For the Sake of Elena

Troughton made a gesture that encompassed the room. “She dropped by here several times during Michaelmas term last year. She’d tell me about how the dog was doing and chat in that odd-voiced way of hers. She’d drink tea, pinch a few cigarettes when she thought I wasn’t looking. I enjoyed her visits. I began to look forward to them. But nothing happened between us until Christmas.”

“And then?”

Troughton returned to his chair. He crushed out his cigarette but did not light another. He said, “She came to show me the gown she’d bought for one of the Christmas balls. She said, I’ll try it on for you, shall I, and she turned her back and began to undress right here in the room. Of course, I’m not entirely a fool. I realised later that she’d done it deliberately, but at the time, I was horrified. Not only at her behaviour but at what I felt-no, what I knew in an instant that I wanted to do-in the face of her behaviour. She was down to her underthings when I said, For God’s sake, what do you think you’re doing, girl? But I was across the room and her head was turned, so she couldn’t read my lips. She just kept undressing. I went to her, made her face me, and repeated the question. She looked me straight in the eye and said, I’m doing what you want me to do, Vittor. And that was that. We made love in the very chair you’re sitting in, Inspector. I was so desperate to have her that I didn’t even bother to lock the door.” He drank the rest of his brandy, set the balloon glass on the table. “Elena knew what I was after. I’ve no doubt she’d known the moment her father brought her to my house to see those dogs. If she was nothing else, she was brilliant at reading people. Or at least she was brilliant at reading me. She always knew what I wanted and when I wanted it and just exactly how.”

“So you’d found that resilient fl esh you’d been seeking,” Lady Helen said. Cool condemnation comprised the undercurrent of the statement.

Troughton didn’t avoid admitting the worst. “I found it. Yes. But not the way I thought. I didn’t count on falling in love. I thought it would just be sex between us. Good, vigorous sex anytime we felt the urge. We were, after all, serving each other’s needs.”

“In what way?”

“She was accommodating my need to savour her youth and perhaps recapture a bit of my own. I was accommodating her need to hurt her father.” He poured himself more brandy and added to the other glasses as well. He looked from Lynley to Lady Helen as if gauging on their faces a response to his final statement. He went on with, “As I said, Inspector, I’m not a complete fool.”

“Perhaps you’re judging yourself too harshly.”

Troughton placed the bottle on the table next to his chair and drank deeply of the brandy, saying, “Not at all. Look at the facts. I’m forty-seven years old and on the downhill plunge. She was twenty, surrounded by hundreds of young men with their entire lives ahead of them. Why on earth would she decide to set her sights on me unless she knew it was the perfect way to strike out at her father? And it was perfect, after all. To choose one of his colleagues-indeed, to choose one of his friends. To choose a man who was even older than her father. To choose a man who was married. To choose a man with children. I couldn’t actually delude myself with the idea that Elena wanted me because she found me more attractive than any other man she knew, and I never did so. I knew from the fi rst what she had in mind.”

“The scandal we were speaking of earlier?”

“Anthony always had too much of himself tied into Elena’s performance here in Cambridge. He involved himself in every aspect of her life. How she acted and dressed, how she took notes in her lectures, how she comported herself in her supervisions. These were weighty matters to him. I think he believed that he would be judged-as a man, a parent, an academic even-dependent upon her success or failure here.”

“Was the Penford Chair tied into all this?”

“In his mind, I should think so. In reality, no.”

“But if he thought judgement of himself was going to be connected to Elena’s performance and behaviour-”

“Then he would want to see to it that she performed and behaved as the daughter of a respected professor should. Elena knew that. She could sense that attitude in everything her father did, and she resented him for it. So you can imagine the vast and-to Elena- amusing possibilities for his humiliation and her revenge when it became known that his daughter was having it off on a regular basis with one of his close colleagues.”

“Didn’t you mind being used in this way?”

“I was living every fantasy I’d ever entertained about making love to a woman and having a woman make love to me. We met at least three times a week from Christmas on and I loved every moment of it. I didn’t care about her motives in the least as long as she kept coming round to see me and taking off her clothes.”

“You met here, then?”

“Generally. I managed to get to London several times during the summer break to see her as well. And on a few weekend afternoons and evenings at her father’s house during term.”

“When he was home?”

“Only once, during a party. She found that particularly exciting.” He shrugged although his cheeks had begun to flush. “I found it rather exciting as well. I suppose it was the sheer terror of thinking we might be caught going at it.”

“But you weren’t?”

“Never. Justine knew-she’d found out somehow, she may well have guessed or Elena may have told her-but she never actually caught us in the act.”

“She never told her husband?”

“She wouldn’t have wanted to bear that sort of witness against Elena, Inspector. As far as Anthony was concerned, it would have been a case of kill the messenger, and Justine knew that better than anyone. So she held her tongue. I imagine she was waiting for Anthony to find things out on his own.”

“Which he never did.”

“Which he never did.” Troughton shifted his position in his chair, crossing one leg over the other and pulling out his cigarette case once again. He merely played it from hand to hand, however. He didn’t open it. “Of course, he would have been told eventually.”

“By you?”

“No. I imagine Elena would have wanted that pleasure.”

Lynley found it hard to believe that Trough-ton had no conscience in the matter of Elena. He had obviously felt no need to guide her. He had seen no necessity for urging her to deal with her resentment towards her father in another way. “But, Dr. Troughton, what I don’t understand is-”

“Why I went along with the game?” Trough-ton set the cigarette case next to the balloon glass. He studied the picture they made, side by side. “Because I loved her. At first it was her body-the incredible sensation of holding and touching that beautiful body. But then it was her. Elena. She was wild and ungovernable, laughing and alive. And I wanted that in my life. I didn’t care about the cost.”

“Even if it meant posing as the father of her child?”

“Even that, Inspector. Once she told me she was pregnant, I nearly convinced myself that the vasectomy had gone wrong all those years ago and that the child was really mine.”

“Have you any idea who the father was?”

“No. But I’ve spent hours since last Wednesday wondering about it.”

“Where have your thoughts led you?”

“To the same conclusion again and again. If she slept with me to have revenge on her father, whomever else she slept with, it was for the same reason. It didn’t have anything to do with love.”

“Yet you were willing to take up a life with her in spite of knowing all this?”

“Pathetic, isn’t it? I wanted passion again. I wanted to feel alive. I told myself that I would be good for her. I thought that with me she would be able to let go of her grievances against Anthony eventually. I believed I’d be enough for her. I’d be able to heal her. It was an adolescent little fantasy that I clung to till the end.”

Lady Helen placed her balloon glass on the table next to Troughton’s. She kept her fi ngers carefully on its rim. She said, “And what about your wife?”

“I hadn’t told her about Elena yet.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know,” he said. “You meant what about the fact that Rowena bore my children and did my laundry and cooked my meals and cleaned my house. What about those seventeen years of loyalty and devotion. What about my