For the Sake of Elena

by Elizabeth George

  Anthony said, “Justine, you encouraged her? You knew?”

  “Of course she knew.”

  “That isn’t true,” Justine said.

  “Don’t think for a moment that she didn’t want Elena to get pregnant, Anthony. She was willing to settle for anything to drive you away from her. Because if she did that, she’d get what she wanted. You. Alone. With no more distractions.”

  “No,” Justine said.

  “She hated Elena. She wanted her dead. I wouldn’t be surprised if she killed her herself.”

  And for a moment—just the fraction of an instant—Justine saw the doubt on his face. She recognised the working of knowledge: she’d been alone in the house when the Ceephone call came, she’d gone out running alone in the morning, she hadn’t taken the dog, she could have beaten and strangled his daughter.

  She said, “My God, Anthony.”

  “You knew,” he replied.

  “That she had a lover. Yes. But that’s all. And I spoke to her. Yes. About cleaning…about hygiene. About taking care that she didn’t—”

  “Who was it?”

  “Anthony.”

  “God damn you, who was it?”

  “She knows,” Glyn said. “You can see that she knows.”

  “How long?” Anthony asked. “How long had this been going on?”

  “Did they do it here, Justine? In the house? While you were home? Did you let them? Did you watch? Did you listen at the door?”

  Justine pushed herself away from the table. She got to her feet. Her head felt empty.

  “I want answers, Justine.” Anthony’s voice rose. “Who did this to my daughter?”

  Justine fought to find the words. “She did it to herself.”

  “Oh yes,” Glyn said, her eyes bright and knowing. “Let’s have at the truth.”

  “You’re a viper.”

  Anthony stood. “I want the facts, Justine.”

  “Then take yourself off to Trinity Lane to find them.”

  “Trinity..” He turned from her to the wall of windows beyond which his Citroën stood on the drive. “No.” He was out of the room without another word, leaving the house without a coat, the sleeves of his striped shirt snapping in the wind. He got into the car.

  Glyn reached for an egg. “It didn’t quite play out as you planned it,” she said.

  Adam Jenn stared at the neat lines of his handwriting and tried to make sense out of his notes. The Peasants’ Revolt. The council of regency. A new query: Was the composition of the council of regency, rather than the imposition of new poll taxes, largely instrumental in the circumstances that led to the revolt of 1381?

  He read a few phrases about John Ball and Wat Tyler, about the Statute of Labourers, and about the King. Richard II, well-intentioned but ineffectual, had lacked the skills and the backbone necessary for a man to be a leader. He had tried to please everyone but had succeeded only in destroying himself. He was historical proof of the contention that success requires more than merely a coincidental birthright. Political acumen is the key to arriving unscathed at a personal and professional goal.

  Adam himself had been living his academic life according to that precept. He’d made his choice of advisor carefully, spending hours of his time scoping out the candidates for the Penford Chair. He finally made his move in Anthony Weaver’s direction only when he felt relatively assured that the St. Stephen’s medievalist would be the selection of the University search committee. To have the holder of the Penford Chair as his advisor would virtually guarantee him the benefits he found essential to labelling himself an eventual success—the initial position of academic supervisor to undergraduates, the consequent attainment of a research fellowship, the future movement to lecturer, and finally a professorship before his forty-fifth birthday. All of it seemed within the bounds of reasonable expectation when Anthony Weaver had taken him on as a graduate advisee. So cooperating with Weaver’s request that he take the professor’s daughter under his wing in order to make her second year at the University a smoother and more pleasant experience than her first had appeared to be yet another fortuitous opportunity for him to demonstrate—if only to himself—that he possessed the requisite amount of political perspicacity to flourish in this environment. What he had not counted on when first told about the professor’s handicapped daughter and first envisaging Dr. Weaver’s gratitude for the time he expended on smoothing the troubled waters of his daughter’s life was Elena herself.

  He had been expecting to be introduced to a stoop-shouldered, concave-chested, pasty-skinned fading wildflower of a girl, someone who sat miserably on the edge of a threadbare ottoman with her legs tucked back and clinging to its sides. She’d be wearing an old dress printed with rosebuds. She’d be wearing ankle socks and scruffy-looking brogues. And for Dr. Weaver’s sake, he’d do his duty with an appealing blend of gravity and graciousness. He’d even carry a small notebook in the pocket of his jacket to make sure that they could communicate in writing at all times.

  He’d held on to this fictional Elena all the way into the sitting room of Anthony Weaver’s house, even going so far as to scan the guests who were there for the history faculty’s Michaelmas drinks party. He’d had to give up the idea of the threadbare ottoman quickly enough when he saw the nature of the house’s furnishings—he doubted that anything threadbare or frayed would be allowed to remain for longer than five minutes in this elegant environment of leather and glass—but he did maintain his mental image of the cringing, retiring, handicapped girl alone in a corner and afraid of everyone.

  And then she came swinging towards him, wearing a clingy black dress and dangling onyx earrings, her hair catching her movement and subtly duplicating the sway of her hips. She smiled and said what he took for “Hi. You’re Adam, aren’t you?” because her pronunciation wasn’t clear. He noted the fact that she smelled like ripe fruit, that she didn’t wear a bra, that her legs were bare. And that every man in the room followed her movement with his eyes, no matter the conversation in which he was engaged.

  She had a way of making a man feel special. He’d learned that soon enough. Astutely, he realised that this feeling of being the sole interest in Elena’s life came from the fact that she had to look directly at people in order to read their lips whenever they spoke to her. And for a time he convinced himself that that was the entirety of his attraction to her. But even on the first evening of their acquaintance, he found his eyes continually dropping to the nubs of her nipples—they were erect, they pressed against the material of her dress, they asked to be sucked and moulded and licked—and he found his hands sore with the need to slide round her waist, cup her buttocks, and pull her against him.

  He’d done none of that. Ever. Not once in the dozen or more times they’d been together. He’d not even kissed her. And the single time she’d reached out impulsively and ran her fingers the length of his inner thigh, he had automatically knocked her hand away. She laughed at him, amused and unoffended. And he wanted to strike her every bit as much as he wanted to fuck her. He felt the desire like a blaze of fire burning right behind his eyes, needing both at once: the violence of abuse and the sexual act itself; the sound of her pain and the satisfying knowledge of her unwilling submission.

  It was always that way whenever he saw too much of a woman. He felt caught within a raging argument of desire and disgust. And perennially playing in the back of his mind was the memory of his father beating his mother and the sound of their frantic coupling afterwards.

  Knowing Elena, seeing Elena, dutifully squiring her here and there had all been part of the political process of academic advancement and scholastic success. But like any act of egocentric machination, what posed as selfless cooperation was not without its attendant price.

  He had seen as much in Dr. Weaver’s face whenever the professor asked him about time spent with Elena, just as he had seen it on the very first night when Weaver’s eyes followed his daughter round the room, shining with satisfaction when she paus
ed to talk to Adam and not to someone else. It wasn’t long before Adam had realised that the price for success in a milieu in which Anthony Weaver played a major role was likely to be bound up intimately in how things developed in Elena’s life.

  “She’s a wonderful girl,” Weaver would say. “She has a lot to offer a man.”

  Adam wondered what twists and turns and rough roads lay in his future now that Weaver’s daughter was dead. For while he’d chosen Dr. Weaver as his advisor strictly for the potential benefits that might accrue from such a choice, he had come to know that Dr. Weaver had accepted him with his own set of benefits in mind. He harboured them in secret, no doubt calling them his dream. But Adam knew exactly what they were.

  The study door opened as he was staring at his references to the fourteenth-century riots in Kent and Essex. He looked up, then pushed back his chair in some confusion as Anthony Weaver came into the room. He hadn’t expected to see him for at least another several days, so he hadn’t done much about straightening up the litter of teacups and plates and essays across the table and on the floor. Even had he done so, the appearance of his advisor directly upon the heels of his having been thinking about him caused the heat to seep up Adam’s neck and spread across his cheeks.

  “Dr. Weaver,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting..” His voice drifted off. Weaver was wearing neither jacket nor overcoat, and his dark hair was curled and chaotic from the wind. He carried neither briefcase nor textbooks. Whyever he had come, it was not to work.

  “She was pregnant,” he said.

  Adam’s throat went dry. He thought about taking a sip of the tea which he’d poured but forgotten about an hour previously. But although he slowly got to his feet, he couldn’t manage any other movement, let alone getting his arm to reach out towards the cup.

  Weaver shut the door and remained standing next to it. “I don’t blame you for it, Adam. Obviously, you were in love with each other.”

  “Dr. Weaver—”

  “I simply wished you’d used some precautions. It’s not the best way to start a life together, is it?”

  Adam couldn’t formulate an answer. It seemed that his entire future depended upon the next few minutes and how he handled them. He danced between the truth and a lie, wondering which would better serve his interests.

  “When Justine told me, I left the house in a rage. I felt like some eighteenth-century father storming out to demand satisfaction. But I know how these things happen between people. I just want you to tell me if you’d talked about marriage. Before, I mean. Before you made love to her.”

  Adam wanted to say that they’d talked about it often, in the late of night typing back and forth furiously on the Ceephone, making plans, sharing dreams, and committing themselves to a life together. But from the roots of such a lie had to grow a convincing performance of grief over the next few months. And while he regretted Elena’s death, he did not actually mourn her passing, so he knew that a show of abject sorrow would prove itself more than he could manage.

  “She was special,” Anthony Weaver was saying. “Her baby—your baby, Adam—would have been special as well. She was fragile and working hard to find herself, it’s true, but you were helping her grow. Remember that. Hold onto that. You were tremendously good for her. I would have been proud to see you together as man and wife.”

  He found he couldn’t do it. “Dr. Weaver, I wasn’t the one.” He dropped his eyes to the table. He concentrated on the open texts, his notes, the essays. “What I mean is I never made love with Elena, sir.” He felt more colour burn its way into his flesh. “I never even kissed her. I hardly ever touched her.”

  “I’m not angry, Adam. Don’t misunderstand. You don’t have to deny you were lovers.”

  “I’m not denying. I’m just telling you the truth. The facts. We weren’t lovers. It wasn’t me.”

  “But she saw only you.”

  Adam hesitated to bring forth the single piece of information which he knew Anthony Weaver was avoiding, perhaps deliberately, perhaps unconsciously. He knew that giving it voice would also mean giving voice to the professor’s worst fears. Yet there seemed to be no other way to convince the man of the truth about his own relationship with Elena. And he was an historian, after all. Historians are supposed to be seekers of truth.

  He could demand no less of himself. He said, “No, sir. You’ve forgotten. I wasn’t the only one Elena saw. There was Gareth Randolph.”

  Weaver’s eyes seemed to unfocus behind his spectacles. Adam hurried on.

  “She saw him several times a week, didn’t she, sir? As part of the deal she’d struck with Dr. Cuff.” He didn’t want to put anything more into words. He could see the grey curtain of knowledge and misery pass across Weaver’s features.

  “That deaf—” Weaver’s words stopped. His eyes sharpened once again. “Did you reject her, Adam? Is that why she looked elsewhere? Wasn’t she good enough for you? Did she put you off because she was deaf?”

  “No. Not at all. I just didn’t—”

  “Then why?”

  He wanted to say, “Because I was afraid. I thought she would suck the marrow from my bones. I wanted to have her and have her and have her but not marry her, God not marry her and live on the black edge of my own destruction for the rest of my life.” Instead, he said, “It just didn’t happen between us.”

  “What?”

  “The sort of connection one looks for.”

  “Because she was deaf.”

  “That wasn’t an issue, sir.”

  “How can you say that? How can you even expect me to believe it? Of course it was an issue. It was an issue for everyone. It was an issue for her. How could it not be?”

  Adam knew this was dangerous ground. He wanted to retreat from the confrontation. But Weaver was waiting for his answer, and his stony expression told Adam how important it was that he answer correctly.

  “She was just deaf, sir. Nothing else. Just deaf.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “That there was nothing else wrong with her. Even being deaf wasn’t something wrong. It’s just a word people use to indicate something’s missing.”

  “Like blind, like mute, like paralysed?”

  “I suppose.”

  “And if she’d been those things—blind, mute, paralysed—would you still be saying that it wasn’t an issue?”

  “But she wasn’t those things.”

  “Would you still be saying it wasn’t an issue?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t say. I can only say that Elena’s being deaf wasn’t an issue. Not for me.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “Sir.”

  “You saw her as a freak.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “You were embarrassed by her voice and pronunciation, by the fact that she couldn’t ever tell how loud she was speaking so that when you were out in public together, people would hear that odd voice. They’d turn, they’d be curious. And you’d feel embarrassed with all those eyes on you. And ashamed, of her, of yourself, of being embarrassed in the first place. Not the great liberal that you once thought you were. Always wishing that she were normal because if she were—if she just could hear—then you really wouldn’t feel as if you owed her something more than you were able to give.”

  Adam felt his body going cold, but he didn’t respond. He wanted to pretend that he hadn’t heard, or at the very least, to keep his face from revealing the extent to which he comprehended the underlying meaning of what the professor had said. He saw that he failed to do so on both scores, for Weaver’s own face seemed to crumble in on itself and he said, “Oh God.”

  He walked to the mantel where Adam had continued to place the gathering collection of envelopes and messages. With what appeared to be a tremendous effort, he swept them up and carried them to his desk and sat down. He began to open them, slowly, ponderously, his movements weighted by twenty years of denial and guilt.

  Adam cautiously lowered himself into his
chair. He went back to his notes, but he saw this time even less than he had managed to see before. He knew that he owed Dr. Weaver some sort of reassurance, a reaching out in fellowship and love. But nothing in his twenty-six years of limited experience provided him with the words to tell the other man that there was no sin in feeling what he felt. The only sin was in running away from it.

  He heard the professor quake with a convulsive sound. He turned in his chair.

  Weaver, he saw, had been opening the envelopes. And although the contents of at least three of them lay on his lap and another was crumpled into his fist, he was looking at nothing. He had removed his spectacles and covered his eyes with his hand. He was weeping.

  16

  Melinda Powell was about to wheel her bicycle from Queens’ Lane into Old Court when a panda car pulled up less than half a block away. A uniformed policeman got out of it, as did the President of Queens’ College along with the senior tutor. The three of them stood talking in the cold, arms folded across their chests, breath clouding the air, faces grave and grim. The policeman nodded at something the President was saying to the senior tutor, and as they moved apart from one another, preparatory to the policeman’s taking his leave, a noisy Mini rumbled into the lane from Silver Street and parked behind them.

  Two people emerged, a tall, blond man wearing a cashmere overcoat and a squat, square woman swathed in scarves and wool. They joined the others, the blond man producing some sort of identification and the President of the College following up by offering his hand. There was a great deal of earnest conversation, a gesture from the President towards the side entrance to the college, and what appeared to be some sort of direction given by the blond to the uniformed policeman. He nodded and came trotting back to where Melinda stood with her mittened hands curved round the handlebars of her bike, feeling the cold from the metal seeping through the knit wool like strips of damp. He said, “Sorry, miss,” as he scooted past her and stepped through the gateway into the college.