The quick change in subject, tagged logically onto her own statement, seemed to take her momentarily aback. Her lips parted briefly. Her gaze went to the wedding photograph on the tea table. She appeared to straighten her spine even further, but it may have been the result of the breath she took before she replied quite evenly, “We have no children.”
He waited to see if she would say more, relying upon the fact that his own silence had so often in the past proved more effective than the most pointed question in pressuring someone into disclosure. Moments ticked by. Outside the sitting room window, a sudden gust of wind tossed a spray of field maple leaves against the glass. They looked like a billowing, saffron cloud.
Justine said, “Will there be anything else?” and smoothed her hand along the perfect, knife-edged crease in her trousers. It was a gesture which eloquently declared her the victor, if only for an instant, in the brief battle of their wills.
He admitted defeat, standing and saying, “Not at the moment.”
She walked with him to the front door and handed him his overcoat. Her expression, he saw, was no different from what it had been when she first admitted him into the house. He wanted to marvel at the degree to which she had herself under control, but instead he found himself wondering whether it was a matter of mastering any revealing emotions or a matter of having—or experiencing—those emotions in the first place. He told himself it was to assess this latter possibility rather than to meet the challenge of cracking the composure of someone who seemed so invulnerable that he asked his final question.
“An artist from Grantchester found Elena’s body yesterday morning,” he said. “Sarah Gordon. Do you know her?”
Quickly, she bent to pick up the stem of a leaf which lay, barely discernible, on the parquet floor. She rubbed her finger along the spot where she had found it. Back and forth, three or four times as if the minuscule stem had somehow damaged the wood. When she had seen to it to her satisfaction, she stood again.
“No,” she said. She met his eyes directly. “I don’t know Sarah Gordon.” It was a bravura performance.
He nodded, opened the door, and walked out onto the drive. Round the corner of the house, an Irish setter bounded gracefully towards them, a dirty tennis ball in his mouth. He vaulted past the Bentley and hurtled onto the lawn, making a joyful racecourse of its perimeter before he leaped over a white wrought iron table and dashed across the drive to land in a happy heap at Lynley’s feet. He loosened his jaws and deposited the ball on the drive, tail wagging hopefully and silky coat rippling like soft reeds in the wind. Lynley picked up the ball and flung it beyond the cypress tree. With a yelp of delight, the dog hurtled after it. Once again, he raced round the edge of the lawn, once more he leaped over the wrought iron table, once more he landed in a heap at Lynley’s feet. Again, his eyes said, again, again.
“She always came to play with him in the late afternoon,” Justine said. “He’s waiting for her. He doesn’t know that she’s gone.”
“Adam said the dog ran with you and Elena in the morning,” Lynley said. “Did you take him yesterday when you went alone?”
“I didn’t want the trouble. He’d have wanted to head in the direction of the river. I wasn’t going that way, and I didn’t want him to fight me.”
Lynley rubbed his knuckles on the top of the setter’s head. When he stopped, the dog used his nose to flip the hand back into appropriate petting position once again. Lynley smiled.
“What’s his name?”
“She called him Townee.”
Justine didn’t allow herself to react until she reached the kitchen. And even then she wasn’t aware she was reacting until she saw that her hand—grasping the water glass—was clenched solidly round it as if she’d been suddenly afflicted by a stroke. She turned on the tap, let the water flow, held the glass beneath it.
She felt as if every argument and discussion, every moment of pleading, every second of emptiness over the last few years had somehow been both concentrated and compressed into a single statement: You and your husband have no children.
And she herself had given the detective the opening to make that observation: Love a man, have his baby.
But not here, not now, not in this house, not with this man.
With the water still running, she brought the glass to her lips and forced herself to drink. She filled the glass a second time, forced the water down again. She filled it a third time and drank again. Only then did she turn off the tap, raise her eyes from the sink, and look out the kitchen window into the rear garden where two grey wagtails bobbed up and down on the edge of the birdbath while a plump woodpigeon watched them from the sloping tile roof of the garden shed.
For a while she had harboured the secret hope that she might arouse him to such an extent that he simply lost himself—lost his control—in the desire to have her. She’d even taken to reading books in which she was alternately advised to be playful, to keep him off-guard, to become his fantasy whore, to sensitise her own body to stimulation so that she might more readily understand his, to become aware of erogenous zones, to demand expect require an orgasm, to vary positions locations times and circumstances, to be aloof, to be warm, to be honest, to be submissive. All of the reading and all of the advice left her nothing more than bewildered. It did not change her. Nor did it alter the fact that nothing—no amount of sighing, moaning, coaxing, or stimulating—kept Anthony from rising from her at the crucial moment, fumbling in the drawer, tearing open the package, and sheathing himself with a millimetre’s despicable latex protection, her punishment for having threatened, in the heat of a wretchedly futile argument, to stop taking the pills without his knowledge.
He had one child. He would not have another. He could not betray Elena again. He had walked out on her, and he would not make the implied rejection worse by having another child that Elena might see as a replacement for herself or a competitor for her father’s love. Nor would he run the risk of her thinking that he was seeking to satisfy his own needs of ego by producing a child who could hear.
They had talked about it all before they married. He had been forthright from the first, letting her know that children between them were out of the question, considering his age and his responsibilities to Elena. At the time, twenty-five years old and just three years into a career at which she was determined to be a success, the idea of having a child had been remote. Her attention had been fixed upon the world of publishing and upon her rise to significance within it. But if the passage of ten years had brought her a fine degree of professional success—thirty-five years old and publishing director of a highly respected press—it also brought her one step closer to the immutable fact of her own mortality and to the need to leave behind something that was her own creation and not the product of someone else.
Each month ticked its way through another cycle. Each egg washed away in a rush of blood. Each gasp of completion her husband experienced marked another wasting of the possibility of life.
But Elena had been pregnant.
Justine wanted to howl. She wanted to weep. She wanted to pull her lovely wedding china from the cupboard and hurl every piece of it against the wall. She wanted to overturn furniture and smash picture frames and drive her fist through the windows. But instead she lowered her eyes to the glass which she held, and she placed it with careful, decided precision into the unblemished porcelain sink.
She thought of the times she had observed Anthony watching his daughter. How that blaze of blind love had burned its way across his face. And all the while confronted with this, she had still managed a disciplined restraint, holding her tongue rather than speaking the truth and running the risk of his concluding that she did not share his love for Elena. Elena. The wild and contradictory currents of life that ran through her—the restless, fierce energy, the probing mind, the exuberant humour, the deep black anger. And always beneath everything, that impassioned need for unequivocal acceptance at continual war with her desire for revenge.
She had managed to achieve it. Justine wondered with what sort of anticipation Elena had looked forward to the moment when she would tell her father about her pregnancy, exacting a payment beyond his every expectation for the well-intentioned but nonetheless revealing crime of wanting her to be like everyone else. How Elena must have triumphed in the potential embarrassment to her father. And how she herself ought to be feeling some small degree of triumph at the idea of being in possession of a fact that would forever dispel Anthony’s illusions about his daughter. She was, after all, so decidedly glad that Elena was dead.
Justine turned from the sink and walked into the dining room and from there to the sitting room. The house was still, with only the sound of the wind outside, rushing through the creaking branches of an old liquidambar. She felt suddenly chilled and pressed her palm to her forehead and then to her cheeks, wondering if she was coming down with something. And then she sat on the sofa, hands folded in her lap, and regarded the neat, symmetrical pile of artificial coals in the fireplace.
We’ll be giving her a home, he had said when he’d learned that Elena would be coming up to Cambridge. We’ll be filling her with love. Nothing, Justine, is more important than that.
For the first time since receiving Anthony’s distraught telephone call at work the previous day, Justine thought about how Elena’s death might actually affect her marriage. For how many times had Anthony spoken of the importance of providing a stable home for Elena outside the college, and how often had he alluded to the longevity of their ten-year marriage as a shining example of the kind of devotion, loyalty, and regenerative love which every couple sought and few couples found, describing it as an island of tranquillity to which his daughter could retreat and gain sustenance to face the challenges and battles of her life.
We’re both Gemini, he had said. We’re the twins, Justine. You and I, the two of us against the world. She’ll see that. She’ll know it. It’ll give her support.
Elena would bask and grow in the radiance of their marital love. She would come to her womanhood better for the experience of having been exposed to a marriage that was solid and happy and loving and complete.
That had been the plan, Anthony’s dream. And clinging to it in the face of all odds had allowed them both to continue to live in the middle of a lie.
Justine looked from the fireplace to her wedding photograph. They were sitting—had it been some sort of bench?—with Anthony behind her, his hair longer then but his moustache still conservatively trimmed and his spectacles the same wire-rimmed frames. They were both of them gazing intently at the camera, half-smiling as if a show of too much happiness might belie the seriousness of their undertaking. It is, after all, a sober business to embark upon establishing the perfect marriage. But their bodies weren’t touching in the picture. His arm wasn’t embracing her. His hands didn’t reach forward to cover her own. It was as if the photographer who had posed them had somehow seen a truth that they themselves had been unaware of, it was as if the photograph itself would not lie.
For the first time Justine saw what the possibilities were if she did not take action, no matter how little to her liking that action was.
Townee was still playing in the front garden when she left the house. Rather than take the time to shut him up at the rear of the house or in the garage, she called to him, opened the car door, and let him leap inside, unbothered by the fact that he left a muddy paw print on the passenger seat. There wasn’t time to consider a minor inconvenience like soiled upholstery.
The car started with the purr of a well-tuned engine. She reversed down the drive and turned east into Adams Road, heading towards the city. Like all men, he was most likely a creature of habit. So he’d be finishing his day near Midsummer Common.
The last of the sunlight fanned out behind the clouds, casting apricot beacons into the sky and throwing the fret-edged shadows of trees like lace silhouettes across the road. In the passenger seat, Townee barked his approval at the sight of hedgerows and cars dashing by. He shifted his weight from right to left front paw, he whined with excitement. Clearly, he thought they were engaged in a game.
And it was a game of sorts, she supposed. But although all the players had taken their positions, the rules were nonexistent. And only the most skilful opportunist among them would be able to shape the horrors of the last thirty hours into a victory that would outlast grief.
The college boathouses lined the north side of the River Cam. They faced south, looking across the river and onto the expanse of Midsummer Common where in the quick-falling darkness, a young girl was grooming one of two horses, her yellow hair streaming out from beneath a cowboy hat and great streaks of mud on the sides of her boots. The horse tossed his head, flicked his tail, and fought against her efforts. But the girl controlled him.
The open land made the wind seem both stronger and colder. As Justine got out of the car, snapping the lead onto Townee’s collar, three pieces of orange paper soared like rising birds into her face. She brushed them away. One fell against the bonnet of her Peugeot. She saw Elena’s picture.
It was a hand-out from DeaStu calling for information. She grabbed it before it could blow away and stuffed it into the pocket of her coat. She headed towards the river.
At this time of day, none of the rowing teams were out on the water. They generally used the morning for their practices. But the individual boathouses were themselves still open, a row of elegant facades fronting nothing more than capacious sheds. Inside these, some oarsmen and women were ending their day in the way they had begun it, with talk about the season that would come with the end of Lent term. Everything now was focussed upon preparation for that time of competition. Self-confidence and hopes had not yet been dashed by the sight of an unexpected eight flying by as if air and not water were the element against which they matched their strength.
Justine and Townee followed the slow curve of the river, the dog straining at the lead and eager to make the acquaintance of four mallards who swam away from the bank at his approach. He bounded and barked, and Justine wrapped his lead round her hand and gave it a quick tug.
“Behave,” she told him. “This isn’t a run.”
But of course, he would think they were meant to run here. It was water after all. It was what he was used to.
Ahead of them, a lone rower was bringing in a scull, moving against the wind and the current at a furious clip. Justine could imagine that she heard him breathing, for even at this distance and in the failing light she could see the sheen of sweat on his face and she could well envision the heaving of chest that must accompany it. She walked to the edge of the river.
He didn’t look up at once as he brought the craft in. Rather, he remained bent over the oars, his head resting on his hands. His hair—thinning at the top and curly elsewhere—was damp and clung to his skull like a new-born’s ringlets. Justine wondered how long he had been rowing and whether the activity had done anything at all to assuage whatever emotion he might have felt when first he heard about Elena’s death. And he had heard about it. Justine knew that from watching him. Although he rowed daily, he wouldn’t have still been here in the dusk, the wind, and the stinging cold, had he not needed to find a physical manner in which he could purge himself of his feelings.
At Townee’s whimper to be off and running, the man looked up. For a moment, he said nothing. Nor did Justine. The only sound between them was the scuffling of the dog’s nails on the path, the warning honk of ducks who felt the other animal’s proximity, and the blare of rock and roll music coming from one of the boathouses. U2, Justine thought, a song she recognised but could not have named.
He got out of the scull and stood on the bank next to her, and she realised, irrelevantly, that she’d forgotten how short he was, perhaps two inches shorter than her own five feet nine.
He said with a futile gesture at the scull, “I didn’t know what else to do.”
“You might have gone home.”
He gave a virtually soundless laugh. It was a reply not of humour, but affirmation. He touched his fingers to Townee’s head. “He looks good. Healthy. She took good care of him.”
Justine reached into her pocket and pulled out the hand-out which had flown against her. She gave it to him. “Have you seen this?”
He read it. He ran his fingers over the black print and then across the picture of Elena.
“I’ve seen it,” he said. “That’s how I found out. No one phoned. I didn’t know. I saw it in the senior combination room when I went in for coffee about ten o’clock this morning. And then—” He looked across the river to Midsummer Common where the girl was leading her horse in the direction of Fort St. George. “I didn’t know what to do.”
“Were you home Sunday night, Victor?”
He didn’t look at her as he shook his head.
“Was she with you?”
“For a time.”
“And then?”
“She went back to St. Stephen’s. I stayed in my rooms.” He finally looked her way. “How did you know about us? Did she tell you?”
“Last September. The drinks party. You made love to Elena during the party, Victor.”
“Oh God.”
“In the bathroom upstairs.”
“She followed me up. She came in. She..” He rubbed his hand along his jawline. He looked as if he hadn’t shaved that day, for the stubble was thick, like a bruise on his skin.
“Did you take off all your clothes?”
“Christ, Justine.”
“Did you?”
“No. We stood against the wall. I lifted her up. She wanted it that way.”
“I see.”
“All right. I wanted it as well. Against the wall. Just like that.”
“Did she tell you she was pregnant?”
“Yes. She told me.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“What did you plan to do about it?”
He’d been looking at the river, but now he turned back to her. “I planned to marry her,” he said.
It wasn’t the answer she had come prepared to hear, although the more she thought about it, the less it surprised her. It did leave, however, a slight problem unresolved.
“Victor,” she said, “where was your wife Sunday night? What was Rowena doing while you were having Elena?”