“Lovely, aren’t they?”
Lynley looked up. Daidre Trahair stood before him, a small stemmed glass in her extended hand. She made a moue of apology as she gave a glance in its direction, saying, “I’ve only sherry for an aperitif. I think it’s been here since I got the cottage, which would be…Four years ago?” She smiled. “I’m not much of a drinker, so I don’t actually know…Does sherry go bad? I can’t tell you if this is dry or sweet, to be honest. I suspect sweet, though. It said cream on the bottle.”
“That would be sweet,” Lynley said. “Thank you.” He took the glass. “You’re not drinking?”
“I’ve a small one in the kitchen.”
“You won’t allow me to help you?” He nodded in the direction from which domestic sounds had been coming. “I’m not very good at it. Truthfully, I’m fairly wretched at it. But I’m sure I could chop something if something needs to be chopped. And measuring also. I can tell you unblushingly that I’m a genius with measuring cups and spoons.”
“That’s comforting,” she replied. “Are you capable of a salad if all the ingredients are set out on the work top and you’ve no critical decisions to make?”
“As long as I don’t have to dress it. You wouldn’t want me wielding…whatever it is one wields to dress a salad.”
“You can’t be that hopeless,” she told him with a laugh. “Surely your wife?” She stopped herself. Her expression altered, probably because his own had altered, she thought. She cocked her head ruefully. “I’m sorry, Thomas. It’s difficult not to refer to her.”
Lynley rose from his chair, the Jekyll book still in hand. “Helen would have loved a Gertrude Jekyll garden,” he said. “She used to deadhead our roses in London because, she said, it encouraged more blooms.”
“It does. She was right. Did she like to garden?”
“She liked to be in gardens. I think she liked the effect of having gardened.”
“But you don’t know for sure?”
“I don’t know for sure.” He’d never asked her. He’d have just come home from work to find her with secateurs in hand and a pail of clipped and spent roses at her feet. She’d look at him and toss her dark hair off her cheek and say something about roses, about gardens in general, and what she’d say would force him to smile. And the smile would force him to forget the world outside the brick walls of their garden, a world that needed to be forgotten and locked away so it didn’t intrude on the life he shared with her. “She couldn’t cook, by the way,” he told Daidre. “She was dreadful at it. Completely appalling.”
“Neither of you cooked, then?”
“Neither of us cooked. I could do eggs and toast, of course, and Helen was brilliant at opening tins of soup, beans, and smoked salmon although she could easily be expected to pop a tin in the microwave and possibly blow the entire electrical system in the house. We employed someone to cook for us. It was that, takeaway curry, or starvation. And one can eat only so much takeaway curry.”
“You poor things,” Daidre said. “Come along, then. I expect you can learn at least something.”
She returned to the kitchen and he followed her. From a cupboard, she took a wooden bowl?carved with primitive dancing figures round its rim?and she rustled up a cutting board and a number of, thankfully, recognisable foodstuffs meant to be combined into a salad. She set him to his task with a knife, saying, “Throw in anything. That’s the beauty of a salad. When you’ve got enough in the bowl, I’ll show you a simple dressing that won’t tax your sadly meagre talents. Any questions, then?”