Chapter 15 #2
"Four hours and seven minutes," Petra said, "and you gave a jury a period of time.
You did the same thing on run one and run two and I let it go to see if you'd hear it.
" She tapped the pad. "You do it every time you get within about eleven seconds of three fifty-one in the morning.
You go up a register and you go abstract and you get extremely well-spoken, and if you do that in September the jury will follow you up there and they will stop being frightened, and the whole case is that they should be frightened. "
"I'm not going to perform it."
"I'm not asking you to perform anything, I'm asking you to say what happened.
" Petra leaned back. "Here is the only piece of advice I'm going to give you about your delivery and then I'll never mention it again.
Do not describe it. Do not tell them it was terrifying, do not tell them you were frightened, do not reach for a single adjective. Tell them where your hand was."
Imogen looked at her.
"Tell them where your hand was," Petra said again, "and what the paint felt like, and how far the door came in, and how long he pushed for, and let twelve people do the rest of it themselves. They'll do it better than you can and they'll believe it because they did it."
"That's a lawyer's trick."
"It's the opposite of a lawyer's trick," Petra said. "It's the only thing in this building that isn't one. Again, please. From the glass."
She did it again.
She did it the fourth time flatly, in short sentences, with her hands on the table, and named the latch and the brass and the emulsion under the gloss and the inch the door came in and the two seconds — and about forty seconds into it the court reporter stopped typing for a moment, which reporters do not do, and then started again.
Petra let the silence sit afterward.
"That," she said. "In September. That, exactly, and nothing else."
Imogen drove home over the bridge that evening and understood that she had just been taught, by a woman eleven years younger than herself, the one thing she had spent thirty-nine years being trained not to do — which is to say a plain thing plainly and let it land on the person it lands on.
She thought about Newport in January and a table of fourteen.
Tell them where your hand was.
She had dinner with Rhys Havilland on the eleventh of June.
She went. She had said not yet for seven months and in the last week of May she looked at herself in the hall mirror and thought that a woman who would not go to dinner because she might enjoy it was not somebody she wanted to be, and she wrote to him and said yes.
He took her to a place in Warren that had eleven tables and a chalkboard, and it was a good evening.
That was the trouble with it. It was a genuinely good evening: they argued about the 1898 hull for forty minutes, and he told her about his daughter in Halifax, and he asked one careful question about the trial and then let it go entirely when she gave a two-sentence answer.
At the end of it he said, "I'm going to ask you something and you can tell me to mind my own business."
"Go on."
"Is he coming back?"
Imogen turned her glass around on the table.
"I don't know."
"That's not a no."
"No," she said. "It isn't."
Rhys sat back. He did not look wounded, which she was grateful for, and he did not look clever about it either.
"Then I'll say my piece and I won't say it twice," he said.
"I've watched you for a year on that catalog and you're the best in the state and you were the best in the state the whole time you were pretending you weren't. Whatever happens with him, don't stop.
That's the only part I've got a claim on. "
"And the other part?"
"The other part I'd have liked very much," Rhys said, "and I'm forty-five and I've been turned down before by less interesting women, and I'd rather have the Saturdays than nothing. So — the Saturdays. If you'll have them."
"I'll have them."
"Good." He picked up the menu. "Now, the hull."
She drove home over the bridge at eleven with the window down, and thought about the fact that she had just been given, plainly and without pressure, an entire other life — a real one, on this coast, with her own name on it and no log in it anywhere — and that she could have had it.
And that she was going to be in a car to Wickford on Sunday instead.
Augusta called on the Friday.
"Your husband has written to me."
"I know."
"He has asked to come on Sunday at eleven." A pause with a great deal in it. "He has also said, in writing, that you will be present and that he intends to say something and that I should not feel any obligation to be kind about it. Imogen, what have you done?"
"I've asked him to tell you what happened."
"I know what happened."
"No, Mother," Imogen said. "You don't. Nobody does.
Not you, not Siobhan, not the Ingersolls, not the man who does the glass.
There's a version going round this coast and it's eighteen months old and it is wrong in the one place that matters, and I have let it stand because I could not face correcting it, and on Sunday he is going to sit in your front room and correct it. "
There was a long silence on the line.
"And then what?" Augusta said.
"I don't know."
"Imogen." Something in her mother's voice was not quite steady, which happened perhaps once a decade. "Are you telling me this because you want my opinion, or are you telling me because you have already decided and you are giving me notice?"
Imogen stood at the kitchen window looking out at the water.
"I'm giving you notice," she said.
"I see."
"Mother—"
"No, that's — " Augusta stopped dead, mid-sentence, the way she had been stopping for fifty years.
And then, for the first time in her daughter's hearing, she went back and finished one.
"That is the first time in eleven years you have given me notice about anything, and I find I mind it a great deal less than I expected to. "
"Will you let him say it?"
"Of course I'll let him say it," her mother said. "I've been waiting eighteen months for somebody in that house to say something."