Believing the Lie

CHELSEA LONDON

When Lynley and Deborah arrived back in London, it was after midnight. They’d made the drive mostly in silence although Lynley had asked her if she wanted to talk. She knew he understood that she was carrying the heavier of both of their burdens because of her part in Alatea’s flight and her death, and he wanted to relieve her of at least part of the weight. But she couldn’t allow it. “May we just be quiet with each other?” she’d asked him. And so they had been, although from time to time he’d reached over and covered her hand with his own.

They hit traffic near the junction for Liverpool and Manchester. They came upon road works near Birmingham and a tailback from an accident at the junction for the A45 to Northampton. At this last, they got off the motorway for a meal and spent ninety minutes hoping the route would be less congested at the meal’s conclusion. They didn’t reach the Cricklewood roundabout until midnight and Chelsea at half past the hour.

Deborah knew that her husband was still up, despite the time. She knew he would be waiting for her in his study on the ground floor of the house because before she climbed the front steps to the door, she saw that the light was on.

She found him reading. He had the fire on, and Peach was snoozing in front of it on a cushion that Simon had placed there for her. The dachshund removed herself from this only slowly as Deborah entered, and she stretched her front legs and then her back legs before toddling over for a late-night greeting.

Simon set his book to one side. Deborah saw it was a novel, which was unusual for him. Simon was strictly a nonfiction reader, favouring biographies and the recounting of superhuman acts of survival in the wild. Shackleton was his foremost hero.

He got to his feet, always an awkward business for him. He said, “I wasn’t sure what time.”

She said, “Traffic was bad in places.” And then, “Tommy told you?”

He nodded, his grey eyes taking in her face and gauging — as he always would — her expression and what it said about her state of mind. He read upon her the heaviness she felt and he said, “He rang me when you stopped for petrol. I’m terribly sorry, my love.”

She stooped to pick up the dachshund, who squirmed in her arms and tried to climb to her face. “You were right about everything,” Deborah said to her husband as she rubbed her cheek against the dog’s silky head. “But then, you usually are.”

“It gives me no pleasure.”

“Which part? Being right always or being right just now?”

“Neither one gives me pleasure. And I’m not always right. In matters of science I feel fairly certain that the ground I’m walking on is solid. But in matters of the heart, in matters affecting you and me… Believe me, I have no idea, Deborah. I’m a wanderer in the dark.”

“It was Conception. It became some sort of obsession for me. I saw a sisterhood forming between us because of that magazine and I let that thought — the thought that someone was as determined as I was, as… as empty as I was — dominate everything else. So I’m responsible for her death. If I hadn’t made her feel so vulnerable. If I hadn’t frightened her. If I hadn’t pursued her. I thought she was talking about that mad journalist from The Source when all along she thought I’d come from the man who’d been searching for her.”

“The man she thought had been searching for her.” Simon corrected her gently. “When you hold your truths as close as she did, those truths can undermine your life. The world becomes a suspicious place. You were there at Tommy’s request, Deborah. The rest came from her.”

“But we both know that’s not quite the truth,” Deborah said. “I made more of what I saw in Arnside House because I wanted to. And both of us, Simon, know exactly why I did that.” She went to one of the armchairs and sat. Peach settled into her lap. Deborah caressed the dog and then said to her husband, “Why’s she not sleeping with Dad?”

“I required her presence. I didn’t want to wait for you alone.”

Deborah took this in. “How strange,” she finally said. “I wouldn’t have thought alone would bother you. You’ve always been so self-contained, so sure.”

“That’s how I’ve seemed to you?”

“Always. How else could you seem? So cool, so rational, so confident. Sometimes I just want you to explode, Simon, but you never do. And now even with this… There you stand. You’re waiting for something from me — I can feel that — but I simply don’t know what it is — ”

“Do you not?”

“ — or how to give it to you.”

Simon sat then, not in the chair where he’d been sitting when she’d entered the room, but rather on the arm of hers. She couldn’t see his face, and he couldn’t see hers. She said, “I simply must get past this. I do understand that. But I don’t know how to do it. Why can I not get past this, Simon? How can I not be obsessed with something I want so much?”

“Perhaps to want it less,” he said.

“How do I manage that?”

“Through resignation.”

“But that means I’ve given up, that we’ve given up. So where does that leave me?”

“Wandering,” he said.

“Hungry,” she said. “That’s what it’s like. Inside of me, always. This… this hunger that nothing is able to assuage. It’s horrible. It’s why I always feel… well, empty. I know I can’t keep living this way, but I don’t know how to make the hunger stop.”

“Perhaps you’re not meant to,” he said. “Perhaps you’re meant to cope with it. Either that or to come to realise that the hunger and the appeasement of the hunger are two entirely different things. They’re unrelated. One will never quell the other.”

Deborah thought about this. She considered how much of herself — and the way in which she’d lived so long — had been tied up with a single unfulfilled desire. She finally said, “This is not who I want to be, my love.”

“Then be someone else.”

“Where on earth do I begin with that project?”

He touched her hair. “With a good night’s sleep,” he said.

WANDSWORTH LONDON

Lynley had thought about going directly home from Chelsea. His town house in Belgravia was less than five minutes by car from the St. Jameses’ home. But as if of its own volition, the Healey Elliott had taken him to Isabelle’s, and he was putting his key in the lock and letting himself inside before he truly thought about why he was doing so.

The flat was dark, as it would be at this time of night. He went to the kitchen and turned on the dim light above the sink. He examined the contents of the fridge and after this, hating himself for doing so but doing it anyway, he looked through the rubbish in its bin, opened and closed the cupboards quietly, and glanced into the oven to make sure it was empty.

He was doing this last when Isabelle came into the room. He didn’t hear her. She’d flipped on the overhead lights before he was aware of her presence, so he had no idea how long she’d watched him prowling through her kitchen on his search.

She said nothing. Nor did he. She merely looked from him to the open oven door before she turned and went back to her bedroom.

He followed her, but in the bedroom it was more of the same and he couldn’t help himself. His glance went to the bedside table, to the floor next to the bed, to the top of the chest of drawers. It was as if an illness had come over him.

She watched him. That he’d awakened her from sleep was obvious. But what sort of sleep, how it had been induced, if it had been induced… These were suddenly troubling matters that he had to sort out. Or so he’d thought until he saw her expression: Acceptance, along with its clansman resignation, was in her eyes.

He said, “In a thousand different ways, I’m sorry.”

“As am I,” she replied.

He went to her. She wore only a thin nightgown and this she lifted over her head. He put his hand on the back of her neck — warm with sleep, it was — and he kissed her. She tasted of sleep interrupted and of nothing else. He broke from her, looked at her, then kissed her again. She began to undress him and he joined her in the bed, pulling the covers away, off, to the floor, so that nothing could come between them.

But it was there nonetheless. Even as their bodies joined, even as she rose above him and his hands sketched curves from her breasts, to her waist, to her hips, even as they moved together, even as he kissed her. It was all still there. No avoiding, he thought, no running, no escape. The pleasure of their connection was a celebration. It was also, however, a pyre that bore the touch of a torch and then did what pyres always do.

Afterwards, their bodies slick and satisfied, he said, “That was the last time, wasn’t it?”

She said, “Yes. But we both knew that.” And after a moment, “It couldn’t have worked, Tommy. But I have to say how I wanted it to.”

He sought her hand, which lay palm-down on the mattress. He covered it, and her fingers spread. His curved into hers. “This isn’t about Helen,” he told her. “You must know that.”

“I do.” She turned her head and her hair fell against her cheek for a moment. It had become mussed during their lovemaking, and he smoothed it for her, brushing it back and behind her ear. “Tommy, I want you to find someone,” she said. “Not to replace her, for who could replace her? But someone to continue your life with. Because that’s all life is, isn’t it? Just continuing, going on.”

“I want that as well,” he said. “I wasn’t sure at first and it’s likely there’ll be days when I step backwards another time and tell myself there’s no real life without Helen in it. But that will be a moment’s thought only. I’ll come through it and out of it. I’ll move on.”

She reached up and used the back of her fingers against his cheek. Her expression was fond. She said, “I can’t say that I love you. Not with my demons. And not with yours.”

“Understood,” he said.

“But I wish you well. Please know that. No matter what happens. I do wish you well.”

BELGRAVIA LONDON

It was half past three in the morning when Lynley finally returned to his home in Eaton Terrace. He let himself inside the silent house, felt for the light switch to the right of the heavy oak door, and flipped it on. His eyes lit on a pair of women’s gloves that had been resting in place against the newel post at the bottom of the stairway for the last nine months. He studied them for a moment before he crossed the entry, took them in hand, and held them briefly to his nose for a final scent of her, faint but there, the smell of citrus. He felt the gloves’ softness against his cheek before he placed them in a small drawer of the coat tree near the door.

It came to him that he was very hungry. The feeling was odd. It had been many months since he’d experienced real, honest hunger in the pit of his stomach. Mostly, he’d been going through the motions of eating just to keep his body alive.

He went to the kitchen. There, he opened the refrigerator and saw that it was well stocked as always. God knew he was pathetic as a cook, but he reckoned he could manage scrambled eggs and toast without burning the house to the ground.

He removed what he would need for his makeshift meal, and he began to search for the proper utensils with which to cook it. He had not got far before Charlie Denton stumbled into the room in his dressing gown and slippers, wiping his spectacles on his belt.

Denton said, “What’re you doing in my kitchen, m’ lord,” to which Lynley replied as he always had done with a patient, “Denton…”

“Sorry,” Denton said. “Half-asleep. What the bloody hell are you doing, sir?”

“Obviously, I’m making something to eat,” Lynley told him.

Denton came to the worktop and examined what Lynley had laid out: eggs, olive oil, marmite, jam, sugar. “What, exactly, would that be?” he enquired.

“Scrambled eggs and toast. Where do you keep the frying pan, for God’s sake? And where’s the bread? That shouldn’t require a search party, should it?”

Denton sighed. “Here. Let me. You’ll only make a bloody mess of everything and I’ll be cleaning it up. What were you intending with the olive oil?”

“Doesn’t one need something… So the eggs don’t stick?”

“Sit, sit.” Denton waved at the kitchen table. “Look at yesterday’s paper. Go through the post. I’ve not put it on your desk yet. Or do something useful like setting the table.”

“Where’s the cutlery?”

“Oh for God’s sake. Just sit.”

Lynley did so. He began to go through the post. There were bills, as always. There was also a letter from his mother and another from his aunt Augusta, both of whom refused to have anything to do with e-mail. Indeed, his aunt had only recently begun resorting to a mobile to make her pronouncements from on high.

Lynley set both letters to one side and unfurled a handbill from the elastic band that had kept it rolled. He said, “What this?” and Denton glanced his way.

“Don’t know. Something on the doorknob,” he replied. “They were up and down the street yesterday. I hadn’t looked at it yet.”

Lynley did the looking. He saw that it was an advertisement for an event at Earl’s Court in two days’ time. Not the normal sort of event, he found, but rather an exhibition of a sport. The sport was flat track roller derby, and he saw that Boadicea’s Broads from Bristol — love the alliteration, he thought — were going to meet London’s Electric Magic in an exhibition match-up that was described with large print that read The Spills! The Chills! The Thrills! Come to witness the spectacular artistry and skate-to-kill drama of the women who live for the jam!

Below this were the names of the sportswomen, and Lynley couldn’t stop himself from reading through the list, from looking for one name in particular, a name he had certainly never thought he’d see again. And there it was: Kickarse Electra, the nom de guerre of a large animal veterinarian from the zoo in Bristol: one Daidre Trahair, a woman who took the occasional country weekend in Cornwall, where he had met her.

Lynley smiled at this. Then he chuckled. Denton looked up from the scrambling of eggs and said, “What?”

“What do you know about flat track roller derby?”

“What in hell is that, if one might ask?” Denton enquired.

“I think we ought to find out, you and I. Shall I purchase tickets for us, Charlie?”

“Tickets?” Denton looked at Lynley as if he’d gone half-mad. But then he fell back against the stove, and he struck a pose, one arm lifted to his forehead. He said, “My God. Has it actually come to this? Are you — dare I say — asking me out on a date?”

Lynley laughed in spite of himself. “I appear to be doing so.”

“What have we come to?” Denton sighed.

“I’ve absolutely no idea,” Lynley answered.