Nine O’Clock

The painter had finished the ceiling of Room 19 that morning, and Gideon was standing under it at one o’clock on Friday looking for the place where the stain had been.

He could not find it. The plaster was flat and white from wall to wall. The carpet was gone and the pine underneath had been sanded and oiled, and it glowed like honey in the light from the lake. There was a new mattress on the bed with the plastic still on it. The bucket had gone back to housekeeping.

That left six days. On Thursday Winnie would have twenty-two keys on the board behind her desk for the first time in three years.

He heard the car before he saw it. He went to the window. A dark grey sedan was coming up the drive at a walking pace, with a driver in front and one passenger behind. It stopped at the front steps. The driver got out and opened the rear door, and a tall, stooped man with white hair unfolded himself onto the gravel and stood looking up at the new copper.

Gideon went down the stairs two at a time.

Desmond Pike was sixty-four. He had been thin all his life and had bent a little further forward every year, like a man reading over someone’s shoulder. He wore a charcoal suit and rimless glasses, and a fat dark-green fountain pen was clipped in his breast pocket, where it had been clipped since Gideon was a boy.

“Desmond. You didn’t say you were coming.”

“No. If I’d said, you would have tidied.” Pike shook his hand with both of his. His eyes were kind and missed nothing. “You look well. You look as though you’ve been outdoors. I find that worrying in a chief executive.”

“Have you had lunch?”

“I had a sandwich in Albany that I’d prefer not to discuss.” He turned and looked down the lawn, at the dock and the mountains. “So this is the place. Thirty-nine days, Gideon. You have never given the Chicago house thirty-nine days in a row, and Chicago makes eleven million dollars a year. I thought I’d come and see what does it.”

“Then I’ll show you.”

He showed him all of it, as he had been shown it himself. Winnie came out from behind the desk and was introduced. She looked Pike over as she had once looked over Gideon, and said that the Champlain Room was made up if he was stopping. He said that he was not, thank you, he would be going back at five.

They went through the fire door into the north wing. Pike walked the corridor with his hands behind his back. He looked into every room. In Room 19 he looked at the ceiling for some time.

“A hundred and forty thousand dollars,” he said.

“Eighty-six for the roof and fifty-four for the rooms. It came in on the figure.”

“I saw it in the commitments report the morning after you signed it. I saw that it was within your limit. I also saw that it was spent on a property with my handwriting in the margin.” He said it mildly. “I’m not here to scold you. You were entitled. I would only point out that a new roof doesn’t change what the land is worth to Alder Shore. They’ll take it down, copper and all.”

“If the board sells.”

“If the board sells. Show me why it shouldn’t.”

Gideon took him to the office and laid it out on the rolltop. There were the two room rates and the reservations book, with twenty-one of the twenty-two rooms taken for the holiday weekend. He showed the bakery window’s three Saturdays, starting with $2,310 on the first of May, and the two white order sheets from Burlington, forty dozen a week from the first of June. Under them was the single page in two handwritings, with fifteen percent taken off every line.

Pike read all of it. He read as he always had, with the cap of the pen against his lower lip. He did not uncap it.

“It’s a careful piece of work,” he said at last. “Whose is the other hand?”

“The head of the kitchen. She built the window from nothing, and the wholesale. She’s the best operator on the property.”

“I should like to meet her.”

Gideon had known that he would say so. He had been deciding since the car came up the drive what his own face ought to do when it happened.

The pastry kitchen at a quarter past two smelled of lamb stock and browning butter. Camille was at the bench in her whites with the blue bandana on, boning a shoulder. She looked up when they came in and put the knife down. She wiped her hands. Her eyes went to Gideon for half a second and told him nothing, and he was proud of her.

“Chef, this is Desmond Pike, our chief operating officer. Desmond, Chef Bouchard.”

Pike had his hand out already. “Chef—”

He stopped. It was a very small stop. His hand stayed in the air between them, and his head came up a little, as if someone had spoken to him from another room.

“Bouchard,” he said.

“That’s right,” said Camille.

“Forgive me. I’ve seen the name written down, and I was trying to think where.” He took her hand then, and bowed over it slightly, in the old-fashioned way he had. “On the payroll schedule, of course. How long have you been with the inn, Chef Bouchard?”

“Since 2019.”

“Since 2019,” Pike repeated. “And you write a very clear figure. I’ve just been reading your wholesale terms. No sale or return. I spent thirty years trying to teach that to hotel men.”

“It isn’t complicated. They’d bin what they hadn’t paid for.”

“Quite so.” He looked round the kitchen, at the deck oven and the old sheeter and the stool at the end of the bench. “I won’t keep you from your lamb. Thank you.”

He had been courteous from first to last. Gideon followed him out and thought about the pause. Desmond read every payroll schedule the company issued, and he forgot nothing with a number beside it. That was probably all it was. Gideon found, in the corridor, that he was not perfectly sure.

At three they were at the front desk with Winnie and the reservations book. Pike was asking about the repeat rate. Camille had come through from the kitchen with a sheet of paper, the dinner menu for the twenty-ninth, which Winnie was to have printed in Vergennes.

The front door opened.

It was a bright afternoon, and the sun came in across the pine floor ahead of her. She was in a blue cotton dress and a cardigan and the red rubber boots, which she wore in all weathers. Her grandmother stood behind her on the porch with a school bag. Tilly came across the lobby at her usual steady pace, and each boot landed squarely.

“The pre-K shut at two,” she told her mother. “It was for kindergarten screening. I was screened. I knew all of it.” She put both hands on the edge of the desk. “Winnie, how many is it now?”

“Twenty-one,” said Winnie. “The last one’s a man from Albany who’s thinking about it.”

“He should stop thinking.” Tilly turned her head and saw Gideon. She did not smile, because she seldom did, but her chin lifted. “Hello, Gideon. Tomorrow is five.”

“I know it is,” he said.

Then she noticed the stranger and looked up at him, full into the light from the door.

Gideon watched Desmond Pike see it.

He had known Conrad Hallett for forty years. He had looked across a desk at that eye every working day from 1989 until the August morning it closed, and for five and a half years since then he had looked at it in Conrad’s son. He did not start. He went entirely still, with one finger on the reservations book, and the colour drained slowly out of his long face. His eyes went from the child’s left eye to Gideon’s and rested there.

He turned to Camille.

“How old is the child, Chef Bouchard?” he asked. His voice was very gentle.

Camille’s hand had come down on Tilly’s shoulder. “She’s five.”

“Five and nearly two months,” Tilly said. “Who are you?”

“My name is Pike. I work with Mr. Hallett, in New York.”

“Are you one of the ones who think it should be sold?”

Winnie made a sound in her throat.

“I am one of the ones who count things,” Pike said gravely. “Somebody has to.”

“I count things too,” said Tilly. She studied him a moment longer and seemed to decide that he was not interesting. “Maman, Mémé says I can have the heel if there is one.”

“There is one. Go with Mémé. I’ll bring it across.”

Lucille had come in from the porch. She took the child’s hand and gave the tall man in the charcoal suit one flat look. She took Tilly out by the side door, toward the cottage. Camille put the menu on the desk in front of Winnie. She did not look at Gideon. She went back down the corridor to her kitchen with her back very straight.

Pike took off his glasses and polished them on his handkerchief.

“Would you excuse me?” he said. “I have a call to return.”

He went out onto the front porch and stood at the far end of it with his telephone, looking at the lake. He was out there for eleven minutes. Winnie turned a page of the book and turned it back.

“That man knows,” she said, without moving her lips.

“I didn’t tell him.”

“Nobody had to tell him. He’s got eyes in his head and so has she.”

When Pike came in he asked whether they might have the office. Gideon shut the door. Pike did not sit down.

“That was Philip Aubrey at Corwin Trust,” he said. “The lenders on the acquisition loan hold their quarterly review on Monday. It’s twenty-three and a half million dollars, Gideon, and it’s seven weeks old. In those seven weeks their borrower’s chief executive has left his desk, gone to the one property of the four that was marked for sale, and spent a hundred and forty thousand dollars on it. They would like him to explain that in person before the review.”

“I can explain it on Monday.”

“They want you tomorrow, in Aubrey’s office, at nine.”

Gideon heard it and for a moment could not speak.

“Tomorrow’s Saturday.”

“Aubrey flies to London on Sunday. Two of the syndicate are coming in from Connecticut.” Pike folded his handkerchief. “He offered me a choice of hours. I told him nine. You’ve been away six weeks, and I prefer them to see you early and eager. Is there a difficulty?”

There was the dock at eight o’clock. There was a jar on a windowsill with four pieces of green glass in it. He could not say either of those things to this man, and the man was watching him with patient, intelligent eyes and waiting to see whether he would.

“Could it be the afternoon?”

“You may ask him. Why would you want it to be?”

“I have a commitment here in the morning.”

“On a Saturday morning, at a country inn.” Pike let that stand for a moment. “Gideon, I have never asked you a personal question in my life and I don’t propose to begin. I’ll say one thing as your father’s friend. If that loan goes into Monday’s review with a question mark on it, no board on earth will vote a dollar for this place in June. Whatever you’re trying to keep here, you’ll lose it by staying.”

He took the pen from his pocket and uncapped it. He wrote on the back of one of his own cards, in green ink and square capitals, and laid the card on the blotter. It said CORWIN TRUST, 9:00 SAT, 41ST FLOOR.

“I’m leaving at five,” he said. “There’s room in the car.”

“I’ll drive myself.”

“As you like.”

Gideon telephoned Philip Aubrey from the boathouse stair at twenty to four. Aubrey was pleasant and immovable. Mr. Pike had said nine would suit. One of the Connecticut men had a daughter graduating at one. It was nine o’clock, or it was Monday’s review without him, and Aubrey could not say how that would go.

He rang off and sat down on the fourth tread from the top, the loose one. He worked it every way he knew. The drive was five hours. If he stood on the dock at eight he would reach Madison Avenue at one in the afternoon, to an empty office. There was no eleventh way to do the sum.

Pike’s car went down the drive at five. Gideon packed a suit.

Friday dinner was thirty-eight covers. He waited on the kitchen porch by the shuttered bakery window until half past seven, when the first rush was out. Arlo saw him through the screen and said something over his shoulder. Camille came out with a side towel in her hands and the heat of the stoves still in her face.

“I’ve two minutes,” she said. “He knows, doesn’t he? Your Mr. Pike.”

“I didn’t tell him. He knew my father’s face for forty years, and he looked at hers. I think he knows. I’m telling you because you ought to hear it from me.”

She took that in with her mouth set. “And?”

“And the banks that lent us the money for the four inns want me in New York at nine tomorrow morning. If I don’t go, the loan goes under review, and the board won’t spend anything here. I tried to move it and I couldn’t. I’m leaving in half an hour.”

She did not move. Behind her a pan hissed, and Arlo called for hands.

“Nine tomorrow,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Then the count starts over. You signed it.”

“I know I did. I’m not asking you to change it.”

“Good. I wouldn’t.” Her voice was quite level, and it was the voice from the first night, the one he had hoped never to hear again. “You were at four.”

“I’ll come straight back when they’ve finished with me. I could leave her a—” He heard it himself and stopped.

“No,” Camille said. “You don’t leave notes at this kitchen. I’ll tell her where you went. I’ll tell her exactly that and nothing kinder.” She twisted the towel once between her hands. “This is the first account, Gideon. Don’t look at me as though it were the other one.”

She went in. The screen door closed on its spring.

He started the car at eight o’clock. The cottage had one lamp lit behind its curtain. He drove past it, and down the drive, and turned south.

Route 22A ran straight through dark farmland, two lanes and no shoulder. He had gone forty minutes on it when a logging truck came over a rise in the middle of the road. He saw the lights and the height of the load and swung right, and the car’s wheels drummed on gravel. The truck went by with a blast of its horn, close enough to rock him on his springs.

He stopped the car at the next farm gate and sat with both hands on the wheel.

He was not hurt, and the car was not marked. It was the kind of thing that happened on a country road a dozen times a night. He sat in the dark and thought, with perfect clearness, of what would have been left if the truck had been a yard further over.

There was a will. Imogen had drawn it up in the autumn of 2021, when he had nobody to think of. It left his forty-five shares to be divided between his mother and his sister. There was a birth certificate in Burlington with a blank line on it. There was a child asleep seven miles from her grandmother’s bus garage who had his eye and nothing else of his. If he died on this road, a man in New York who had gone white in a hotel lobby this afternoon would be the only person on the company’s side who knew that she existed.

She would have a jar with four greens in it. He was about to cost her those.

He took out his wallet. He did not open it. He knew what the yellow paper said. No lawyers. No papers. No money. Not until I say. He put the wallet back and pulled onto the road, and at the junction with Route 4 he told the telephone to call Imogen Farr at home.

She answered on the third ring. Imogen was fifty-one and had been the family’s lawyer since she was a young associate carrying Conrad’s files. Her voice was dry and unhurried at any hour.

“Gideon. It’s a quarter past nine on a Friday. Either someone’s died or you’re in a car.”

“I’m in a car. Imogen, I need something drafted. I need you to listen to the whole of it before you give me the speech.”

“That’s an alarming way to begin.”

“I have a daughter. She’s five. Her name is Matilda Bouchard, and she was born in Burlington, Vermont, on the twenty-seventh of March, 2022. I’ve known for five weeks. There’s no doubt about it and I won’t be testing for any.”

The line hummed. He heard her pull out a chair.

“Go on,” Imogen said.

“I want a trust for her. Five million dollars, out of my own money, with nothing from the company in it. And I want whatever papers would establish me as her father.”

“In Vermont that’s an acknowledgment of parentage, which the mother signs with you, or a petition to the court, which she doesn’t.”

“Draft both. This is the part I need you to write down. You draft, and that’s all you do. Nothing is filed. Nothing is sent. Nobody in Vermont gets a telephone call or an envelope with your firm’s name on it. They sit in your file until I tell you otherwise, and I may never tell you.”

“Does the mother know you’re asking me for this?”

He watched the white line run under the headlights.

“No.”

“Has she said what she wants?”

“She’s said she wants no lawyers and no papers and no money until she says so. I gave her my word on it. I signed it.”

“Then you already know the speech.” Imogen did not raise her voice. “A draft is a paper, Gideon. I can keep it in a drawer, but I can’t make it not exist. Files get opened. Why now?”

“Because a truck nearly put me in a field twenty minutes ago, and there’d have been a blank line and my mother’s lawyers. I won’t leave her with that.”

“That’s a reason to do it. It isn’t a reason to do it behind the woman’s back.”

“I know the difference.”

“I wonder if you do.” She was silent a moment. “I’ll draft. The bill goes to you personally, and it goes in the family file. You’ll have them in a fortnight. Gideon, tell her. Do it soon, and do it yourself.”

“Thank you, Imogen.”

He ended the call. The road went on through Whitehall and out to the Northway, and the signs began to count down the miles to Albany.

He told himself a draft was only words in a drawer. It could not reach her and it took nothing from her. It was a seat belt, and nobody asked leave to wear one. He had handed that kind of reasoning to lenders across polished tables for years, and he knew what it was worth.

There was a telephone in the cottage and he had the number now. He looked at the clock on the dashboard. It was not yet ten. She would be closing down the kitchen. She would answer.

He drove on south with the yellow paper folded in his back pocket, and he did not call.
***