by Laura McNeal
When the doorbell rang, Audrey grabbed the cardigan, headed downstairs, and opened the door. Wickham Hill had his back to her; he was staring out at the grounds. As he turned around, his eyes slowly ran down to her shoes, and up again.
“My God,” he softly drawled. “I knew you were great-looking, but I didn’t know you were ravishing.”
A happy laugh slipped from Audrey. “You’re not looking too bad yourself,” she said, and felt herself immediately begin to color, though Wickham Hill did not.
“Let me grab my bag,” she added.
Wickham Hill stepped into the entry and was peering into the library when Audrey reappeared wearing her winter coat. “Great library,” he said, then glanced beyond her. “Should we say something to your dad?”
“Not here. He’s working late.” She began pushing buttons on the alarm keypad; then, after punching the last number, she said, “Okay. We’ve got eight seconds to vaminose.”
Outside, idling under the portico, was a green-and-white taxi.
Wickham held the back door open and slid in after her.
“This is nice,” Audrey said as the taxi pulled slowly away, “but you . . .”
“My mother thinks I drive too fast,” Wickham said, “so she set up an account for me with the cab company.” He didn’t look at her when he said this, but turned now and smiled. “I thought I’d hate it, but it’s actually not so bad. At least it’s all warmed up for you when you get in.”
Wickham Hill settled back into the seat, and Audrey gazed out the window and was glad when he reached forward to take her hand. “Well, that’s one mystery solved,” she said, thinking that now she could tell Lea and C.C. that Wickham wasn’t the sort of guy who got rides, but the sort who paid for them.
“Which mystery’s that?”
“How you found yourself talking to a Nigerian taxi driver about his little boy.”
Wickham leaned forward and whispered, “Didn’t know that was a mystery,” and gave her a little kiss, received tinglingly at the earlobe. “Any more mysteries you want solved?”
Actually, there were quite a few, but she wasn’t going to ask, so she laughed and said, “Just one. Where’re we going?”
The restaurant was called Le Bistro. It was a converted cottage with small rooms, soft lights, and wooden floors. It smelled like rosemary. Audrey and Wickham were shown to a secluded table next to a small fireplace. “My mother suggested I reserve this table,” Wickham said. “I guess she and my father always asked for it.”
Audrey’s gaze moved from the fire to Wickham, whose face in the firelight had the same radiant glow she’d seen the first time she’d laid eyes on him as he walked into Mrs. Leacock’s classroom.
“Très romantique,” she said, and Wickham himself seemed pleased. His gaze slid away, though, when she said, “Did your parents come here before or after they were married?”
“Before, mostly,” he said as the waiter arrived with menus.
Audrey had slipped on the modesty cardigan before entering the restaurant, but it was warm next to the fire, so she slipped it off.
In a mock-solemn voice, Wickham Hill said, “I don’t know what large sums were paid for that dress, but I just want you to know it was money well spent.”
Audrey smiled. The fire shifted and popped. “I was window-shopping at Veni, Vidi, Emi,” she said. “Or at least I thought I was until I saw this dress.”
“Veni, Vidi, Emi?”
Audrey smiled. “I came, I saw, I purchased.”
Wickham nodded and let his eyes move over her. “You know what’s funny? When I imagined coming here with you, I pictured you wearing that exact color.”
“Which either makes you telepathic or me predictable.” He looked up from buttering a roll. “You’re not at all predictable.”
“I’m not?”
He shook his head no. “For example, I didn’t think you’d have dinner with me, and here you are.”
This was interesting to Audrey, and completely unbelievable. “Why didn’t you think I’d have dinner with you?”
“I don’t know. When I first saw you, you just seemed so . . . beautiful and contained.” His face, tight with concentration, relaxed. “Now you just seem beautiful.”
Audrey lowered her eyes. “I’m not, though.”
“Argue all you want,” Wickham said, “but my mind’s made up.”
They talked easily then, their conversation straying this way and that as men in black suits appeared with food and disappeared with empty dishes. She hardly tasted what she ate—it was all she could do not to just put down her knife and fork and sit listening to Wickham Hill, and looking at him.
After dinner, Audrey had bread pudding (“a guilty pleasure,” she called it, and he said he hoped there were others). Wickham had a glass of vintage port (after discreetly showing a doctored ID indicating his age as twenty-one) before he settled the bill by signing on his father’s account.
On the way home, in the cozy privacy of another taxi, Wickham Hill slid his arm around Audrey, who instinctively leaned into his hold. A few seconds passed and then Audrey said, “If ever in my life I’m a little sad, I’m going to think back to that table by the fire.”
His arm tightened slightly, and his hand, moving to the edge of her breast, thrilled her nerves.
“Me too,” he said in a low voice, almost a whisper. As he turned and leaned close to her, Audrey smelled the sugary sweetness and felt her lips tingling even before his touched hers. When his hand lightly slid her dress strap down her shoulder and gently peeled the dress away from one breast, she felt a surge of almost greedy desire move through her—a desire that later would make her feel ashamed but now, as it flooded through her, seemed irresistible, and wonderful.
Chapter 24
Two Brief, Unsettling Conversations
When Audrey returned home, she was surprised to see a light coming from her father’s study, and peered in. Her father had his back to her and was standing over one of his cherrywood file cabinets, dropping handfuls of paper into a shopping bag at his feet. He was still wearing his work clothes—gray slacks, a white shirt, burgundy suspenders—but his gray sports coat hung from one of a row of cherrywood pegs on the wall.
“Hi,” Audrey said.
Her father wheeled around quickly, and the startled look that crossed his face was of somebody who’d just been caught at something. But then, seeing her, his face visibly relaxed. “Oh, hi, Polliwog. You gave me a start.”
He gave her dress a quick look, and she was glad she’d slipped the modesty sweater back on. Her father had set a gooseneck lamp on top of the cabinet and adjusted it to crane down and shine on the open files, but its harsh light shone on him, too. He looked old to her, old and worried. “What’re you doing?” she said.
“Nothing much. You weren’t home, so I decided to clean out some old files.”
Audrey nodded as if this made perfect sense, though it didn’t. She glanced down at the shopping bags stuffed with papers. The nearest one read VENI, VIDI, EMI.
“So how was dinner with the new boy?” he asked.
“Good,” Audrey said, trying to sound more or less businesslike, which was the way her father liked her to talk about her personal life. “If I’d known you were still up, I’d have brought him in to meet you. You’d like him. He’s pretty impressive.”
“Next time,” her father said, and regarded her. “Presuming there will be a next time.”
Audrey made a point of not lowering her eyes. She hoped she wasn’t blushing. “I don’t know,” she said. “It seems possible.”
“Ah,” her father said in a tone Audrey recognized as carefully neutral.
They were both quiet then, and it seemed to Audrey that her father was ready to resume his file-cleaning work. She yawned, said, “ ’Night, Dad,” and was nearly out the door when her father said, “Audrey?”
It was the voice he used when there was something he felt he needed to talk to her about, but didn’t want to. It took
him a moment to speak, and when he did, he was almost apologetic. “Look, when I got these shopping bags out of the pantry, I couldn’t help seeing the receipts.”
Audrey was relieved he wasn’t talking about her responsibility to herself and her future, all that stuff—but still, his bringing up money was weird enough. He’d never brought up money before. She didn’t know what to say, so she said, “Did I spend too much?”
“No, no, it’s not that,” her father said quickly. “It’s nothing you did.” His gaze floated away from her. “It’s just that, right now, temporarily, for just a little while . . .” He didn’t finish the sentence.
“I can cut down,” Audrey said quickly. “I don’t need new stuff.” She shrugged and smiled. “New stuff is just, you know, new stuff.”
Her father was nodding, but he still kept his eyes averted from hers.
“I can take the new dress and stuff back,” Audrey offered.
Her father shook his head vaguely. “You don’t have to do that,” he said, which Audrey understood was different than telling her not to.
“It’s no problem,” Audrey said, but the truth was, she had no idea whether it was a problem or not. She’d never returned an article of clothing in her life. Oggy always did that if something didn’t fit or turned out to be of poor quality. Returning something because you couldn’t afford it seemed a different matter altogether.
Half a mile away, Wickham Hill came home to find his mother sitting at the kitchen table with a magazine and a cup of tea—in theory a comforting scene, but he saw at once that the tea had gone cold and that she wasn’t reading the magazine. Crumpled tissues lay nearby.
“What?” Wickham said. His mother glanced up at him, then tugged her earlobe and looked away. Whenever his mother felt fragile, she would begin the earlobe-tugging. Wickham sat down at the table and, more softly now, said, “What?”
His mother was not a plain woman, and when she was happy, she seemed beautiful to Wickham, but tonight she’d been crying, and her washed-out face and runny nose and red eyes gave her a hapless aspect. She dabbed at her nose, took a deep breath, and said, “James called.”
Dr. Yates. His actual but unofficial father.
Wickham waited.
His mother opened her mouth, breathed in, breathed out. “He said he’d been getting our bills.” Another deep breath. “He said he’d keep paying them, up to a thousand dollars a month for the next three months. I told him I didn’t care about the money, I just wanted to see him, but it was as if he didn’t hear me. He just said that after three months, the amount he’d pay would go down by one hundred dollars a month.” Another pause and earlobe tug. “He called it a one-year weaning period.”
Wickham stared at the tablecloth. It was red-and-white gingham, the kind you saw in reassuring depictions of cheerful American kitchens. “What about the house?” he said. “Can we stay in the house?”
“He said that after nine months, we’d receive a ninety-day notice to vacate.” Pause, earlobe tug. “He was using his business voice. I’ve heard him use it with other people lots of times. But he’d never used it with me.”
Wickham worked his jaw and with low vehemence said, “And people thought I was the bastard.”
Quietly his mother said, “No. This isn’t him. This is someone else. This is what his horrible wife and that horrible town have turned him into.”
These words had a softening effect on Wickham, toward his mother if not his father. He never touched his mother, never took her hand or kissed her, and though he wouldn’t now, he wanted to. He wanted to lean forward and kiss her on the cheek before he spoke. Instead, he just used his gentlest voice to say, “No, this is him, Mom, and nobody made him him but him.”
Upstairs, Wickham took down his father’s boyhood dictionary and skimmed through the “W” section until he found the word he wanted:
wean . . . v.t. 1 : To accustom (as a child or other young animal) to loss of mother’s milk. 2 : Hence, to detach the affections of; to reconcile to a severance—as “to wean one from a life of ease.”
Wickham opened the nearest window and, with a quick sidearm toss, sent the dictionary sailing out into the darkness. He heard a dull thump-shush as it hit the ground and skidded onto the driveway.
Weaning.
It was just like the bastard to find the one word that fit the circumstance more insultingly than any other in the English language.
Chapter 25
A Single Droplet
“You kissed in the backseat of a taxi?”
Audrey was caught between feeling excited and embarrassed. “A little,” she said.
It was Saturday morning, and Audrey, C.C., and Lea were sitting in a window booth at Bing’s. Outside, the sky was Indian-summer blue, and for November it was strangely warm—people passed in short sleeves, and newspaper headlines talked of global warming.
Lea, in her quiet voice, said, “What does ‘a little’ mean?”
Audrey just smiled and stirred Sweet’n Low into her tea.
C.C. leaned forward and said, “Does ‘a little’ mean a little too much?”
A light, surprised laugh escaped Audrey. “I don’t think so, no.”
The girls all took bites of their bagels.
“Okay,” C.C. said carefully. “How did it make you feel?”
Audrey smiled and blinked slowly. She’d awoken this morning thinking of a legend they’d learned at the Tate School, the one in which the young, brave, and handsome Tristan is sent to Ireland to escort the beautiful Iseult to Britain so that she can join her intended husband, the vengeful and ignoble King Mark, who is also Tristan’s uncle. Tristan is sent with a magic potion for Iseult to drink so that she might fall eternally in love with the elderly uncle, but on the way Tristan and Iseult mistakenly drink the potion and fall eternally in love with each other instead.
Audrey said, “I felt as if for the first time in my life I could imagine what Tristan and Iseult felt after they’d drunk the love potion.” This seemed to go too far, so she added, “Except I didn’t feel like I’d drunk the whole potion or anything. It was more like a single droplet.”
Lea and C.C. had stopped chewing while she talked.
Now, after a long moment, they resumed.
Audrey said, “Almost the weirdest thing happened after I came home.” She was about to describe the money talk with her father when she noticed someone entering the restaurant, and stopped short.
“Uh-oh,” she said in a small voice.
It was Theo Driggs with about five of his enormous, slouching friends. They sauntered down the next aisle.
Audrey wanted to avert her eyes, but couldn’t—a mistake, it turned out. When Theo noticed her, he silently, exaggeratedly mouthed two words, and Audrey could read his plump lips loud and clear.
Do list.
Audrey looked away. Mucker, she thought. Mucker, mucker, mucker. She glanced at C.C. and Lea. “Vacate, vacate, vacate,” she said, and they all got up.
Outside, in the warm sunshine, C.C. suggested tennis.
“In November?” Audrey said.
C.C. spread her arms and gestured at the blue sky. “Audrey, honey, everything I see says June.”
So they agreed on tennis at C.C.’s, but not until after lunch, because Audrey said she needed to run an errand for her father.
“What kind of errand?” C.C. said.
“The boring kind,” Audrey said, to deflect any interest in their tagging along. “See you guys after lunch.”
Chapter 26
The Return of the Spaghetti-Strap Dress
“Reason for return?”
Audrey was returning the spaghetti-strap dress, along with the shoes and sweater. “The fit wasn’t—” Audrey began, but stopped. She didn’t want to lie; she didn’t know what to say; she’d never done this before.
The clerk, a thin, fortyish woman with a clamped-tight face, lowered her chin and peered over her reading glasses. “You didn’t try them on before you bought them?” It was
more an accusation than a question.
“I did, but—” She glanced away, searching the aisles and hoping nobody she knew was in the store.
“Was there something wrong with the garments?”
Audrey turned. “No. It’s just that . . . my father didn’t like them.”
The clerk brought the dress close to her face and sniffed it. “I think it’s been worn,” she said, and again peered down at Audrey. “Has it been worn?”
Audrey lowered her eyes and nodded. Outside, it was the most beautiful, sunny November day ever, and here she was, standing inside a shop, doing this. She wanted to say, It’s okay, I’ll just go ahead and keep it, but her father had looked so worried that she said nothing and waited.
The thin clerk, reading from the receipt, typed some words into the computer and stared silently at the screen. It was too excruciating. Audrey turned and found herself looking at a long, slinky beaded dress that C.C., she knew, would have called fabulous. Audrey stepped close to feel the material, then turned over the price tag: $394.
From behind her, in a weary voice, the thin clerk said, “Okay, you’re a good customer. I’m going to go ahead and credit your account.”
“Thank you,” Audrey said. She wondered how she could feel so grateful to so cold a woman, but she did. She quickly signed the return slip.
It was barely noon, which meant Audrey had a full hour before heading over to C.C.’s for tennis. She walked down the block, bought a smoothie, and was sitting at a sunny table when her cell phone chimed. The caller’s number appeared with his name, which all by itself made her feel better.
“Wickham,” she said.
“Audrey,” he said. “I have an idea.”
“You do?”
“Mmm. Let’s do something we’ve never done before.”
“Okay.”
A low laugh came from his end of the line. “Aren’t you going to ask what it is we’re going to do that we’ve never done before?”
“Okay. What’re we going to do that we’ve never done before?”