A Traitor to Memory

“Here's my guess,” Robson said. “Tell me how it matches to reality. I did a wardrobe for her. Cherry wood, it was. First rate. Beautiful. Not the sort of thing you see every day. I did her a commode as well, early eighteenth century. Oak. And a washstand. Victorian. Ebony with a marble top. One of the drawer pulls is missing, but you wouldn't want to replace it because you couldn't match it and anyway leaving it without the pull actually gives it more character. The wardrobe took the longest, because you don't ever want to refinish a piece unless there is no hope for it. You just want to restore it. So it was six months before I had it the way I wanted it and no one”—he nodded at the house to indicate his housemates—“was pleased that I was working on that instead of something we could get a profit from.”


Lynley frowned at this, knowing that there were lines upon lines being written by Robson and wondering how adept he himself could be to read between them in the time they had. He said, “You had a falling-out with Mrs. Davies because of a decision she'd made. But I can't think her decision was about selling the pieces of furniture you'd done for her. Am I right?”

Robson's shoulders dropped slightly, as if he'd been hoping that Lynley wouldn't be able to confirm what he himself suspected. He'd been clutching his handkerchief, and now he looked down at it as he said, “So she didn't keep them, did she? She didn't keep any of the pieces I gave to her. She sold them all and gave the money to charity. Or she just gave the furniture itself away. But she didn't keep it. That's what you're telling me.”

“She had no antiques in her house in Henley, if that's what you're wondering,” Lynley said. “Her furniture was—” He looked for the right word to convey the manner in which Eugenie Davies' house in Friday Street had been furnished. “Spartan,” he said.

“Just like a nun's cell, I expect.” Robson's words were bitter. “That's how she punished herself. But it wasn't enough, that sort of deprivation, so she was ready to take it to the next level.”

“What would that be?” Nkata had given up writing during Robson's recitation of the antiques he'd given to Eugenie Davies. The next level, however, clearly promised more.

“Wiley,” Robson said. “The bloke from the bookshop. She'd been seeing him for several years, but she'd decided it was time to …” Robson shoved his handkerchief into his pocket and gave his attention to the listing wardrobe. To Lynley's eyes, the piece didn't look even salvageable, with its missing leg and its gaping interior that showed a large jagged hole in its back, very much as if someone had taken an axe to it. “She was going to marry him if he asked her. She said that she believed—she felt, she said, with women's bloody intuition, she said—that they were heading towards it. I told her that if a man didn't bother to make an attempt … In three years, if he didn't try to make a move on her … God, I'm not talking about rape. Not shoving her into a wall and feeling her up. But just … He hadn't even tried to get close to her. He hadn't even talked about why he hadn't tried. They just went on their picnics, took their walks, rode the bus on those stupid pensioners' days out…. And I tried to tell her that it wasn't normal. It wasn't red-blooded. So if she made it permanent with him, if she actually made herself his partner and took herself out of the sodding running …” Robson ran out of steam. His eyes became red-rimmed. “But I suppose that's what she wanted. To take up life with someone who couldn't begin to give her anything complete, who couldn't begin to give her what a man can give to a woman when she means everything to him.”

Lynley examined Robson as he spoke, saw the misery in the lines that etched their painful history on his patchy-skinned face. “When was the last time you saw Mrs. Davies?”

“A fortnight ago. Thursday.”

“Where?”

“Marlow. The Swan and Three Roses. Just outside of town.”

“And you didn't see her again? Did you speak to her?”

“On the phone twice. I was trying to … I'd reacted badly to what she'd told me about Wiley, and I knew it. I wanted to make things right between us. But it just got worse, because I still wanted to talk to her about it, about him, about what it meant that he never … never once in three years … But she didn't want to hear. She didn't want to see. ‘He's a good man, Raphael,’ she kept saying, ‘and it's time now.’”

“Time for what?”

Robson continued as if Nkata hasn't asked the question, as if he himself were a silent Cyrano who'd waited long for an opportunity to unburden himself. He said, “I didn't disagree that it was time. She'd punished herself for years. She wasn't in prison, but she may as well have been because she made her life a prison anyway. She lived one step away from solitary confinement, in complete self-denial, surrounding herself with people with whom she had nothing in common, always volunteering for the worst jobs, and all of it so that she could pay and pay and pay.”