Page 52 of Gifted & Talented

“Oh, I’ve always thought it would be so romantic to tie a man’s tie,” said Philippa, slipping an arm around his waist. “Unfortunately, I haven’t the faintest idea how.”

Arthur chuckled as Philippa folded into his embrace with an ease that would have filled Gillian with longing, for reasons entirely unrelated to the presence of another woman. “I could teach you now, if you wanted. We could make quite a portrait of domesticity.”

“As tempting as that would be, I think adventure suits us more.” Philippa smiled up at him and Arthur bent to kiss her neck.

“Well, I suppose that adventure is about to change, isn’t it? A very domestic adventure, such that tie-tying might not be totally out of place.” His lips traveled to her clavicle, to the place she wore a locket with a filigreedM,for Mouse. “It’s nice, isn’t it? Having so much time,” said Arthur, winding his hands into her hair, which Philippa currently wore loose and windswept and golden. Arthur’s father’s death had created an interesting pocket universe where time no longer mattered and everything felt suspended, hung low and swaying on an existential breeze.

“I suppose we’ll have more of this soon enough,” Arthur realized. He could certainly afford a few months to bond full-time with Riot, and surelyPhilippa would want to continue her charity work, so perhaps it would make more sense for Arthur to stay home. “What do you think about me taking a year off, or maybe more than that, when the baby comes?”

“Ouch,” said Philippa, withdrawing to look up at him with a little pout. “You stung me.”

“I did?” asked Arthur, confused. Normally he was more aware when things were going awry. “Like a static shock, you mean? I’m sorry.” The electrical malfunctions had been confined to work situations up to then, a slip for which he felt a genuine guilt. “I suppose it’s my father’s death—everything’s just a bit off.” Even more so than usual, and the “usual” of the past few weeks had already been less than ideal. “You know, when I woke up this afternoon I couldn’t even move, like one of those weird paralytic dreams,” Arthur remarked, before recalling, “Where were you, by the way?”

Philippa was plucking lint from his collar. “Oh, I was just—”

“Brother Indolent,” announced Meredith, bursting once again into the room. This time she wore a black dress that looked some years off trend, her hair in severe, precise curls that she had pulled into a ponytail, and at her side, with one hand tucked into hers as if he were a prop, was Cass. “Do you intend to conduct your indecencies in a public way,” Meredith asked Arthur, “or would you like to track down your wife?”

“I’m here,” said Gillian in a small, efficient voice, bustling past Meredith in the clothes she’d been wearing that morning. Arthur moved instinctively to let go of Philippa, then realized Philippa had already withdrawn from him, busying herself with her hair. Gillian met Arthur’s gaze in the mirrored surface, pausing him for a moment. She was looking very intently at him, more so than usual. Gillian had the most remarkable eyes, thought Arthur. He supposed as a practical matter they were brown—that was what it said on Gillian’s passport, brown eyes, brown hair—but there was something of an earth-shattering quality to looking at her, a burst, like watching a flower bloom before his eyes in an effervescing time lapse.

“Are you all right?” Arthur mouthed to her.

Gillian turned her gaze from his in the mirror. “Fine,” she said in her usual perfunctory way, reaching up to untie his tie with characteristically brutal efficiency. She had taken offense to his usual Windsor, as she often did, but this time, as she began tactically reconstructing the double Windsor that was, to Gillian, as significant as the Oxford comma, she hesitated a moment, for the first time ever doing so that Arthur could remember, andsimply paused there, as if she were temporarily confused—no, the opposite. As if she’d had a revelation.

Then her eyes lifted sheepishly to something over Arthur’s shoulder, an odd expression alighting on Gillian’s cheeks with a flush that Arthur had never seen before.

From the mirror, Arthur caught Yves’s insouciant presence in the doorway. Then he spotted Philippa’s narrowed gaze, which lingered on Gillian’s back.

From where they rested uneasily at his sides, Arthur’s knuckles tensed. Overhead, the lights resumed flickering, one bulb sharply burning out.

“Hello?” said Meredith in a voice that was pure infuriation. “Did I not make it clear that you’re all running late?”

23

By six thirty that evening, Eilidh had done what she customarily did at social functions and disappeared. She sat alone in the chair behind the desk in her father’s home office, ignoring the muffled sound of partygoing mourners outside the door while staring up at the painting on the wall. It was a Degas, one of the paintings of the ballerinas, which Thayer had purchased at great expense in honor of Eilidh, assuming she would love it. She didn’t, and not because it made her nostalgic, or even sad.

Actually, it was one of the rare things in her life that made her feel better about having lost ballet. She had never told her father how sinister that series of paintings felt to her, how insidious they seemed, the way there was a male presence lurking in them, the idle sense of depravity to the girls being placed on display. How young they were, the dancers—howgirlish. Pretty things in pretty clothes. Ballet was both delicacy and contortion. Like girlhood, ballet was art meant for consumption; it was virtuous because it was beautiful pain.

Eilidh learned later that her instincts were right—that at the time Degas painted, ballet was actual entrapment in its way, with the girls plucked off the street too young to say no, usually forced to engage in sex work for their patrons. Ballet had always been a little bit cruel, the way that at the highest levels it deformed you, hurt you, broke you. Eilidh had thought that was something she and her father had in common. The brokenness, which made Eilidh harder to love, actually, than Meredith.

Eilidh thought of her affairs, her liaisons with other dancers; the way that they, too, were just bodies to her. Means to an end. Which was not to say it hadn’t been consensual, but Eilidh only knew how to live for an audience. What she did with her lovers was never sacred because there was always the implication of a performance. Her intimacy was a lie that lived in the lurking presence of some higher desire—at the time it was ambition, hercraving to shine on the stage. It was a hunger that Eilidh still felt, but no longer knew how to satisfy.

The thing in her chest snapped with an unquenched thirst for vengeance, like biting the inside of its cheek and flooding the Nile red.

“Oh. You’re already in here.”

Eilidh glanced up sharply to find Meredith standing in the doorway of Thayer’s office, looking annoyed. Meredith hesitated, then shrugged and closed the door behind her. “Fine.”

It was Meredith’s usual treatment of her, as if Eilidh were something she wished would disappear, an inconvenience or a blemish. Something that would, eventually, go away if she simply outlasted, which Meredith usually did. But Eilidh didn’t currently feel like giving in.

“I don’t like them either,” Eilidh pointed out, gesturing to the people outside. “Are you drunk?” she asked in matronly disbelief, noting Meredith’s quick stumble over the corner of the office rug. To Meredith’s answering middle finger, Eilidh sighed, shaking her head. “Dad would hate this,” she muttered, now sounding all of six years old.

“Disagree,” Meredith countered, toasting her with a bubbling glass. “Or rather, irrelevant. He’s gone.”

Eilidh said nothing.

“I think he’d find it funny. Champagne for his real friends,” said Meredith in an ironic toast, draining the glass and then moving as if to drop it on the floor.

Eilidh leapt up from her chair. “Don’t—!”

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