18. Connor
CONNOR
The physiotherapist is packing a resistance band into a canvas bag and telling my grandfather he did well, and my grandfather is looking at the ceiling like a man waiting for a bus in the rain.
“He says that every time,” Ambrose tells me. “I lifted my own arm. I’m to be congratulated.”
“You did lift it,” she says cheerfully, and goes out past me with a nod.
He’s in the chair by the window again. The line’s under his nose, the machine’s going on its trolley, and there’s a rug over his knees that somebody put there and he hasn’t bothered to fight. His color’s bad. It goes into my stomach and sits.
“Sit down,” he says.
I take the chair. It’s warm. Somebody was in it recently and I don’t ask.
He looks at me for a while. Then he says, “What did she take?”
“What?”
“My daughter. She came up here with a folder, she’s been at that table an hour and a half, you’ve been in my corridor with her—” He runs out of air and takes more on board. “—and you’ve come in with a face like a car crash. So. What did she take?”
There’s no point at all in lying to him.
“Everything that isn’t my salary.” It comes out in one breath, and one breath turns out to be all it needs. “I’ll have it in writing this week.”
Ambrose closes his eyes.
“On what grounds?”
“Divorce. Or any conduct the trustee thinks is an irreparable embarrassment to the family.”
“That’s not a clause, that’s a leash.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“And she’d hold the other end of it.” He opens his eyes. “What did you say?”
“Not much. I asked whether she’d had it drawn up before the ballroom or after.”
“And?”
“She said she keeps her affairs current.”
He makes a sound that’s part laugh, part cough, and it takes him a while to get past it. I half stand and he waves me off with two fingers, eyes shut.
“That’s a yes,” he says, when he can.
“I know.”
“You understand what that means. She sat at my table at that fundraiser knowing the whole—” A breath. “The whole shape of it.”
“Yes.”
He’s quiet a while. Out on the lawn the light is going already; it does that in November, gives up in the middle of the afternoon.
“Your wife came to see me,” he says.
I hadn’t decided whether I’d ask. Now I don’t have to. “I know. She told me.”
“She sat right where you’re sitting and she wanted nothing from me.
Not a penny. Not a word to a journalist.” Breath.
“Not so much as a lift home.” He turns his head.
“I told her the truth about myself, and most of it was years late, and she took it without making it easy for me. She’s better than the lot of us.
I’ve thought so since a ribbon-cutting.”
My throat closes and I have to look at the window.
“Don’t start,” he says. “If you start I’ll have to be kind to you and I haven’t the breath.”
I laugh, badly. “Okay.”
“Good boy. Now, what have you done? Since the ballroom. Don’t tell me what you’ve felt. I haven’t time for what you’ve felt.”
So I tell him. The documents into her hands. Her grandmother’s boxes out from under the plastic sheet. The instruction I wrote and signed and had stamped, giving her Bennett House for good, and the copy I stood in that office and waited for.
He listens with his eyes shut.
“The boxes were in the building? All this time?”
“Rowan Street. Bottom shelf, under a sheet, with MISC on the side in marker.”
“Christ.” He shakes his head slowly against the chair back. “Her grandmother’s things. In my building.” He’s quiet a beat. “Good. That’s real. Keep doing things that are real.”
Then he shifts himself up straighter in the chair, and it hurts him, and he does it anyway.
“I’ve moved the Jubilee,” he says.
It takes a second to land. “You’ve what?”
“Moved it up. Three weeks from Saturday. Told the events office this morning, and told them it isn’t a discussion.”
“Grandpa—”
“They’ll wring their hands at me. The room’s booked, the printer’s booked, the caterer has a wedding—” Breath.
“They’ll come back with a date a fortnight later than mine, and I’ll take it and pretend I’ve been beaten.
That’s how you get a date out of an events office.
Ask for what they can’t do. Let them win. ”
“You’ve been running that play my whole life.”
“Never once failed.” He looks at me steadily. “But it will be before Christmas. It will not be in the spring. That part isn’t theater.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m not going to be here in the spring, Connor.”
It hits before I understand it. The floor drops away behind my ribs, my eyes are burning, my mouth has come open with nothing in it.
My body knows the sentence whole before my head finishes hearing it.
The machine clicks and sighs. The radiator ticks.
I sit in a warm chair with my grandfather watching me and I can’t do anything at all with my face.
He’s dying. He’s just told me the season.
“Don’t,” I say, and it comes out wrecked.
“I’m eighty-five. I’ve had a good run and a bad heart and a worse pair of lungs.
” He gathers air. “And I’ve spent this month watching a girl I like get taken to pieces by people whose name is on my buildings.
I want to see it put right. Not read about it in a card somebody brings up on a tray.
In the room. On my feet. Glass in my hand.
” His voice has gone thin, but it doesn’t waver. “I want to see the faces.”
“Then that’s what we’ll do.”
“Do you know what I actually want out of that night? Not the speeches. Fifty years of speeches and I couldn’t tell you one of them.”
“Tell me.”
“The first place had eleven rooms and a boiler that made a noise like a man being murdered.” His voice has gone somewhere else.
“I’d stand behind that desk at two in the morning, couldn’t afford a night porter, and people would come in off a train in the rain, and I’d give them a key, and—” The air runs out.
He takes what the machine gives him. “And they’d stop being frightened.
Somebody arrives somewhere strange, and you make it so they can put their bag down. ”
He turns his head and looks at me.
“Your wife knows that. She’s the only one left in this family who does, and she isn’t even in it at the moment.”
I’ve got nothing to say to that, so I don’t say anything.
“Right.” His voice goes brisk, the way it must have gone across a hundred tables. “Now listen, because I’ll want a rest after this.”
I sit forward.
“You will fix it in that room. In front of the same people who sat there and watched her walk out. Not in a newspaper, not in a lawyer’s letter. Yourself. Out loud. Your own mouth, your own name.”
“I know.”
“Do you? Because there’s a version of you that arranges it.
” He has to stop; his chest works; I make myself sit still and let him get there.
“A friendly reporter. A word with the right people. It comes out sideways and nobody has an uncomfortable evening. Your uncle would do it that way. Your mother—” Breath.
“Your mother invented that way. If you do it like that, it won’t count.
She’ll know it doesn’t count. So will everyone else. ”
My hands are shaking, so I put them on my knees.
“Whatever it costs you,” he says.
“You know what it’ll cost me. You heard it in one breath.”
“I did. I’m telling you to do it anyway.” He lets that sit. “You’ve had a soft life, and you’ve been polite about it. Nobody’s ever asked you for a thing that—” Breath. “—that hurt. This will. Do it in front of witnesses.”
I don’t say anything for a while, because there isn’t anything to say that isn’t just noise.
“I need to tell you something,” I say eventually. “About where the footage came from. There’s a name on the request card, and there’s a?—”
“No.”
I stop.
“No,” Ambrose says again. “Don’t tell me in this room, in a chair, with a rug on my knees. If it’s what I think it is, I don’t want it from you privately, and then spend whatever I’ve got left wondering whether you shaded it.”
“I’m not shading anything.”
“I know you’re not. That isn’t the point.
” He gets a breath and pushes on. “Put it in front of me with her in the room. Whoever it is. Whatever it is. Let them answer it where I can watch them do it. I’ve sat in this house being managed for two years, and I would very much like to see one true thing happen in front of me before the end. ”
It gets me low, under the breastbone, and comes up fast. I put my hand over my mouth and it doesn’t help.
My breath comes apart anyway, loud in that quiet room, and my eyes spill over, and I have to grip the arm of the chair and stare at the dark lawn until I can see it again.
He waits. He doesn’t tell me it’s all right.
He looks out at the lawn too, giving me that much privacy, and his hand stays where I can see it on the rug.
“All right,” I manage.
“Good.” He settles back. “Then that’s arranged.”
The light’s nearly gone off the lawn now and neither of us has put a lamp on. He’s tired. I can see him going, the way he does, sliding down into it.
“One more thing,” he says, eyes half shut. “I’ve spoken to my own lawyer. Not the family’s. Mine.”
I go still. “About what?”
“Some things.”
“Grandpa.”
“Some things,” he says again, in a tone I know from a thousand board meetings, the one that means the subject is closed and will not be reopened. “An old man’s entitled to a private conversation.”
And I let it go. I sit there and think: he’s dying, he’s frightened, he wants a hand on something still. Everybody in that position moves furniture around. My grandmother spent her last summer rewriting who got which painting, and changed it twice.
“Okay,” I say.
“Mm.”
“Do you want the nurse?”
“God, no.” His eyes close properly. “I want ten minutes without anybody in this room saying the word comfortable.”
So I sit with him until his breathing goes even and the machine’s the only thing talking, and then I put the rug straight over his knees, which he’d hate, and I go.
Downstairs my mother is at the table by the front window with her cards laid out in rows, working under a lamp. She doesn’t look up. I don’t stop. Neither of us says a word, and I walk out through the hall, past the winter branches, into a cold that’s got teeth in it now.
I sit in the car without starting it, breath going white, hands loose on the wheel.
Three weeks from Saturday. Call it early December, whatever the events office claws back.
A real date, with my grandfather’s fist around it, coming whether I’m ready or not, and a room at the end of it holding the same people who watched my wife walk out into the flashes.
I keep waiting to be frightened. It doesn’t come. The thing I’ve been circling for a decade finally has a day on it, and I can stop wondering when.
I start the car and drive back into the city with the heater roaring, and somewhere around the bridge I catch myself planning, actually planning, for the first time since October.