The price of her forgiveness

SUNDAY LUNCH

Chapter 3: Sunday Lunch

Lachlan

Uncle Cormac cooks the way other men pray. Slowly, without talking, with his whole back.

I stood in the doorway of his kitchen and watched him baste a shoulder of lamb with a wooden spoon older than I am. He wore the blue apron with the faded daisies. It was Aunt Maren’s, and he’s worn it every Sunday since the funeral, and in nine years I have never once seen him tie it in any way but crooked. Rosemary and garlic hung in the air so thick I could have leaned on it.

“You’re letting the heat out,” he said, not turning around.

“I’m standing in a doorway.”

“Standing in a doorway is how heat gets out. Come in, boy. Sit. You look like something the cat found.”

I sat at the scarred oak table, the same one where I did my homework at ten and learned to lose at chess at twelve. He put a mug in front of me without asking. Tea, too strong, two sugars. I haven’t taken sugar since I was seventeen. I drank it anyway.

That’s the thing about Cormac. He’s seventy-one, a widower, a retired shipping man with hands like shovels, and he is the only person left who remembers me before I was a Vance. When my father died, it was Cormac who sat on the end of my bed and said nothing for three hours, and that was the most useful thing anyone has ever said to me.

“Marcus rang you,” he said now. “Friday. I heard it from Dennis at the club.”

“Marcus rang me Thursday night. Midnight.” I turned the mug in my hands. “Someone’s buying our debt, Cormac. Quietly. Fifteen percent now, maybe sixteen. He still can’t find a name.”

He set down the spoon, wiped his hands on the daisies, and finally looked at me. His eyes are pale and watery and they miss nothing. They never have.

“What do you want to do?”

“I want to find them. I want to ring every bank in the city and shout.”

“Mm.”

“I’ve had Marcus working through the weekend. I’ve got two lawyers on it. I called a man in Zurich who owes me a favour.”

“And what did you not do?”

I frowned. “What?”

“Everyone tells me what they did. The thing that matters is always what they didn’t.” He lowered himself into the chair opposite with a small grunt. “A man who buys slowly wants you to move fast. That’s all the patience is for. He’s leaving you room to do something stupid. So don’t.”

“Sit still.”

“Be patient. It’s different. Sitting still is what rabbits do.”

I almost smiled. “You sound like Dad.”

“Your father would’ve had the police and a private army in by now, and lost the company by Tuesday. He was a magnificent man and a terrible waiter.” He said it fondly, and the old grief went through both of us and out the other side. “You’re not him, Lachlan. That’s the best thing about you, whatever your face says.”

I looked down at the table. There was a ring in the wood where Maren used to set her wine glass. I put my thumb over it.

“I haven’t been sleeping,” I said.

“No.”

“It’s not the buyer. It was before the buyer. It’s been bad since the launch.” I couldn’t believe I was saying it out loud, in a room that smelled of roasting meat, to a man in a daisy apron. “I talk to her side of the bed. Every night. I will tell her about my day.”

Cormac didn’t flinch. He didn’t do the sympathetic head tilt that I’d learned to dread. He just sat with it, and the clock over the stove ticked, and a small bird went at the window feeder.

“Grief without a funeral,” he said at last. “That’s the worst kind. You’ve nothing to bury, so you keep it on the mantelpiece and dust it.”

“She isn’t dead.”

“No. That’s what makes it worse.” He reached across and patted my wrist, twice, the way you’d settle a horse. “I’m not telling you to stop. I’m telling you it isn’t madness. You loved her. A man doesn’t stop having a wife because the wife leaves the house.”

My throat did something. I picked up the tea and drank so I wouldn’t have to speak.

“Be patient,” he said again, softer. “With the buyer. With yourself. Things come to the surface if you let them. They always do.”

He got up, checked the lamb, and hummed something tuneless that might once have been a hymn. I watched his broad back and felt something in my chest unclench, a notch, the first in days.

One o’clock came and went. Quarter past. Half past.

“She’s late,” Cormac said, carving potatoes into a dish.

“She texted. The meeting ran over.”

“On a Sunday.”

“Briony’s meetings don’t observe the sabbath.”

He made a small sound in his throat that wasn’t consistent. Cormac has never disliked Briony. He’s been courteous and a little careful, the way you’re careful with a very good china plate. I’d never asked him why.

She arrived at ten to two, in a rush of cold air and expensive perfume, and the first thing I noticed was that she hadn’t taken the time to fix her face. Briony always fixes her face. A smear of mascara under her left eye. Her hair is coming loose from its clip.

“I’m so sorry. Cormac, forgive me, the traffic, and then the client,” She kissed his cheek, then mine, and her lips were cold. “It smells incredible.”

“It’s only lamb,” Cormac said. “Sit. Eat.”

She sat. She ate three bites in total, and I counted, because I couldn’t help it. She moved the potatoes from one side of the plate to the other. She laughed at the right places in Cormac’s story about the harbour master and the missing goat, a little too late each time, as if the joke had to travel a long way to reach her.

Her phone buzzed on the table. She turned it face down so fast it skidded.

“Work?” I asked.

“Mother.” She smiled. “You know how she is.”

I didn’t, actually. In eighteen months I’d met her mother once, at a restaurant, for forty minutes.

Under the table Briony’s thumbnail was working at the side of her index finger. Quietly. Relentlessly. When she lifted her hand to reach for her water I saw the skin there was raw and red.

Something in me went still and watchful.

“Marcus says the buyer’s up to sixteen percent,” I said, to see what her face would do.

Her face did nothing. That was the odd part. It did nothing so carefully that I could see the effort.

“Has he got any names?” she said.

“Not yet.”

“Well, he will.” She picked up her fork. “Marcus is very thorough.”

“Is he?”

“Isn’t he?”

“Eat, the pair of you,” Cormac said, in the voice he used when I was twelve and sulking. “Business is for Mondays.”

So we ate. Or Cormac and I did. Briony pushed food and watched the clock on the stove, and every few minutes her eyes went to the window and the long road beyond it, as if somebody might be coming up it.

Afterwards Cormac made us take the pudding out onto the porch, a rhubarb crumble in three mismatched bowls. The garden went down in uneven steps to a stone wall, with the hills blue behind it. Briony stood at the rail with her bowl untouched and her back to us.

“She’s frightened,” Cormac murmured, low, beside me.

“Of what?”

“Ah.” He lowered himself onto the bench with his crumble. “If I knew that I’d be a cleverer man. Women have an instinct for the weather. Maybe she smells rain.”

“She smells everything. She’s better at reading a room than I am.”

“Then listen to her. Even when she isn’t talking.”

I wanted to ask him what he meant by that. I opened my mouth, and Briony turned from the rail with a bright brittle smile and said, “I’m so sorry, I’ve got the worst headache. Would you mind terribly if we went?”

Cormac stood and kissed her on both cheeks, and held her a second longer than politeness required. “Look after yourself, girl,” he said.

“I always do.”

He held on to my hand in the car, those big dry fingers. “Patient,” he said again. “Promise me.”

“I promise.”

He nodded, and let go, and stood on the porch in the daisy apron until we were round the bend.

We drove home in near silence. The hills slid by. Briony watched them with her bad hand tucked under her good one. I wanted to ask. I had the question lined up and ready, I even had the first word. But she said, “Please don’t, Lachlan,” without turning her head, and her voice was so tired that the question died in my mouth.

“Okay,” I said.

“Thank you.”

I dropped her off at her flat. She didn’t invite me up, and I didn’t expect it. She stood at her building’s door a moment, small in the evening light, and lifted a hand to me. Not a wave. More the way you’d touch glass.

Then I drove home to the empty house and the lamp in the hall.

I told myself I’d go straight upstairs. I told myself I’d sleep. But Cormac’s voice kept running behind my eyes, what did you not do, and I found myself walking the wrong way down the corridor, to study.

My father’s study. I never changed it. Oak shelves, ledgers in uniform rows, the green banker’s lamp he bought in Edinburgh and swore at every time the bulb blew. I switched it on. The light pooled over the desk and left the corners brown.

I went to the bottom shelf behind the third row of ledgers. I’m not sure what I thought I was doing. Checking. Looking for something to check. There’s a lockbox back there, grey steel, the size of a bread tin. My father’s will. The deeds. The few papers I’ve never wanted to look at again. I’d put them there three years ago and told no one. Not the housekeeper, not Marcus, not Briony. The key lives on a chain in the pocket of my winter coat, where it has always lived.

I knelt and moved the ledgers aside.

The lockbox was there. But it was wrong.

It took me a moment to see how. The dust on the shelf had a clean outline in it, a pale rectangle, and the box sat two inches to the left of that rectangle. Two inches. Someone had lifted it out and put it back, and they’d been careful. They just hadn’t been careful enough.

I ran my thumb across the lock. A fresh bright scratch ran along the edge of the keyhole, thin as a hair.

The housekeeper had been off since Friday. The study door had been shut. And nobody, nobody on this earth, had the key but me.

I knelt there in the green light with my heart going like a fist on a door, and I understood, slowly and all at once, that I wasn’t the only person in this house who’d been keeping secrets.