Chapter 10 A House Divided

The luxury of the Hollowell Estate had been designed for people who arrived with the intention of being comfortable.

It accommodated two people who had arrived with the intention of being professional rather less elegantly.

The residential wing was generous—there was no shortage of space, no practical reason for their paths to cross more than their working schedule required. Ernest had his bedroom and his study. Don had his. The shared sitting room between them remained largely unoccupied during the first two weeks—a room that awaited a use that neither of them had yet articulated. There was a fireplace that had not been lit. There were two chairs facing it in the manner of a conversation about to begin that neither party had started.

Ernest walked past the sitting room door several times a day. He did not go in.

He was aware that this was a choice.

The house itself complicated things in ways he hadn't anticipated. A house has its own grammar—the patterns of movement and encounter it creates by virtue of its layout. The corridor to the office was shared. The kitchen was shared. The garden entrance, which Ernest had eventually located on the ground floor at the end of a flagstoned passage, was shared. The house therefore produced, at ordinary intervals throughout the day, moments of overlap that the office alone didn't.

Passing in the corridor. The kitchen in the mornings. The occasional collision of schedules—the afternoon when Ernest returned from a call to find Don on the same corridor staircase, coming the opposite direction, and they had both made the small automatic adjustment of two people in a narrow space, and Don had said nothing, and Ernest had said nothing, and they had passed each other with approximately fourteen inches between them, which was close enough for Ernest to register that Don was wearing a different version of the same cologne he'd always worn. The same base. Something slightly different in the top notes.

He had not found this piece of information useful.

On the tenth day, there was a house meeting.

This was not their idea. Helen Marsh had scheduled it—a practical review of the estate's daily operational needs, the staffing schedule, the maintenance work planned for the winter months, and the logistics of upcoming corporate bookings. She sat at the head of the kitchen table with her notebook and went through the points in her brisk, capable way, and Ernest and Don sat on opposite sides of the table and responded to each item as it arose.

It was, from the outside, entirely ordinary.

From the inside—at least, from Ernest's inside—it was complicated by the fact that this was the closest they had been, physically, since the dining room on the first night. The kitchen table was not large. Don's reading glasses were on the table in front of him—he wore them for documents; he had always resisted them and had evidently stopped resisting—and this detail, which was so ordinary it should have been invisible, caught Ernest's attention for a moment he couldn't justify.

Don had reading glasses. This was new. This was something that had happened in the time he hadn't been there.

There were, Ernest was discovering, many such things. Small developments in the ongoing project of a person that you missed when you were no longer in the room. The reading glasses. The slightly different cologne. The way Don took his coffee now—less sugar than before, no sugar at all, in fact. The physical notebook. The morning garden walks. All the small accumulated evidence of a person continuing to become themselves in the years you spent being elsewhere.

He found this more affecting than made sense.

"The east courtyard drainage," Helen was saying, "needs attention before the winter rains—we've had some flooding issues in past years."

"Budget?" Don said.

Helen gave a figure. Don wrote it down. Ernest noted it on his tablet.

"And the west kitchen garden wall has a section that will need repointing in spring—minor, but worth flagging now."

"Can you get three quotes?" Ernest said. "We should have them on file before the end of the year."

"Of course." Helen made a note. "One more thing." She looked between them. "The Christmas corporate event—the booking is confirmed for the fourteenth of December. It's our largest annual hospitality event. Fifty guests, two nights. Historically both owners have attended the welcome dinner."

A brief pause.

"We'll both attend," Don said.

Ernest looked at him across the table. Don's face was professionally composed, entirely unremarkable.

"Naturally," Ernest said.

Helen looked pleased. "Wonderful. I'll let the events coordinator know."

The meeting concluded. Helen collected her notebook and departed with the efficient warmth she brought to everything. Ernest and Don remained at the kitchen table for a moment in the aftermath.

Don put his reading glasses in their case. Ernest watched him do this in his peripheral vision.

"The Christmas event," Ernest said. Not a question.

"It's the largest single revenue event of the year," Don said. "Of course we will attend." He snapped the glasses case closed. "It's also visible. Clients, contacts. The industry press sometimes cover it. It's an opportunity to demonstrate stability of ownership." He looked up. "Unless you have a conflict."

"No conflict," Ernest said.

"Then there's no issue."

Ernest nodded. He started to stand.

"Ernest."

He stopped. Don said his name rarely—they had been using surnames, mostly, the professional distance of West and James—and the use of his given name now arrived with a slightly different weight.

"The drainage in the east courtyard," Don said. "There's a contractor I've worked with on property issues before. Reliable, good value. I'll have his details sent over."

It was completely prosaic. It was a contractor referral. And yet Ernest stood for a moment registering the fact that Don had a contractor he'd used on property issues. Don had a life, a full and complex life, in which he had hired contractors and bought glasses cases and decided how he took his coffee, and all of it had happened in the years Ernest had not been paying attention.

"Thank you," Ernest said. "That would be useful."

Don nodded. He picked up his glasses case and his notebook and stood and left the kitchen.

Ernest sat back down. He looked at the table—the kitchen table, the empty chairs, the room that held no particular history of the two of them but felt, this morning, full of something.

He sat there longer than he had intended.

Outside, through the kitchen window, the garden lay in its ordered winter quiet, and somewhere in the house a door closed gently, and the day continued.