by Torey Hayden
“Seems a shame,” I said. “It sounds like it would have been a fulfilling career.”
Her expression was momentarily wistful. “Yes, maybe.” Then she shrugged. “But who knows.”
We got up and took the dishes into the kitchen. Ladbrooke unloaded the dishwasher. Acknowledging that she did virtually nothing in the kitchen, she admitted to having no idea where most of the things went. So we spent a giggly ten minutes opening cupboards and drawers and just chucking things in. Poor Consuela undoubtedly would not be able to find anything for weeks. Then Ladbrooke made us coffee in a thing that looked like it would require a physics degree to operate.
“I’m going to regret this,” she said, as she did it. “It kills my stomach. But sometimes it just tastes so nice.”
And it was good coffee, filling the room around us with its dark, robust smell.
“Come on,” Ladbrooke said. “Let’s take this down to the study. It’s friendlier down there.” She then led me through unlit halls and down two short flights of stairs to a smaller, much more intimate room. Unlike the rest of the house, which was showroom immaculate, this room betrayed definite signs of being lived in. Shoes, socks, dirty clothes, and, in particular, newspapers were everywhere.
“I’m afraid I’m as lousy a housekeeper as I am a cook,” Ladbrooke said, shifting things off one chair. I sat down there. Ladbrooke put her mug on the coffee table and stretched out full length on the couch. Putting her feet up on the far arm, she had her head on the near-side arm, her long hair spilling up and over it.
We said nothing for several minutes. I sipped the coffee, which was hot and strong and tasted wonderful. Ladbrooke remained stretched out. I couldn’t see her face from that position but I had the definite impression she had her eyes closed. The silence, warm and intimate, was almost sleepy.
“You know, I lied back there, a bit,” Ladbrooke said, her voice quiet.
“Back where?”
“Back there, in the dining room, when you were asking me about why I gave up my work.”
“Oh.”
“Well, it wasn’t a lie exactly. All that commuting and everything was hard. But I was being a little stingy with the truth.” She had her hands together, fingertip to fingertip, resting on her abdomen. She studied the shape they created.
“It was actually my fault. That’s what I wasn’t telling you. Not Tom’s. Not Leslie’s. Not anybody else’s. I quit because of something stupid I did.” Again she contemplated her hands. “I haven’t told anybody about this. I mean, quite a few people knew anyway. But I haven’t told anyone else. I haven’t told Tom. I doubt I ever will.”
Silence slid in around us.
“I guess first I need to explain what it’s like doing hard research. Hard, as opposed to soft. Not hard, as opposed to easy. In the hard sciences, it’s really competitive. I don’t think most people appreciate that. They see it all as ivory-tower stuff, but they don’t seem to realize that up there in the ivory tower, folks are killing one another just as mercilessly as everywhere else. Slit, slit, slit at one another’s throats. You have to. The money’s hard to come by, and the projects are expensive. The project leader has to be one hell of a good politician as well, to get the kind of money that’s needed to most really serious research. And to keep it.”
She paused.
“There are a lot of scientific awards around, and they’re vital. You’ve got to get them. If you’ve done something at all notable, you’ve got to get some recognition for it. It helps you get your money. See, a lot of the big corporations who do the funding, their bigwigs aren’t going to understand your research. But they all understand if you beat out the competition to one of the awards. They know you’re good then, and they’re willing to back you. Plus, in a lot of cases, the awards themselves are worth a sizable amount of money. So people take them very seriously indeed.”
Another pause. Ladbrooke sucked in a long, audible breath and held it several seconds before slowly releasing it.
“We were at this awards dinner. My advisor, who was the head of our project, was in contention for one of the awards. We had a very good chance of getting it and we all knew it, so everyone was in pretty high spirits. You see, we were having trouble with our funding. There was another project in California that was quite similar to ours, and one of our sponsors had defected the previous year and backed that project instead. And the administration in Washington had changed … It was critical that we find some new sources of support. We needed recognition that year.
“So there we were at that awards dinner, waiting to hear if John was going to win. It was a very highbrow affair. You know the kind—evening gown and gloves and all that. And I’d been drinking …”
She paused and several seconds went by before I realized she’d come to a full stop. Expectancy hung in the air.
I said nothing, waiting.
Ladbrooke contemplated her hands, holding them both up in front of her.
“I didn’t think I really had a drinking problem then,” she said. “I suppose I did, if I think back on it, but it wasn’t significantly interfering with my lifestyle. A few people had said things to me about it, but nothing too serious. Or at least I didn’t take them too seriously.”
Selecting a fingernail, she chewed it, the sound of her teeth audible to me.
“At this dinner … I was, what would you call it? … flirting I guess, with my advisor, with the man who’d been my advisor when I was a grad student, but who was the project leader then. I really had had too much to drink. I’d been miserably anxious, miserably worried about making a good impression at that dinner, because it was so important. I’d started drinking in the afternoon so I’d be calm enough to get ready. I don’t remember how much I’d had by the time I got there, but it was enough. And then, of course, we were all drinking once the thing started. First the predinner cocktail party. And then the wine and all that.
“Anyway, I began flirting with my advisor. His wife was there. All of them had their wives or girlfriends with them, you see. I was the only woman on the project. Five days a week it was just me and the guys. But here, at this dinner, it was all the guys and their sweeties. And me on my own. I didn’t have Tom with me. He was back here. He was busy. So I was alone.
“John’s wife, of all people, was sitting right across the table from me. That’s what got me started, I think. Although God knows. Anyway, I started doing all these silly things to get John’s attention, to make him acknowledge me, but he wouldn’t. I think it was because his wife was there. I wasn’t really jealous of her. I mean, after all, I was the one he was sleeping with, so I had nothing to be jealous about. No, what it was, was that he was treating me like his wife. Like I was just one of the decorations and not a colleague. I guess what I wanted, if I’m honest, was for him to show the other women I wasn’t one of them. I wasn’t just a pretty face. I was there because I’d earned a place there. I was an equal. And that’s what I wanted, to be treated like that.”
Dead silence followed.
“What happened next?” I asked.
Still the silence.
“I’m embarrassed to talk about this,” she said finally.
“You don’t have to, you know.”
“I do have to. I need to hear myself say this. It’s like the first time I ever told anyone I was an alcoholic. Some things you just need to hear yourself say.”
She let out a long breath.
“What I did … and this really makes me sound awful … but what I did was this kind of striptease. I thought that for every ten minutes that went by and John didn’t acknowledge me, I was going to take something off. I thought, if that’s the only way he knows how to relate to me, then that’s what I’m going to do. I know it doesn’t make any sense sober, but it made a hell of a lot of sense to me at that point. I was feeling really angry. And the longer we sat there, the angrier I got. He made me feel like trash. There I was, a full member of the project team. Maybe I was a junior member, but I was a member.
I’d earned my place. And not by being fucked behind the filing cabinet, either. I’d worked. And yet, he was treating me like I was no more than his bit on the side. I kept thinking, if that’s the way he wants it, I can play that part too …
“So I did. I had gloves on. I took them off. I had a necklace on. I took that off. I had my hair up. I took the pins out. This little pile of things was accumulating beside me as the meal progressed. And people certainly started noticing, once my hair came down. Then I took the jacket to my evening gown off …”
She sat up abruptly. She was blushing. With one hand, she gingerly touched the skin along one cheekbone. Then she put her hands over her face and rubbed her eyes. “I shouldn’t have had that coffee. Now I feel sick.” Lowering her hands slowly, she pressed her fingertips against her lips a moment before taking them away and looking at them. “See? I’m shaking.”
Silence came, and it grew very, very long.
At last she sank back into the cushions on the couch. She sighed. “If you’re wondering what happened that night, what happened at that dinner, suffice it to say that a lot of people forgot they’d come for an awards ceremony. I got the attention I was wanting so much.”
She glanced over, and I nodded.
“I’ve got to admit, I don’t even remember what all happened. What I do remember is so incredibly humiliating that I hate to even think what I might have gotten up to that I don’t know about. I remember John taking me out of the room. And I remember getting sick all over the sidewalk outside, but that’s about all, until the next morning, when I woke up in the apartment of this other guy on the project. God knows how I got there. I hardly knew him, which makes it worse, because I can just imagine what might have happened. Anyway, I couldn’t go back. Not after embarrassing John and the others in front of everybody. How could I? And I sure never told Tom. In the end, I just withdrew from the project. I came back here, wrote out my resignation and never returned. That seemed the only alternative.”
Silence.
Ladbrooke blew out a long breath. “So, now you really know what kind of stupid booby you’ve gotten lumbered with.”
“I can see where that must have been pretty horrific, all right.”
Lad sighed again. “It took me two years to come to the point where I could bear even thinking about it. This is the first time I’ve tried to talk about it with someone else. It was the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever done.”
A rueful smile touched her lips. She cast a long, sideways glance in my direction and caught my eye. “Well, of course, there was what I did in your room.”
I grinned, and the tension eased off abruptly.
“I suppose what happened in your room wasn’t as bad,” she said. “At least it was less public. But I think I felt about as bad, because there was no way of escaping from it. I wanted to die then, that time in with you.”
She brought her hand up and thoughtfully chewed the thumbnail.
“I don’t remember very much about that day. I’d been drinking from about 6:15 in the morning. I hadn’t been able to sleep at all the night before, and all I remember was needing courage to face you. Everything else is pretty hazy. Up until I got sick. I sure remember throwing up everywhere. The look on your face when I did …” She smiled slightly then and looked over. The smile became teasingly affectionate.
I grinned again.
“You were a picture, Torey. You really were.”
I blushed.
“And you and those damned floor cloths …” She chuckled. “It’s probably not funny. I never expected to be laughing about it. Not in a million years. I was so terrified of you. You’d said, ‘You’re not going to be sick again?’ And I’d said no. But I kept thinking, what if I am? I felt paralyzed, sitting there. And you had those floor cloths. You were very gentle about it, but there was no nonsense. There was no doubt who was in charge. I was thinking, it’s like I’m just another kid. Which was all right. I think that’s the precise moment it occurred to me, really occurred to me, that I needed to do something. Not earlier, not when I was sick—that was just humiliating—but then, with you and your floor cloths. I thought, I need this. I need somebody else to take control for a while. Because I just wasn’t making it on my own. I needed to start over. I needed to grow up, because I don’t think I ever really did it the first time.”
Caught up in my own memories of the day, I was still smiling. “Do you remember threatening me with that lawsuit over my taking Leslie out of your car the day before? When you came into the room that next day, I thought you were going to kill me. No joking. You had death in your eyes. Do you remember that?”
“Sort of. I mean, I don’t really. I remember having been angry with you, but that’s about it. But Tom’s reminded me about the lawsuit business, because we got charged for the call I made to the lawyer.”
“You really did frighten me. I got a heck of a scare from that,” I said.
“I scared you? You scared the shit out of me. Right from that very first day. Remember that? In the front office, when we couldn’t get Leslie out of the car? I was scared to death of you. And remember that first meeting you set up for Tom and me, that first conference? I got so worried over it, I got sick. Tom was furious with me, but I just couldn’t go. I couldn’t face you. You scared me shitless.”
Amazed, I looked over. “Why on earth—?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Just the way you looked at me. It scared me. I felt like you saw right through me.”
“I didn’t.”
She straightened up, stretched, ran her fingers through her hair, pushing it back over her shoulders. “I think you did,” she replied. “And that was what was so frightening. But it’s all right. I think I was ready to be seen through.”
Chapter 25
“It wouldn’t be like this in Ulster,” Geraldine said, as she stared out the window. There was snow again, feet of it this time instead of inches. “Daddy’d have planted our broad beans by now.”
“It snows in Ulster,” Shamie replied.
“Not like this.”
It was a spring snow, deep, heavy and wet, but uncannily beautiful. The drab grays and browns of a fading Western winter had disappeared under what looked like heavy-handed dollops of marshmallow creme. But it was impossible weather for driving. I had managed to make it to work all right, and the Lonrhos had a four-wheel-drive vehicle, but we were it. The buses carrying Dirkie and Mariana couldn’t get through, and I didn’t know what had happened to Lad and Leslie. I assumed they had been defeated by the snow, like practically everyone else. It was almost ten o’clock and they still hadn’t arrived.
“Come on, you lot,” I said. “Let’s get back to work.” The snowfall was proving an irresistible distraction that morning. Everyone kept pausing to look at it. The fact that there were so few of us made it even harder to keep things going as usual. “Come on,” I said again and put my hand on Shamie’s shoulder to guide him back to his chair.
“We’d have our garden all laid out by now,” Geraldine said, as she sat down. “This is a silly place. You never know what’s going to happen.”
“I like it here,” Shamie replied. “You can do lots more things than you can at home.” He turned to me. “The trouble with Geraldine is that she thinks everything that happened in Ulster was good and everything that happens here is bad.”
“It was good,” Geraldine said.
“It wasn’t. It wasn’t, Geraldine. Where’s your memory?”
“It was. We had our garden in by now. Daddy was making our garden.”
“Garden?” Shamie cried. “Garden-schmarden, Geraldine. I get fed up with all your talk. Don’t you remember it over there? What kind of place it was? We couldn’t even go down to the playground anymore. Remember what it looked like after the riots? Was that good? And remember the cellars? Remember Colin in the cellars, making petrol bombs, and how Shemona got down there, got the petrol all over herself and cut her hand? Was that good, Geraldine?”
Ger
aldine’s expression blackened.
“She could have been killed, Geraldine. And she was just a wee child. And your sister. She could have been killed, like Matthew was.”
I could see tears glistening in Geraldine’s eyes. Her expression had softened slightly; she was obviously most intent at that moment on not crying. She swallowed, sniffed softly, swallowed again. Shamie was watching her closely. His mood wasn’t malicious, but I could tell he intended to make his point.
Although the tears hadn’t fallen, Geraldine removed her glasses and wiped them from her eyes. She replaced her glasses. “I just want to go home,” she said, her voice very small.
Shamie mellowed slightly. “It’s nicer here, Geraldine,” he said gently.
“I was going to have a wee bit of garden for myself. Daddy said.”
“Maybe you can have a garden here. Maybe Auntie Bet’ll let you.”
“They don’t have any garden at all.”
“Well, maybe they could make one for you.”
Geraldine wasn’t going to be placated. She shook her head morosely.
Silence drifted down around us, soft as the snow beyond the window. Shamie looked down at the tabletop and his folder. Geraldine had her eyes squeezed shut to keep the tears back. Beside me, Shemona sat, watching the other two. We were on the opposite side of the table from Shamie and Geraldine and a couple of seats down, so we weren’t directly across from them. Shemona, who was nearer to them than I, appeared to be listening intently to the conversation.