Chapter 11
She found out from the worst possible person, which was, she decided later, the only way it could have been true.
The first she knew of anything was the third week of August, and it was not news. It was the Journal's business page, four column inches, which she read standing up in the kitchen with a coffee because it had the word Nereid in it.
NEREID MARINE SALE COLLAPSES ELEVEN DAYS FROM CLOSE
The buyer's people said nothing on the record.
An analyst in Boston used the word inexplicable.
There was a line near the bottom saying the transaction had been eleven months in preparation and that a person familiar with the matter described the termination as originating with the seller and being, quote, without commercial logic.
Imogen read it twice and put the paper down and looked out at the water.
Eleven days.
She knew what eleven days from close meant, because she had lived in a house with that deal for eleven months.
Eleven days from close is after the diligence, after the financing, after the disclosure schedules have been argued over comma by comma by people billing in six-minute units.
Eleven days from close, the thing is done.
You do not walk away eleven days from close.
You walk away in March, or you walk away never.
She thought: that's a hundred and ten million dollars.
Then she thought, with a flare of something so ugly she actually put her hand over her mouth: and if he thinks I'm going to be impressed—
But he had not told her.
That was the part that sat wrong all week.
He had not called, had not written, had not had someone call.
It had been in the paper on a Wednesday and it was Sunday and there was nothing.
The last message she had from Cormac Severin was eleven days old and said I heard you saw her. I'm not asking what was said.
Lennox Draycott arrived on the Tuesday without being invited.
She heard the car at eleven in the morning and looked out and did not go to the door, and he came around the side of the house to the terrace the way he always had, and stopped when he saw her face.
"I know," he said. "I know. Thirty seconds, and if you tell me to go I'll go."
"Say it from there."
"Imogen—"
"There is fine, Lennox."
He stopped on the grass at the bottom of the terrace steps, which she would remember, because in six years Lennox Draycott had never once stood below anybody.
He looked terrible. That was the first real information she got. He was in the expensively casual clothes and he had shaved and none of it worked; there was something loose around his eyes and his color was bad.
"He's killed it," he said.
"I read the paper."
"You read four inches of the paper." He came up one step and she let him. "Do you know what he actually did? Because the paper doesn't know. Nobody knows. Two people know and I'm one of them and I'm about to be the only one, because he isn't going to tell you."
"Then don't—"
"He terminated for cause under a clause that doesn't exist," Lennox said.
"He invented a breach. He stood up in a room on Weybosset Street on the eleventh of August and told four lawyers to terminate, and when they told him there were no grounds he told them to do it anyway.
It is going to cost him the break fee, the buyer's costs, and about two years of litigation he will lose.
He knows he'll lose. He said so in the room. "
Imogen put her cup down very carefully on the arm of the chair.
"Why," she said.
"Oh, he was extremely clear about why." Lennox laughed, and it came out wrong, and he stopped it.
"He said — and I want to be accurate, because I've had it going around my head for eleven days — he said: this deal is the reason she was in that house, and I am not going to spend the next four years of my life running the earnout that pays for it. "
Out on the water, August carried on same as ever.
"There's more," Lennox said.
"Is there."
"He bought me out on Thursday."
She did not offer him a chair. He sat down on the top step anyway, sideways, with his forearms on his knees, and talked to the flagstones.
"Twenty-two years," he said. "We started it in a shed in Warren with four thousand dollars, most of which was mine — I've never once let him forget it, and I'd like the record to show I've never once actually needed it.
" He turned his hands over. "He bought me out at the number from the July valuation.
Not the deal number. The July number, which is about a third of it, because with the sale dead the company's worth what it's worth. "
"He can't force you to sell."
"He can, as it happens. There's a provision. We wrote it in 2011 in case one of us went mad." Lennox looked up at her. "We wrote it so that the sane one could get the mad one out."
"And you think he's mad."
"I think," Lennox said slowly, "that I have known that man since he was twenty-five years old and I have never seen him do a single thing that was not in his own interest, and in the last eleven days he has done four."
Imogen stood at the terrace rail with her back to the water.
"Did you fight it?"
"Of course I fought it. I had counsel on it inside two hours." He shrugged. "The provision's clean. My own drafting. Thirteen years ago."
"Then what are you doing here, Lennox?"
And he was quiet for long enough that a boat went by out on the water and was gone again.
"I came to ask you to talk to him," he said.
She laughed.
She had not laughed in that particular way in her life. It came out of her flat and hard and surprised them both, and Lennox Draycott went the color of the flagstones.
"You came here," she said, "to ask me to intervene with my husband. On your behalf."
"When you put it like—"
"How else would you like it put?"
"He'll listen to you—"
"He does not speak to me, Lennox." She came down one step.
"He has not spoken to me since the fourth of February.
I get about one message every eleven weeks and it is always about a patrol or a gutter and it always ends with I'm not asking you anything.
That's what I have. That is the entire content of my marriage since February.
And you have driven down from Boston to ask me to spend it on you. "
"Imogen, twenty-two years—"
"You put her in the guest wing."
He stopped.
"I've thought about it for nine months," Imogen said, "and I've been extremely fair to you in my head, which is more than you've earned. It was a logistics call. You said so in November, in that chair, with a glass of wine in your hand, and you said you'd make it again. Do you remember that?"
"Yes."
"I want you to tell me the truth about one thing and then I want you off my property."
"Ask it."
"In December," Imogen said. "The security review. The one your people ran."
And Lennox Draycott put his face in his hands.
"I'd like to say I knew about the log," he said, from behind his hands. "It'd be cleaner. You could hate me properly and I could go home."
"You didn't know."
"I did not know there was a log until I read about it on his face in February.
" He dropped his hands. "What I knew in December was that he'd told me the Sable woman was — his word — heavy.
He said she came into rooms. He said she'd been at the house on the fifteenth before anybody called her and she'd been at the house twice since without a reason. "
"And you thought."
"I thought my friend had a woman in his life who made him feel like a coward every time she parked in his drive," Lennox said, "and I thought, well, we can't have that, can we.
So I had the review done. And the numbers were real, Imogen, I want that clear, the arrangement was twice what the coverage was worth—"
"But that isn't why you did it."
"No."
"Say why."
"Because he wanted her gone and he was never going to be able to say so," Lennox said, "and saying things men can't say has been my job for twenty-two years."
Imogen looked at him for a long moment.
"That's the most honest thing you've ever said to me."
"It's not a nice one."
"No," she said. "But I notice it took me asking."
He stood up off the step eventually. He looked about sixty.
"He's going to lose," he said. "I want you to understand the shape of it, because he won't tell you and you'll hear it in pieces for two years.
There'll be a suit and he'll lose it. There'll be a second one from the minority holders and he'll settle that.
He's sold the Watch Hill place and he'll sell the boat, and by the time the litigation's done he'll be worth somewhere between a fifth and a tenth of what he was worth in June.
He will still be a rich man and he will not be that man. Do you understand the difference?"
"Yes."
"Nobody will ever know why he did it. That's the thing I can't — " Lennox's mouth moved.
"He won't put it in a filing. He won't put it in a statement.
He has instructed everyone, including me, in writing, not to characterize his reasons.
So the whole of that world is going to spend two years saying Cormac Severin lost his nerve, and he has arranged it so that they can't be corrected. "
"He told you why."
"He told me why in a room with four lawyers in it and then had the transcript sealed," Lennox said. "Which I suppose is the point. He didn't do it for the room."
He went down the steps onto the grass and then stopped and turned around, and for one second there was the old Lennox, warm and sure and entirely at ease.
"You know what I keep coming back to?" he said.
"He never asked me to stop putting things in front of him.
Twenty-two years, and he never once said Lennox, don't. He just took everything I handed him and used it and let me be the one holding it.
" A pause. "I'm not saying that to excuse myself.
I'm saying I've thought about who I've been in that man's life, all week, at some length, and I did not enjoy it. "
"Lennox."
"Yes."
"I'm not going to talk to him for you."