“That’s not always enough.”
Rodger laughed sharply. “You sound just like her. She’s lost her self, she says. She’s just an extension of everyone else. What absolute rubbish. What she’s lost is things. What her parents provided her. What we used to have when both of us worked. Things.” He dropped his athletic bag next to the sofa, wearily rubbed the back of his neck. “I’ve spoken to her doctor. Give her time, he says. It’s that post-partum business. She’ll be back to herself in a few more weeks. Well, as far as I’m concerned, it had better happen soon. I’m just about at the end of my patience with her.” He nodded at the baby. “Watch her for me, will you? I’ve got to get something to eat.”
That said, he left the room, disappearing through the door that led into the kitchen. The baby gurgled once again and clutched at the air. She made a sound like “uh puh” and grinned with happy, toothless pleasure at the ceiling.
Lynley sat down next to her laundry nest and took hold of one of her hands. It wasn’t much larger than the pad of his thumb. Her nails teased his skin—odd to think that he’d never once considered the fact that babies have nails—and he felt a rush of tenderness towards her. Unprepared to feel anything more than bemusement when left alone with her, he pulled over one of Penelope’s art books. Although the words were out of focus because he didn’t want to bother—couldn’t really bother—with his spectacles, he plunged himself wholeheartedly into distraction with an account of James McNeill Whistler’s earliest days in Paris and the typically stuffy, academic revelation of his relationship with his first mistress, who was both introduced and dismissed from Whistler’s life within the confines of a single gerund phrase: “He began by assuming a life style he deemed appropriate to a bohemian and by going so far as to attract a young milliner—nicknamed La Tigresse with the joyful hyperbolic propensity of the period—to live with and pose for him for a period of time.” Lynley read on, but there was nothing more of the milliner. To the academic who had written the volume, she merited one sentence in an account of Whistler’s life, no matter what she may have been to him, no matter the way in which she may have influenced or inspired his work.
Lynley reflected on the veiled implication behind that simple group of words. Nonentity, they declared, someone he painted and took to his bed. She was consigned to history as Whistler’s mistress. If she’d ever had a self, it was long forgotten.
He got up restlessly, walked across the room to the fireplace with its display of photographs lined up on the mantel. They depicted Penelope with Harry, Penelope with the children, Penelope with her parents, Penelope with her sisters. But there was not a single picture of Penelope alone.
“Tommy?”
He turned to see that Helen had come into the room. She stood near the door, dressed in brown wool and ivory silk with a trim camel jacket slung over her arm. Penelope was just behind her.
He wanted to say to them both, “I think I understand. Now. In this moment. I think I finally understand.” But instead, feeling the depth and breadth of his own inadequacy defined and conditioned by the fact that he was male, he said, “Harry’s getting himself something to eat. Thanks for your help, Pen.”
Her acknowledgement of this was tentative and brief: a movement of her lips that might have passed for a smile, a quick bob of the head. Then she walked to the sofa and began closing her books. She stacked them on the floor and picked up the baby.
“She’s due to be fed,” Penelope said. “I can’t think why she hasn’t begun to fuss.” She wandered from the room. They heard her climbing the stairs.
They didn’t say anything until they were in the car, driving the short distance to Trinity Hall where the jazz concert was scheduled to be performed in the junior combination room. And then it was Lady Helen who broke the silence between them.
“She actually came to life, Tommy. I can’t tell you what a relief it’s been.”
“Yes. I know. I could see the difference.”
“All day she was involved in something beyond the scope of that house. It’s what she needs. She knows it. They both do. They must.”
“Have you talked to her about it?”
“‘How can I leave them?’ she asks me. ‘They’re my children, Helen. What kind of mother am I if I want to leave them?’”
Lynley glanced at her. Her face was averted. “You can’t solve this problem for her, you know.”
“I don’t see how I can leave her if I don’t.”
The determination behind her words plunged his spirits. He said, “You’re planning to stay on here, aren’t you?”
“I’ll phone Daphne tomorrow. She can put off her visit for another week. God knows she’d be happy enough to do so. She has a family of her own.”
Without a thought, he said, “Helen, damn it all, I wish you would—” and then he stopped himself.
He felt her turn in her seat, knew she was watching him. He said nothing more.
“You’ve been good for Pen,” she said. “I think you’ve made her face something she didn’t want to see.”
He took no pleasure from the information. “I’m glad I’m good for someone.”
He parked the Bentley in a narrow space on Garret Hostel Lane, a few yards away from the gentle rise of the footbridge that crossed the River Cam. They walked back towards the porter’s lodge of the college, just down the street from the entrance to St. Stephen’s.
The air was cold, it seemed hung with moisture. A heavy cover of clouds obscured the night sky. Their footsteps echoed against the pavement, a brisk sound like the sharp tattoo of drums.
Lynley glanced at Lady Helen. She was walking near enough at his side that her shoulder brushed his, and the warmth of her arm, the fresh, crisp scent of her body, acted in concert as a call to action which he tried to ignore. He told himself that there was more to life than the immediate gratification of his own desires. And he tried to believe this even as he felt himself grow lost in the simple contemplation of contrast offered by the dark fall of her hair as it swung forward to touch the pearl of her skin.
He said, as if there had been no break in their conversation, “But am I good for you, Helen? That’s the real question, isn’t it?” And although he managed to keep his voice light, his heart still beat rapidly at the back of his throat. “I wonder that. I put the sum of what I am into a balance and weigh it against what I ought to be, and I ask myself if I’m really enough.”
When she turned her head, the amber light shafting down from a window above them surrounded her like an aureole. “Why would you ever think you’re not enough?”
He pondered the question, tracing his thoughts and his feelings right back to their source. He found that both of them grew from her decision to remain with her sister’s family in Cambridge. He wanted her back in London, available to him. If he was good enough for her, she’d return at his request. If she valued his love, she’d bow to his wishes. He wanted her to do so. He wanted an overt manifestation of the love she claimed to feel for him. And he wanted to be the one to decide exactly what that manifestation would be.
But he couldn’t tell her this. So he settled on saying, “I think I’m struggling with a definition of love.”
She smiled and slipped her hand through his arm. “You and everyone else, Tommy darling.”
They rounded the corner into Trinity Lane and entered the college grounds where a blackboard sign had been decorated with the words Jazz Up Your Life Tooo-nite in coloured chalk, and construction paper arrows affixed to the pavement led the way through the main college court to the junior combination room in the northeast corner of the grounds.
Similar to St. Stephen’s College, the building that housed Trinity Hall’s JCR was modern, little more than alternating panels of wood and glass. In addition to the combination room, it contained the college bar, where a considerable crowd was gathered at small round tables, engaged in boisterous conversation that seemed to be revolving round the good-humoured harassment of two men who were playing darts
with rather more intensity than usually accompanied the game. The apparent reason for their avid concentration seemed to be age. One player was a youth of no more than twenty, the other an older man with a close-cropped grey beard.
“Go for it, Petersen,” someone shouted when the younger man took position for his turn. “Junior fellows kick arse. Show him.”
The young man made an elaborate display of loosening up his muscles and assuming the correct stance before he flung the dart and missed the shot entirely. Jeers roared through the room. In response, he turned around, pointed to his backside meaningfully, and hefted a pint of beer to his mouth. The crowd hooted and laughed.
Lynley guided Lady Helen through the jostling group to the bar and from there they made their way towards the JCR, beers in hand. The JCR was built on several different levels accommodating a line of immovable sofas and a number of uninteresting chairs with lazy, slung backs. At one end of the room, the floor rose to what was being used as a small staging area where the jazz group was getting ready to perform.
There were only six of them, so they didn’t need room for anything more than the space required to set up a keyboard and drums, three straight-back chairs for the saxophone, the trumpet, and the clarinet players, and a roughly defined triangular area for the double bass. Electrical extension cords from the keyboard seemed to snake everywhere, and when she turned and saw Lynley and Lady Helen, Miranda Webberly tripped over one in her haste to say hello.
Regaining her footing with a grin, she dashed over to greet them. “You came!” she said. “This is absolutely grand. Inspector, will you promise to tell Dad I’m a musical genius? I’m after another trip to New Orleans, but he’s only likely to cooperate if he thinks I’ve a future playing the changes on Bourbon Street.”
“I’ll tell him you play like an angel.”
“No! Like Chet Baker, please!” She greeted Lady Helen and went on confidentially. “Jimmy—he’s our drummer—wanted to cancel tonight’s gig. He’s at Queens’, you know, and he thought with that second girl getting shot this morning…” She looked over her shoulder to where the drummer was moodily tapping his sticks in a light spitting rhythm against the cymbals. “‘We shouldn’t be out entertaining,’ he says. ‘It’s not right, is it? It doesn’t feel right.’ But he can’t come up with an alternative for us. Paul—he plays double bass—wanted to bash local heads in some Arbury pub. But all in all, it seemed best that we just go ahead and play. I don’t know what it’ll sound like, though. No one seems very much in the mood.” She glanced anxiously round the room as if in the need for some sort of contradiction to reassure her.
A respectable crowd had begun to gather, apparently drawn by the rapid scales and chords which the keyboard player was using to warm up. Lynley took the opportunity before the concert began to say:
“Randie, did you know Elena Weaver was pregnant?”
Miranda shifted on her feet, rubbing the right sole of her high-topped black gym shoe against her left ankle. “Rather,” she said.
“How’s that?”
“I mean, I suspected. She never told me.”
They’d trodden this ground together before. “You mean you didn’t know it for a fact.”
“I didn’t know it for a fact.”
“But you suspected? Why?”
Miranda sucked at the inside of her lower lip. “It was the Cocoa Puffs in the gyp room, Inspector. They were hers, the same carton. It’d been there for weeks.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“Her breakfast,” Lady Helen said.
Miranda nodded. “She’d left off eating in the morning. And three times—perhaps four—I’d gone to the loo and she’d been in there being sick. Once I found her at it and the other times—” Miranda twisted a button on her navy cardigan. She wore a navy T-shirt beneath it. “It’s just that I could smell it.”
She belonged on the force, Lynley thought. She was a natural observer. She didn’t miss a trick.
She said in a rush, “I would have said something to you Monday night only I didn’t know for sure. And other than being sick those mornings, she didn’t act any different.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean she wasn’t acting like she had anything in particular to worry about, so I thought perhaps I might have been wrong.”
“Perhaps she wasn’t worried. An out-of-wedlock pregnancy isn’t the sort of disaster it might have been thirty years ago.”
“Maybe not in your family.” Miranda smiled. “But I can’t exactly see my dad greeting that kind of news like it was an announcement of the Second Coming. And I never got the impression her dad was any different.”
“Randie, come on. Let’s do it,” the saxophone player called from across the room.
“Right,” she said. She gave Lynley and Lady Helen a light-hearted salute. “I’m taking a ride during the second number. Listen for it.”
“Taking a ride?” Lady Helen said as Randie scampered back to join the rest of the jazz combo. “What on earth does she mean, Tommy?”
“It must be jazzspeak,” Lynley said. “I’m afraid we’d need Louis Armstrong here to translate.”
The concert began with a roll of drums and the keyboard player call-ing out, “Pound the valves down, Randie. One and two and three and—”
Randie, the saxophonist, and the clarinet player lifted their instruments. Lynley glanced down at the sheet of paper that served as programme for the concert and read the name of the number. “Circadian Dysrhythmia.” It featured the keyboard player who, huddled over his instrument with effort and concentration, carried the lively melody for the first few minutes before tossing it over to the clarinet player who surged to his feet and took it from there. The drummer provided a steady tip-tapping on the cymbals in the background. As he did so, his narrowed eyes flitted round the room to take in the crowd.
By the middle of the number, more listeners had joined the group in the JCR, wandering in from the bar with drinks in hand, and coming in directly from the college grounds where the music no doubt drifted into the surrounding buildings. Heads bobbed in the sort of second-nature response that is generally the listener’s reaction to good jazz while handsrapped against the arms of chairs, the tops of thighs, and the sides of beer glasses. By the end of the number, the audience was won, and when the song ended—with no prior warning or winding down of the musicians’ enthusiasm but just upon a single note that was cut off into silence—the moment of stunned surprise that followed was broken by long and enthusiastic applause.
The band didn’t acknowledge this approbation with anything more than a nod from the keyboard player. Before the applause died down, the saxophone was twirling through the familiar, sultry melody of “Take Five.” After one complete turn through the number, he began to improvise. The double bass player kept up with him through the repetition of three notes and the drummer maintained the beat, but otherwise the saxophone was on his own. And he gave it his heart—eyes closed, his body swayed back, his instrument lifted. It was the sort of music one felt in the solar plexus, hollow and haunting.
As he completed his improvisation, the saxophone player nodded at Randie, who stood and began hers on the last note of his. Again, the double bass played the same three notes, again the drums maintained the same steady beat. But the sound of the trumpet changed the mood of the piece. It became pure and uplifting, a joyous celebration of brassy sound.
Like the saxophone player, Miranda performed with her eyes closed, and she tapped her right foot in time with the drummer. But unlike the saxophonist, when her solo was completed and the improvisation thrown to the clarinet, she grinned with unrestrained pleasure at the applause that greeted the ride she had taken.
Their third number, “Just a Child,” changed the mood once again. It featured the clarinet player—an overweight redhead whose face shone with perspiration—and it provided a dusky sound that spoke of rainy evenings and fusty nightclubs, a fog of cigarette smoke and glasses of gin. It in
vited slow dancing, lazy kissing, and sleep.
The crowd loved it, as they did the fourth, a piece called “Black Nightgown” which featured the clarinet and saxophone. It also ended the first set.
There was a general cry of protest when the keyboard player announced “We’re breaking for fifteen,” but since it was an opportunity to replenish drinks, most of the audience began to shuffle towards the bar. Lynley joined them.
The two darts players were still at it, he saw, their concentration and dedication having gone unimpaired by the performance in the next room. The younger man had apparently hit his stride, for the score on the blackboard showed that he had drawn nearly even with his bearded competitor.
“Last toss, this,” the younger player announced, displaying the dart with the flare of a magician about to make an elephant disappear. “Over the shoulder and I’ll have a bull’s-eye and a win. Who wants money on it?”
“Oh, too right!” Somebody laughed.
“Just throw the dart, Petersen,” someone else called. “Put an end to your misery.”
Petersen clucked in mock dismay. “Oh, you of intolerably little faith,” he said. He turned his back to the dart board, threw over his shoulder, and looked as surprised as everyone else when the dart flew like a magnet drawn to metal and lodged in the bull’s-eye.
The crowd sent up a satisfied roar. Petersen jumped on top of one of the tables.
“I’m taking all comers!” he shouted. “Step up. Try your luck. Senior members only. Collins here just got bashed and I’m looking for fresh blood.” He squinted through the cigarette smoke and the bodies. “You! Dr. Troughton! I see you hulking in the corner. Step up and defend the SCR.”
For the Sake of Elena Page 36