Chapter 17
Three years, near enough to the day.
The summer people had been gone since the second week of October and the road out to the point belonged to the crows and the oil truck again, and Winterbourne sat at the end of it with every shutter open and every light on, which was not how it used to be in November.
Imogen came down the back stairs at six with her hair still up from work and found the kitchen smelling like garlic and her husband swearing at a pan.
"It's catching."
"Take it off the heat."
"If I take it off the heat it stops."
"Cormac. Take it off the heat."
He took it off the heat. It was the lamb thing; it had been the lamb thing on and off for three years and it had never once gone entirely right, and he made it anyway, roughly every two weeks, with total confidence.
She got a glass down and filled it at the tap.
She did not stand with her back to the sink. She had stopped doing that about a year and a half ago without noticing, and had noticed one evening in June, and had stood there on purpose for a second to see how it felt and found that it felt like standing at a sink.
"How was the board," he said.
"Sybil cried."
"Sybil cried?"
"Sybil Amory cried in the boardroom of the Narragansett Maritime Institute over a shed.
" Imogen sat up on the stool. "We got the Havilland collection.
All of it. Two hundred and eleven objects and the drawings and the tools, and Rhys is keeping the yard but the archive comes to us, and Sybil has wanted that collection since 1998 and she put her hand over her face for about four seconds and then said right and moved to the next item. "
"That's the whole capital campaign."
"That's the whole capital campaign."
He came and stood in front of her with the dishtowel over his shoulder.
"Say the thing," Imogen said.
"What thing?"
"The thing you're not saying because you've decided I'd rather do the modest version."
Cormac put his hands on the counter either side of her.
"I think you're the best there's ever been at this," he said, "and I think Sybil Amory has known it since the day you took a board off a wall on your own at eight in the morning, and I think in about four years they're going to put your name on that building, and when they do I am going to be so insufferable that you will have to leave the room. "
"Better."
"Thank you."
"Don't look so pleased with yourself, you burned the lamb."
"It's not burned, it's caught," he said. "There's a difference and I'll thank you to learn it."
He was not the same man and she was not sentimental about why.
He was not a billionaire, for one thing.
The Nereid suit had settled in the spring of the second year for a number that took most of what was left, and the minority action after it took a slice of the rest, and what Cormac Severin had at fifty-one was a boatyard-sized business in Warren with nineteen employees that built survey rigs for people who worked on the water, and a salary, and the house his wife owned.
He was in it at seven every morning. He came home at six, and had done for three years, and on the day he did not — a Thursday the previous March when a launch went wrong and he was there until eleven — he called her at ten past six from the floor and said, badly, with a grinder going in the background, that it had gone wrong and he did not know when he would be back and that he had been putting off calling her for forty minutes because he had been trying to work out how to say it in a way that sounded managed.
"And then I thought," he said, "ledger."
"Good."
"It's gone very wrong, Imogen. It might be the whole quarter."
"Come home when you come home," she said. "Tell me the bad version when you get here."
He told her the bad version when he got there, at midnight, sitting on the kitchen floor with his back against the cabinet, and it was the whole quarter, and she sat down on the floor next to him and they worked out what it meant until two in the morning.
That was the marriage. Not the courtroom. That.
Other things that were true, three years on.
He said Fiona Lachlan's name when it came up — about twice a year — without lowering his voice.
Imogen said what she wanted at dinner tables in Newport.
She had got a reputation for it — Imogen Tillinghast Severin will tell you, people said, half admiring and half not — and she had discovered, to her enormous surprise, that a woman who says the thing is invited to more dinners rather than fewer, and that eight years of manners had been protecting nobody but the people she was being mannerly at.
They went to Siobhan's on Sunday nights, both of them, and Siobhan had been civil to Cormac for the first eleven months and had cracked in the twelfth, at a table, over a boiler, and now the two of them argued about the harbor commission for sport while Imogen watched.
Augusta had come to Winterbourne for Christmas two years running.
She had never once said she was glad. She had said, the previous December, standing in the morning room with her hand on the sash, "You've had the muntins done," and Imogen had said "Cormac did them, in August, with a book out of the library," and her mother had said, "Yes.
Well." And that was the whole of it, and it was enough, and Imogen had gone out to the terrace for a minute afterward.
And every fourteenth of November at two in the morning, Imogen Severin woke up.
Not badly. Not every year in the same way.
She woke up and lay in the dark for a while and her husband — who also woke, every year, without an alarm, without discussing it — put his hand flat on her sternum and left it there, and neither of them said anything, and after a while they both went back to sleep.
That was the only ritual they had about it. It was not a wound anymore. It was a scar, and scars are weather, and you do not build a life around the weather.
The room at the top of the back stairs took eleven months.
The floor got levelled first. Then the plaster, redone twice because the first man was cheap. Then the shelves, which Cormac built himself over four months of Saturdays with a router he did not know how to use and learned to, badly, and then better.
The window came out of the brick and stayed out. In the afternoon the light comes off the water and goes all the way across the floor to the far wall, and there is about an hour in September when the whole room is the color of the inside of a shell.
The door went on last.
It is wooden, and it is painted the same as the trim, and it has a brass handle.
It opens both ways. It has no lock and no latch and no catch of any kind; Cormac took the strike plate off the frame himself and filled the mortise and painted over it, and if you push the door it swings and keeps swinging, and if you let go of it in a draft it drifts open on its own.
There is no plaque and there is no story about it. Anybody who comes to that house sees a library at the top of the back stairs with good light and a door that will not stay shut, and thinks the house has settled, and says so, and is told yes, it's an old house.
They said the vows in that room on the fourteenth of November.
It was not an event. Imogen had been extremely clear about that with everybody, repeatedly, for six weeks, and had still ended up with twenty-two people in a library that fits eleven.
Siobhan did the food, which meant it was the best food anybody at that gathering had eaten in a year, and she closed the restaurant to do it, on a Friday, in November, which for Siobhan Brennan was the largest statement available in the language.
Augusta sat in the front, in the upright chair from the study, which Cormac had carried up the back stairs that morning without being asked.
Astrid Sable came. She had her own firm now — she had started it eighteen months after the trial and she did residential work up and down that coast and she was, Imogen gathered, doing extremely well, and she had written back to the invitation with one line: I'll come.
Thank you for asking me. She stood at the back with her arms folded and her jaw set and looked about as uncomfortable as a person can look, and at the end of it she shook Cormac's hand for a long time and did not say anything at all, and that was the whole of that.
Nuala Reddington came and drank three glasses of wine and told Imogen that in twenty-five years she had never attended anything like this and that she was going to bill her for it.
Rhys Havilland did not come. He had been asked, properly, by Imogen, in person, in the shed.
He had said, "That's kind and no," and then he had sent, on the day, a half-model of the 1898 hull as it would look finished — carved at some point over the preceding two months by a man who had nine years of work left in it — with a card that said For the library. Finish is a strong word for it. R.H.
It hangs over the shelves on the north wall.
There was no officiant and nothing legal about it; they had never stopped being married, which Imogen pointed out to at least four people, who did not care.
They stood in the middle of the room in the light with twenty-two people around them.
Cormac went first and he did not have anything written down.
"I'm not going to talk about the night," he said. "Everybody in this room knows about it. It was in the paper."
Somebody laughed — Siobhan, probably — and he waited it out.
"I'll say the other thing instead. For four years of our marriage I told a woman who was not my wife what I actually thought, because she didn't have an opinion about whether I was any good, and Imogen did, and I couldn't stand to be measured.
And that's the whole of it. Everything else came out of that, including the worst thing I've ever done.