Resurgence (17 page)
“True. That would’ve been anyone’s impression, layman or professional alike. Inevitable, it was.”
“Can you say how he’s different now? What the biggest changes are?”
Chris rakes back his shoulder-length dark hair with both hands and stretches his long weedy legs before answering.
“I keep forgetting you didn’t know him before—you didn’t even know of him, I’m told.”
“That’s correct.”
“So I could tell you any damn thing I wanted to about the before.” Chris flashes one of his rare smiles.
She smiles back. “Yes, you could, and I could always check with Rachel. I doubt she’d whitewash anything, and all kidding aside, I have considered asking her. I’ve even considered asking Colin, but he’s still reluctant to talk about himself except in the most general way—almost as reluctant as he was at the inception of the biography project.”
“‘Reluctant’ is the nice polite word for his stubborn refusal to just get on with certain things, and that’s the main reason I barged in on you today. He’s struggling, Laurel, he’s having a bad time of it with the old Verge standards.”
“I’m not sure I understand. Is he struggling to
remember
them?”
“Hell no. Nothing like that. If anything, he’s remembering too well—remembering the period they represent. He knows I’m onto him and soon everyone’ll be aware of the problem, if he goes through with his threat to omit most of our best-known tunes from the tour playlist.”
“If I’m reading you right, he’s trying to distance himself from the period when he was most heavily involved—”
“Embroiled.”
“Yes, thank you—
embroiled
with Aurora. Can you tell me why on earth this should matter now? Who could possibly care?”
“You could.”
Laurel gulps audibly, bows her head as though vestiges of the jealousy felt while listening to Dr. Kice’s opinion might show on her face. “That’s ridiculous,” she says.
“Ridic’lous,” Simon says with more conviction than she mustered.
“I was hoping you’d see it that way,” Chris says.
“How could I see it any other way?” Laurel says, a defensive edge sharpening her tone. “I’ll speak to him about it.”
“Can you do it in a way that doesn’t point the finger at me?”
“No, I can’t. I already learned that lesson when I didn’t tell him right away that I was in touch with Nate. I can’t expect him to confide in me if I’m not completely open with him.”
“I suppose that’s only fair, but you sound a bit pissed about it.”
“I
am
pissed. He’s showing a remarkable lack of faith in me, and violating his own rule by not coming straight to me with his concerns,”
“You want me to tell him that?”
“Absolutely not! Did you hear anything I just said? All this go-between business is symptomatic of my annoyance. I’d like to hear straight from
Colin
how he’s changed since the accident. And I’d like
him
to be the one telling me he thinks I might be bothered by musical references to his late wife.”
Before she digs herself deeper into a pit of jealousy and resentment, she thanks Chris for his input and assures him he’s in no danger for having been the messenger. She says nothing about when they might next get together for the purpose of adding to her research. At the moment, she’s not sure she wants to hear anything more about Colin Elliot that doesn’t come direct from Colin Elliot.
Chris has been gone a half hour before Laurel attempts to utilize what’s left of an afternoon she had planned to spend selecting textbooks and lesson outlines for her upcoming stint as Anthony’s tutor. With Simon and the little cat in close attendance, she moves to the north wing office, where her efforts are desultory at best. Her thoughts won’t crystallize while dominated by Chris’s revelation, and she’s too close to anger to be much company to Simon right now.
Although rain threatens, she decides a long walk will benefit her legs, if not her mind. Simon objects to being left behind with Gemma, but his outcry isn’t enough of a deterrent to hold her back.
She starts out at a brisk walk and is soon jogging. She’s running by the time she reaches the specimen copper beech tree, and doesn’t slow down until she reaches the high meadow, where the helicopter landed—where she first set foot on Terra Firma—where she first came to earth, one could say. Remembering the landing in those terms could make her wonder if she’s now looking for another do-over—if she ran all this way to find her footprint and either refresh it or erase it. That notion brings her to a standstill. That, and the electrical whine of a farm conveyance coming her way.
She turns in the direction of the house, expecting to see Sam Earle or one of the gardeners approaching with a load of mulch or a day’s accumulation of brush. Instead, it’s Colin at the wheel of a converted golf cart, waving as though she’d just returned after a year’s absence, and closing in on her at a fact clip.
“Oi there! Baby girl! I came home early and you weren’t there,” he shouts across the diminishing distance.
She tries not to smile; she’s annoyed with him, after all. But she’s not very convincing when he jumps off the cart and grabs her in a bear hug. She’s not very convincing when he kisses her repeatedly, and repeatedly tells her how much he missed her today, and how they’ll have to book rooms in London because the commute’s killing him and he doesn’t fancy leaving her behind every time he’s needed there.
He doesn’t want to hear her argument that she can go as many as eight hours without him, or that she’s needed here during the day. She’s unable to overcome his insistence that she return to the house now, in the golf cart, with him. She offers no resistance when he demands that they have a late supper alone tonight, and she’s helpless not to be touched when they’re under way and he makes a big deal of stopping at the magnificent copper beech and sheltering for a few hushed minutes within the cavern of its dark-leaved branches.
At the house, Laurel insists on taking over supper preparations for the boys. Anthony kibitzes, makes a real pest of himself while she peels apples for a Chandler family favorite. To lessen the irritant factor, she puts him to work assembling the other ingredients.
“Is this for pudding?” he says of the sugar and cinnamon he’s asked to bring from the pantry.
“No, darling, it’s for a pancake, even though it’s baked in the—oh, you mean dessert. I keep forgetting pudding means
dessert
in your country. One of these days I’ll have to learn British English, won’t I?”
“I guess.”
“This is a treat my family liked a lot. Sometimes we’d have it for breakfast and sometimes for supper if there wasn’t anything else in the house.”
“Do you have children?” Anthony says when he brings eggs and milk from the big double refrigerator.
“No. If I had children they’d be with me, wouldn’t they?”
“Some mums go away without their children.”
“Well I don’t, so you can put that worry aside.”
“But you’re not my mum.”
Laurel groans a trifle dramatically and sets aside the batter ingredients. “Sit down.” She indicates a high stool opposite her work space and fetches another stool for herself. “Anthony, how many times have we been over this?”
“Dunno,” he mumbles and stares at the floor.
“I think you do. Too many. You tempt me to have you write on the blackboard a hundred times: ‘Laurel is my acting mum till August when she’ll marry my father and make it official.’”
“We don’t have a blackboard.”
“Don’t push me, Anthony. You’re still on probation, you know. And look at me when I’m talking to you!”
He looks up and she’s instantly ashamed of making him suffer for a crime he didn’t commit—if she can even call it a crime now that she sees his concern as an extension of Colin’s.
“Come here, sweetheart.” She holds out her arms and he edges around the work island, slowly, warily, the way he accepts her hug.
“I think we need to begin again,” she says and gives him an extra squeeze while pretending it’s the cooking that needs to be started over. “I forgot that you should have bacon and sausages—no, that would be rashers and bangers wouldn’t it?—with this great delicacy we’re concocting, and I need you to help me find some.”
“You don’t have to invent things for me to do so I’ll feel important.”
“Believe me, I’m not. I don’t know where the damn bacon and sausages are kept. And yes, I cursed in your presence. Get over it.”
She’s not proud of that outburst either, but it did seem to clear the air. After rolling his eyes no less extravagantly than she did when she groaned at him a minute ago, he locates the requested items in an overlooked compartment of the refrigerator and preparations get under way.
The sweet and savory aromas attract first Gemma, who brings Simon to the table, then Colin, who is only passing through after his workout. While Laurel serves and supervises the meal, talk centers on the European tour, something even Simon can show interest in without knowing exactly why. After Anthony has been excused to finish his homework, she sits for a while with the little one, plays a few games of very tangled cat’s cradle with him until he starts rubbing his eyes and yawning.
She leaves the dishes to be cleared away by the help—as she’s been told to do nearly as many times as Anthony has been told he’s no longer motherless—and carries Simon upstairs to the children’s suite. She bathes and dresses him for bed in record time, and is just tucking him in with a worn copy of
Goodnight Moon
under her arm, when Colin comes in, fresh from his own bath and dressed in a black silk shirt and tuxedo trousers.
As if that’s not enough to dispel her anger with him, he sits down beside her on the edge of the bed, and spouts one of his better emergency rhymes.
Bees are known to bumble
Biscuits tend to crumble
Footballers sometimes fumble
Malcontents do grumble
But though it’s not that humble
My home is just a jumble
So excuse me as I mumble
Please overlook the rumble
As up the stairs I stumble
And tumble into bed
.
This produces a sleepy grin from Simon and a sigh of resignation from her.
“I’ll see to Anthony whilst you get into something . . . more comfortable,” Colin says with an eye to her wrinkled shorts and batter-spattered camp shirt.
“I think you mean appropriate”
“Yeh, I do,” he says, and bends to kiss Simon goodnight.
Laurel interprets “appropriate” to mean “alluring.” After a quick shower in the master suite, she selects the grey chiffon with the draped bodice purchased to understudy the evocative black dress which has now seen better days. She puts it on over minimal underwear, stabs in her regulation diamond stud earrings, and slips into a pair of high-heeled silver sandals.
Because she forgot to turn on the fan or open a window prior to showering, the bathroom mirrors are fogged over, so she arranges her hair by feel and dabs on mascara and lipstick hit-or-miss.
In the bedroom proper, she sees she needn’t have rushed. Although the small round table in front of the fireplace has been set for dinner during her absence, she’s alone in the candlelit room.
When Colin appears, Anthony is with him, ostensibly to say goodnight, but it’s clear he wants to linger. And linger he does, going on and on about the apple pancake—shades of his father—until even Colin grows impatient with his neediness. The third time one of the kitchen staff looks in to see if dinner should be served, the boy takes the hint and leaves on his own.
The food, when it arrives, is of Colin’s choosing and reminds her of the dinner she had with Nate for being elegant without going completely overboard. They start with paper-thin gravlax on crustless buttered triangles of pumpernickel, followed by apricot-glazed poussin, short-grained East Indian rice, new peas and baby carrots, and finish with a Pavlova filled with whipped cream and mixed berries.
For no good reason, she felt nervous throughout. Perhaps because no conversational thread was established; no single topic survived more than a couple of back-and-forths. They could have been on a first date, casting about for interests in common, awkwardly testing the waters of sexual attraction. And, now that they’re finished eating, true to first date form, Colin is offering her more of the sublime white Bordeaux that accompanied the meal. He’s already begun pouring when she places her hand across the top of her glass, causing him to spill some on her.
“You could have said no before I started pouring,” he says without appearing perturbed.
“I’m sorry,” she says, licking wine off her fingers.
“And you could let me do that.” He reaches across the table for her hand and she pulls it back.
Now he appears perturbed.
“Am I gonna find out anytime soon what’s going on?” he says. “You’ve been acting strange ever since I found you on the high meadow this afternoon, and Anthony tells me you lost your temper with him in the kitchen. I’m not sayin’ he didn’t deserve it, but that’s not like you at all.”