Eugenie stepped away. The car reversed. Its gears ground like animals being dismembered. Its tyres spun wickedly against wet pavement. Rubber met tarmac with a sound like despair.
Another roar and the car was speeding towards the exit. Not six yards from where Ted watched in the shelter of a young liquidambar tree, the Audi—for now it was close enough for Ted to see the distinguishing quadruple circles on its bonnet—swerved into the street without so much as a moment's pause for its driver to determine if any other vehicles were in his way. There was just enough time for Ted to catch a glimpse of a profile that was twisted with emotion before the Audi veered left in the direction of Duke Street and there turned right for the Reading Road. Ted squinted after it, trying to make out the number plate, trying to decide if he'd ill-chosen his moment to happen upon Eugenie.
He didn't have much time to select between scarpering for home and pretending he'd just arrived, however. Eugenie would be upon him in thirty seconds or less.
He looked down at the dog, who'd taken the opportunity of this respite from their walk to deposit herself at the base of the liquidambar, where she now lay curled, with the apparent and martyred determination to sleep in the rain. How reasonable was it, Ted wondered, to suppose he could coax P.B. into a fast trot that would take them out of the immediate area before Eugenie reached the edge of the car park? Not very. So he would offer Eugenie the pretence that he and the dog had just arrived.
He squared his shoulders and gave a tug on the lead. But as he was doing so, he saw that Eugenie wasn't heading his way at all. Instead, she was walking in the opposite direction, where a path between buildings offered pedestrians access to Market Place. Where the blazes was she going?
Ted hastened after her, at a brisk pace that P.B. didn't much care for but couldn't avoid without serious risk of strangulation. Eugenie was a dark figure ahead of them, her black raincoat, black boots, and black umbrella making her an unsuitable ambler on a rainy night.
She turned right into Market Place, and Ted wondered for the second time where she was going. Shops were closed at this hour, and it wasn't in Eugenie's character to frequent pubs alone.
Ted endured a moment of agony while P.B. relieved herself next to the kerb. The dog's capacious bladder was legend, and Ted was certain that, in the lengthy wait for P.B. to empty a pool of steaming urine onto the pavement, he'd lose Eugenie to Market Place Mews or Market Lane when she crossed halfway down the street. But after a quick glance right and left, she continued on her way, towards the river. Passing by Duke Street, she crossed into Hart Street, at which point Ted began thinking that she was merely taking a circuitous route home, despite the weather. But then she veered to the doors of St. Mary the Virgin, whose handsome crenellated tower was part of the river vista for which Henley was famous.
Eugenie hadn't come to admire that vista, however, for she swiftly ducked inside the church.
“Damn,” Ted muttered. What to do now? He could hardly follow her into the church, canine in tow. And hanging about outside in the rain wasn't an appealing idea. And while he could tie the dog to a lamppost and join her at her prayers—if praying was what she was doing in there—he couldn't exactly maintain the pretence of a chance encounter inside St. Mary the Virgin after nine in the evening, when there was no service going on. And even if there had been a service, Eugenie knew he wasn't a churchgoer. So what the hell else could he do now except turn tail for home like a lovesick idiot? And all the time seeing seeing still seeing that moment in the car park when she touched him again, again that touch …
Ted shook his head vigorously. He couldn't go on like this. He had to know the worst. He had to know tonight.
To the left of the church, the graveyard made a rough triangle of sodden vegetation bisected by a path that led to a row of old brick almshouses whose windows winked brightly against the darkness. Ted led P.B. in this direction, taking the time that Eugenie was inside the church to marshal his opening statement to her.
Look at this dog, fat as a sow, he would say. We're on a new campaign to slim her down. Vet says she can't go on like this without her heart giving out, so here we are and here we'll be nightly from now on, making a circumvention of the town. May we toddle along with you, Eugenie? Heading home, are you? Ready to talk, are you? Can we make this the soon you spoke to me about? Because I don't know how much longer I can hold on, wondering what it is that you want me to know.
The problem was that he'd decided upon her, and he'd reached the decision without knowing if she'd reached it as well. In the last five years since Connie's death, he'd never had to pursue a woman, since women had done the pursuing of him. And even if that had demonstrated for him how little he liked to be pursued—damnation itself, when had women become so flaming aggressive? he wondered—and even if what evolved from those pursuits tended to be a pressure to perform under which he had consistently wilted, yet there had been an intense gratification in knowing that the old boy still had It and It was highly in demand.
Except Eugenie wasn't demanding. Which made Ted ask himself whether he was man enough for everyone else—at least superficially—but for some reason not man enough for her.
Blast it all, why was he feeling like this? Like an adolescent who'd never been laid. It was those failures with the others, he decided, failures he'd never once had with Connie.
“You should see a doctor about this little problem of yours,” that piranha Georgia Ramsbottom had said, twisting her bony back from his bed and donning his flannel dressing gown. “It's not normal, Ted. For a man your age? What are you, sixty? It's just not normal.”
Sixty-eight, he thought. With a piece of meat between his legs that remained inert despite the most ardent of ministrations.
But that was because of their pursuit of him. If they'd only let him do what nature intended every man to do—be the hunter and not the hunted—then everything else would take care of itself. Wouldn't it? Wouldn't it? He needed to know.
A sudden movement within one of the squares of light from an almshouse window attracted his attention. Ted glanced that way to see that a figure had come into the room that the window defined. The figure was a woman, and as Ted looked curiously in her direction, he was surprised to see her raise the red jumper that she was wearing, lifting it over her head and dropping it to the floor.
He looked left and right. He felt his cheeks take on heat, despite the rain that was pelting him. Peculiar that some people didn't know how a lit window worked at night. They couldn't see out, so they believed no one could see in. Children were like that. Ted's own three girls had to be taught to draw the curtains before they undressed. But if no one ever taught a child to do that … peculiar that some people never learned.
He stole a glance in her direction again. The woman had removed her brassiere. Ted swallowed. On the lead, P.B. was beginning to snuffle in the grass that edged the graveyard path, and she headed towards the almshouses innocently.
Take her off the lead, she won't go far. But instead Ted followed, the lead looped in his hand.
In the window the woman began brushing her hair. With each stroke her breasts lifted and fell. Their nipples were taut, with deep brown aureoles encircling them. Seeing all this, his eyes fixed to her breasts as if they were what he'd been waiting for all evening and all the evenings that had preceded this evening, Ted felt the incipient stirring within him, and then that gratifying rush of blood and that throb of life.
He sighed. There was nothing wrong with him. Nothing at all. Being pursued had been the problem. Pursuing—and afterwards claiming and having—was the sure solution.
He tugged P.B.'s lead so the dog walked no farther. He settled in to watch the woman in the window and to wait for his Eugenie.
In the Lady Chapel of St. Mary the Virgin, Eugenie didn't so much pray as wait. She hadn't darkened the doorway of a house of worship in years, and the only reason she'd done so tonight was to avoid the conversation she'd promised herself that she'd have with Ted.
She knew he was following her. It wasn't the first time she'd come out of the Sixty Plus Club to see his silhouette under the trees on the street, but it was the first time she wouldn't allow herself to talk to him. So she hadn't turned in his direction when she could have done, at the natural moment to offer an explanation to what he'd witnessed in the car park. Instead, she'd headed for Market Place with no clear idea of where she was going.
When her gaze had fallen upon the church, she'd made the decision to slip inside and adopt an attitude of supplication. For the first five minutes in the Lady Chapel, she even knelt on one of the dusty hassocks, gazed upon the statue of the Virgin, and waited for the old familiar words of devotion to spring into her mind. But they would not. Her head was too filled with impediments to prayer: old arguments and accusations, older loyalties and the sins committed in the name of them, current importunacies and their implications, future consequences if she made an ignorant misstep now.
She'd made enough missteps in the past to devastate thirteen dozen lives. And she'd long ago learned that an action taken was the same as a pebble dropped into still water: The concentric rings that the pebble effects may lessen in substance, but they do exist.
When no prayer came to her, Eugenie rose from her knees. She sat with her feet flat on the floor and studied the face of the statue. You didn't make the choice to lose Him, did you? she asked the Virgin silently. So how can I ask you to understand? And even if you did understand, what intercession can I ask you to give me? You can't turn back time. You can't unhappen what happened, can you? You can't bring back to life what's dead and gone, because if you could, you would have done it to save yourself the torture of His murder.
Except they never say it was murder, do they? Instead, it's a sacrifice for a greater cause. It's a giving of life for something far more important than life. As if anything really is …
Eugenie put her elbows on her thighs and rested her forehead in the palms of her hands. If she was to believe what her erstwhile religion taught her to believe, then the Virgin Mary had known from the start exactly what would be required of her. She'd understood clearly that the Child she nurtured would be ripped from her life in the flowering of His manhood. Reviled, beaten, abused, and sacrificed, He would die ingloriously and she would be there to watch it all. And the only assurance she would ever have that His death had a greater meaning than what was implied by being spat upon and nailed up between two common criminals was simple faith. Because although religious tradition had it that an angel had appeared to put her in the picture of future events, who could really stretch their brains to fit around that?
So she'd gone on blind faith that a greater good existed somewhere. Not in her lifetime and not in the lifetime of the grandchildren she would never have. But there. Somewhere. Quite real. There.
Of course, it hadn't happened yet. Fast-forward two thousand brutal years and mankind was still waiting for the good to come. And what did she think, the Virgin Mother, watching and waiting from her throne in the clouds? How did she begin to assess the benefit against the cost?
For years newspapers had served to tell Eugenie that the benefits—the good—tipped the scales against the price she herself had paid. But now she was no longer sure. The Greater Good she'd thought she was serving threatened to disintegrate before her, like a woven rug whose persistent unraveling makes a mockery of the labour that went into its creation. And only she could stop that unraveling, if she made the choice to do so.
The problem was Ted. She hadn't intended to draw close to him. For so very long she hadn't allowed herself near enough to anyone to encourage confidence of any kind. And to feel herself even capable now—not to mention deserving—of establishing a connection to another human being seemed like a form of hubris that was certain to destroy her. Yet she wanted to draw close to him anyway, as if he were the anodyne for a sickness that she lacked the courage to name.
So she sat in the church. In part because she did not want to face Ted Wiley just yet, before the way was paved. In part because she did not yet possess the words to do the paving.
Tell me what to do, God, she prayed. Tell me what to say.
But God was as silent as He'd been for ages. Eugenie dropped an offering in the collection box and left the church.
Outside, it was still raining relentlessly. She raised her umbrella and headed towards the river. The wind was rising as she reached the corner, and she paused for a moment to wrestle against it as it struck her umbrella with more force than she expected and turned it inside out.
“Here. Let me help you with that, Eugenie.”
She swung round and Ted was standing there, his old dog droopily at his side and rainwater dripping from his nose and jaw. His waxed jacket glistened brightly with damp, and his peaked cap clung to his skull.
“Ted!” She offered him the gift of her spurious surprise. “You look positively drowned. And poor P.B.! What are you doing out here with that sweet dog?”
He righted her umbrella and held it over both of them. She took his arm.
“We've begun a new exercise programme,” he told her. “Up to Market Place, down to the church yard, and back home four times a day. What're you doing here? You haven't just come out of the church, have you?”
You know I have, she wanted to say. You just don't know why. But what she said was, lightly, “Decompressing after the committee meeting. You remember: the New Year's Eve committee? I'd given them a deadline to decide on the food. So much to be ordered, you know, and they can't expect the caterer to wait forever for them to make up their minds, can they?”
“On your way home now?”
“I am.”
“And may I …?”
“You know that you may.”
How ridiculous it was, the two of them in such an idle conversation, with volumes of what needed saying deliberately going unsaid between them.
You don't trust me, Ted, do you? Why don't you trust me? And how can we foster love between us if we have no foundation of trust? I know you're worried because I'm not telling you what it was I said I wanted to tell you, but why can't you let the wanting to tell you be enough for now?
But she couldn't risk anything that would lead to revelation at the moment. She owed it to ties far older than the tie she felt to Ted to put her house in order before burning it down.
So they engaged in insignificant chat as they walked along the river: his day, her day, who'd come into the bookshop and how his mother was getting on at Quiet Pines. He was hearty and cheerful; she was pleasant albeit subdued.
“Tired?” he asked her when they reached the door of her cottage.
“A bit,” she admitted. “It's been a long day.”
He handed her the umbrella, saying, “Then I won't keep you up,” but he looked at her with such open expectation in his ruddy face that she knew her next line was supposed to be to ask him in for a brandy before bed.
It was her fondness for him that prompted the truth. She said, “I've got to go into London, Ted.”
“Ah. Early morning, then?”
“No. I've got to go tonight. I've an appointment.”
“Appointment? But with the rain, it'll take you more than an hour…. Did you say an appointment?”
“Yes. I did.”
“What sort …? Eugenie …” He blew out a breath. She heard him curse quietly. So, apparently, did P.B., because the old retriever raised her head and blinked at Ted as if with surprise. She was soaking, poor dog. At least, thank God, her fur was thick as a mammoth's. “Let me drive you in, then,” Ted said at last.
“That wouldn't be wise.”
“But—”
She put her hand on his arm to stop him. She raised it to touch his cheek, but he flinched and she stepped away. “Are you free for dinner tomorrow night?” she asked him.
“You know that I am.”
“Then have a meal with me. Here. We'll talk then, if you'd like.”
He gazed at her, trying—she knew—and faili
ng to read her. Don't make the attempt, she wanted to tell him. I've had too much rehearsal for a rôle in a drama you don't yet understand.
She watched him steadily, waiting for his reply. The light from her sitting room came through the window and jaundiced a face already drawn with age and with worries he wouldn't name. She was grateful for that: that he wouldn't speak his deepest fears to her. The fact that what frightened him went unspoken was what gave her courage to contend with everything that frightened her.
He removed his cap then, a humble gesture that she wouldn't for all her life have had him make. It exposed his thick grey hair to the rain and removed the meagre shadow that had hidden the rubicund flesh of his nose. It made him look like what he was: an old man. It made her feel like what she was: a woman who didn't deserve such a fine man's love.
“Eugenie,” he said, “if you're thinking you can't tell me that you … that you and I … that we aren't …” He looked towards the bookshop across the street.
“I'm not thinking anything,” she said. “Just about London and the drive. And there's the rain as well. But I'll be careful. You've no need to worry.”
He appeared momentarily gratified and perhaps a trifle relieved at the reassurance she meant to imply. “You're the world to me,” he said simply. “Eugenie, do you know? You're the world. And I'm a bloody idiot most of the time, but I do—”
“I know,” she said. “I know that you do. And we'll talk tomorrow.”
“Right, then.” He kissed her awkwardly, hitting his head on the edge of the umbrella and knocking it askew in her hand.
Rain dashed against her face. A car raced up Friday Street. She felt spray from its tyres hit her shoes.
Ted swung round. “Hey!” he shouted at the vehicle. “Watch your bloody driving!”
“No. It's all right,” she said. “It's nothing, Ted.”
A Traitor to Memory Page 4