A Traitor to Memory

“Is he really?”


“She says Hillier wanted to make sure she knew. Although, she says, he complimented her first. On the case. He complimented both of you.”

“Yes. Well, that sounds like Hillier. Never say ‘well done’ without pulling the rug out just in case you're feeling cocky.”

“She'd like her rank back. But, of course, you know that.”

“And I'd like the power to give it to her.” He picked up the book she'd been reading. He turned it over and examined its title. A Lesson Before Dying. How apt, he thought.

She said, “I found it among your novels in the library. I've not got far, I'm afraid. I dropped off to sleep. Lord. Why have I become so exhausted? If this goes on all nine months, by the end of the pregnancy I'll be sleeping twenty hours a day. And the rest of the time I'll spend being sick. It's supposed to be more romantic than this. At least, that's what I was always led to believe.”

“I've told Deborah.” He explained why he'd gone to Chelsea in the first place, adding, “She already knew, as things turned out.”

“Did she really?”

“Yes. Well, obviously, she knows the signs. She's very pleased, Helen. You were right to want to share the news with her. She was only waiting for you to tell her.”

Helen searched his face then, perhaps hearing something in his tone that seemed misplaced, given the situation. And something was there. He could hear it himself. But what it was had nothing to do with Helen and even less to do with the future Lynley intended to share with her.

She said, “And you, Tommy? Are you pleased? Oh, you've said that you are, but what else can you say? Husband, gentleman, and a party to the process, you can hardly go tearing from the room with your head in your hands. But I've had the feeling that something's gone badly wrong between us lately. I didn't have that feeling before we made the baby, so it's seemed to me that perhaps you aren't as ready as you thought you were.”

“No,” he said. “Everything's right, Helen. And I am pleased. More than I can say.”

“I suppose we could have done with a longer period of adjustment together all the same,” she said.

Lynley thought of what Deborah had said to him, about the source of happiness coming from what's given. “We have the rest of our lives to adjust,” he told his wife. “If we don't seize the moment, the moment's gone.”

He set the novel on her bedside table then. He bent and kissed her forehead. He said, “I love you, darling,” and she pulled him down to her mouth and parted her lips against his. She murmured, “Talking of seizing the moment …” and she returned his kiss in a way, he realised, that connected them as they hadn't been connected since she'd first told him she was pregnant.

He felt a stirring for her then, that mixture of lust and love that always left him at once both weak and resolute, determined to be her master and at the same time completely within her power. He laid a trail of kisses down her neck to her shoulders, and he felt her shiver as he eased the straps of her nightgown gently down her arms. As he cupped her bare breasts and bent to them, her fingers went to his tie and unknotted it and began to work on the buttons of his shirt.

He looked up at her then, passion suddenly tempered by concern. “What about the baby?” he asked. “Is it safe?”

She smiled and drew him into her arms. “The baby, darling Tommy, will be fine.”





29





WINSTON NKATA CAME out of the bathroom and found his mother seated beneath a standard lamp whose shade had been removed to give her better light in which to work. What she was working on was her tatting. She'd taken a class in this form of lace-making with a group of ladies from her church, and she was determined to perfect the art. Nkata didn't know why. When he'd asked her the reason she'd begun messing about with cotton reels, shuttles, and knots, she said, “Keeps my hands busy, Jewel. And just 'cause something's not done much any longer doesn't make it worth chucking out.”

Nkata thought it actually had to do with his father. Benjamin Nkata snored so ferociously that it was impossible for anyone to sleep in the same room with him unless they managed to drop off first and lie like the dead once they got there. If Alice Nkata was up past her usual retiring time of ten forty-five, it stood to reason that she was practising her lacework in lieu of suffocating her snorting and bellowing husband in sheer insomniac frustration.

Nkata could tell that was the case this night. The moment he stepped from the bathroom, he was greeted not only with the sight of his mother at her lace but also with the sound of his father at his dreams. It sounded as if bears were being baited inside his parents' bedroom.

Alice Nkata looked up from her work, over the top of her half-moon glasses. She was wearing her ancient yellow chenille dressing gown, and her son frowned with displeasure when he saw this.