“Then Lotty developed TB. Or so she said.” Carl bit off the words.
He turned back to Lotty. “You never told me you were ill. You never said good-bye! I got your letter—letter? A notice in The Times would have told me more!—when I returned from Edinburgh, there it was, that cold, cryptic note. I ran across town. That imbecile landlady in your lodgings—I can still see her face, with the horrible mole on her nose and all the hairs sticking out of it—she told me. She was smirking. From her I learned you were in the country. From her I learned you’d instructed her to forward all your mail to Claire Tallmadge, the Ice Queen. Not from you. I loved you. I thought you loved me. But you couldn’t even tell me good-bye.”
He stopped, panting, then added bitterly, “To this day I do not understand why you let that Tallmadge woman run you around the way she did,” he said to Lotty. “She was so—so supercilious. You were her little Jewish pet. Couldn’t you ever see how she looked down on you? And the rest of that family. The vapid sister, Vanessa, and her insufferable husband, what was his name? Marmalade?”
“Marmaduke,” Lotty said. “As you know quite well, Carl. Besides, you resented anyone I paid more attention to than you.”
“My God, you two,” Max said. “You should join Calia up in the nursery. Could we get to the point?”
“Besides,” Lotty said, flushing again at Max’s criticism, “when I returned to the Royal Free, Claire—Claire felt her friendship with me was inappropriate. She—I didn’t even know she retired until I saw it in the Royal Free newsletter this spring.”
“What did the Radbukas have to do with this?” Don asked.
“I went to see Queen Claire,” Carl snarled. “She told me she was forwarding Lotty’s mail to a receiving office in Axmouth in care of someone named Sofie Radbuka. But when I wrote, my mail was returned to me, with a note scribbled on the envelope that there was no one there by that name. I even took a train out from London one Monday and walked three miles through the countryside to this cottage. There were lights on inside, Lotty, but you wouldn’t answer the door. I stayed there all afternoon, but you never came out.
“Six months went by, and suddenly Lotty was back in London. With no word to me. No response to my letters. No explanation. As if our life together had never taken place. Who was Sofie Radbuka, Lotty? Your lover? Did the two of you sit in there all afternoon laughing at me?”
Lotty was leaning back in an armchair, her eyes shut, the lines in her face sharply drawn. So might she look dead. The thought made me clutch at my stomach.
“Sofie Radbuka no longer existed, so I borrowed her name,” she said in the thread of a voice, not opening her eyes. “It seems stupid now, but we all did unaccountable things in those days. The only mail I accepted was from the hospital—everything else I sent back unread, just as I did your letters. I had a mortal condition. I needed to be alone while I coped with it. I loved you, Carl. But no one could reach me in the alone place I was. Not you, not Max, no one. When I—recovered—I had no capacity for talking to you. It—the only thing I knew to do was draw a line. You—you never seemed inconsolable to me.”
Max went to sit next to her, taking her hand, but Carl got up to pace furiously about the room. “Oh, yes, I had lovers,” he spat over his shoulder. “Lovers aplenty that I wanted you to know about. But it was many years before I fell in love again and by then I was out of practice, I couldn’t make it last. Three marriages in forty years and how many mistresses in between? I’m a byword among women in orchestras.”
“Don’t blame me for that,” Lotty said coldly, sitting up. “You can choose how to act. I don’t bear responsibility for that.”
“Yes, you can choose to be remote as ever. Poor Loewenthal, he wants you to marry him and can’t figure out why you won’t. He doesn’t realize you’re made of scalpels and ligatures, not heart and muscle.”
“Carl, I can manage my own business,” Max said, half laughing, half exasperated. “But returning to the present, if I may, if the Radbukas are gone, how exactly did this man tonight get the name in the first place?”
“Yes,” Lotty agreed. “That’s why I was so startled to hear it.”
“Do you have any sense of how to find that out, Victoria?” Max asked.
I yawned ferociously. “I don’t know. I don’t know how to get him to let me see these mystery documents. The other end of the investigation would be his past. I don’t know what kind of immigration records might survive from ’47 or ’48, when he would have come into this country. If he really was even an immigrant.”