'Why haven't you returned my calls, Tommy?' Lady Helen asked the moment they were alone. 'I've telephoned here and the Yard repeatedly. I've stopped by four times. I've been sick with worry about you.'
'Sorry, old duck,' he said easily. 'There's been a mass of work lately. I'm up to my ears in it. Will you have a drink?' He walked to a rosewood table on which were arranged several decanters and a set of glasses.
'Thank you, no.'
He poured himself a whisky but did not drink it at once. 'Please sit down.' 'I think not.'
'Whatever you'd like.' He offered her a lopsided smile and tossed back a large portion of his drink. And then, perhaps unwilling to keep up the pretence any longer, he looked away from her, saying, Tm sorry, Helen. I wanted to return your calls. But I couldn't do it. Sheer cowardice, I suppose.'
Her anger melted immediately. 'I can't bear to see you like this. Walled up in your library. Incommunicado at work. I can't bear it, Tommy.'
For a moment, the only response was his breathing. She could hear it, shallow and unevenly spaced. Then he said, 'The only time I seem to be able to drive her from my mind is when I'm working. So that's what I've been doing, that's all I've been doing. And when I haven't been on a case I've spent the time telling myself that I'll get over this eventually. A few more weeks, a few months.' Shakily, he laughed. 'It's a bit difficult to believe.'
'I know. I understand.'
'God, yes. Who on earth could know better than you?'
'Then, why haven't you phoned me?'
He moved restlessly across the room to the fireplace. No fire demanded his attention there, so he gave it instead to a collection of Meissen porcelain plates on the overmantel. He took one from its stand, turning it in his hands.
Lady Helen wanted to tell him to have a care, the plate might well shatter under the strength with which he gripped it, but she said nothing. He put the plate back. She repeated her question.
'You know I've wanted to talk to you. Why haven't you phoned me?'
'I haven't been able to. It hurts too much, Helen. I can't hide that from you.'
'Why on earth should you want to?'
'I feel like a fool. I should be stronger than this. None of it should matter. I should be able just to slough it off and go on.'
'Go on?' She felt all her anger return in a rush. Her blood heated in the presence of this stiff-upper-lip attitude which she'd always found so contemptible in the men she knew, as if schooling and breeding and generations of reserve condemned each of them to a life of feeling nothing. 'Do you actually mean to tell me that you've no right to your sorrow because you're a man? I don't believe that. I
'It's nothing at all to do with sorrow. I've just been trying to find my way back to the man I was three years ago. Before Deborah. If I can reclaim him, I'll be fine.'
'That man was no different from the man you are now.'
'Three years ago, I'd not have taken this so hard. What were women to me then? Bed partners. Nothing more.'
'And that's what you want to be? A man drifting through life in a sexual fugue? Only thinking about his next performance in bed? Is that what you want?'
'It's easier that way.'
'Of course it's easy. That kind of life is always easy. People fade out of one another's bed with hardly a word of farewell, let alone one of commitment. And, if by chance they wake up one morning with someone whose name escapes them, it's all right, isn't it? It's part of the game.'
'There was no pain involved in relationships then. There was nothing involved. Never for me.'
'That may be what you'd like to remember, Tommy, but that's not the way it was. Because, if what you say is true, if life was nothing more than collecting and seducing a stableful of women, why did you never have me?'
He reflected on the question. He went back to the decanters and poured himself a second drink. 'I don't know.'
'Yes, you do. Tell me why.' 'I don't know.'
'What a conquest I would have been. Thrown over by Simon, my life in a shambles. The last thing I wanted was an involvement with anyone. How on earth did you resist a challenge like that? What a chance it was to prove yourself to yourself. What incredible fodder for your self-esteem.'
He placed his glass on the table, turned it beneath his fingers. She watched his profile and saw how fragile a thing was his veneer of control.
'I expect you were different,' he said.
'Not at all. I had the right equipment. I was just like the others – heat and pleasure, breasts and thighs.'
'Don't be ridiculous.'
'A woman, after all. Easily seduced, especially by an expert. But you never tried with me. Not even once. That sort of sexual reticence doesn't make sense in a man whose sole interest in women revolves round what they have to offer him in bed. And I had it to offer, didn't I, Tommy? Oh, I would have resisted at first. But I would have slept with you eventually, and you knew it. But you didn't try.'
He turned to her. 'How could I have done that to you after what you'd been through with Simon?'
'Compassion?' she demanded. 'From the man bent on pleasure? What difference did it make whose body provided it? Weren't we all the same?'
He was quiet for so long that she wondered if he would answer. She could see the struggle for composure on his face. She willed him to speak, knowing only that he had to acknowledge his sorrow so that it could live and rage and then die.
'Not you,' he said finally. She could tell the phrase cost him dearly. 'Not Deborah.' 'What was different?' 'I let things go further.' 'Further?' 'To the heart.'
She crossed the room to him. Her hand touched his arm. 'Don't you see, Tommy? You weren't that man bent on pleasure. You want to think you were, but that wasn't the case. Not for anyone who bothered to take the time to know you. Not for me certainly, who was never your lover. And not for Deborah, who was.'
'I wanted something different with her.' His eyes were red-rimmed. 'Roots, ties, a family. I was willing to be something more to have that. It was worth it. She was worth it.'
'Yes. She was. And she was worth grieving over as well. She's still worth that.' 'Oh God,' he whispered.
Her hand slid down his arm, closed over his wrist. 'Tommy dear, it's all right. Really.'
He shook his head blindly, as if by that movement he could shake off his terrible desolation. 'I think I shall die of loneliness, Helen.' His voice broke horribly, the sound of a man who hadn't allowed himself to experience a single emotion in years. 'I can't bear it.'
He started to turn from her, to go back to his desk, but she stopped him and closed the remaining space between them. She took him into her arms.
'You're not alone, Tommy,' she said quite gently.
He began to cry.
Deborah pushed open the gate just as the street-lamp in Lordship Place lit for the evening, sending delicate sprays of light through the mist that fell on the garden. She stood for a moment and gazed at the warm burned sienna bricks of the house, at its fresh white plasterwork, at its old wrought iron hand rail that forever rusted in spots that forever needed paint. In so many ways, it would always be home to her, no matter how long she managed to stay away – three years, three decades or, like this time, a month.
She'd managed avoidance through a string of fabrications which she knew her father didn't believe for a moment.
No more than did she, her father didn't savour a repetition of their row in Paddington, a week after her return from Cornwall. He had wanted her to come home. She refused to consider it. He didn't understand. To him, it was simple. Pack your things, close the flat, come back to Cheyne Row. In effect, as far as he was concerned, return to the past. She couldn't do so. She tried to explain her need for a time that was solely her own. His response was a nasty castigation of Tommy – for changing her, destroying her, distorting her values – and from there the row grew, ending with her wresting from him a bitter promise not to speak of her relationship with Tommy ever again, to her or to anyone else. They had parted acrimoniously and had not seen each other since.
