Chapter 17 #2
"So this is what I've got, and it's not romantic and I've thought about it for three years.
" He looked at her. "I'll tell you things.
The day they happen. Before I've worked out how they sound, and in the ugly version, and when I catch myself getting ready to hand you a nicer one I'll say so out loud in front of you and let it be embarrassing. Every time. For the rest of my life.
"And I'm going to be measured," he said. "By you. Every day. Which is what I was too much of a coward for at forty-three, and which I'd now rather have than anything else that's ever been on offer."
He stopped.
"I love you," he said. "That's the end of the speech, and I'm saying it out loud in front of your mother so you can hold me to it."
Imogen had written hers down and did not look at it.
"I'm going to be brief, because Siobhan's food is going cold and that's a genuine tragedy," she said, "and because I've said most of this to him already, in a drive, in September, with the gate open."
She took his hands.
"I had somewhere else to go," she said. "I want everyone here to know that, because a few of you told me to go there, and you were right to and I'd have done the same for any of you.
There was an entire life available to me on this coast with my own name on it and nothing wrong with it at all.
I built it myself. It took nineteen months.
"I didn't take it. Not because I couldn't. Because I wanted this one more."
She heard her own voice go and let it.
"You were not a good husband for eight years and then you were a catastrophe for fifty-two days," she said.
"And then you did nineteen months of work that nobody watched, with nothing coming back, and you arranged it so I'd never hear about most of it, and I heard about it anyway because Lennox Draycott cannot keep his mouth shut. "
There was a real laugh at that.
"I'm not doing sums," Imogen said. "I've told you that and I'll tell this room.
I don't have the two of you balanced against each other in a ledger somewhere and I never will.
You're my husband. You're the one I want.
I chose it three years ago on the gravel out there and I'm choosing it again in front of everyone who told me not to, and I'd choose it tomorrow and the day after that.
"I'm never going to absorb anything again," she said. "And you're never going to decide what I can carry. And we're going to be extremely happy, which I'd like to say out loud in November in this particular room, because I spent a long time thinking I wasn't allowed to want that plainly."
She put her hand flat on his chest.
"I love you," she said. "Now kiss me, so Siobhan can serve."
He kissed her, and the room made a great deal of noise, and Augusta Tillinghast — who had not, at any point in her daughter's life, been observed to weep — sat in an upright chair carried up the back stairs and put two fingers against her mouth and left them there for a moment before she began to applaud.
Later — much later, when the last car had gone down the drive and Siobhan had been made to stop washing up and go home — Imogen came back up the back stairs with two glasses.
The room was warm. All the lamps were on. There were chairs where chairs did not belong and a plate on the windowsill and the half-model glinting on the north wall, and her husband was standing in the middle of it in his shirtsleeves with his hands in his pockets, looking at the door.
It had drifted open in the draft, the way it does.
"It does that," he said.
"It does."
"I could plane a quarter inch off the bottom and it'd sit."
"Don't you dare."
"No," Cormac said. "I'm not going to."
She gave him a glass and stood next to him and they looked at a door that would not stay shut.
"Are you happy?" she said.
He turned his head.
"Ask me a hard one."
"I'm asking you that one. Say it properly. I've had eight years of fine."
"I'm so happy I don't know where to put it," he said. "I wake up before you every morning and I lie there and I can't work out what to do with my chest. That's the honest version. It's been three years and it hasn't worn off and I've stopped expecting it to."
"Good."
"Are you?"
Imogen thought about it, because he deserved a real answer and because she had spent thirty-nine years giving pleasant ones.
"I'm happier than I have ever been in my life," she said. "By a distance. It isn't close."
"Say the rest."
"There is no rest," she said. "That's the thing I keep waiting to find and it isn't there.
I'm not making do. I'm not being brave about anything.
I've got my name, and my work, and my mother, and Siobhan, and a house I love on water I've known since I was six, and you in it — and you're the part I'd fight hardest to keep, and I've had a long time to check. "
He put his glass down on the shelf.
"Come here," he said.
"You come here."
He laughed — the short one, down in the chest, and she had lost count of those years ago — and came, and put his arms around her.
Behind them the door drifted a little wider on its hinges and did not shut.
Imogen stood in a warm bright room at the top of her own back stairs with her face against her husband's collarbone and both his arms around her, and thought: this is mine, and I picked it, and I get to keep it.
"Say it again," she said.
"I love you."
"Again."
"I love you, Imogen. For the rest of it."
"Good," she said, and reached up, and pulled him down.
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