She said, I don’t want you to pay, Thomas.
He said, I know. But I hope you can cope with the fact that I intend to do so.
She started the car. They reentered the road. They drove for some minutes in silence with the countryside passing and evening dropping round them like a shifting veil.
He finally said to her the only thing worth saying, the only request he had that she might grant at this point. He’d asked once and been denied, but it seemed to him that she might reconsider although he couldn’t have explained why. They were jouncing across the car park of the Salthouse Inn where they’d begun their day when he spoke a final time.
“Will you call me Tommy?” he asked her again.
“I don’t think I can,” she replied.
HE WASN’T PARTICULARLY HUNGRY, but he knew he had to eat. To eat was to live, and it appeared to him that he was doomed to go on living, at least for now. After he watched Daidre drive off, he went inside the Salthouse Inn, and he decided that he could face a bar meal but not the restaurant.
He ducked inside the low doorway and found that Barbara Havers had possessed the same idea. She was in the otherwise abandoned inglenook, while the rest of the bar’s patrons crowded on stools round the few scarred tables and at the bar itself, behind which Brian was pouring pints.
Lynley went to join her, drawing out the stool opposite the banquette that she herself occupied. She looked up from her food. Shepherd’s pie, he saw. The obligatory sides of boiled carrots, boiled cauliflower, boiled broccoli, tinned peas, and chips. She’d used ketchup on the lot of it, save the carrots and the peas, which she’d moved to one side altogether.
“Didn’t your mum insist you eat all your veg?” he asked her.
“That’s the beauty of adulthood,” she replied, shoving some of the mash and minced beef onto her fork, “one may ignore certain foods altogether.” She chewed thoughtfully and observed him. “Well?” she asked.
He told her. As he did so, he realised that, without anticipating or wanting it, he’d passed into another stage of the journey he was on. One week ago, he’d not have spoken at all. Or if he’d done so, it would have been to make a remark that served to abbreviate the conversation as much as possible.
He finished with, “I couldn’t actually make her see that this sort of thing…the past, her family, or at least the people who gave birth to her…It’s not important, really.”
“’Course not,” Havers said genially. “Abso-bloody-lutely not. Not in a bottle. Not on a plate. And specially not to someone who never lived it, mate.”
“Havers, we’ve all got something in our pasts.”
“Hmm. Right.” She forked up some broccoli doused in ketchup, carefully removing a single pea that had got mixed in. She said, “Except not all of us have silver serving dishes in ours, if you know what I mean. And what’s that big thing you lot have sitting in the centre of your dining room tables? You know what I mean. All silver with animals hopping about it. Or vines and grapes or whatever. You know.”
“Epergne,” he told her. “It’s called an epergne. But you can’t possibly be thinking that something as meaningless as a piece of silver?”
“Not the silver. The word. See? You knew what to call it. D’you think she knows? How much of the rest of the world ever knows?”
“That’s hardly the point.”
“That’s just the point. There’re places, sir, that the hoi polloi aren’t going to, and your dinner table is one of them.”
“You’ve eaten at my dinner table yourself.”
“I’m the exception. You lot find my ignorance charming. She can’t help it, you think. Consider where she came from, you tell people. Sort of like saying, ‘Poor thing, she’s American. She doesn’t know any better.’”
“Havers, hang on. I’ve never once thought?”