She knew all the governing principles behind a child’s progression from infant to autonomous adult. She’d read the books, determined to be the best possible mother. But how to deal with this? How to develop a delicate balancing act between fact and fiction to give Maggie the father she wanted and at the same time set her own mind at rest? And even if she was able to do that much for her daughter and herself—which she could not do and would not even consider doing, no matter the cost—what would Maggie have learned from her mother’s capitulation: that sex is not an expression of love between two people but a powerful ploy.
Maggie and sex. Juliet didn’t want to think about it. Over the years she’d grown more and more adept at the art of repression, refusing to dwell upon anything that evoked unhappiness or turmoil. She moved forward, she moved on, she kept her attention on the distant horizon where existed the promise of exploration in the form of new places and new experiences, where existed the promise of peace and sanctuary in the form of people who, through centuries of habit and custom, kept their distance from taciturn strangers. And until last August, Maggie had always been perfectly happy to keep her eyes on this horizon as well.
Juliet let the cat out and watched him disappear into the shadows cast by Cotes Hall. She went upstairs. Maggie’s door was closed, but she didn’t tap on it as she otherwise might on another sort of night, going in to sit on her daughter’s bed, smoothing back her hair, allowing her fingertips to graze against that peach-soft skin. Instead, she went to her own room across the landing and took off the rest of her clothes in the darkness. In doing so on another sort of night, she might have thought about the pressure and warmth of Colin’s hands on her body, allowing herself just five minutes to relive their lovemaking and recall the sight of him etched above her in the semidarkness of his room. But tonight, she moved like an automaton, grabbing up her woollen dressing gown and making her way to the bathroom to draw a bath.
You smell of it, too.
How could she in conscience counsel her daughter against a behaviour she engaged in—looked forward to, longed for—herself? The only way to do it was to give him up and then to move on as they had done in the past, no looking back, cutting every tie. It was the only answer. If the vicar’s death had not been enough to bring her to her senses about what was and was not possible in her life—had she actually believed even for an instant that she might make a go of it as the loving wife of the local constable?—Maggie’s relationship with Nick Ware would.
Mrs. Spence, my name is Robin Sage. I’ve come to talk to you about Maggie.
And she’d poisoned him. This compassionate man who had meant only good to her and her daughter. What kind of life could she hope to have in Winslough now when every heart doubted her, every whisper condemned her, and no one save the coroner himself had had the courage openly to ask how she had come to make such a fatal mistake.
She bathed slowly, permitting herself only the immediate physical sensations attendant to the act: the flannel on her skin, the steam rising round her, the water in rivulets between her breasts. The soap smelled of roses, and she breathed its fragrance to obliterate all others. She wanted the bathing to wash away memory and to free her of passion. She looked to it for answers. She asked it for equanimity.
I want to know about Daddy.
What can I tell you, my dearest love? That running his fingers through your downy hair meant nothing. That the sight of your eyelashes lying like feathery shadows against your cheeks when you slept did not make him want to hold you close. That your grubby hand clutching a dripping ice lolly would never have made him laugh with delight and dismay. That your place in his life was quiet and sleeping in the rear seat of a car with no muss and no fuss and no demands, please. That you were never as real to him as he was to himself. You were not the centre of his world. How can I tell you that, Maggie? How can I be the one to destroy your dream?
Her limbs felt heavy as she towelled herself off. Her arm seemed weighted as she brushed her hair. The bathroom mirror wore a thin skin of steam, and she watched the movements of her silhouette in it, a faceless image whose only definition was dusky hair fast going to grey. The rest of her body she could not see in reflection, but she knew it well enough. It was strong and durable, firm of flesh and unafraid of hard work. It was a peasant’s body, made for the easy delivery of children. And there should have been many. They should have tumbled round her feet and cluttered the house with their mates and belongings. They should have played, learned to read, skinned their knees, broken windows, and wept their confusion at life’s inconsistencies in her arms. But there had been only one life given into her care and one chance to mould that life into maturity.
Had it been her failure, she wondered not for the first time. Had she let parental vigilance lapse in the cause of her own desires?
She set her hairbrush on the edge of the basin and went across the landing to the closed door of her daughter’s room. She listened. No light shone from beneath the door, so she turned the knob quietly and entered.
Maggie was asleep, and she did not awaken when the dim oblong of light from the landing fell across her bed. As she so often did, she’d kicked off the blankets, and she was curled on her side, her knees drawn up, a child-woman wearing pink pyjamas with the top two buttons of the jacket missing so that the crescent of a full breast showed, the nipple an aureole flushed against her white skin. She’d taken her stuffed elephant from the bookcase on which he’d resided since their coming to Winslough. He lay in a lump bunched into her stomach, his legs sticking straight out like a soldier’s at attention and his old mangled trunk prehensile no longer, but loved down to a stub from years of wear and tear.
Juliet eased the blankets back over her daughter and stood gazing down at her. The first steps, she thought, that odd, teetering baby walk of hers as she discovered what it was to be upright, clutching onto a handful of Mummy’s trousers and grinning at the miracle of her own awkward gait. And then the run, hair flapping and flying and chubby arms extended, full of confidence that Mummy would be there with her own arms outstretched to catch and to hold. That way of sitting, legs splayed out stiffly with the feet pointing northeast and northwest. That utterly unconscious posture of squatting, scooting her compact little body closer to the ground to pick a wildflower or examine a bug.
My child. My daughter. I don’t have all the answers for you, Margaret. Most of the time I feel that I’m merely an older version of a child myself. I’m afraid, but I cannot show you my fear. I despair, but I cannot share my sorrow. You see me as strong—the master of my life and my fate—while all the time I feel as though at any moment the unmasking will occur and the world will see me—and you will see me—as I really am, weak and riven by doubt. You want me to be understanding. You want me to tell you how things are going to be. You want me to make things right—life right—by waving the wand of my indignation over injustice and over your hurts, and I can’t do that. I don’t even know how.
Mothering isn’t something one learns, Maggie. It’s something one does. It doesn’t come naturally to any woman because there is nothing natural about having a life completely dependent upon one’s own. It’s the only kind of employment that exists in which one can feel so utterly necessary and at the same moment so entirely alone. And in moments of crisis—like this one, Maggie—there is no sagacious volume in which one looks up answers and thus discovers how to prevent a child from harming herself.
Children do more than steal one’s heart, my dear. They steal one’s life. They elicit the worst and the best that we have to offer, and in return they offer their trust. But the cost of all this is insurmountably high and the rewards are small and long in coming.
And at the end, when one prepares to release the infant, the child, the adolescent into adulthood, it is with the hope that what remains behind is something bigger—and more—than Mummy’s empty arms.
CHAPTER SIX
THE SINGLE MOST PROMISING SIGN WAS that when he reached out to touch her
—smoothing his hand along the bare pathway of her spine—she neither flinched nor shrugged off the caress in irritation. This gave him hope. True, she neither spoke to him nor discontinued her dressing, but at the moment Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley was willing to accept anything that wasn’t an outright rejection leading to her departure. It was, he thought, decidedly the down side of intimacy with a woman. If there was supposed to be a happily-ever-after associated with falling in love and having that love returned, he and Helen Clyde had not yet managed to find it.
Early days, he tried to tell himself. They were still unused to the role of lover in each other’s life after having, for more than fifteen years, been resolutely living the role of friend. Still, he wished she would stop dressing and come back to bed where the sheets were still warm from her body and the scent of her hair still clung to his pillow.
She hadn’t switched on a lamp. Nor had she opened the curtains to the watery morning light of a London winter. But despite these facts, he could see her plainly in what little sun managed to seep first through the clouds and then through the curtains. Even if this had not been the case, he had long ago committed to memory her face, each one of her gestures, and every part of her body. Had the room been dark, he could have described with his hands the curve of her waist, the precise angle at which she dipped her head a moment before she shook back her hair, the shape of her calves, her heels, and her ankles, the swell of her breasts.
He had loved before, more often in his thirty-six years than he would have liked to admit to anyone. But never before had he felt such a curious, utterly Neanderthal need to master and possess a woman. For the last two months since Helen had become his lover, he’d been telling himself that this need would dissolve if she agreed to marry him. The desire to dominate—and to have her submit—could hardly flourish in an atmosphere of power sharing, equality, and dialogue. And if these were the hallmarks of the sort of relationship he wanted with her, then the part of him that needed to control how things would be in the here and now was the part of him that was going to have to be immolated soon.
The problem was that even now when he knew that she was upset, when he knew the reason why and could not begin with any degree of honesty to fault her for it, he still found himself irrationally wanting to browbeat her into a submissive and apologetic admission of error, one for which the most logical expiation would be her willing return to bed. Which was, in and of itself, the second and more imperative problem. He’d awakened at dawn, aroused by the warmth of her sleeping body pressed against his. He’d run his hand along the curve of her hip, and even in sleep she’d turned into his arms to make slow, early-in-the-morning love. Afterwards, they’d lain among the pillows and the tousled blankets, and with her head on his chest and her hand on his breast and her chestnut hair spilling like silk between his fingers, she’d said:
“I can hear your heart.”
To which he’d answered: “I’m glad. That means you’ve not broken it yet.”
To which she’d chuckled, gently bitten his nipple, then yawned and asked her question.
To which, like the utterly besotted fool he was, he’d given an answer. No prevarication. No equivocation. Just a hem and a haw, a clearing of the throat, and then the truth. From which rose their argument—if the accusation of “objectifying women, objectifying me, me, Tommy, whom you claim to love” could be called an argument. From which rose Helen’s present determination to be dressed and be gone without further discussion. Not in anger, to be sure, but in yet another instance of her need to “think things out for myself.”
God, how sex makes fools of us, he thought. One moment of release, and a lifetime to regret it. And the hell of it was that, as he watched her dressing—hooking together the bits of silk and lace that posed as women’s underwear—he felt the heat and tightening of his own desire. His body was itself the most damning evidence of the basic truth behind her indictment of him. For him, the curse of being male seemed to be entrenched inextricably in dealing with the aggressive, mindless, animal hunger that made a man want a woman no matter the circumstances and sometimes—to his shame—because of the circumstances, as if a half hour’s successful seduction were actually proof of something beyond the body’s ability to betray the mind.
“Helen,” he said.
She walked to the serpentine chest of drawers and used his heavy silver-backed brush to see to her hair. A small cheval mirror stood in the midst of his family photographs, and she adjusted it from his height to hers.
He didn’t want to argue with her, but he felt compelled to defend himself. Unfortunately, because of the subject she’d chosen for their disagreement—or if the truth be admitted, the subject which his behaviour and then his words had ultimately propelled her into choosing—his only defence appeared to have its roots in a thorough examination of her. Her past, after all, was no more unsullied than was his own.
“Helen,” he said, “we’re two adults. We have history together. But we each have separate histories as well, and I don’t think we gain anything by making the mistake of forgetting that. Or by making judgements based upon situations that might have existed prior to our involvement with each other. I mean, this current involvement. The physical aspect.” Inwardly, he grimaced at his bumbling attempt at putting an end to their contretemps. Goddamn it, we’re lovers, he wanted to say. I want you, I love you, and you bloody well feel the same about me. So stop being so blasted sensitive about something which has nothing whatsoever to do with you, or how I feel about you, or what I want from you and with you for the rest of our lives. Is that clear, Helen? Is it? Is it clear? Good. I’m glad of it. Now get back into bed.
She replaced the hairbrush, rested her hand upon it, and didn’t turn from the chest of drawers. She hadn’t yet put on her shoes, and Lynley took additional, if tenuous, hope from that. As he did from the certainty of his belief that she no more wanted any form of estrangement between them than did he. To be sure, Helen was exasperated with him—perhaps only marginally more than he was exasperated with himself—but she hadn’t written him off entirely. Surely she could be made to see reason, if only through being urged to consider how in the past two months he himself could have easily misconstrued her own erstwhile romantic attachments should he ever have been so idiotic as to evoke the spectral presence of her former lovers as she had done with his. She would argue, of course, that she wasn’t concerned with his former lovers at all, that she hadn’t, as a matter of fact, even brought them up. It was women in general and his attitude towards them and the great ho-ho-ho-I’m-having-another-hot-one-tonight that she believed was implied by the act of draping a tie on the outer knob of his bedroom door.
He said, “I haven’t lived as a celibate any more than have you. We’ve always known that about each other, haven’t we?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s just a fact. And if we start trying to walk a tightrope between the past and the future in our life together, we’re going to fall off. It can’t be done. What we have is now. Beyond that, the future. To my way of thinking, that ought to be our primary concern.”
“This has nothing to do with the past, Tommy.”
“It does. You said not ten minutes ago that you felt just like ‘his lordship’s squalid little Sunday-night score.’”
“You’ve misunderstood my concern.”
“Have I?” He leaned over the edge of the bed and scooped up his dressing gown which had fallen to the floor in a heap of blue paisley sometime during the night. “Are you angrier about a tie on the door knob—”
“About what the tie implies.”
“—or more specifically about the fact that, by my own extremely cretinous admission, it’s a device I’ve used before?”
“I think you know me well enough not to have to ask a question like that.”
He stood, shrugged his way into the dressing gown, and spent a moment picking up the clothing he’d been in such a tearing hurry to divest himself of at
half past eleven on the previous night. “And I think you’re at heart more honest with yourself than you’re being at the moment with me.”
“You’re making an accusation. I don’t much like that. Nor do I like its connotation of egocentricity.”
“Yours or mine?”
“You know what I mean, Tommy.”
He crossed the room and pulled open the curtains. It was a bleak day outside. A gusty wind was scudding heavy clouds from east to west in the sky above, while on the ground a thin crust of frost lay like fresh gauze on the lawn and the rose bushes that comprised his rear garden. One of the neighbourhood cats perched atop the brick wall against which heavy solanum climbed. He was hunched into dual humps of head and body with his calico fur rippling and his face looking shuttered, demonstrating that singularly feline quality of being at once imperious and untouchable. Lynley wished he could say the same about himself.
He turned from the window to see that Helen was watching his movements in the mirror. He went to stand behind her.
“If I choose,” he said, “I could drive myself mad with thinking of the men you’ve had as your lovers. Then in direct avoidance of the madness, I could accuse you of using them to meet your own ends, to gratify your ego, to build your self-esteem. But my madness would still be there all the time, just beneath the surface, no matter the strength of my accusations. I’d merely be diverting and denying it by focusing all my attention—not to mention the force of my righteous indignation—on you.”
“Clever,” she said. Her eyes were on his.
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