A Suitable Vengeance

by Elizabeth George

  'Not you,' he said finally. She could tell the phrase cost him dearly. 'Not Deborah.' 'What was different?' 'I let things go further.' 'Further?' 'To the heart.'

  She crossed the room to him. Her hand touched his arm. 'Don't you see, Tommy? You weren't that man bent on pleasure. You want to think you were, but that wasn't the case. Not for anyone who bothered to take the time to know you. Not for me certainly, who was never your lover. And not for Deborah, who was.'

  'I wanted something different with her.' His eyes were red-rimmed. 'Roots, ties, a family. I was willing to be something more to have that. It was worth it. She was worth it.'

  'Yes. She was. And she was worth grieving over as well. She's still worth that.' 'Oh God,' he whispered.

  Her hand slid down his arm, closed over his wrist. 'Tommy dear, it's all right. Really.'

  He shook his head blindly, as if by that movement he could shake off his terrible desolation. 'I think I shall die of loneliness, Helen.' His voice broke horribly, the sound of a man who hadn't allowed himself to experience a single emotion in years. 'I can't bear it.'

  He started to turn from her, to go back to his desk, but she stopped him and closed the remaining space between them. She took him into her arms.

  'You're not alone, Tommy,' she said quite gently.

  He began to cry.

  Deborah pushed open the gate just as the street-lamp in Lordship Place lit for the evening, sending delicate sprays of light through the mist that fell on the garden. She stood for a moment and gazed at the warm burned sienna bricks of the house, at its fresh white plasterwork, at its old wrought iron hand rail that forever rusted in spots that forever needed paint. In so many ways, it would always be home to her, no matter how long she managed to stay away - three years, three decades or, like this time, a month.

  She'd managed avoidance through a string of fabrications which she knew her father didn't believe for a moment. Setting myself up professionally, Dad. Working very hard. Appointments here and there. Showing my portfolio around. Shall we meet somewhere for dinner? No, I can't come to Chelsea. He'd accepted the excuses rather than quarrel with her again.

  No more than did she, her father didn't savour a repetition of their row in Paddington, a week after her return from Cornwall. He had wanted her to come home. She refused to consider it. He didn't understand. To him, it was simple. Pack your things, close the flat, come back to Cheyne Row. In effect, as far as he was concerned, return to the past. She couldn't do so. She tried to explain her need for a time that was solely her own. His response was a nasty castigation of Tommy - for changing her, destroying her, distorting her values - and from there the row grew, ending with her wresting from him a bitter promise not to speak of her relationship with Tommy ever again, to her or to anyone else. They had parted acrimoniously and had not seen each other since.

  Nor had she seen Simon. Nor had she wanted to. Those few horrifying moments in Nanrunnel had exposed her to herself in an unforgiving light that she could no longer ignore, and for the month that followed she'd had to examine and admit to the lie she'd been living for the last two and a half years. The lover of one man, bound in a thousand different ways to another. And yet bound forever to Tommy as well in ways she could never allow him to know.

  She didn't know where to begin to undo the damage she had done to herself and to others. So she had stayed in Paddington, working as an apprentice photographer for a Mayfair studio, spending a long weekend in Wales and another in Brighton. And she had waited for her life to take on a semblance of peace. It had not done so.

  So she had come on this visit to Chelsea, not exactly knowing what she could accomplish, only knowing that the longer she stayed away, the more difficult a reconciliation with her father would be. What she wanted from Simon, she could not have said.

  Through the mist, she saw the kitchen lights come on. Her father passed the window. He went to the stove, then to the table where he disappeared from her view. She followed the flagstone path across the garden and descended the stairs.

  Alaska met her at the door as if, with that preternatural sensitivity inherent to felines, he'd known she'd be arriving. He twitched one ear and began a stately crisscrossing through her legs, his tail waving majestically.

  'Where's Peach?' she asked the cat as she rubbed his head. His back arched appreciatively. He began to purr.

  Footsteps came out of the kitchen into the foyer. 'Deb!'

  She straightened. 'Hello, Dad.'

  She saw him looking for signs that she'd come home -a suitcase, a carton, an easily movable item like a lamp. But he said nothing other than, 'Had your dinner, girl?' and returned to the kitchen where the rich smell of roasting meat was scenting the air.

  She followed him. 'Yes. At the flat.' She saw that he was working at the table, that he'd lined up four pairs of shoes to be polished. She noted the heaviness of their construction, necessary so that the crosspiece of his brace could fit through the left heel. For some reason, the sight effected a blackness in her. She looked away. 'How's work?' Cotter asked her.

  'Fine. I've been using my old cameras, the Nikon and the Hasselblad. They're working for me well. They make me rely on myself more, on knowledge and technique. I find I like that.'

  Cotter nodded, applied two fingertips of polish to the top of a shoe. He was nobody's fool. 'It's forgotten, Deb,' he answered. 'All of it, girl. You do what's best for you.'

  She felt a rush of gratitude. She looked round the room at the white brick walls, the old stove with three covered pots sitting on it, the worn worktops, the glass-fronted cabinets, the uneven tile floor. A small basket near the stove legs sat empty.

  'Where's Peach?' she asked.

  'Mr St James's taken 'er out for walk.' Cotter gave a glance to the wall clock. 'Absent-minded, 'e is. Dinner's been ready these last fifteen minutes.'

  'Where's he gone?'

  'The Embankment, I expect.'

  'Shall I fetch him?'

  His reply was perfectly noncommittal. 'If you fancy a walk. If you don't, it's fine. Dinner'll keep a bit.'

  She said, 'I'll see if I can find him.' She went back to the hallway but turned at the kitchen door. Her father was giving his complete attention to the shoes. 'I've not come home, Dad. You know that, don't you?'

  'I know what I know,' was Cotter's answer as she left the house.

  The mist was encircling each street-lamp with an amber corona, and a breeze was beginning to blow off the Thames. Deborah turned up the collar of her coat as she walked. Inside houses, people were sitting down to their evening meals while at the King's Head and Eight Bells at the corner of Cheyne Row others gathered at the bar for conversation and refreshment. Deborah smiled fondly when she saw this latter group. She knew most of them by name. They'd been nightly patrons of the pub for years. The sight of them filled her with unaccountable nostalgia which she dismissed as nonsensical and pushed on to Cheyne Walk.

  Traffic was light. She crossed quickly to the river and saw him some distance away, elbows resting on the embankment wall, studying the charming whimsicality of Albert Bridge. In the summers of her childhood they had frequently wandered across it to Battersea Park. She wondered if he remembered that. What a gawky little companion she'd been to him then. How patient and kind his friendship had been in return.

  She stopped for a moment to observe him unnoticed. He scanned the bridge. A smile played on his lips. And all the while at his feet Peach sat placidly chewing on her lead. As Deborah watched the two of them, Peach caught sight of her and began pulling away from St James. She turned a quick circle, got tangled in the lead, fell in a heap, and gave a happy yelp.

  Distracted from his admiration of one of London's most capricious structures, St James looked down at the little dachshund and then back up as if to locate the cause of her desire for escape. When he saw Deborah, he released his grip on the lead and let the dog run to her, which Peach did, ears flopping wildly, rear legs nearly overtaking the rest of her body. She was a frenzy of joy.
She threw herself upon Deborah, barking ecstatically, wagging her tail.

  Deborah laughed, hugged the dog, allowed herself to be licked on the nose. She thought about how it was so simple with animals. They gave their hearts without question or fear. They had no expectations. They were so easy to love. If people could only be like that, no-one would ever be hurt, she thought. No-one would ever need to learn how to forgive.

  St James watched her walk towards him in the light of the embankment lamps with Peach dancing along at her side. She carried no umbrella against the mist that was creating a net of bright beads on her hair. Her only protection was a lamb's wool coat, its collar turned up so that it framed her face like an Elizabethan ruff. She looked lovely, like someone out of a sixteenth-century portrait. But there was a change to her face, something that hadn't been there six weeks ago, something aching and adult.

  'Your dinner's ready,' she said when she reached him. 'You're out late for a walk, aren't you?' She joined him at the wall. It felt like a commonplace sort of meeting, as if nothing had happened between them, as if in the last month she hadn't faded in and out of his life without greeting or farewell.

  'I wasn't thinking of the time. Sidney told me she went with you to Wales.'

  ‘We had a lovely weekend on the coast.'

  He nodded. He had been watching a family of swans on the water and would have pointed them out to her - their presence at this section of the river was certainly unusual - but he did not do so. Her manner was too distant.

  Apparently, however, she saw the birds herself, caught in silhouette in the lights that sparkled from the opposite bank. 'I've never seen swans in this part of the river before,' she said. 'And at night. D'you suppose they're all right?'

  There were five of them - two adults and three nearly grown cygnets - floating peacefully near the piers of Albert Bridge.

  'They're all right,' he said and saw how the birds gave him a small opening to speak. 'I was sorry you broke the swan that day in Paddington.'

  'I can't come home,' she said in reply. 'I need to make peace with you somehow. Perhaps take a step towards being friends again some day. But I can't come home.'

  This was the difference then. She was maintaining that kind of careful emotion-sparing distance that people develop to protect themselves when things come to an end between them. It reminded him of himself three years ago, when she had come to say goodbye and he had listened, too afraid to speak lest saying one word might cause the floodgates to open and everything he felt to spill forth in a humiliating wave of entreaty that both time and circumstance would have forced her to deny. They had come full circle, it seemed, to goodbye again. How simple just to say it and get on with living.

  He looked from her face to her hand resting on the embankment wall. It was bare of Lynley's ring. He lightly touched the finger that had worn it. She didn't pull away, and it was that absence of movement which prompted him to speak.

  'Don't leave me again, Deborah.'

  He saw that she hadn't expected a response of that kind. She'd come without a line of defence. He pressed the advantage.

  'You were seventeen. I was twenty-eight. Can you try to understand what it was like for me then? I'd cut myself off from caring about anyone for years. And all of a sudden I was caring for you. Wanting you. Yet all the time believing that if we made love—'

  She spoke quickly, lightly. 'All that's passed, isn't it? It doesn't matter really. It's much better forgotten.'

  'I told myself that I couldn't make love to you, Deborah. I manufactured all sorts of mad reasons why. Duty to your father. A betrayal of his trust. The destruction of our friendship - yours and mine. Our souls couldn't bond together if we became lovers, and I wanted a soulmate, so we couldn't make love. I kept repeating your age over and over. How could I live with myself if I took a seventeen-year-old girl to bed?'

  'What does it matter now? We're beyond that. After all that's happened, what does it matter that we didn't make love three years ago?' Her questions weren't so much cold as they were cautious, as if whatever careful reasoning she'd gone through in her decision to leave him were under attack.

  'Because if you're going to make this leaving of yours a permanent arrangement, then at least you'll leave this time knowing the truth. I let you go because I wanted peace. I wanted you out of the house. I reasoned that if you were gone I'd stop feeling torn. I'd stop wanting you. I'd stop feeling guilty for wanting you. I'd get the whole issue of sex driven out of my mind. You'd been gone less than a week when I saw the truth of the matter.'

  'It doesn't—'

  He persisted. 'I'd thought I could exist quite nicely without you, and my own hypocrisy slapped me right in the face. I wanted you back. I wanted you home. So I wrote to you.'

  As he was speaking, she'd kept her attention on the river, but now she turned to him. He didn't wait for her to ask the question.

  'I didn't post the letters.'

  'Why?'

  And now he had come to it. So easy to sit alone in the study and rehearse for a month all the things he had needed to say to her for years. But now that he had the opportunity to say them he found himself faltering all over again and he wondered why it had always been so frightening that she should know the truth. He drew in air like resolution.

  'For the same reason I wouldn't make love to you. I was afraid. I knew that you could have any man in the world.' 'Any man?'

  'All right. You could have Tommy. Given that choice, how could I expect that you might want me?'

  'You?'

  'A cripple.'

  'So there it is, isn't it? We end up at cripple no matter where we begin.'

  'We do. Because it's a fact of who I am and we can't ignore it. I've spent the last three years considering all the things I could never do at your side, things that any other man - Tommy - could do with ease.'

  'What's the point of that? Why keep torturing yourself?'

  'Because I had to work through it. It had to stop mattering so much that I couldn't even hold you if I were unattached to this cursed brace. It had to stop mattering so much that I'm crippled. And that's what you need to know before you leave me. That it doesn't matter any longer. Crippled or not. Half a man. Three-quarters. It doesn't matter. I want you.' And then he added unfairly but without a regret since there are no rules that govern affairs of the heart, 'Once and for life.'

  It was done. In whatever fashion she would judge them, the words had been said. Three years too late, but said all the same. And, even if she chose to leave him now, at least she chose knowing the worst he was and the best. He could live with that.

  'What do you want of me?' she asked.

  'You know the answer to that.'

  Peach moved restlessly at their feet. Someone shouted from the patch of green across Cheyne Walk. Deborah watched the river. He followed the direction of her gaze to see that the swans had cleared the final piers of the bridge. They were floating unchanged as they had done before, as they always would do, seeking the safety of Battersea.

  'Deborah,' he said.

  The birds gave her the answer. 'Like the swans, Simon?'

  It was more than enough. 'My love, like the swans.'

  THE END