“Not at all, I was delighted to come.” He smiled, and she noticed what she hadn’t been able to see in the artificial light at Sherry’s—that his eyes were intensely blue and his dark, blond-tipped lashes were nearly as long as a woman’s.
She led him over to the couch, where Lauren still sat curled in the corner like a cat. “Lauren, this is Mr. McKie, our new architect. Miss Hubbard is an old friend.”
Lauren stretched a hand up, with a look on her face that Sara knew well: full of charm and coy delight, it was the one she wore whenever she met a new man who interested her. Sara folded her arms while the two of them spoke pleasantly and easily, discovering within a few sentences that they had mutual friends. Did Mr. McKie find Lauren attractive? Well, Sara thought, what man wouldn’t? She was small and petite, hardly taller than a child, but still unmistakably feminine. Huge, beautiful green eyes dominated her wry, intelligent face. If men were sometimes put off, it was because of her determinedly eccentric dress. Today she could have passed for a gypsy herself in a beaded smock of orange and yellow printed muslin. She’d wrapped an Indian scarf around her head for a turban, hiding the pretty brown hair she wore short in defiance of fashion.
When she and Mr. McKie ran out of conversation for a moment, Lauren unwound gracefully and stood up. “I hate to go, but I must—I’ve promised to watch some friends rehearse for a new play at the DeWitt Theatre.”
It was the first Sara had heard. She looked at her watch. Nearly four; Ben would be home soon. He was infallibly rude to Lauren, so she avoided him whenever possible. Sara often wondered what he disliked about Lauren more—her ideological opposition to everything he stood for or simply that she and Sara loved each other, and their friendship was something he couldn’t control?
“I’ll call you, Sara,” Lauren said, pulling on a fringed shawl.
“Yes, you’d better. I want to hear all about Paris.”
“Goodbye, Mr. McKie, it’s been a great pleasure.
“The pleasure was mine.” They shook hands again, and Lauren glided out. A hint of her lemon-and-clove cologne lingered in the room after her.
“Please, sit down,” Sara invited, and Mr. McKie took a seat on the just-vacated couch. “I can’t think what’s keeping Ben. He went to his office at noon, but he said he’d be home in a few hours. He knew you were coming to tea, of course.” Indeed, he’d commanded her to invite him so he could see the revised plans for the Newport house before he left for Chicago. “I see you’ve brought your blueprints—is that what you call them?” She indicated the long cardboard tube he set on the floor at his feet.
“No, these are the design development drawings; blueprints come a little later.”
“Oh, I see.”
“And then we usually call them construction documents. That’s when we convert the design concept into feet and inches, door swings, window frames, things like that. We’re not quite to that point yet with your house.”
“How long will it take to build it?”
“A lot depends on the weather. If we can get started in early June, it should be up by early autumn.”
“So soon?”
“That’s just the exterior. You couldn’t move in before Christmas.”
She could tell from his expression and the careful way he spoke that he was privately amazed that she didn’t already know the answers to these questions. She could understand his confusion; it was her house—ostensibly—and she was the one who had been elected to supervise its construction. How could he know that Ben wanted her advice and opinions on his new architectural toy about as much as he wanted Michael’s?
“Would you care to see the drawings?”
She hesitated. In a way, she was curious— about the house, and even more about this man’s skill as an architect. But the ultimate pointlessness of it dissuaded her. “Let’s wait for Ben,” she suggested.
“Fine.”
She thought he sounded faintly disappointed. The clock struck the quarter hour. “I’m sure he’ll be here soon, but would you like to have some tea now?”
“No, that’s all right, I’ll wait.”
“A drink, then.”
“No, thanks.”
She relaxed her hands on the arms of her chair and returned his disconcertingly direct gaze with studied casualness. His manners were perfect; he had never been anything but gentlemanly in their brief acquaintance. Nevertheless, the edginess she’d felt alone in his company last week returned now, and she wondered why.
“Have you lived in this house long?” he asked.
“Eight years.”
“You didn’t buy it together, then, you and Ben?”
“No, he bought it about a year before I met him.” As he crossed his long legs and glanced around the drawing room, she found herself trying to guess what he was thinking. He kept his handsome face pleasantly bland and accepting, but she suspected it was a mask. She suspected he was a diplomat. What did he really think of her home—and of her?
Alex hardly knew what he thought. Mrs. Cochrane and her house presented a powerful paradox he wasn’t yet able to reconcile. There she sat, cool and elegant, her bright gold hair upswept in that loose, effortless-looking, two-tiered affair so many women tried nowadays but few achieved. He liked her black silk suit and the humorously masculine waistcoat and tie she wore with it. Her skirt was the fashionable new “instep” length, so called because it revealed three-quarters of the shoes. Composed, genteel, unaffected, lovely—and she was sitting on an ugly chair in a pretentious room, surrounded by furnishings of surpassing stupidity. He’d thought of her often since their last meeting, and not only for the obvious reason—because she attracted him. The puzzle of her marriage intrigued him as well, keeping him pondering what life with a man like Bennet Cochrane might be like for such a woman. Now to that mystery he could add the baffling incongruity of this wretched house. He stroked his mustache and asked innocently, “Would you mind giving me a tour? While we wait for your husband.” He thought she hesitated, but then she said, “Yes, of course,” rose to her feet graciously, and led him out to the hall.
They walked across its pinched, dark, uninviting width, past a sunken palm garden and into another drawing room, this one uglier and more grandiose than the other—something he would not have thought possible. Mrs. Cochrane pointed out, without enthusiasm, the most noticeable features—the English bog oak dadoes and wainscoting, the crimson stamped-leather wall coverings, the Spanish altar cloths of gold and garnet plush used as portieres to separate this room from the music room. On his own he took note of a Chinese ceramic pug dog standing knee-high beside the fireplace and a hideous gasolier hung over a damask-upholstered ottoman, the two creating a sort of static carousel that blocked traffic and devoured space.
“Who decorated the house?” he had to know.
“Parker and Stine, I believe.”
That explained a good deal; Parker and Stine’s specialty was ostentation and pretense. Still, even they had to have had an accomplice in the homeowner to commit an atrocity this flagrant.
She showed him the dining room and the conservatory, billiard room and smoking and sitting rooms, halls and salons. His favorite was Cochrane’s combined office and trophy room, a truly horrible menage of stuffed ram and stag heads, a collection of vicious-looking medieval weapons, hunting prints of stunning mediocrity, leopard and bear and tiger skin rugs, hanging snowshoes, dead birds mounted on stalks—all against a background of black walnut woodwork, Beauvais tapestries, Oriental ceramics, Renaissance Revival bric-a-brac, and anything else that could possibly be crammed into the big, dark, stupendously depressing chamber. Even Mrs. Cochrane couldn’t disguise her distaste for this room, and hung back in the doorway until he had looked his fill.
They wandered dispiritedly back toward the first drawing room, both pensive and silent. As they crossed the entry hall, the front door burst open and a small, yellow-haired boy barreled in. “Mum!” he shouted, then skidded to a comical halt at the sight of a strange man
with his mother.
Alex’s first thought was that the Cochranes must have two children, for this could hardly be seven-year-old Michael. This boy looked closer to five than seven, with his spindly body and his big, intelligent head on a neck so thin Alex could have wrapped one hand around it. He was a tow-head blond with pale skin the color of skim milk, bony-shouldered, and sharp-kneed. But it was Michael because Sara said, “Hullo, darling, come and meet Mr. McKie. This is my son, Michael.”
They shook hands solemnly. The boy had a pair of roller skates tied over his shoulder; the wheels left dust marks on the short jacket he wore over a white Russian blouse with knickers and black stockings. He’d come from the Lenox Lyceum, he told Alex politely but breathlessly, where he’d learned how to skate backwards. “You wouldn’t care to see me do it now, would you?” he asked tentatively, then threw caution to the winds and yanked on his mother’s sleeve, begging, “Oh, come out and watch me, Mummy, do, I’ll stay on the sidewalk, I promise!”
A woman’s irritable voice came through the open door—“I told you to wait”—just before its owner stepped over the threshold. She broke off when she saw the three in the hall, and Alex took note that her ill-humored face matched her voice perfectly. Short, going soft as she approached middle age, she had gray-streaked blond hair that she wore in braids pinned on top of her head. “He ran ahead of me all afternoon,” she informed Sara in aggrieved tones, pulling off a woolen scarf that was much too warm for the day and probably accounted for the perspiration beading her pink, discontented countenance.
The boy looked at his feet, whether with contrition or sullenness Alex couldn’t tell. “That was naughty of you, Michael,” Sara said evenly, “you must mind Mrs. Drum. Come and have your tea now, and after—”
“But don’t you want to see me skate? I can do it, Mum, really I can, come and look—”
“He’ll have to wash before his tea,” Mrs. Drum interrupted imperiously. “He’s covered with grime. I’ve never seen a child for dirt like this one. Come upstairs, young man, and get changed.”
Sara put a light hand on the back of Michael’s head. “You know, I think just this once he’ll have his bath later. Thank you, Mrs. Drum, I’ll send him up to you in half an hour.”
Alex and Michael looked back and forth at the locked gazes of the two women, both fascinated by the undercurrent of war going on between them. The battle was swift but bitter. Mrs. Drum’s round hazel eyes turned muddy with resentment and her colorless lips thinned. “Very good, Mrs. Cochrane,” she said with eerie indifference, then turned and trudged up the wide oak staircase while they all watched.
“Well,” Sara said faintly. She could feel the flush on her cheeks. Her eyes sidled over Mr. McKie’s interested gaze as she reached for Michael’s hands to examine them. “Good lord, she’s right,” she murmured, and started to laugh.
Michael’s infectious giggle prompted Alex to laugh with them. With their heads together, faces alight with the thrill of conspiracy, the resemblance between mother and son intrigued him. Had Sara Longford’s hair been that brilliant shade of yellow-white when she was a girl? he wondered. It was honey-gold now in the light from the open door, heavy and rich and lush. They had exactly the same eyes, though—blue-gray and guileless, and full of mischief at the moment.
Sara straightened. “Really, darling, you are a fright. Go and wash your hands,” she said in a no-nonsense voice, pointing Michael toward the lavatory at the end of the hall. “Then come and join us—we’re in the blue parlor.”
“Okay.”
“And put your skates by the door.”
“Okay!”
He trotted off. Sara smiled at Alex, feeling more relaxed with him than she ever had. “Mrs. Drum can be a bit of a trial,” she confided.
“So I see. Why do you keep her on?”
“Oh … we’re used to her,” she hedged. “And Michael’s getting so big, it won’t be long before he won’t need a nanny at all.” She went to the hall table and rang the bell for tea. When the servant arrived carrying a tray, Sara said, “Shall we?” to Alex, leading him back along the paneled hall to the drawing room.
After his tour, the blue parlor seemed almost subdued, or at least less relentlessly over-decorated than most of the other rooms; he suspected it was, for that reason, where Mrs. Cochrane chose to do her private entertaining. “I can’t think what’s keeping Ben,” she told him again as she poured tea into porcelain cups so paper-thin he could almost see through them. He wondered if it was being English that just naturally endowed a woman with that courtly, impossibly refined manner of handing over a teacup. While he made casual conversation, his mind sauntered along its worn and familiar path whenever he contemplated a beautiful woman, turning over the pros and cons, the advantages and obstacles to trying to take her to bed. Would Sara Cochrane be easy to persuade? Her sour marriage would seem to be no deterrent. And although her behavior toward him was still somewhat reserved, experience had taught him that nothing was more deceptive than a lady’s outward demeanor, or less compatible with her true character once she’d made up her mind to be indiscreet.
Nevertheless, his fine-tuned instincts warned him she would be a challenge. She was kind, for one thing—he knew it from her gentle manner, the way she tried to draw him out, the way she treated her son—and coldblooded seduction was always harder—not impossible, but harder—for him to countenance under those circumstances. Constance, for example, had many fine character traits, but compassion for others wasn’t noticeably among them. Besides kindness, though, Mrs. Cochrane had another quality—delicacy, perhaps; he hesitated to call it integrity because the thought was too daunting to his plans—that also tempered his expectations of success. At the very least, then, he would have to go slowly. And carefully, for he’d never broken his own stringent rule of staying away from the wives of clients. The rewards had never seemed worth the risk. Until now. Which was odd, since the rewards for making Ben Cochrane a happy man were much higher than any he’d ever been offered before.
Michael raced into the room, making skating noises. His mother’s low-voiced admonishment transformed him into a gentleman in the blink of an eye. Wet comb tracks in his hair testified to the pains he’d taken with his toilette, evidently for Alex’s benefit. He sat next to him on the sofa and politely devoured wafer-thin watercress sandwiches, cinnamon cookies, and little square sponge cakes, washed down with three cups of hot chocolate. Alex, who almost always felt uncomfortable around children, warmed to him immediately. He’d thought of being charming to Michael as a means of endearing himself to his mother, but clearly he was the one being charmed. He wasn’t sure what it was about the child that appealed to him so strongly; his elegant shyness, perhaps, and his lightning-quick changes from earnest to silly and back again as he made a manly effort to participate in the grown-ups’ conversation. He was impressed when Alex told him he was an architect, and begged to be shown the plans for “Daddy’s new house” when he learned they were inside the long, intriguing tube of cardboard on the floor. “Oh, no, you needn’t—” Sara started to protest when Alex agreed. He assured her it was quite all right, while privately contrasting her indifference with her son’s interest in the house they were both going to live in one day.
Opening the tube, he spread his drawings out in the center of the sofa, anchoring the ends with pillows. Michael stared down at them until it occurred to him that some comment was called for, and then he said, “Very nice,” in such a false, politely adult tone that Alex had to hold back a laugh. Obviously his drawings were a let-down. In the simplest terms he could think of, he began to try to explain what the neatly sketched plans and sections and elevations meant.
Sara stood up. Listening to Mr. McKie’s careful, measured sentences finally piqued her curiosity, and she couldn’t resist going closer for a look at his work. At first she could only sympathize with Michael’s disappointment, for the drawings looked only vaguely like a house—more like webs or networks of wires with numbers and
arrows scattered around at random. But her eyes shifted perspective when he explained that this one was a view from above, this from the side, this one a slice down the middle.
“Why don’t you just draw a picture of it?” Michael wanted to know. His shyness was drifting away, which meant he was becoming more direct.
“But I have,” Alex insisted. “This is how I explain to all the different people who’ll have to work on the house—the plumbers, painters, plasterers, electricians—what I want them to know. I use drawings to tell people what I want done, the same way your dad uses letters or reports.”
“But I can’t see it. What does it look like?”
Alex scowled, thinking. Then he flipped the top drawing over, took an odd-looking pencil from his inner pocket, and began to sketch. Michael was kneeling on the floor. He rested his chin on his crossed hands at the edge of the sofa and exhaled a sigh of satisfaction, watching expectantly.
Sara perched on the sofa arm above them, holding her empty teacup. She wondered if Mr. McKie’s soft-looking brown hair had been blond in his youth, for it was still that color at the forehead and temples. He wore it in the fashionable new side part, without side-whiskers. She’d thought him handsome the other night at Sherry’s, but she hadn’t much liked him. Today she liked him very much. Because he was being so nice to Michael, of course. But no—not only that. He must have found the house shocking, atrocious, but he hadn’t let on by so much as a raised eyebrow. She sensed that he took pride in his work, and an instinct told her he was good at it; so it must have taken a great deal of restraint—born of kindness, surely, and consideration for her feelings—to subdue his professional dismay and pretend that the monstrous edifice did not repel him.