A Suitable Vengeance

“Tommy was my forgetting at first. When he came to visit, we laughed. We talked. The first time he made an excuse why he’d come. But not after that. And he never pushed me, Simon. He never once made demands. I didn’t talk about you, but I think somehow he knew and was determined to wait until I was ready to open my heart to him. So he wrote, he phoned, he laid a real foundation. And when he took me to bed, I wanted to be there. I’d finally let you go.”


“Deborah, please. It’s all right. I understand.” He stopped looking at her. Turning his head was the only movement he seemed capable of making. He stared at the items he’d placed on the bed.

“You’d rejected me. I was angry. I was hurt. I got over you in the end, but for some reason I still believed that I had to show you how things were now. I had to make you see that if you didn’t want me, someone else did. So I put that photograph on the wall in my flat. Tommy didn’t want me to. He asked me not to. But I pointed out the composition, the colour, the texture of the curtains and the blankets, the shapes of clouds in the sky. It’s just a photograph, I said, are you embarrassed about what it implies about us?”

For a moment, she said nothing more. St. James thought she was finished, and he looked up to see that her hand was at her throat, her fingers pressing along her collarbone. “What a terrible lie to tell Tommy. I just wanted to hurt you. As deeply as I could.”

“God knows I deserved it. I hurt you as well.”

“No. There’s no excusing a need for retaliation like that. It’s adolescent. Disgusting. It says things about me that make me ill. I’m so sorry. Truly.”

It’s nothing. Really. Do forget it, little bird. He couldn’t bring himself to say it. He couldn’t say anything. He couldn’t bear the thought that, through his own cowardice, he had driven her to Lynley. It was more than he could suffer. He despised himself. As he watched, seeking words that he didn’t know, feeling wrenched by emotions he couldn’t bear to possess, she placed the photographs on the edge of the bed, pressing their corners down to keep them from curling.

“Do you love him?” The question sounded as if he had flung it.

She had gone to the door, but she turned to answer. “He’s everything to me,” she said. “Loyalty, devotion, affection, warmth. He’s given me things—”

“Do you love him?” The question was shaken this time. “At least can you say that you love him, Deborah?”

For a moment he thought she might leave without answering. But he saw Lynley’s power sweep right through her body. Her chin raised, her shoulders straightened, her eyes shone with tears. He heard the answer before she gave it. “I love him. Yes. I love him. I do.” And then she was gone.



He lay in bed and stared at the shifting patterns of black shadow and dim light on the ceiling. The night was warm, so his bedroom window was open, the curtains were undrawn, and he could hear, occasionally, cars rumbling along Cheyne Walk just a block away, the noise of their engines amplified by the open expanse of the river. His body should have been tired—demanding sleep—but instead it ached, muscles excruciatingly tense in his neck and shoulders, hands and arms feeling strung with external nerves, chest sore and constricted as if pressed by a weight. His mind was a maelstrom in which were swirling fragments of former conversations, half-formed hazy fantasies, things needing to be said.

He tried to think of anything other than Deborah. A fibre analysis he needed to complete, a deposition he was due to give in two weeks, a conference at which he was to present a paper, a seminar in Glasgow he had been asked to teach. He tried to be what he had been during her absence, the cool scientist meeting commitments and facing responsibilities, but instead he saw the man he really was, the coward who filled his life with denial and distraction to avoid running the risk of vulnerability.

His entire life was a lie, founded on noble aphorisms in which he knew he did not believe. Let her go. Let her find her own way. Let her have a world of expanding horizons filled with people who could give her riches far beyond the paucity of what he had to offer. Let her find a kindred soul with whom she could share herself, one unburdened by the weaknesses that plagued his own life. But even this listing of the specious regulations that had governed his behaviour still left him safe from having to confront the final truth.