3
Anthony Weaver pulled his Citro?n to a halt on the wide gravel drive of his home in Adams Road. He stared through the windscreen at the winter jasmine that grew—neat and restrained—on the trellis to the left of the front door. For the last eight hours he’d been living in the region that lies just between a nightmare and hell, and now he was numb. It was shock, his intellect told him. Certainly, he’d begin feeling something again just as soon as this period of disbelief had passed.
He made no move to get out of the car. Instead, he waited for his former wife to speak. But stolidly sitting next to him in the passenger seat, Glyn Weaver maintained the silence with which she had greeted him at the Cambridge railway station.
She hadn’t allowed him to drive to London to fetch her, to carry her suitcase, or to open a door. Nor had she allowed him to witness her grief. He understood. He’d already accepted the blame for their daughter’s death. He’d taken on that responsibility the moment he’d identified Elena’s body. Glyn had no need to hurl accusations at him. He would have agreed with every one.
He saw her eyes sweep over the front of the house, and he wondered if she would remark upon it. She hadn’t been to Cambridge since helping Elena get settled into St. Stephen’s in her first term, and even then she’d not set foot in Adams Road.
She would, he knew, see the house as indication of the combined elements of remarriage, inheritance, and professional egocentricity, a veritable showpiece of his success. Brick, three storeys, white woodwork, decorative tile cladding from second storey to roofline, a glass-enclosed morning room with a roof terrace atop it. This was a far cry from their claustrophobic newlywed digs, three rooms on Hope Street more than twenty years ago. This house was set alone at the end of a curved drive, not butted up to a neighbour’s dwelling and squatting less than five feet from the street. This was the house of a tenured professor, a respected member of the history faculty. This was no ill-lit tenement of dying dreams.
To the right of the house, a copper beech hedge—brilliant with the sunset colours of autumn—walled off the back garden. Through an opening in the bushes, an Irish setter bounded joyfully towards the car. Seeing the animal, Glyn spoke for the first time, her voice low, without apparent emotion.
“This is her dog?”
“Yes.”
“We couldn’t keep one in London. The flat was too small. She always wanted a dog. She talked about a spaniel. She—”
Breaking off, Glyn got out of the car. The dog took two hesitant steps forward, tongue hanging out in a slap-dash canine grin. Glyn observed the animal but made no overt attempt to greet him. He took another two steps and snuffled round her feet. With a rapid blink, she looked back at the house.
She said, “Justine’s made you a lovely place in the world, Anthony.”
Between brick pilasters, the front door opened, its polished oak panels catching what little of the quickly fading afternoon light managed to seep through the fog. Anthony’s wife, Justine, stood with one hand on the doorknob. She said, “Glyn. Come in. Please. I’ve made tea,” after which she backed once again into the house, wisely offering no condolences where they would not be welcome.
Anthony followed Glyn into the house, carrying her suitcase up to the guestroom, and returning to find her and Justine standing in the sitting room, Glyn at the window overlooking the front lawn with its careful arrangement of white, wrought iron furniture glistening through the fog, and Justine by the sofa with the tips of her fingers pressed together in front of her.
His first and second wives could not have been more dissimilar. Glyn, at forty-six, was making no attempt to resist the encroachments of middle-age. Her face was worn, with crow’s feet at her eyes, deep lines like trenches from nose to chin, tiny indentations shooting out from her lips, jawline losing definition from the pull of flesh beginning to sag. Grey streaked her hair, which she wore long, drawn back from her face in a severe chignon. Her body was thickening at the waist and hips, and she covered it with tweed and wool and flesh-coloured stockings and flat walking shoes.
In contrast, Justine, at thirty-five, still managed to suggest the fresh bloom of youth. Blessed with the sort of facial structure that would only enhance her looks as she grew older, she was attractive without being beautiful, with smooth skin, blue eyes, knife-edged cheekbones, a firm jaw. She was tall and lanky with a cascade of dusty blonde hair that hung, as it had from adolescence, loosely round her shoulders. Trim and fit, she wore the same clothes now in which she had gone off to work this morning, a tailored grey suit with a wide black belt, grey stockings, black pumps, a silver pin on her lapel. She was perfect, as always.
Anthony looked beyond her to the dining room where she had laid the table for afternoon tea. It served as demonstration of how Justine had spent the hours since he had telephoned her at the University Press to tell her of his daughter’s death. While he had been to the morgue, to the police station, to the college, to his office, to the railway station, while he had identified the body and answered questions and accepted incredulous condolences and contacted his former wife, Justine had made her own preparations for the coming days of their mourning. The result of her efforts was spread across the burl-topped dining table.
On a linen cloth sat the entire tea service from their wedding china, a pattern of gilt-edged roses and curling leaves. Among the plates and cups and silver and crisp white napkins and vases of flowers lay a poppy seed cake, a platter of delicate afternoon sandwiches, another of thinly sliced bread and butter, fresh scones, strawberry jam, and clotted cream.
Anthony looked at his wife. Justine smiled fleetingly, saying again with an airy motion at the table, “I’ve made tea.”
“Thank you, darling,” he said. The words felt unnatural, badly rehearsed.
“Glyn.” Justine waited for the other woman to turn. “May I offer you something?”
Glyn’s eyes slid to the table, from there to Anthony. “Thank you. No. I couldn’t possibly eat.”
Justine turned to her husband. “Anthony?”
He saw the trap. For a moment, he felt suspended in the air, like the rope in an endless tug-of-war. Then he went to the table. He chose a sandwich, a scone, a slice of cake. The food tasted like sand.
Justine came to his side and poured the tea. Its steam rose in the air with the fruity scent of the modern, herbal blend she preferred. The two of them stood there with the food spread out before them, the silver gleaming, and the flowers fresh. Glyn remained by the window in the other room. No one moved towards a chair.
“What did the police tell you?” Glyn asked. “They never phoned me.”
“I told them not to.”
“Why?”
“I thought I should be the one to—”
“You?”
Anthony saw Justine set down her teacup. He saw that her eyes remained on its rim.
“What happened to her, Anthony?”
“Glyn, sit down. Please.”
“I want to know what happened.”
Anthony set his plate down next to the cup of tea which he had not tasted. He returned to the sitting room. Justine followed. He sat on the sofa, motioned his wife down next to him, and waited to see if Glyn would move from the window. She did not do so. Next to him, Justine began twisting her wedding band.
Anthony recited the facts for Glyn. Elena was out running, someone killed her. She was beaten and strangled.
“I want to see the body.”
“No. Glyn. You don’t.”
Glyn’s voice wavered for the first time. “She was my daughter. I want to see the body.”
“Not as she is now. Later. When the morticians—”
“I’ll see her, Anthony.”
He could hear the tight elevation in her voice and knew from experience where it would lead. He headed her off with, “One side of her face is bashed in. The bones are showing. She doesn’t have a nose. Is that what you want to see?”
Glyn fumbled in her handbag and brought out a tissue. “Damn you,” she whispered. Then, “How did it happen? You told me—you promised me—she wouldn’t run alone.”
“She phoned Justine last night. She said she wasn’t going to run this morning.”
“She phoned..” Glyn’s glance moved from Anthony to his wife. “You ran with Elena?”
Justine stopped twisting her wedding band, but she kept her fingers on it, as if it were a talisman. “Anthony asked me to. He didn’t like her running along the river when it was dark, so I ran as well. Last night she phoned and said she wouldn’t be running, but evidently, for some reason she changed her mind.”
“How long has this been going on?” Glyn asked, her attention going back to her former husband. “You said Elena wouldn’t be running alone, but you never said that Justine—” She abruptly shifted gears. “How could you do that, Anthony? How could you entrust your daughter’s well-being to—”
“Glyn,” Anthony interposed.
“She wouldn’t be concerned. She wouldn’t watch over her. She wouldn’t take care to see that she was safe.”
“Glyn, for God’s sake.”
“It’s true. She’s never had a child, so how could she know what it’s like to watch and wait and worry and wonder. To have dreams. A thousand and one dreams that won’t come to anything because she didn’t run with Elena this morning.”
Justine hadn’t moved on the sofa. Her expression was fixed, a glazed mask of good breeding. “Let me take you to your room,” she said and got to her feet. “You must be exhausted. We’ve put you in the yellow room at the back of the house. It’s quiet there. You’ll be able to rest.”
“I want Elena’s room.”
“Well, yes. Of course. That’s no trouble at all. I’ll just see to the sheets..” Her voice drifting off, Justine left the room.
Glyn said at once, “Why did you give her Elena?”
“What are you saying? Justine is my wife.”
“That’s the real point, isn’t it? How much do you care that Elena’s dead? You’ve got someone right here to cook up another.”
Anthony got to his feet. Against her words, he summoned up the image of Elena as he last had seen her from the window of the morning room, offering him a grin and a final wave from her bicycle as she pedalled off to a supervision after their lunch together. It had been just the two of them, eating their sandwiches, chatting about the dog, sharing an hour of love.
He felt anguish swell. Re-create Elena? Fashion another? There was only one. He himself had died with her.
Blindly, he pushed past his ex-wife. He could still hear her low, harsh words continue as he left the house even though he couldn’t distinguish one from another. He stumbled to his car, fumbled the keys into the ignition. He was reversing down the driveway when Justine ran outside.
She called his name. He saw her caught for a moment in the headlamps before he plunged his foot onto the accelerator and, with a sputter of gravel, clattered into Adams Road.
He felt his chest heaving, his throat aching as he drove. He began to weep—dry, hot, tearless sobs for his daughter and his wives and the mess he’d made of every part of his life.
He was on Grange Road and then on Barton Road and then, blessedly, out of Cambridge itself. It had grown quite dark and the fog was thick, especially in this area of fallow, open fields and winter-dying hedges. But he drove without caution, and when the countryside gave way to a village, he parked and threw himself out of the car only to find that the temperature had fallen further, encouraged by the bitter East Anglian wind. He’d left his overcoat at home. All he wore was a suit jacket. But that was of no account. He turned up its collar and began to walk, past a kissing gate, past half a dozen thatched cottages, stopping only when he came to her house. He crossed the street then to get some distance from the building. But even through the fog, he could see in the window.
She was there, moving across the sitting room with a mug in her hand. She was small, so slender. If he held her, she would be practically nothing in his arms, just a fragile heartbeat and a glowing life that consumed him, fired him, and had once made him whole.
He wanted to go to her. He needed to talk to her. He wanted to be held.
He stepped off the kerb. As he did so, a car skidded by, horn honking in warning, a stifled shout from inside. It brought him back to his senses.
He watched her go to the fireplace where she fed wood into the flames as he once had done, turning from the fire to find her eyes on him, her smile a benediction, her hand held out.
“Tonio,” she’d murmur, his name underscored with love.
And he’d answer her even as he did this moment. “Tigresse.” Just a whisper. “Tigresse. La Tigresse.”