Chapter 288: Drunk by noon
"I have everything under control," Julian said.
Madam Vale looked at the television. At Amara’s face, frozen in a still frame beneath a headline that was doing its best to narrate a story it did not understand.
"She is extraordinary," his mother said. It was not a question and not quite a statement...something between them.
"Yes," Julian said. Simply. "She is."
Another pause.
"Come for breakfast when this is done," Madam Vale said. "Both of you. And bring my grandchildren."
"Yes, Mother." She ended the call. She picked up her tea.
She looked at the television for one more moment at the headline, at the ticker, at the assembled machinery of a narrative that had been handed to the world by a man who had spent thirty years underestimating the people around him, and then she pointed the remote at the screen and turned it off.
She had correspondence to finish.
—-
In the Creed mansion, all the curtains were drawn by three in the afternoon.
This was the first thing Seren noticed when the school car dropped her at the gate the curtains, which her father never drew in the daytime, which belonged to evenings and bedtimes and the domestic punctuation of a day that had run its course.
It was not evening. It was not bedtime. The curtains were drawn regardless, and she stood at the gate for a moment with her school bag on her back and her lunchbox in her hand and the specific, quiet dread of a child who has learned to read a house before entering it.
She was ten years old. She had learned a great deal in ten years. She pushed open the gate and walked up to the front door.
The house smelled different.
Not bad, not dirty or neglected, the staff still came, things were still maintained in the surface way of a house whose owner had not yet lost the infrastructure of his life, only the will to animate it.
But underneath the surface smell of the cleaned rooms, there was something else, something that Seren had no words for yet, and so she held it as a feeling, the particular atmosphere of a place where someone had been sitting very still for a very long time.
She found him in the sitting room.
He was in the large chair, the one that faced the window, he had covered with a glass on the table beside him, and the particular, boneless quality of a man who had not moved enough today.
The television was on, but he was not watching it. He was watching the middle distance that was not actually the middle distance but was somewhere inside himself, somewhere she could not follow, somewhere that had been taking him away with increasing frequency in the weeks since everything changed.
There was a bottle on the table. It was mostly empty.
Seren stood in the doorway with her school bag and her lunchbox, and she looked at her father, and her father looked at the covered window, and the television said things that neither of them was listening to.
"Daddy."
He turned.
The process of his returning from wherever he had been took a moment. She watched it happen, watched his eyes find her and then focus, watched the thing that lived in his face when he was like this recede enough to make room for her.
"Seren." He sat up. The movement cost him something. "Hey, baby."
"You forgot to pick me up," she said.
Not accusatory. Just reporting. Stating the fact of it in the careful, neutral tone she had developed for delivering information that might produce a reaction she didn’t want to cause.
He looked at her.
Then he looked at the window.
Then he looked at the glass on the table and at the bottle beside it, and something moved through his face that she recognized as the specific, private shame of someone seeing themselves clearly for a moment through someone else’s eyes and not caring for the view.
"What time is it?" he said.
"Half past three," she said. He pressed his hand over his eyes.
"I’m so sorry, my love." He began, with visible effort, to stand. The effort was real, not performed, not for her benefit, but the genuine physical negotiation of a body that had spent the day in a chair with a bottle for company and was now being asked to be a father, which required a different kind of being upright.
"I’m so sorry. Come here. Are you okay? Did you wait long?"
"Mariam’s mum made me join the school bus," Seren said. She came into the room and set her lunchbox on the coffee table and slid her school bag off her shoulders with the practiced efficiency of a child who had learned not to make extra mess in rooms where her father was already struggling.
"I will make you some dinner, okay? I know how to do the pasta."
"No." He was upright now, and he looked at her, really looked at her, the way he looked at her when he was fully present, which was the version of her father she loved most because it was the version that looked at her like she was the most important thing in any room.
"No, sweetheart. That’s my job. I’ll make dinner." He crossed to her and crouched down to her level and put his hands on her shoulders. "Go change your uniform. Do your homework. Give me twenty minutes."
Seren looked at him.
She had Elara, her mother’s eyes, everyone said so, the staff, the relatives, even her father, who said it sometimes with a complicated expression she was still too young to fully decode.
She looked at him with those eyes now, with the direct, undefended attention of a child who had not yet learned to look at difficult things sideways.
"Daddy," she said.
"Yes, baby."
"I don’t like it when you’re sad."
He looked at her.
His jaw moved.
"I know," he said. Quietly.
"Should I call Mummy?"
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