A Traitor to Memory

Then Eugenie's: “We'll talk. There's so much to say.”


And then, unaccountably, his own Connie's murmur coming to him from the grave itself, Connie, who'd known him as no one else had: “You're a match for any man alive, Ted Wiley.”

Why now? he wondered. Why Connie now?

But there was no answer, only the question. And there was also what had to be faced and dealt with across the street.



As Lynley began going through the letters he'd pulled from the papier-maché holder, Barbara Havers went up the narrowest staircase she'd ever seen to the first floor of the tiny house. There, two very small bedrooms and an antiquated bathroom opened off a landing that wasn't much larger than a drawing pin's head. Both bedrooms continued the theme of monastic simplicity bordering on shabbiness that began in the sitting room below. The first room contained three pieces of furniture: a single bed covered by a plain counterpane, a chest of drawers, and a bedside table on which stood yet another tasseled lamp. The second bedroom had been turned into a sewing room and contained, aside from the answer machine, the only remotely modern appliance in the entire building: an advanced sewing machine next to which lay a considerable pile of tiny garments. Barbara fingered through these and saw that they were dolls' clothes, elaborately designed and more elaborately fashioned with everything from beadwork to faux fur. There were no dolls anywhere in the sewing room nor were there any in the bedroom next door.

There Barbara went first to a chest of drawers, where she found a humble paucity of clothing, even by her own indifferent standards of dress: threadbare knickers, equally worn brassieres, a few jumpers, a limp collection of tights. There was neither a fitted clothes cupboard nor a wardrobe in the room, so the few skirts, trousers, and dresses that the woman had owned were folded carefully into the chest of drawers as well.

Among the trousers and the skirts, at the back of the drawer, Barbara saw that a bundle of letters had been tucked. She fished these out, removed the rubber band that held them together, laid them out across the single bed, and saw that they had all been written in the same hand. She blinked at this hand. She took a moment to assimilate the fact that she recognised the black, decisive scrawl.

The envelopes bore postmarks as old as seventeen years. The most recent, she saw, had been sent just over one decade ago. She reached for this one and slid the contents out.

He called her “Eugenie my darling.” He wrote that he didn't know where to begin. He said those things that men always say when they claim to have reached the decision that they no doubt intended to reach all along: She must never doubt that he loved her more than life itself; she must know, remember, and hold to her heart the fact that the hours they had spent together had made him feel alive—truly and wonderfully alive, my darling—for the first time in years; indeed, the feeling of her skin beneath his fingers had been like liquid silk shot through with lightning….

Barbara rolled her eyes at the purple phrasing. She lowered the letter and gave herself a moment to react to it and, more important, to what it implied. Read more or not, Barb? she asked herself. Read more and she felt something akin to unclean. Not and she felt unprofessional.

She went back to the letter. He'd gone home, she read, intending to tell his wife everything. He'd screwed his courage to the sticking place—Barbara winced at the pilfering from Shakespeare—and held the image of Eugenie in his mind to give him the strength to deal a mortal blow to a perfectly good and decent woman. But he'd found her unwell, Eugenie darling, unwell in a manner that he couldn't explain in a mere letter, but that he would explain, would lay before her in all its desperate detail, when next they met. This didn't mean they would not be together at the end of the day, darling Eugenie. This didn't mean they had no future. Above all, this didn't mean everything that had passed between them counted for nothing, because that was not the case.

He'd concluded with, “Wait for me. I beg you. I'm coming to you, darling.” And he'd signed it with the scrawl that Barbara had seen on notes, on Christmas cards, on departmental letters, and on memos for years.

At least she now knew what had seemed off at the Webberly party, she thought as she stuffed the letter back into its envelope. All that jolly-good-fellowing to celebrate twenty-five years of sham.

“Havers?” Lynley was in the doorway, spectacles sliding down his nose and a greeting card in his hand. “Here's something that fits in with one of the phone messages. What've you found?”

“Swap,” she said, and handed over her envelope in exchange for what he was carrying.