Another Eden (5 page)

"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 gases 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 overdecorated 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.

She liked his manners, too, the easy way he talked and listened, his naturalness. She didn't need to be told that women found him charming; she found him so herself and was perfectly aware of a pull between them that was subtly but unmistakably sexual. It didn't concern her. Once in a great while she met a man she felt drawn to, one who, under other circumstances, in a different life, could have become important to her. But this was her life and these were her circumstances. And so it was possible to enjoy Mr. McKie's company, to take pleasure in looking at him—even to flirt a little—without engaging anyone's true feelings, hers or his, and without penetrating the deceptively pliant surface of courtesy and reserve she used to protect her inner life.

"Why do you move your hand like that when you draw?" Michael wanted to know. Sara wondered, too; he rotated the pencil in his fingers slightly as he drew each line.

"Like this? It keeps the lead sharp. You don't get any flat spots, so no wide, fuzzy lines."

"Neat. What's that?" He pointed.

"The carriage house and the stables."

"Oh. What's that?"

"Greenhouse."

Sara pressed her fingers to her lips. Just what they needed at their summer pied-a-terre on the ocean: a greenhouse. "And that?" Michael prodded. "Pool." "
Pool
?" she exclaimed, taken by surprise. "But—isn't the house on the water? The Narragansett Bay?"

Alex made sure his voice stayed neutral. "Yes, but Ben thought a pool would be nice for anyone who didn't like salt water. And it'll be heated, so you can swim year-round."

"Heated," she echoed weakly. Dear God.

"It's really
big
, isn't it?"

Out of the mouths of babes, thought Alex, still sketching. "Yes, indeed. Lots of rooms for you to play in."

"What will it be made of?" Sara asked dully.

"Limestone. Coral-colored."

Michael had finished counting the wings out loud—four—and was starting on the chimneys—seven so far. "It looks just like a castle," he noted with enthusiasm.

"It's a… sort of villa, isn't it? Italian?"

"Currently," Alex answered, then bit his tongue. It wasn't prudent to complain about the vagaries of the client's demands to the client's wife. Even if the client's wife would sympathize with him—and he suspected this one would.

"What's going to be on the new floor?"

Was there a twinkle in her eye now? He ignored it, in case he'd imagined it. "Servants' quarters. It's really a half-floor."

Then Michael wanted to know how the servants could Eve on a half-floor; would they have to bend over all the time? Alex started to explain, but the image of doubled-up servants caught Michael's fancy all at once and he burst into laughter. He had a giddy, gurgling laugh Sara could never resist, no matter what silliness provoked it. It overcame him now and he slid to the floor, convulsed with mirth. He recovered enough to get up and demonstrate how the hapless servants would have to live, which struck him as doubly hilarious and started him off again.