A Traitor to Memory

She smiled. “I couldn't help knowing. After … what is it, now? seven pregnancies? … I've become pretty well-attuned to the signs. I never got far in them—the pregnancies, I mean … well, you know that—but far enough to feel that I'd never get over being sick.”


Lynley swallowed. Deborah went back into the study. He followed her, found the glass of whisky where he'd left it, and took a momentary refuge in its depths. He said when he could, “We know how you want … And how you've tried … You and Simon …”

“Tommy,” she said firmly, “I'm pleased for you. You mustn't ever think that my situation—Simon's and mine … well, no … mine, really—would ever keep me from feeling happiness for yours. I know what this means to you both, and the fact that I'm not able to carry a baby … Well, it's painful, yes. Of course it's painful. But I don't want the rest of the world to wallow round in my grief. And I surely don't want to put anyone else in my situation just for the company.”

She knelt among her photographs. She seemed to have dismissed the subject, but Lynley could not because, as far as he was concerned, they had not yet come to the real topic. He went to sit opposite her, in the leather chair St. James used when he was in the room. He said, “Deb,” and when she looked up, “There's something else.”

Her green eyes darkened. “What else?”

“Santa Barbara.”

“Santa Barbara?”

“That summer when you were eighteen, when you were at school at the institute. That year when I made those four trips to see you: October, January, May, and July. July, especially, when we drove the coastal road into Oregon.”

She said nothing, but her face blanched, so he knew that she understood where he was heading. Even as he headed there, he wished that something would happen to stop him so he wouldn't have to admit to her what he could hardly bear to face himself.

“You said it was the car on that trip,” he told her. “You weren't used to so much driving. Or perhaps it was the food, you said. Or the change in climate. Or the heat when it was hot outside or the cool when it was cold indoors. You weren't used to being in and out of air-conditioning so much, and aren't Americans addicted to their air conditioners? I listened to every excuse you made, and I chose to believe you. But all the time …” He didn't wish to say it, would have given anything to avoid it. But at the last moment he forced himself to admit what he'd long pushed from his mind. “I knew.”

She lowered her gaze. He saw her reach out for the scissors and bubble-wrap, pulling one of her pictures towards her. She did nothing with it.

“After that trip, I waited for you to tell me,” he said. “What I thought was that when you told me, we'd decide together what we wanted to do. We're in love, so we'll marry, I told myself. As soon as Deb admits that she's pregnant.”

“Tommy …”

“Let me go on. This has been years in the making, and now we're here, I have to see it through.”

“Tommy, you can't—”

“I always knew. I think I knew the night that it happened. That night in Montecito.”

She said nothing.

He said, “Deborah. Please tell me.”

“It's no longer important.”

“It is important to me.”

“Not after all this time.”

“Yes. After all this time. Because I did nothing. Don't you see? I knew, but I did nothing. I just left you to face it alone, whatever ‘it’ was going to be. You were the woman I loved, the woman I wanted, and I ignored what was happening because …” He became aware that still she wasn't looking at him, her face fully hidden by the angle of her head and the way her hair fell round her shoulders. But he didn't stop speaking because he finally understood what had motivated him then, what was indeed the source of his shame. “Because I couldn't sort out how to work it,” he said. “Because I hadn't planned it to happen like that and God help anything that stood in the way of how I planned my life to work out. And as long as you said nothing about it, I could let the entire situation slide, let everything slide, let my whole damned life slide right on by without the least inconvenience to me. Ultimately, I could even pretend that there was no baby. I could tell myself that surely if there was, you'd have said something. And when you didn't, I allowed myself to believe I'd been mistaken. When all the time I knew at heart that I hadn't. So I said nothing throughout July. In August. September. And whatever you faced when you finally made your decision to act, you faced alone.”

“It was my responsibility.”

“It was ours. Our child. Our responsibility. But I left you there. And I'm sorry.”

“There's no need to be.”

“There is. Because when you and Simon married, when you lost all those babies, what I had to think was that if you'd had that first child, ours—”

“Tommy, no!” She raised her head.

“—then none of this would have happened to you.”

“That's not how it was,” she said. “Believe me. That's not how it is. You've no need to punish yourself over this. You've no obligation to me.”