strange things done ’neath the midnight sun” while thinking, How thin her hair has become!
Discovering Natalie in eavesdropping range by the pantry offered little in the way of surprise; she faded from view and was next seen gathered around Mother Whitelaw’s rather good Georgian tea service, which when Paul was in jail had represented, in his mind, if not the good life, then the unconfined life; and once he’d heard it appraised in the spinning portrait of value called “the estate,” he immediately concluded it would be even handsomer in cash form than it had been during its two hundred years on an Edinburgh sideboard before Sunny Jim swept it to the Rockies on the wings of his credit card. When in unlamented down-and-out days Paul had suggested to Evelyn that she possibly gather it unto him, she cried “Never!” and thus differentiated herself from her own sister, who at the behest of a discomposed main man would’ve jogged off with the whole kit and kaboodle.
“Good afternoon, Natalie.”
“Paul.” She seemed unable to fathom his warm and admiring gaze. Alice Whitelaw got up to fill the teapot, trailing a cloud of Joy perfume behind her. When the spring-loaded door to the kitchen quit flashing, Paul said to Natalie, “Stop by later and I’ll throw a good one into you.”
“Give it a rest, Paul.”
Paul parted the drapes absentmindedly. “Around eightish would be good.” Then, to Alice, who’d just returned with the exaggerated difficulty meant to highlight her hospitality, “I hope you’ve packed plenty of warm things, Mrs. Whitelaw!”
“Nice black English breakfast,” said Alice Whitelaw. “Yes, I have, Paul, all I’ll need.”
“You’re going to Alaska, you know.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Icebergs, igloos, killer whales with the big fin.” He sailed on, completely twisted in Natalie’s view but merely baffling in her mother’s. “In a ship with a casino, four ballrooms, six restaurants and
a putting green,
you will be insulated from the very worst of the people who wish to take such a trip.” And hopefully all memories of Papa in his final days, the dribbling fuckwit who’d once ruled them with such might and incomprehension.
“I don’t know about
that
.
I
wish to be on this trip. Paul, I hope to be dis
or
iented by comfort and services. I don’t want to suffer, but I don’t want to be around here before I can make sense of things.”
“What do you mean ‘sense of things’?”
“Just what I said. We’re not having the easiest time of this, Paul. And we hear quite frequently from the employees. Maybe you can see our point of view.”
Paul was aware of the discontent but thought, I’m going to kick ass and take names. “Of course I can,” said Paul with surprising mildness. “I find it very awkward, and I hope that by running things profitably and intelligently that I will win your confidence.”
“As a businessman,” Alice Whitelaw said, “you already have it.”
Paul was not about to go digging around about what other areas might lie in Ma Whitelaw’s omissions when it was far better to pour tincture on her remark and treat it like blanket approval. At all events the bottom line was the bucks.
While Natalie watched in amazement, he beamed like Howdy Doody and stated his gratitude. He said nothing whatsoever about what it was to be chained to the bottling plant for as far into the future as he could see, or to go through life as an ex-convict in a Paul Stuart Canadian twill suit and a hundred-dollar shantung tie. What chance was there of persuading her that he had a stain which no money could reach, and which was perhaps not entirely visible to someone heading for an Alaskan cruise in a haze of thousand-dollar-an-ounce perfume?
Aware of their gazes crossing somewhere in front of him, Paul felt rather hemmed in and took a geographer’s note of the form and movement of altocumulus clouds through the garden window, some starting to stream in from the north.