Missing Joseph

He glanced up to see that she was watching him. She spun away and dealt with the ground coffee intently. But he had seen the momentary confusion in her eyes — when on earth had Helen ever been nonplussed about anything? — and he wondered how much, if any, of her current interest in weddings had to do with him and how much of it had to do with her father’s criticism. She seemed to read his mind.

“He always goes on about Cybele,” she said, “which puts him into a state about me. There she is: mother of four, wife of one, the grande dame of Milano, patroness of the arts, on the board of the opera, the head of the museum of modern art, chairwoman of every committee known to mankind. And she speaks Italian like a native. What a wretched sort of oldest sister she is. She could at least have had the decency to be miserable. Or to be married to a lout. But no, Carlo adores her, worships her, calls her his fragile little English rose.” Helen slammed the glass carafe under the spout of the coffee maker. “Cybele’s as fragile as a horse and he knows it.”

She opened a cupboard and began pulling out an assortment of tins, jars, and cartons, which she carried to the table. Cheese biscuits took up position on a plate with a wedge of brie. Olives and sweet pickles went into a bowl. To these, she added a splash of cocktail onions.

She finished off the array with a hunk of salami and a cutting board.

“Lunch,” she said and sat down opposite him as the coffee brewed.

“Eclectic gastronomy,” he noted. “What could I have been thinking of, suggesting smoked salmon and veal?”

Lady Helen cut herself some brie and smoothed it onto a biscuit. “He sees no need for me to have a career — honestly, what a Victorian Daddy is — but he thinks I ought to be doing something useful.”

“You are.” Lynley tucked into his banana yogurt and tried to think of it as something one could chew rather than simply gum and swallow. “What about everything you do for Simon when he gets swamped?”

“That’s a particularly sore spot with Daddy. What on earth is one of his daughters doing dusting and photographing latent fi ngerprints, placing hairs on microscope slides, typing up reports about decomposing flesh? My God, is this the sort of life he expected the fruit of his loins to be living? Is this what he sent me to finishing school for? To spend the rest of my days — intermittently, of course, I don’t pretend to be doing anything far removed from frivolity on a regular basis — in a laboratory? If I were a man, at least I could fritter away my time at the club. He’d approve of that. It’s what he spent most of his youth doing, after all.”

Lynley raised an eyebrow. “I seem to recall your father chairing three or four rather successful investment corporations. I seem to recall that he still chairs one.”

“Oh, don’t remind me. He spent the morning doing so, when he wasn’t listing the charitable organisations to which I ought to be giving my time. Really, Tommy, sometimes I think he and his attitudes stepped right out of a Jane Austen novel.”

Lynley fingered the magazine he’d been looking through. “There are, of course, other ways to appease him, aside from giving your time to charity. Not that he needs to be appeased, of course, but supposing you wish to. You might, for instance, give your time to something else he considered worthwhile.”

“Naturally. There’s fund raising for medical research, home visits to the elderly, working on one hot line or another. I know I ought to do something with myself. And I keep intending to, but things just get in the way.”

“I wasn’t talking about becoming a volunteer.”

She paused in the act of slicing herself a piece of salami. She placed the knife down, wiped her fingers on a peach linen napkin, and didn’t respond.

“Think how many birds the single stone of marriage would kill, Helen. This flat could go back to the use of your whole family.”

“They can come here any time as it is. They know that.”

“You could declare yourself too busy with your husband’s egocentric interests to be able to live a life of social and cultural responsibility as Cybele does.”

“I need to start being more involved in things, anyway. Daddy’s right about that, although I hate to admit it.”

“And once you had children, you could use their needs as a shield against whatever judgement your father might cast upon you for inactivity. Not that he’d cast any judgements at that point. He’d be too pleased.”

“About what?”

“About having you…settled, I suppose.”

“Settled?” Lady Helen speared a sweet pickle and chewed it thoughtfully, watching him.

“My God, don’t tell me you’re really that pro

vincial.”

“I didn’t intend—”

“You can’t honestly believe that a woman’s place is to be settled, Tommy. Or,” she asked shrewdly, “is it just my place?”

“No. Sorry. It was a poor choice of words.”

“Choose again, then.”

He placed his yogurt carton on the table. Its contents had tasted fairly good for the first few spoonfuls, but they didn’t wear well on the palate after that. “We’re dancing round the issue and we may as well stop. Your father knows that I want to marry you, Helen.”

“Yes. What of it?”

He crossed his legs, uncrossed them. He lifted his hand to loosen the knot of his tie, only to discover and recall that he wasn’t wearing one. He sighed. “Damn it all. Nothing of it. It merely seems to me that marriage between us wouldn’t be such a miserable thing.”

“And God knows that it would please Daddy well enough.”

He felt stung by her sarcasm and answered in kind. “I have no idea about pleasing your father, but there are—”

“You used the word pleased less than a minute ago. Or have you conveniently forgotten?”

“But there are moments — and frankly this isn’t turning out to be one of them — when I’m actually blind enough to think that it might please me.”

She looked stung in turn. She sat back in her chair. They stared at each other. The telephone, mercifully, began to ring.

“Let it go,” he said. “We need to thrash this out, and we need to do it now.”

“I don’t think so.” She got up. The phone was on the work top, next to the coffee maker. She poured them each a cup as she spoke to her caller, saying, “What a good guess. He’s sitting right here in my kitchen, eating salami and yogurt…” She laughed. “Truro? Well, I hope you’re running his credit cards to the limit…No, here he is…Really, Barbara, don’t give it a thought. We weren’t discussing anything more earthshaking than the merits of sweet pickles over dill.”

She had a way of knowing when he felt most betrayed by her levity, so Lynley wasn’t surprised when Helen didn’t meet his eyes as she handed him the phone and said, unnecessarily, “It’s Sergeant Havers. For you.”

He caught her fingers under his when he took the receiver. He didn’t release her until she looked at him. And even then, he said nothing, because, damn it all, she was at fault and he wasn’t going to apologise for lashing out when she drove him to it.

When he said hello to his sergeant, he realised that Havers must have heard more in his voice than he intended to convey, for she launched into her report without prefatory remarks of any kind, saying, “You’ll be chuffed to know that the C of E take police work dead to heart down here in Truro. The bishop’s secretary kindly gave me an appointment to see him a week from tomorrow, thank you very much. Busy as a bee in the roses, the bishop, if his secretary’s to be believed.” She blew out a long, loud breath. She’d be smoking, as usual. “And you should see the digs these two blokes live in. Sodding bloody hell. Remind me to hold on to my money the next time the collection plate is passed round in church. They should be supporting me, not vice versa.”

“So it’s been a waste.” Lynley watched Helen return to the table where she sat and began unfolding the corners of the magazine pages she’d previously folded down. She was pressing each one deliberately flat and smoothing it with her fingers. She wanted him to see the activity. He knew that as well as he knew her. Realising this, he felt the momentary grip of an anger so irrationally powerful that he wanted to kick the table through the