’s. She doesn’t say that part aloud. She doesn’t have to.
“Who decided you would be his godmother?”
She lowers the book slightly. “Magnus and I discussed it.”
I look at him. “When?”
“Dulcie.”
“When did you discuss it?”
“Before she ordered it.”
Dorothea sits in the chair across from me. “You make everything sound so clandestine. Families discuss things.”
“I’m his mother.”
“And nobody is disputing that.”
Cressida strokes the edge of the page. “I’m trying to do something generous. It would be nice if you could see that.”
“You knew I didn’t agree to the name.”
Her hand stills. Then she closes the cover.
“Magnus said that had been settled.”
I wait for him to deny it. He stands by the mantel, one shoulder angled toward us, watching the conversation as though I am taking too long to arrive at the reasonable conclusion.
“Did you?” I ask.
“The book is a gift.”
“It has a decision written inside it.”
“It has a dedication.”
“To my baby. From a godmother I haven’t chosen.”
Cressida’s smile disappears. I prefer her face without it. At least now I don’t have to pretend she is confused about why this hurts.
“There are things I was promised too,” she says.
The sentence catches at me. “What things?”
“A place in his life. This isn’t something I thought of this morning.”
Magnus moves away from the mantel. “We aren’t going to quarrel over a children’s book.”
He takes it from Cressida and crosses to the shelves.
I see where he is going to put it. There is a gap beside a row of novels I brought from my old apartment. I made that gap myself, moving things over to leave room for the picture books I wanted to read to our son.
“Please don’t put it there.”
Magnus slides the book into the space.
The spine faces out. Benedict. The gold letters are larger than the titles around them.
For a moment I do nothing.
Cressida looks at the shelf, then at me. Her relief is unmistakable. She has come for something and received it.
I stand up.
It takes me longer than I want. I have to move the empty box off my lap and find my balance before I can cross the room. Nobody speaks while I do it.
I take the book down.
“Thank you for thinking of the baby,” I say, because some deeply trained part of me still wants to make my refusal polite. “But I’m not accepting this.”
I hold it out to Cressida.
She doesn’t reach for it.
“You can’t be serious.”
“I am.”
“After I had it made especially?”
“You had it made after you knew I objected.”
Dorothea’s voice cuts across the room. “Put it down, Dulcie. You’re embarrassing yourself.”
My arm begins to ache. The book is heavier than it looks. I lower it a little, still holding it toward Cressida.
“She can take it with her,” I say. “I don’t want it in my home.”
Magnus turns his head toward me.
The room changes before he says anything. I feel myself watching his mouth, waiting to learn whether I have finally made the wrong person angry enough to be heard.
“It stays.”
“No.”
The word sounds thin. I say it again.
“No, Magnus. I have said no to the name, and I have said no to this. You can’t keep treating me as though I haven’t spoken.”
He comes toward me. I hold the book against my body now, not because I want it, but because I cannot think where to put it that he will not interpret as agreement.
He stops close enough that I have to tilt my face up.
“Give it to me.”
“Will you give it back to her?”
“It belongs on the shelf.”
“Then no.”
His hand closes on the top edge of the cover. He waits. I could keep holding it. I could make the next thing a struggle over a book in front of his mother and his ex.
My baby moves between us.
I let go.
Magnus turns and puts the book back in the space I emptied.
This time there is no possibility that he has failed to understand me. He heard every word. He felt my hand holding what I refused. He took it from me anyway and put it exactly where he wanted it.
Dorothea exhales.
“Thank you,” she says to him. “There’s no reason to indulge this.”
I can’t seem to make my fingers uncurl. They retain the shape of the cover although I am holding nothing.
Cressida picks up the white box and folds the loose ribbon inside it.
“I’m sure you’ll feel differently when you read it to him.”
“I won’t read it to him.”
Her gaze flicks toward the shelf again. “Then someone else will.”
Magnus doesn’t answer her.
He asks whether she wants coffee.
I stand between the sofa and the shelves while they settle into the room. The place where I was sitting has become somewhere Cressida can put her bag. Dorothea asks about a dinner next month. Magnus answers. Their conversation resumes around the space I occupy.
I leave before anybody has to ask me to be more pleasant.
In the kitchen, I fill a glass with water. I spill a little on the counter because my hand is shaking. I wipe it up with a dish towel and keep wiping after the surface is dry.
I wait until I hear the front door close.
Then I go back into the sitting room.
The book is where he put it.
I could take it down now. Nobody is watching. I could hide it, throw it away, leave it on his pillow. For a moment I imagine the relief of an empty space.
But he would put it back.
I know that with a certainty that makes my knees feel loose.
I sit in the chair by the window and call my mother.
She answers with my name, warmly, as if I have interrupted something she would rather stop doing to speak to me.
For a moment I can’t say anything.
“Dulcie? Are you all right?”
“Mom.”
“What is it?”
I look at the shelf.
“He put it back,” I say. “I told him not to, and he took it out of my hands and put it back.”