Chapter 4
The thing about November on the point is that there is nobody to go to.
In July she could have walked out the kitchen door and been at four houses in twenty minutes, and two of them would have poured her a drink and one of them would have given her a bed and all four would have called everyone they knew.
In late November the road out to the point was six closed houses, a mailbox with a dead wasp nest in it, and Siobhan's, and then eleven miles of nothing to the bridge.
So there was the house.
There was the house, and a man in it, and the two of them moving around each other from the fifteenth of November like people in a small boat.
He did not hire anyone.
That was the first thing she noticed and the first thing that got under her guard.
Cormac Severin had spent eleven years not doing things himself.
There was a man for the boats and a woman for the garden and a firm for the taxes, and when the dishwasher went in the spring he had someone drive down from Fall River the same afternoon.
On the seventeenth he boarded the morning room window himself.
He did it badly. He cut the plywood an inch short on the long side and had to shim it, and he put the screws in too close to the edge and split it once and swore and started over, and it took him until after dark with a work light balanced on a chair.
It rained on the twentieth and water came in around the bottom corner anyway and he was out there at ten at night with a caulk gun and a headlamp doing it again.
Imogen stood at the kitchen window with a cup of tea she was not drinking and watched her husband kneel on wet grass in the dark and do a bad job on a window for the second time.
She could have said: there's a company.
She did not say it.
He slept in the hall.
Not on the first night. On the first night he had gone to the master bedroom and she had gone to the stripped guest wing and they had each lain awake at opposite ends of a house with plywood in it.
On the second night she came out at three because she could not be in a dark room anymore and nearly stepped on him.
He was on the floor of the hall outside the guest wing door, on top of a quilt with another quilt over him, with his back against the wall and his legs out in front of him and his head tipped sideways.
He had a book he was not reading. When she opened the door he did not startle.
He just opened his eyes and looked up at her.
"What are you doing?"
"Nothing," Cormac said.
"You're on the floor."
"I'm reading."
"It's three."
"Yes."
They looked at each other in the dark hall.
"Are you going to do this every night?" Imogen said.
He thought about lying. She watched him think about it, and watched him decide against it, and that was the second thing that got under her guard.
"Yes," he said.
He did it for eleven nights.
He never mentioned it. Not once — not in the morning, not sideways, not to make a point.
There was no version where he said I've been sleeping in the hall.
He was simply there every night when she opened the door and gone every morning before she came out, and the quilts went back in the cedar chest at the end of the hall so the housekeeper would not find them, and Imogen worked out on about night four that he was folding them himself.
On night six she found a glass of water on the floor outside her door.
Just that. A glass of water, on a coaster, because he had been married to her for eight years and knew she woke thirsty at two and knew what she had been doing in the kitchen on the fourteenth and had made the only calculation available to him: that she should never have to go down there again.
She stood over it for a long time.
Then she picked it up and drank it and put the empty glass back on the coaster where he would find it, which was the closest thing to a kind word she had said to him in six days.
The dark was the problem.
She had not expected that. She had expected to be angry — she was angry, all the time, in a flat continuous way like a noise from another room. What she had not expected was the other thing, which arrived on the third night and did not leave.
She could not be alone downstairs after dark.
Not would not. Could not. She tried it on the eighteenth, deliberately, the way you press a bruise, and got as far as the bottom of the back stairs with the kitchen black in front of her and found that her body simply stopped.
Her legs stopped. Her hand was on the newel and her hand would not come off it.
She stood there in the dark for a minute and a half with her heart going like something being hit and then she went back up and sat on the bathroom floor for twenty minutes.
She did not tell anyone.
She told Siobhan a version. She told Nuala Reddington nothing. She told the detective, when he came back on the twenty-first with photographs of two men from a gas station in Tiverton, that she was fine, and he said of course, in the way people say it, and wrote something down.
What she did instead was work out the route.
Back stairs after four o'clock, never the front.
Lights on in the hall before she started down.
Never the butler's pantry, in any circumstance, at any hour — she had not been through that doorway since the fifteenth and when the housekeeper asked about the silver Imogen said leave it.
Check the door behind her before she sat down anywhere.
That one she did not know she was doing until Cormac mentioned it, three weeks later, very carefully, and she snapped at him so hard he did not raise it again for a year.
And at some point in the third week she understood a thing she did not want to understand: that the only hour of the day her body was not doing this was the hour he was in the room.
Not because he made her feel safe. She would have laughed at that; she nearly did laugh, out loud, alone, standing in the pantry-free kitchen with the lights on. He was the reason. He was the man who had not looked around.
But bodies are stupid and old and do not read the room.
Eight years of a particular weight on the other side of the mattress, a particular voice two rooms off, a particular set of footsteps on the stairs — her nervous system had decided a long time ago what safe sounded like, and it had not been consulted about November.
So she was frightened in an empty house and less frightened in a house with him in it, and she despised that, and it was true anyway.
"Trauma," Siobhan said.
"Don't."
"I'm not being clever, Im, it's the actual word.
You're not attracted to him again, you're a rabbit in a hole.
" Siobhan was doing prep with the phone against her shoulder; Imogen could hear the knife.
"It's the house. Come here for four nights.
Four. If you still want to be there on the fifth I'll drive you back myself. "
"I can't."
"You can, you just won't."
"It's the same thing this month."
The knife stopped.
"Can I say the mean version?"
"You're going to."
"He shut a door," Siobhan said. "And now you can't be downstairs on your own, so you need him in the house. So the thing he did is the reason you can't leave. Do you see how that works?"
Imogen stood at the kitchen window.
"I know what you're saying."
"But?"
"But you weren't in the pantry," Imogen said, "and he was on the other side of that door for four hours knowing it, and I've watched him not sleep for two weeks, and I'm not going to let you make him into a coward because it's a cleaner story."
There was a long pause on the line.
"Okay," Siobhan said.
"Siobhan—"
"No, that's fair. That's fair." The knife started again.
"I'll say one more thing and then I'll leave it till you ask.
You're not wrong about him. I think he's dying.
I think he'd put his hand in that boiler if you asked him to.
" A pause. "I just think you're deciding what kind of man he is at the exact moment you most need him to be a particular kind of man, and that's not a great time to be deciding. "
"Noted."
"I love you."
"I know."
Here is what he did not do, in three weeks, and she made the list without meaning to, the way you do.
He did not buy her anything.
He did not say I'm sorry more than once. He said it on the morning of the fifteenth, in the kitchen, before the police left, and after that he stopped, and she understood at some point that he had stopped on purpose and that stopping had cost him something.
He did not explain. Not once. There was no speech.
She kept waiting for the speech — she had been to enough dinners with enough men to know the shape of it, the let me give you some context, the part where the thing is framed.
He never gave it. When she asked him something he answered it in about eleven words and then shut his mouth and waited to see if there was another question.
He did not ask her for anything. Not to come back to the room, not to talk, not to sit down, not to eat. Twice she came into a room and he got up to leave and she had to say you don't have to go.
He did not mention the deed again.
And he did not defend himself about the door.
That was the strangest one and it took her longest to see it.
Every other person in her life had a position on the ninety seconds.
Siobhan thought he'd let it shut. Her mother thought he'd bought her off.
Lennox thought nobody gets it right. Imogen herself had said the automatic-seal sentence out loud four or five times now, to Siobhan, to Nuala, to her own reflection at two in the morning, getting smoother at it each time.
Cormac never said it at all.
She asked him about it exactly once, on the twenty-fourth, in the study, not gently.
"You don't talk about the door."
"No."
"Why."
"Because anything I say about it is for me," he said.
And went back to what he was doing.
She moved back into the main house on the twenty-eighth.
She told herself it was the stairs. That was the reason she gave and it was even partly true: the guest wing was at the wrong end for the back stairs, and the only way to the guest bath at night was past the head of the front stairs.
She could not do that anymore. She was not washing properly, and it was becoming a real thing rather than a symbolic one.
So: the stairs.
She carried her own things down the long hall at four in the afternoon while it was still light, two trips, and she did not tell him she was doing it. She put her toothbrush back in the holder in the master bath. She put her book on the left nightstand.
Then she sat on the end of the bed in her coat for a while and looked at the room.
He came up at six and stopped in the doorway.
He saw the toothbrush first — she watched his eyes go to the bathroom door and come back — and then the book. He did not say anything for a second.
"The guest wing's cold," Imogen said.
"It's the same boiler."
"The stairs are wrong."
"Okay."
"I'm not —" She stopped. Started again. "This isn't anything."
"I know."
"I'm serious, Cormac."
"I know what it is," he said. "It's a bed."
And he turned around and went back down.
That night she lay in the dark on her side of a mattress she had slept on for six years and listened to the house.
He was not in it. He had taken a quilt off the end of the bed on his way out with no comment at all, and he was somewhere down the hall, on the floor, doing the thing he did not mention.
She lay there and thought: he'll come in at some point.
He did not come in.
She thought: he'll knock.
He did not knock.
At half past one she got up and walked down the long dark hall — the whole length of it, past the master landing, past the pine panel with eighteen inches of steel behind it, which she made herself do at a normal walking pace and which took everything she had — and found him against the wall outside the guest wing door with his eyes shut, on the floor, in the wrong place, guarding a room she was no longer in.
He had not moved. Nobody had told him.
Imogen stood in the dark hall and looked at her husband asleep sitting up on the floor outside an empty room, and felt the whole architecture of the last two weeks give somewhere underneath her, quietly, the way a floor goes.
"Cormac."
He came awake all at once. He always had.
"Yeah. What. What's wrong—"
"Nothing's wrong."
He got his focus. He looked at her standing there in the middle of the hall — in the middle of it, at half past one, forty feet from the stairs — and she watched him understand what that cost and decide not to say anything about it.
"Okay," he said.
"You're outside the wrong room."
He looked at the door beside him. Then at the long hall behind her.
"Yes," he said. "I am."
And then neither of them said anything for what felt like a very long time, and Imogen stood there in a dark hallway in a house with plywood on the morning room window, and understood perfectly well what she was about to do, and how fast it was, and what every single person who loved her would say about it.
"Come to bed," she said.
"Imogen—"
"I'm not asking you for anything. I'm asking you to be in the room."
He got up off the floor with the quilt over his arm.
They walked back down the hall together, not touching, and she went in first, and he stopped in the doorway the way he had at six o'clock, and she said, "Don't make me say it twice," and he came in and shut the door.
She slept that night for the first time since the fourteenth.
That was the whole of it. Nothing happened. He lay down on top of the covers on his own side with the quilt over him and his shoes off and his shirt on, six inches of cold sheet between them, and she went out like a light in under four minutes and did not wake until the gray came up over the water.
When she did wake he was already gone, and the quilt was folded at the end of the bed, and downstairs she could hear him talking on the phone in the study, low, to somebody about Thursday.