For the Sake of Elena

by Elizabeth George

  He got up and walked across the room to the window that overlooked the college garden. He pulled back the curtain and studied the outdoors, sipping his brandy.

  “So I made my plans. I had the vasectomy to protect myself from any unexpected difficulties, and I began to go my own way. The only problem was that I found I really didn’t have the right…What do they call it? The right moves? The technique?” He chuckled derisively. “I’d actually thought it would be easy. I’d be joining the sexual revolution two decades too late, but I’d be joining it nonetheless. A middle-aged pioneer. What a nasty surprise it all was for me.”

  “And then Elena Weaver came along?” Lynley asked.

  Troughton stayed by the window, backdropped by the black glass of night. “I’ve known her father for years, so I’d met her before, on one visit or another when she was up from London. But it wasn’t until he brought her to my house last autumn to choose a puppy that I really thought of her as anything other than Anthony’s little deaf girl. And even then, it was just admiration on my part. She was lively, good-humoured, a mass of energy and enthusiasm. She got on well in life in spite of being deaf, and I found that—along with everything else about her—immensely attractive. But Anthony’s a colleague, and even if a score of young women hadn’t already given me sufficient evidence of my undesirability, I wouldn’t have had the nerve to approach a colleague’s daughter.”

  “She approached you?”

  Troughton made a gesture that encompassed the room. “She dropped by here several times during Michaelmas term last year. She’d tell me about how the dog was doing and chat in that odd-voiced way of hers. She’d drink tea, pinch a few cigarettes when she thought I wasn’t looking. I enjoyed her visits. I began to look forward to them. But nothing happened between us until Christmas.”

  “And then?”

  Troughton returned to his chair. He crushed out his cigarette but did not light another. He said, “She came to show me the gown she’d bought for one of the Christmas balls. She said, I’ll try it on for you, shall I, and she turned her back and began to undress right here in the room. Of course, I’m not entirely a fool. I realised later that she’d done it deliberately, but at the time, I was horrified. Not only at her behaviour but at what I felt—no, what I knew in an instant that I wanted to do—in the face of her behaviour. She was down to her underthings when I said, For God’s sake, what do you think you’re doing, girl? But I was across the room and her head was turned, so she couldn’t read my lips. She just kept undressing. I went to her, made her face me, and repeated the question. She looked me straight in the eye and said, I’m doing what you want me to do, Vittor. And that was that. We made love in the very chair you’re sitting in, Inspector. I was so desperate to have her that I didn’t even bother to lock the door.” He drank the rest of his brandy, set the balloon glass on the table. “Elena knew what I was after. I’ve no doubt she’d known the moment her father brought her to my house to see those dogs. If she was nothing else, she was brilliant at reading people. Or at least she was brilliant at reading me. She always knew what I wanted and when I wanted it and just exactly how.”

  “So you’d found that resilient flesh you’d been seeking,” Lady Helen said. Cool condemnation comprised the undercurrent of the statement.

  Troughton didn’t avoid admitting the worst. “I found it. Yes. But not the way I thought. I didn’t count on falling in love. I thought it would just be sex between us. Good, vigorous sex anytime we felt the urge. We were, after all, serving each other’s needs.”

  “In what way?”

  “She was accommodating my need to savour her youth and perhaps recapture a bit of my own. I was accommodating her need to hurt her father.” He poured himself more brandy and added to the other glasses as well. He looked from Lynley to Lady Helen as if gauging on their faces a response to his final statement. He went on with, “As I said, Inspector, I’m not a complete fool.”

  “Perhaps you’re judging yourself too harshly.”

  Troughton placed the bottle on the table next to his chair and drank deeply of the brandy, saying, “Not at all. Look at the facts. I’m forty-seven years old and on the downhill plunge. She was twenty, surrounded by hundreds of young men with their entire lives ahead of them. Why on earth would she decide to set her sights on me unless she knew it was the perfect way to strike out at her father? And it was perfect, after all. To choose one of his colleagues—indeed, to choose one of his friends. To choose a man who was even older than her father. To choose a man who was married. To choose a man with children. I couldn’t actually delude myself with the idea that Elena wanted me because she found me more attractive than any other man she knew, and I never did so. I knew from the first what she had in mind.”

  “The scandal we were speaking of earlier?”

  “Anthony always had too much of himself tied into Elena’s performance here in Cambridge. He involved himself in every aspect of her life. How she acted and dressed, how she took notes in her lectures, how she comported herself in her supervisions. These were weighty matters to him. I think he believed that he would be judged—as a man, a parent, an academic even—dependent upon her success or failure here.”

  “Was the Penford Chair tied into all this?”

  “In his mind, I should think so. In reality, no.”

  “But if he thought judgement of himself was going to be connected to Elena’s performance and behaviour—”

  “Then he would want to see to it that she performed and behaved as the daughter of a respected professor should. Elena knew that. She could sense that attitude in everything her father did, and she resented him for it. So you can imagine the vast and—to Elena—amusing possibilities for his humiliation and her revenge when it became known that his daughter was having it off on a regular basis with one of his close colleagues.”

  “Didn’t you mind being used in this way?”

  “I was living every fantasy I’d ever entertained about making love to a woman and having a woman make love to me. We met at least three times a week from Christmas on and I loved every moment of it. I didn’t care about her motives in the least as long as she kept coming round to see me and taking off her clothes.”

  “You met here, then?”

  “Generally. I managed to get to London several times during the summer break to see her as well. And on a few weekend afternoons and evenings at her father’s house during term.”

  “When he was home?”

  “Only once, during a party. She found that particularly exciting.” He shrugged although his cheeks had begun to flush. “I found it rather exciting as well. I suppose it was the sheer terror of thinking we might be caught going at it.”

  “But you weren’t?”

  “Never. Justine knew—she’d found out somehow, she may well have guessed or Elena may have told her—but she never actually caught us in the act.”

  “She never told her husband?”

  “She wouldn’t have wanted to bear that sort of witness against Elena, Inspector. As far as Anthony was concerned, it would have been a case of kill the messenger, and Justine knew that better than anyone. So she held her tongue. I imagine she was waiting for Anthony to find things out on his own.”

  “Which he never did.”

  “Which he never did.” Troughton shifted his position in his chair, crossing one leg over the other and pulling out his cigarette case once again. He merely played it from hand to hand, however. He didn’t open it. “Of course, he would have been told eventually.”

  “By you?”

  “No. I imagine Elena would have wanted that pleasure.”

  Lynley found it hard to believe that Troughton had no conscience in the matter of Elena. He had obviously felt no need to guide her. He had seen no necessity for urging her to deal with her resentment towards her father in another way. “But, Dr. Troughton, what I don’t understand is—”

  “Why I went along with the game?” Troughton set the cigarette case next to the ballo
on glass. He studied the picture they made, side by side. “Because I loved her. At first it was her body—the incredible sensation of holding and touching that beautiful body. But then it was her. Elena. She was wild and ungovernable, laughing and alive. And I wanted that in my life. I didn’t care about the cost.”

  “Even if it meant posing as the father of her child?”

  “Even that, Inspector. Once she told me she was pregnant, I nearly convinced myself that the vasectomy had gone wrong all those years ago and that the child was really mine.”

  “Have you any idea who the father was?”

  “No. But I’ve spent hours since last Wednesday wondering about it.”

  “Where have your thoughts led you?”

  “To the same conclusion again and again. If she slept with me to have revenge on her father, whomever else she slept with, it was for the same reason. It didn’t have anything to do with love.”

  “Yet you were willing to take up a life with her in spite of knowing all this?”

  “Pathetic, isn’t it? I wanted passion again. I wanted to feel alive. I told myself that I would be good for her. I thought that with me she would be able to let go of her grievances against Anthony eventually. I believed I’d be enough for her. I’d be able to heal her. It was an adolescent little fantasy that I clung to till the end.”

  Lady Helen placed her balloon glass on the table next to Troughton’s. She kept her fingers carefully on its rim. She said, “And what about your wife?”

  “I hadn’t told her about Elena yet.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I know,” he said. “You meant what about the fact that Rowena bore my children and did my laundry and cooked my meals and cleaned my house. What about those seventeen years of loyalty and devotion. What about my commitment to her, not to mention my responsibilities to the University, to my students, to my colleagues. What about my ethics and my morals and my values and my conscience. That’s what you meant, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose it is.”

  He looked away from them, eyes focussed on nothing. “Some kinds of marriages wear at a person until the only thing left is a body that’s simply going through the motions.”

  “I wonder if that’s your wife’s conclusion as well.”

  “Rowena wants out of this marriage as much as I do. She just doesn’t know it yet.”

  Now, in the darkness on the terrace, Lynley felt burdened not only by Troughton’s assessment of his marriage but also by the mixture of revulsion and indifference he had expressed towards his wife. More than anything, he wished Helen had not been with him to hear the story of his attachment to Elena Weaver and his maddeningly level-headed rationale for that attachment. For as the historian had calmly outlined his reasons for turning away from his wife and seeking the company and the love of a woman young enough to be his daughter, Lynley believed he had finally come to understand at least part of what lay at the root of Helen’s refusal to marry him.

  The understanding had been an uneasiness churning within him—asking to be noticed—since the start of the evening in Bulstrode Gardens. It had demanded some sort of spoken release in the musty confines of Victor Troughton’s study.

  What we ask of them, he thought. What we expect, what we demand. But never what we will give in return. Never what they want. And never a moment’s thorough consideration of the burdens which our desires and requirements place upon them.

  He looked up at the vast grey darkness of the cloud-heavy sky. A distant light winked in it.

  “What are you seeing?” Lady Helen asked him.

  “A shooting star, I think. Close your eyes, Helen. Quickly. Make a wish.” He did so himself.

  She laughed at him quietly. “You’re wishing on a plane, Tommy. It’s heading for Heathrow.”

  He opened his eyes, saw that she was right. “I’ve no viable future in astronomy, I’m afraid.”

  “I don’t believe that. You used to point out all the constellations to me. In Cornwall. Don’t you remember?”

  “It was all show, Helen darling. I was trying to impress you.”

  “Were you? Well, I was suitably impressed.”

  He turned to look at her. He reached for her hand. In spite of the cold, she wasn’t wearing gloves, and he pressed her cool fingers against his cheek. He kissed her palm.

  “I sat there and listened and realised that he may as well have been me,” he said, “because it all boils down to what men want, Helen. And what we want is women. But not as individuals, not as living, breathing, vulnerable human beings with a set of desires and dreams of their own. We want them—you—as extensions of ourselves. And I’m among the worst.”

  Her hand moved in his, but she didn’t withdraw it. Rather, her fingers entwined with his.

  “And as I listened to him, Helen, I thought of all the ways I’ve wanted you. As my lover, as my wife, as the mother of my children. In my bed. In my car. In my home. Entertaining my friends. Listening to me talk about my work. Sitting next to me quietly when I don’t feel like speaking. Waiting up for me when I’m out on a case. Opening your heart to me. Making yourself mine. And those are the operative words I kept hearing: I, me, my, mine.” He looked across the Backs to the smudgy forms of English oaks and common alders that were little more than shadows against a charcoal sky. When he turned back to her, her expression was grave, but her eyes were still on him. They were dark and kind.

  “There’s no sin in that, Tommy.”

  “You’re right,” he replied. “There’s only self in it. What I want. When I want it. And you’re meant to cooperate because you’re a woman. That’s how I’ve been, isn’t it? No better than your brother-in-law, no better than Troughton.”

  “No,” she said. “You’re not like them. I’ve not seen you that way.”

  “I’ve wanted you, Helen. And the hell of it is that I want you right now as much as I ever have. I sat there and listened to Troughton and had my own eyes opened in a thousand different ways about what goes wrong between men and women and it all comes down to the same damned fact with absolutely no change in it. I love you. I want you.”

  “If you had me once, could you let it all go? Could you let me go?”

  His answering laugh was mordant and painful. He looked away. “I wish it were as simple as taking you to bed. But you know it isn’t. You know I—”

  “But could you, Tommy? Could you let me go?”

  He turned back to her slowly, recognising something in her voice, an urgency, a plea, an inherent call for a degree of understanding he’d never been able to establish with her. It seemed to him as he studied her face—and saw the thin line of worry between her brows—that the attainment of every dream he’d ever harboured depended upon his ability to know what she meant.

  He looked at her hand, still held in his own. So fragile, he could feel the bones of her fingers. So smooth that he could easily conceive of its tender passage against his skin.

  “How do I answer that?” he said at last. “I feel you’ve placed my whole future on the line.”

  “I don’t mean to do that.”

  “But you’ve done it, haven’t you?”

  “I suppose I have. In a way.”

  He released her hand and walked to the low brick wall that edged the river terrace. Below, the Cam glinted in the darkness, green-black ink drifting lazily towards the Ouse. It was an inexorable progress—this movement of water—slow and sure and as unstoppable as time.

  “My longings are the same as every other man’s,” he said. “I want a home, a wife. I want children, a son. I want to know at the end that my life hasn’t been for nothing, and the only way I can know that for a certainty is to leave something behind, and to have someone to leave it to. All I can say right now is that I finally understand what kind of burden that places on a woman, Helen. I understand that no matter how the load is shifted between partners, or divided or shared, the woman’s burden will always be greater. I do know that. But I can’t lie to you ab
out the reality that remains. I still want those things.”

  “You can have them with anyone.”

  “I want them with you.”

  “You don’t need them with me.”

  “Need?” He tried to read the expression on her face, but she was just a pale blur in the darkness beneath the tree that threw a cavernous shadow over the terrace bench. He pondered the oddity of the word she had chosen, reflecting on her decision to remain with her sister in Cambridge. He considered the canvas of the fourteen years he had known Lady Helen. And finally, the realisation struck him.

  He sank onto the concrete ledge that comprised the top of the brick river wall. He regarded her evenly. Faintly, he heard the click-clacking of a bicycle passing across Garret Hostel Bridge, the grinding clang of a lorry shifting gears as it made its way down the distant Queens’ Road. But neither sound did more than stir against his consciousness as he studied Lady Helen.

  He wondered how he could have come to love her so much and all the time know her so very little. She had been before him for more than a decade, never attempting to disguise who and what she was. Yet for all that time, he had failed to see her in the light of reality, imbuing her instead with a set of qualities which he wished her to possess while all along, her every relationship had been acting as a cogent illustration of what she saw as her role, her way of getting on. He couldn’t believe he had been such a fool.

  He spoke more to the night than to her. “It’s all because I can function by myself. You won’t marry me because I don’t need you, Helen, not the way you want me to. You’ve decided I don’t need you to stand on my own, or to get on in life, or even to be whole. And it’s the truth, you know. I don’t need you that way.”