A Traitor to Memory

Richard, on the other hand, was electricity. She'd liked matching wits and battling wills with him. She'd found that appealing and sexy, despite the enormous gap in their ages. Arguing with a man was such an aphrodisiac. And so few men in Jill's life were actually willing to argue. Especially English men, who generally decomposed into passive-aggression at the first sign of a row.

Arguing, however, was not what Richard had in mind at the moment: arguing about the name of their daughter, the location of the freehold they had yet to purchase, the choice of wallpaper once that freehold was theirs, or the size and the date of their future wedding. All those had been subjects of past rows between them, but she could see he hadn't the heart for a heated discussion now.

His colourless face was an advertisement for what he'd undergone in the past few hours, and despite the fact that his clinging to the idea of Cara was rather more maddening than she'd anticipated it might be when he first suggested the name five months ago, Jill wanted to appear sympathetic to his recent experiences. No matter that she felt like saying, “What on earth's wrong? For God's sake, Richard, the beastly woman walked out on you nearly twenty years ago.” She knew the wisdom of saying instead, “Was it bad, darling? Are you quite all right?” in the gentlest of tones.

Richard went to the sofa and sat, his scoliosis looking worse for the dejection that drooped his shoulders. He said, “I couldn't tell them.”

She frowned. Couldn't tell them …? “What, darling?”

“Eugenie. I couldn't tell them if the woman was actually Eugenie.”

“Oh.” In a small voice. Then, “She'd changed that much? Well, I suppose it's not that odd, is it, Richard? So long since you've seen her. And perhaps she's had a rough time …”

He shook his head. He dug two fingers into his eyebrows and rubbed. “It isn't that, although I couldn't have told them even if it was.”

“Then what?”

“She was hit quite badly. They wouldn't say exactly what happened, even if they knew. But she looked as if a lorry had run over her. She was … She was mangled, Jill.”

“My God.” Jill struggled into a sitting position. She put a supportive hand on his knee. This was something to go all grey in the face about. “Richard, I'm so terribly sorry. What an ordeal for you.”

“They showed me a Polaroid first, which was good of them. But when I couldn't identify her from that, they showed me her body. They asked if there were distinguishing marks somewhere on her that might identify her. But I couldn't remember.” His voice was dull, like an old copper coin. “All I could tell them was the name of her dentist twenty years ago and think of that, Jill. I could remember the name of her dentist but not if she had a birthmark somewhere that might tell the police that she is—that she was—Eugenie, my wife.”

Former wife, Jill wanted to add. Deserting wife. Wife who selfishly left behind a child whom you raised to adulthood alone. Alone, Richard. Let's not forget that.

“But I could remember the name of her bloody dentist,” he was saying. “And only because he's mine as well.”

“What will they do?”

“Use the x-rays to make sure it's Eugenie.”

“What do you think?”

He looked up. He seemed so tired. With an unaccustomed sense of guilt, Jill thought of how little sleep he was managing to get on her sofa and how kind and solicitous it was of him to stay the nights with her now when her time was drawing near. Since Richard had already had two children—although only one of them was actually still alive—Jill hadn't honestly expected him to be as lovingly concerned for her welfare as he'd been during most of the pregnancy. But from the moment her stomach had started to swell and her breasts had begun to grow heavier, he'd treated her with a tenderness she'd found rather poignant. It served to open her heart to him and to bind them more closely together. This unit they were forming was something she warmed to. It was what she'd longed for and dreamed of having and despaired of finding among men her own age.

“What I think,” Richard said in answer to her question, “is that the likelihood of Eugenie's having had the same dentist since our marriage ended—”

Since she deserted you, Jill corrected him silently.

“—is fairly remote.”

“I still don't understand how they connected you with her. And how they tracked you down.”

Richard stirred on the sofa. In front of him on the large plump ottoman that served as a coffee table, he fingered the latest copy of Radio Times. Its cover featured a toothy American actress who'd agreed to simulate what would undoubtedly be a wildly imperfect English accent so she could play the part of Jane Eyre in yet another resurrection of that eponymous and utterly implausible Victorian melodrama. Jane Eyre indeed, Jill thought with a scoff, she who fostered within the soft brains of more than one hundred years of mentally pliable female readers the nonsensical belief that a man with a past as dark as licorice could be elevated by the love of a decent woman. What utter nonsense.