Chapter 22: The House Went On
The thing nobody prepares you for is that a house does not stop.
The wedding was thirty-eight days away on the sixteenth of September and nobody canceled anything.
The florist came on the seventeenth.
The calligrapher came on the eighteenth and worked at the dining table for six hours.
A man came about a marquee and walked the south lawn with a wheel measure.
The gates opened at six every morning for deliveries, whatever Victor Blackwood had said in the rain on Monday night.
Serena Montigue was in that house the whole time.
She had a fitting on the nineteenth.
Two women came from the city with a box the size of a door.
I saw her for the first time on the morning of the seventeenth, on the second-floor landing, at eight minutes past nine.
I had Ethan on my right hip and a bottle in my left hand.
She was coming up.
I was going along.
There is a stretch of about four metres where the landing is a corridor.
She said, “Good morning, Lily.”
I said, “Good morning.”
And she went past, and that was all of it, and I stood there afterwards for a second with my heart going like a bird.
That is what it was like.
It was like that for ten months.
She never once said anything to me that could be written down.
I made rules for myself, that week, and I kept every one of them.
Never in a room with her without a third person.
Never in a doorway.
Never on the stairs if she was on the stairs.
Write down the time of every encounter, the place, the words, and who else was present.
I kept that on separate sheets, never in the blue notebook, because the blue notebook was Ethan’s and I was not going to put her in it.
By the end of that autumn I had thirty-one entries on those sheets and not one of them was worth anything to anybody.
Good morning, Lily. Good afternoon, Lily.
Is he sleeping? He looks well.
A woman from the Department came on the eighteenth. Her name was Ms. Okonjo and she was about forty and she was very tired.
She was with Ethan for twenty minutes and with me for forty, in the morning room, with Aaronson sitting three metres away saying nothing.
She asked me to describe a breathing episode and I described one and she wrote three lines.
She took the notebook away and photographed nine pages of it and brought it back the same afternoon.
She said, “You’ve kept this well.” I have thought about that sentence a great deal.
Victor Blackwood was in the house for three of the first eight days.
He went to New York on the seventeenth and to Cleveland on the twenty-first and he telephoned twice.
He came into the nursery once in that week, on the evening of the sixteenth, and sat in the chair by the window for nineteen minutes.
Ethan looked at him from the floor and did not go over.
Victor asked me one question, which was, “Does it hurt him?”
I said, “Not much now. It hurt him on Monday.”
He said, “Right,” and looked at the window for a while, and then he stood up and went out.
He did not ask about the episodes.
He did not ask about the notebook. He had said I understand the first five minutes in a marble hall and then he had gone to New York.
That is the man, and I am done being surprised by it, and it took me the whole of that autumn.
Constance Blackwood arrived on the nineteenth of September at twenty past two in the afternoon.
She was seventy-one and she came in a gray car with a driver and she was carrying a knitted rabbit in a paper bag.
I had met her perhaps nine times in thirteen months. She had always been kind to me and she was kind to me that day.
She came up to the nursery herself rather than sending for the child, which almost nobody in that family ever did.
She sat down on the low chair, which is not a chair for a woman of seventy-one, and she put the rabbit on the rug and waited.
Ethan went to her. He went to her more readily than he had gone to his father.
She did not pick him up.
She let him come and put his hand on her knee and she said, “Well, look at you. Look at that blue arm.”
She stayed fifty minutes. She asked me what he was eating and whether he was sleeping and she listened to both answers.
At the door, on the way out, she put her hand over mine, and hers was very dry and very warm.
She said, “He knows your voice, my dear. That is not nothing.”
And then she said, “You must stay.”