A Traitor to Memory

After the trial, the tabloids had gone after her with the same rapacity that had driven their stories about Katja Wolff. Where the Wolff girl had been the reincarnation of every beast, from Mengele to Himmler, responsible in the eyes of the press for everything from the Holocaust to the Blitz, Eugenie had been the indifferent mother: she who worked outside the home, she who had employed an unskilled girl untutored in English and in the ways of the English to care for a badly disabled child. If Katja Wolff had been vilified in the press—and deservedly so, considering her crime—Eugenie had been pilloried.

She'd accepted this public scourging as her due. “I'm to blame,” she'd said. “This is the least I deserve.” She spoke with simple dignity, with neither hope nor desire of being contradicted. Indeed, she would not allow contradiction. “I just want it to end,” she'd said.

He saw her again, two years after the trial, quite by chance at Paddington Station. He was on his way to a conference in Exeter. She was coming into town, she said, for an engagement with someone she did not name.

“Just coming in?” he'd said. “You've moved house, then? To the country? That's good for your boy, I expect.”

But no, they hadn't moved to the country. She'd just moved herself, alone.

He'd said, “Oh. I'm sorry.”

She'd said, “Thank you, Inspector Webberly.”

He'd said, “Malcolm. Please, it's plain Malcolm.”

She'd said, “Plain Malcolm, then,” and her smile was infinitely sad.

He'd said impulsively and in a rush because it was mere minutes before his train left the station, “Would you give me your number, Eugenie? I'd like to check how you're doing now and then. As a friend. If that's all right with you.”

She'd written it on the newspaper he'd been carrying. She'd said, “Thank you for your kindness, Inspector.”

“Malcolm,” he'd reminded her.

Summer on the river had been twelve months later and not the first time he'd found an excuse to drive to Henley-on-Thames to check on Eugenie. She was lovely that day, quiet as always but with a sense of peace that he'd not witnessed in her before. He rowed the boat and she leaned back and rested on her side, not trailing her hand in the water in the way some women might have done, hoping for a seductive pose, but merely watching the river's surface as if its depths hid something she was waiting to see. Her face reflected brightness and shadow as they glided along beneath the trees.

He was aware in a rush that he'd fallen in love with her. But they had those twelve months of chaste friendship between them: walks round town, drives in the country, lunches at pubs, the occasional dinner and the warmth of conversation, real conversation about who Eugenie Davies had been and how she'd come to be who she was.

“I believed in God when I was young,” she told him. “But I lost God along the way to adulthood. I've been a long time without Him now, and I'd like to get Him back if I can.”

“Even after what's happened?”

“Because of what's happened. But I'm afraid He won't have me, Malcolm. My sins are too great.”

“You haven't sinned. You couldn't possibly sin.”

“You of all people can't believe that.”

But Webberly couldn't see sin in her no matter what she said about herself. He saw only perfection and—ultimately—what he himself wanted. But to speak of his feelings seemed a betrayal in every direction. He was married and the father of a child. She was fragile and vulnerable. And despite the time that had passed since her daughter's murder, he couldn't bring himself to take advantage of her grief.

So he settled on saying, “Eugenie, do you know that I'm married?”

She moved her gaze from the water to him. “I assumed that you were.”

“Why?”

“Your kindness. No woman thinking straight would be foolish enough to let someone like you get away. Would you like to tell me about your wife and family?”

“No.”

“Ah. What does that mean?”

“Marriages end sometimes.”

“Sometimes they do.”

“Yours did.”

“Yes. My marriage ended.” She moved her gaze back to the water. He continued to row, and he watched her face, feeling as if in a hundred years as a man long blind he would still be able to draw from memory every line and curve of it.

They'd brought a picnic with them, and when he saw the spot he wanted, Webberly bumped the boat into the bank. He said, “Wait. Stay there. Let me tie it up,” and as he scrambled up the slippery little slope, he lost his footing and slid into the water, where he stood humiliated with the Thames lapping coolly round his thighs. The mooring rope draped over his hand, and the river ooze seeped into his shoes.

Eugenie sat up straight, saying, “Heavens, Malcolm! Are you all right?”

“I feel a perfect fool. It never happens this way in films.”

“But this way is better,” Eugenie said. And before he could speak again, she scrambled from the boat and joined him in the water.

“The mud—” he began in protest.

“Feels exquisite,” she finished. And she began to laugh. “You've blushed to the roots of your hair. Why?”

“Because I want everything perfect,” he admitted.

She said, “Malcolm, everything is.”

He was flustered, wanting and not wanting, sure and unsure. He said nothing more. They clambered from the river onto the bank. He pulled the boat close and took from it the lunch they'd brought with them. They found a spot under a willow that they liked. It was when they sank to the ground that she spoke.