A Suitable Vengeance

“You were perfect. You were my standard. I wanted to be like you. When I found I couldn’t, I just gave it up. If I couldn’t be you, I didn’t want to be anything.”


Peter’s words sounded the sure ring of finality. They sounded not only like the end of an interview that had barely begun, but also like the end of any possibility to put things right between them. Lynley sought something—words, images, a common experience—that would allow him to reach back through those fifteen years and touch the little boy he had abandoned at Howenstow. But he could find nothing. There was no way to go back and no way to make amends.

He felt leaden. He reached in his jacket pocket, brought out his cigarette case and lighter, and laid them on the table. The case had been his father’s, and the elaborately engraved A on the cover had worn through time. Portions of it had disappeared altogether, but the case was familiar to him, dear to him, nicked and dented with age though it was. He wouldn’t have considered replacing it with another. Staring at it—small rectangular symbol of everything he had run from, all the areas of his life he had chosen to deny, the welter of emotions he had refused to face—he found the words.

“It was knowing that she was sleeping with Roderick while Father was alive. I couldn’t stand that, Peter. It didn’t matter to me that they’d fallen in love, that they hadn’t set out to but that it just happened between them. It didn’t matter that Roderick had every intention of marrying her when she was free. It didn’t matter that she still loved Father—and I knew she loved him, because I saw how she acted with him even after she’d begun the affair with Roderick. Still, I didn’t understand, and I couldn’t abide my own blind ignorance. How could she love them both? How could she be devoted to one—take care of him, bathe him, read to him, see to him hour after hour and day after day, feed him, sit with him…all of that—and still sleep with the other? And how could Roderick go into Father’s bedroom—talk to him about his condition—and all the time know that he would be having Mother directly afterwards? I couldn’t understand it. I didn’t see how it was possible. I wanted life simple and it wasn’t. They’re savages, I thought. They have no sense of propriety. They don’t know how to behave. They have to be taught. I’ll teach them. I’ll show them. I’ll punish them.” Lynley took a cigarette and slid the case across the table to his brother. “My leaving Howenstow, my coming back so seldom, had nothing to do with you, Peter. You just turned out to be the victim of my need to avenge something which Father probably never even knew was happening. For what it’s worth—God knows it’s little enough—I’m sorry.”

Peter took a cigarette. But he held it in his fingers, unlit, as if to light it would be taking a step further than he wished to go.

“I wanted you to be there, but you weren’t,” he said. “No one would tell me when you’d be home again. I thought it was a secret for some reason. Then I finally realised that no one would tell me because no one knew. So I stopped asking. Then after a while, I stopped caring. When you did come home, it was easier to hate you so that when you left again—as you always did—it wouldn’t really matter.”

“You didn’t know about Mother and Trenarrow?”

“Not for a long time.”

“How did you find out?”

Peter lit his cigarette. “Parents’ Day at school. Both of them came. Some blokes told me then. ‘That chap Trenarrow’s been boffing your mum, Pete. You too daft to know it?’” He shrugged. “I pretended to be cool. I pretended I knew. I kept thinking they’d get married. But they never did.”

“I made certain of that. I wanted them to suffer.”

“You didn’t have that sort of control over them.”

“I did. I do. I knew where Mother’s loyalties lay. I used them to hurt her.”

Peter asked for no further explanation. He put his cigarette into the ashtray and watched its fragile plume of smoke rise. Lynley chose his next words carefully, feeling his way in a land that should have been old and familiar but was instead quite foreign.

“Perhaps we can make our way through this together. Not try to go back, of course. That’s impossible. But try to go on.”

“As restitution on your part?” Peter shook his head. “You don’t have to make anything up to me, Tommy. Oh, I know you think you do. But I chose my own path. I’m not your responsibility.” And then, as if he thought his final statement sounded petulant, he finished with, “Really.”

“None of this has anything to do with responsibility. I want to help. You’re my brother. I love you.”