Careless in Red

Chapter Thirty

THEY SPOKE LITTLE ON THE DRIVE BACK FROM ST. AGNES. And when they did speak, it was of mundane matters. She needed to stop for petrol, so they’d take a diversion from the main road if he didn’t mind.

He didn’t mind at all. Did she want a cup of tea while they were at it? Surely there was a hotel or tea shop along the way where they might even have a proper Cornish cream tea. Scones, clotted cream, and strawberry jam.

She remembered the days when it was difficult to find clotted cream outside of Cornwall. Did he?

Yes. And proper sausages as well. Not to mention pasties. He’d always enjoyed good pasties, but they’d never had them at home, as his father had considered them…There he stopped himself. Common was the word of choice. Vulgar in its most precise usage.

She supplied it for him, using the former term. She added, And you weren’t that, were you?

He told her his brother was a narcotics user, because that was the truth of the matter. Tossed out of Oxford, his girlfriend dead with a needle in her arm, himself in and out of rehab ever since. He said he thought that he’d failed Peter altogether. When he should have been there for the boy-present, he meant, present in every possible way and not just a warm body occupying a sofa or something-he hadn’t been.

Well, these things happen, she said. And you had your own life.

As you have yours.

She didn’t say what another woman in her same position might have said at the end of the day they’d just spent together: And do you think this levels the playing field, Thomas? but he knew she was thinking it, for what else could she think upon his mentioning Peter in the midst of nothing vaguely related to the topic? In spite of that, he wanted to add more life details, piling them up so that she would be forced to see similarities instead of differences. He wanted to tell her that his brother-in-law had been murdered some ten years earlier, that he himself had been suspected of the crime and had even been carted off to gaol and held twenty-four hours for a grilling because he’d hated Edward Davenport and what Edward Davenport had wrought upon his sister, and he’d never made a secret of that. But to tell her that seemed too much a begging for something that she wasn’t going to be able to give him.

He deeply regretted the position he’d put her in because he could see how she would interpret his reaction to everything she’d revealed that day, no matter his declarations to the contrary. There was an enormous gulf between them created first by birth, second by childhood, and third by experience. That the gulf existed only in her head and not in his was something he could not explain to her. Such a declaration was facile, anyway. The gulf existed everywhere, and for her it was something so real that she would ever fail to see it was not equally real to him.

You don’t actually know me, he wanted to tell her. Who I am, the people I move among, the loves that have defined my life. But then, how could you? Newspaper stories-tabloids, magazines, whatever-taken up from the Internet reveal only the dramatic bits, the heartrending bits, the salacious bits. Those elements of life comprising the valuable and unforgettable everyday bits are not included. They lack drama even as ultimately they define who a person is.

Not that that mattered: who he was. It had ceased to matter with Helen’s death.

Or so he had told himself. Except that what he felt now indicated something different. That he should care for another’s suffering spoke of…what? Rebirth? He didn’t want to be reborn. Recovery? He wasn’t sure he wanted to recover. But a sense of who he was at the core of who he appeared to be prompted him to feel at least something of what Daidre herself was feeling: caught out in the spotlight, naked when she’d worked so hard to fashion clothing for herself.

I’d like to turn back time, he told her.

She looked at him and he saw from her expression that she thought he was talking of something else. Of course you would, she said. My God, who wouldn’t in your position?

Not about Helen, he said, although I’d give nearly anything to bring her back to me if I could.

Then, what?

This. What I’ve brought you to.

It’s part of your job, she said.

But it wasn’t his job. He wasn’t a cop. He’d walked away from that part of his life because he couldn’t bear it a moment longer, because it had taken him away from Helen, and had he known how many hours upon hours he’d be away from her and each of those hours trickling through a glass in which the remaining days of her life were contained… He would have called a halt to all of it.

No, he said. Not part of my job. That’s not why I was here.

Well, they asked you to. She asked you. I can’t think you did it all on your own. Came up with the plan, whatever.

I did. He said it heavily and he regretted having to say it at all. But I want you to know that if I’d known…because, you see, you don’t seem like…

Like them? she asked. I’m cleaner? More educated? More accomplished? Better dressed? More well-spoken? Well, I’ve had eighteen years to put them…it…that whole terrible…I want to call it an “episode” but it wasn’t an episode. It was my life. It made me who I am no matter who I try to be now. These sorts of things define us, Thomas, and that defined me.

Thinking that, he told her, negates the last eighteen years, doesn’t it? It negates your parents, what they did for you, how they loved you and made you part of their family.

You’ve met my parents. You’ve seen my family. And how we lived.

I meant your other parents. The ones who were your parents as parents are meant to be.

The Trahairs. Yes. But they don’t change the rest of it, do they. They can’t. The rest is…the rest. And it’s there as it always will be.

That’s no cause for shame.

She looked at him. She’d found the petrol station she was seeking, and they’d pulled into its forecourt. She’d turned off the ignition and rested her hand on the door handle. He’d done the same, ever the gentleman, unwilling to let her pump the petrol herself.

She said, That’s just it, you see.

What? he asked her.

People like you-

Please don’t, he said. There is no people-like-me. There are just people. There’s just the human experience, Daidre.

People like you, she persisted nonetheless, think it’s about shame because that’s what you would feel in the same circumstances. Travelling about. Living most of the time in a rubbish tip. Bad food. Cast-off clothing. Loose teeth and ill-formed bones. Shifty eyes and sticky fingers. Why read or write when one can steal? That’s what you think and you’re hardly wrong. But the feeling, Thomas, has nothing at all to do with shame.

Then…?

Sorrow. Regret. Like my name.

We’re the same, then, you and I, he told her. Despite the differences-

She laughed, a single weary note. We are not that, she replied. I expect you played at it, you and your brother and your sister and your mates. Your parents may have even found you a gipsy caravan and parked it somewhere quite hidden away on the estate. You could go there and play dress-up and act the part, but you couldn’t have lived it.

She got out of the car. He did the same. She went to the pumps and studied them, as if trying to decide which type of petrol she needed when she probably knew very well what was required for her car. As she hesitated, he went for the nozzle himself. He began to fill the tank for her.

She said, I expect your man does that for you.

He said, Don’t.

She said, I can’t help it. I’ll never be able to help it.

She shook her head in a fierce little movement, as if to deny or obliterate all that was left unspoken between them. She climbed back into the car and shut the door. He saw that she looked straight ahead afterwards, as if there was something in the window of the petrol station’s shop that she needed to memorise.

He went to pay. When he climbed in the car, he saw she’d put a neat stack of notes on his seat to cover the cost of the petrol. He took them, folded them neatly, and put them into the empty ashtray just above the gearshift.

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-”

“Doesn’t matter,” she said, waving her fork at him. She had chips on it now, although they were barely discernible through the ketchup. “I don’t care, you see. I don’t mind.”

“Then-”

“But she does. And that’s the bit that gets one into trouble: the minding bit. Don’t mind and you can swan round in ignorance or at least pretend to. Mind and you’re all thumbs and fumbling with the cutlery. Sixteen knives and twenty-two forks and why are these people eating asparagus with their fingers?” She shuddered dramatically. She went for more shepherd’s pie. She washed it down with what she was drinking, which appeared to be ale.

He watched her and said, “Havers, is it my imagination, or have you been drinking rather more than your usual tonight?”

“Why? Am I slurring my words?”

“Not slurring exactly. But-”

“I’m owed. A stiff one. Fifteen stiff ones if that’s what it takes. I’m not driving and I should be able to make it up the stairs. Just.”

“What’s going on?” he asked her, for it wasn’t like Havers to drink to excess. She was generally a one-a-week sort of drinker.

She told him, then. Jago Reeth, Benesek Kerne, Hedra’s Hut-which she referred to as “some mad cabin on the edge of the cliff where we all might’ve died, mind you”-and the result, which was no result at all. Jonathan Parsons and Pengelly Cove, Santo Kerne, and-

“Are you saying he confessed?” Lynley said. “How extraordinary.”

“Sir, you’re missing the point. He didn’t confess. He supposed. He supposed this and he supposed that and in the end he supposed himself right out of that hovel and on his way. Revenge is sweet and all that rubbish.”

“And that’s it?” he said. “What did Hannaford do?”

“What could she do? What could anyone do? If this had been written by the Greeks, I suppose we could hope that Thor would hit him with a bolt of lightning in the next couple days, but I wouldn’t count on that.”

“Good grief,” Lynley said, and then after a moment he added, “Zeus.”

“What?”

“Zeus, Havers. Thor’s Norse. Zeus’s Greek.”

“Whatever, sir. I am, we know, one of the hoi polloi. Point is this: The Greeks aren’t exactly involved here, so he walks away. She intends to keep after him but she’s got sweet FA to work with, thanks to that idjit McNulty whose sole contribution appears to be one surfing poster. That and giving out information when he’s meant to keep his mug plugged tight. It’s a right bloody mess, and I’m glad I’m not responsible for it.”

Lynley blew out a breath. “Ghastly for the family,” he said.

“Isn’t it just,” she replied. She examined him. “You eating or what, sir?”

“I thought to have something,” he told her. “How’s the shepherd’s pie?”

“Shepherd’s pie-ish. One can’t be too choosy when it comes to shepherd’s pie as a bar meal, I find. Let’s put it this way, Jamie Oliver’s got nothing to worry about tonight.” She forked up a sample and handed it over.

He took it and chewed. It would do, he thought. He started to get up to order himself a plate from the bar. Her next remarks stopped him.

“Sir, if you don’t mind…” She spoke so carefully that he knew what was coming.

“Yes?”

“Will you come back to London with me?”

He sat down again. He looked not at her but at her plate: the remains of the shepherd’s pie and the carefully avoided peas and carrots. It was all so vintage Havers, he thought. The meal, the carrots, the peas, the conversation they’d been having, and the question as well.

He said, “Havers…”

“Please,” she said.

He looked up at her. Ill featured, ill dressed, ill shorn. So quintessentially who she was. Behind the mask of indifference she presented to the world he saw what he’d seen in Havers from the first: the earnestness and the truth of her, a woman among millions, his partner, his friend.

He said, “In time. Not now, but in time.”

“When?” she asked. “Can you at least say when?”

He looked to the window, which faced the west. He thought about what lay in that direction. He considered the steps he’d taken so far, and the rest of the steps that remained to be taken.

“I’ve got to walk the rest of the path,” he told her. “After that, we’ll see.”

“Will we?” she asked.

“Yes, Barbara. We will.”