Chapter 6
They had a good Christmas.
That was the truth of it and she never took it back afterward, not even in the worst week of March.
It was a good Christmas. It snowed on the twenty-third, which it does maybe one year in four on that water, and they walked down to the boathouse in it and came back with wet feet and Cormac made a fire in the library that smoked for twenty minutes because the flue had been shut since February.
Siobhan closed the restaurant on the twenty-fifth and came at two and stayed until nine.
She was careful with Imogen all afternoon in a way that Imogen could feel from across the room, and at one point in the kitchen she said, "You look well," and meant about four other things by it, and Imogen said, "I am well," and meant about four other things back.
Augusta did not come. Augusta had a cold, which Augusta did not have.
"She said she'd see us in January," Imogen said, coming back in with the phone.
"Does she have a cold?"
"No."
"Right," Cormac said, and left it there. It was the correct thing.
He was good to her that winter. She would like that on the record.
He came home for lunch. He had never done that before.
He put his phone face-down on the table without being asked and then, after a week, stopped bringing it to the table at all.
He asked her about the Herreshoff catalog she had been picking at for two years and then asked about it again four days later, having remembered the answer — so unprecedented that she had to go and stand in the pantry, the pantry she could now do, for a minute.
He learned to make one thing that was not eggs. It was a lamb thing. It took him three attempts and the third one was good.
He stopped saying fine. She noticed that in the first week of January and it took her another week to work out why it bothered her, and then she had it: he had not stopped saying fine because he had started telling her the truth.
He had stopped saying fine because somebody had told him that saying fine was the problem.
The answers got longer. They did not get more honest. He would come in and give her nine minutes on his day, well organized, with a beginning and an end, and she would listen to it and feel — and she could not for the life of her have justified this to another human being — managed.
Astrid Sable did not come back.
Imogen noticed in the second week of January. A van came out on a Tuesday with two men from the alarm company to do the annual and swap the sensors in the morning room, and Imogen stood in the hall with a cup of tea and said, "Is Astrid not with you?"
"Astrid?"
"Sable. She runs the detail."
The older of the two men had a look on his face that she did not like.
"There's no detail now, ma'am," he said. "It's just the monitoring contract."
"Since when?"
"Couldn't tell you."
She asked Cormac that night, at dinner, the way you ask about a boiler.
"Astrid's not with the alarm people anymore."
"No," he said.
"Did she leave?"
"We made a change."
Imogen put her fork down.
"What does that mean?"
"It means the arrangement we had was expensive for what it was," Cormac said. "There's a monitoring contract and there's a patrol twice a night out of Tiverton and it's better coverage than one person on a phone. Draycott's people looked at it."
"Draycott's people."
"Imogen."
"Did you fire her?"
"We ended a contract."
"Cormac."
He set his knife down and looked at her, and she watched something come into his face that she had not seen since the fourteenth of November — something patient, and slightly braced, and very slightly performed.
"Do you want her back?" he said. "Because if you want her back, she's back tomorrow. Say the word and I'll call her tonight."
And that was — it was correct. It was the right answer. He was offering her the thing.
But she had watched her husband negotiate for eight years and she knew the shape of an offer made in the certain knowledge it will not be taken, and she heard herself say, "No, it's fine," the word out before she could stop it, and watched him pick his knife back up.
Neither of them said anything else about it.
That night she lay awake next to him and did the thing she had promised herself she had stopped doing: the arithmetic.
Astrid Sable had specified the room. Astrid Sable had written the ninety seconds. Astrid Sable had arrived at twenty past seven on the morning of the fifteenth without being called, had gone into that room alone, had come out in four minutes with her jaw set, and had said nothing at all to anybody.
And Astrid Sable was gone, and there was a monitoring contract, and Draycott's people had looked at it.
Imogen turned over.
She thought: don't.
She thought: you have had six weeks of your husband being a good man and you are going to take it apart because a woman's contract ended.
She thought: he offered to call her tonight.
And she went to sleep, and in the morning it had gone back to being what it had been the day before: nothing.
Lennox came for the weekend of the seventeenth.
He arrived on Friday at six with a case of something and a bag of oysters and filled the kitchen the way he always did, and he was so pleased about the two of them that Imogen found herself smiling at the floor.
"Look at this," he said, with an arm around each of them. "Look at this."
"Stop it."
"I will not stop it. I have been extremely worried and I am now extremely unworried and I intend to be insufferable about it for two days."
He was good company. He was always good company.
He did the oysters himself at the sink with a towel over his hand and told a long story about a man in Lisbon that was probably half true, and he asked Imogen about the Herreshoff catalog and listened to the answer, and he was kind about Augusta's cold in a way that made it clear he knew perfectly well there was no cold.
At about eleven on the Saturday night the three of them were in the library with the fire going properly this time, and Lennox was on his third glass, and he said:
"You know what I keep thinking about."
"Don't," Cormac said.
"No, it's a nice thought. It's a nice thought, let me have it.
" He turned to Imogen. "I keep thinking about how nobody died.
That's all. Two men in the house, four hours, a great deal of damage, and at the end of it everybody walks out.
The incident could have gone about nine other ways and it went the way it went. "
Imogen looked at the fire.
"The incident," she said.
"Well—"
"You've called it that four times this weekend."
"Have I?" Lennox looked genuinely thrown for a second, and then he smiled and spread his hands. "What should I call it?"
And Imogen opened her mouth and found that she did not have an answer.
That was the thing. She turned it over for a week afterward and never got to the bottom of it. She did not have a word either. The break-in made it about property. The fourteenth was what Cormac said and it made it about a date. The night was what Siobhan said and it made it about weather.
Nobody in that house had a name for the thing that had happened to her, and she had not noticed, because she had not needed one, because she had not been saying it out loud to anybody.
The Ingersoll dinner was the twenty-fourth of January.
Imogen had been going to that dinner for eleven years, since before Cormac, back when she went as a Tillinghast and somebody's plus-one.
It was fourteen people in a dining room in Newport with a Herreshoff half-hull over the sideboard and the same argument about the harbor commission every single year.
She had not wanted to go. She had said so twice, in the mild way, and both times Cormac had said "then we won't," and both times she had heard herself say "no, we should," and that was how it was decided.
They drove up over the bridge at half six in the dark. He had got the tie wrong and she fixed it in the car at a light — a thing she had done perhaps two hundred times — and neither of them remarked on it.
The house was on a street where every house was the same house. Inside there were the same nineteen people there had been for eleven years, minus the ones who had died, and a fire going, and the Herreshoff half-hull over the sideboard that Imogen had been quietly correcting people about since 2014.
She was good in that room. She had always been good in that room.
It took about four minutes for her to be talking to a woman she did not like about a granddaughter's application to Brown, and about nine before somebody asked her what she thought of the harbor commission's dredging proposal, and she said what she thought of it, mildly and at some length, and two people laughed and one man went slightly pink.
Across the room her husband was doing his version — standing near the fire, saying very little, being enormously attended to.
She watched him for a second from the other side of the room.
He was good at this now. He had been terrible at it for the first three years — too direct, too quick to say a number out loud — and somewhere around year five he had worked out that in that particular room the man who says least wins, and he had adjusted, the way he adjusted to everything, and now people leaned in.
He is the most adaptable person I have ever met, she thought, standing with a glass in her hand at a party. He will become whatever the room requires.
It was an entirely fond thought at the time. It did not become anything else for another five weeks.
They went in at eight. The table ran the length of the room and the cards had been done by somebody who thought about it, and Imogen was seated between a trustee she had known since graduate school and a man she did not know at all — somebody's brother, down from Boston, in finance, pleasant enough.
The fish came and went. The dredging argument had its annual outing and burned itself out by the second course, the way it always does.
And then the man she did not know said, at some point between the fish and the lamb:
"You're the Sakonnet house, aren't you. The break-in."
The table did the thing a table does. Not silence — worse than silence, a dip, a lull in the middle with three conversations still going at the edges.
"Yes," Imogen said.
"Ghastly. Ghastly. And they got the whole family into the — what is it, a safe room?"
She was aware of Cormac four seats down on the other side.
"Yes," she said.
"Thank God."
"Yes."
"And you were away, weren't you," the man said. "Somebody told me you were up in Providence."
There was a beat of about a second and a half.
"I was," Imogen said.
It came out perfectly. It came out the way she had been producing sentences at that table for eleven years — level, warm, faintly amused at the whole business — and the man said thank God again and the table came back up and the lamb arrived.
Imogen put her hands in her lap.
I was in the pantry, she thought. I was eleven feet from that room. A man put his hand on the door I was standing behind, twice. I watched my husband on a phone for four hours.
She picked up her fork.
It was not the lie that frightened her, afterward, in the car. It was how little it had cost. She had not braced for it. She had not chosen it. It had come out of her the way of course, it's no trouble at all had come out of her in September, smooth and warm and instant, with no author.
Eight years of manners had a mouth of its own and it did not need her permission.
In the car going back over the bridge Cormac said, "You didn't have to say that."
"I know."
"I'd have backed whatever you said."
"I know."
"Imogen—"
"Don't," she said. "Please don't be kind about it. I'd rather you said nothing."
So he said nothing. He put his hand over hers on the seat and drove.
And she sat in the dark with the bridge lights going over the windshield and understood that he had heard her tell it and had let her tell it, and that letting her tell it was the single easiest thing that had happened to either of them all month.
At the end of January she realized he had stopped saying Fiona's name.
Not avoided it. Stopped. She went back through the whole winter in her head, standing at the kitchen window with a dishtowel, and could not place a single instance since the eleventh of December — not in the account in the study, where he had said she nine times and Fiona not once; not in anything about the deal, where it was the Providence office and the diligence team; not at Christmas, not with Lennox, not ever.
There were eleven ways to read that.
He was being careful of her. That was the obvious one and probably the true one. You do not say that woman's name at your wife's table; that is not delicacy, that is arithmetic any man can do.
Or.
Imogen put the dishtowel down.
She thought about the fact that she had not said the name either. Not once, since the kitchen on the morning of the fifteenth. Not to Siobhan, not to Nuala Reddington, not to her mother, not out loud alone in the car.
Two people in a house, for seven weeks, carefully not saying a word.
That was not delicacy. That was maintenance.
That was two people keeping a thing standing by agreeing where not to put their weight — and she was doing half of it, and she had been doing half of it for seven weeks, and she was the one who knew exactly how it felt to be on the wrong side of a door that everybody had agreed not to mention.
She stood at the window for a long time.
Then she picked the dishtowel back up, because he was coming in from the drive with the mail, and she said, "How was it?", and he told her, for nine minutes, with a beginning and an end.