mistake.
She bathed slowly, permitting herself only the immediate physical sensations attendant to the act: the flannel on her skin, the steam rising round her, the water in rivulets between her breasts. The soap smelled of roses, and she breathed its fragrance to obliterate all others. She wanted the bathing to wash away memory and to free her of passion. She looked to it for answers. She asked it for equanimity.
What can I tell you, my dearest love? That running his fingers through your downy hair meant nothing. That the sight of your eyelashes lying like feathery shadows against your cheeks when you slept did not make him want to hold you close. That your grubby hand clutching a dripping ice lolly would never have made him laugh with delight and dismay. That your place in his life was quiet and sleeping in the rear seat of a car with no muss and no fuss and no demands, please. That you were never as real to him as he was to himself. You were not the centre of his world. How can I tell you that, Maggie? How can I be the one to destroy your dream?
Her limbs felt heavy as she towelled herself off. Her arm seemed weighted as she brushed her hair. The bathroom mirror wore a thin skin of steam, and she watched the movements of her silhouette in it, a faceless image whose only definition was dusky hair fast going to grey. The rest of her body she could not see in refl ection, but she knew it well enough. It was strong and durable, firm of flesh and unafraid of hard work. It was a peasant’s body, made for the easy delivery of children. And there should have been many. They should have tumbled round her feet and cluttered the house with their mates and belongings. They should have played, learned to read, skinned their knees, broken windows, and wept their confusion at life’s inconsistencies in her arms.
But there had been only one life given into her care and one chance to mould that life into maturity.
Had it been her failure, she wondered not for the first time. Had she let parental vigilance lapse in the cause of her own desires?
She set her hairbrush on the edge of the basin and went across the landing to the closed door of her daughter’s room. She listened. No light shone from beneath the door, so she turned the knob quietly and entered.
Maggie was asleep, and she did not awaken when the dim oblong of light from the landing fell across her bed. As she so often did, she’d kicked off the blankets, and she was curled on her side, her knees drawn up, a child-woman wearing pink pyjamas with the top two buttons of the jacket missing so that the crescent of a full breast showed, the nipple an aureole flushed against her white skin. She’d taken her stuffed elephant from the bookcase on which he’d resided since their coming to Winslough. He lay in a lump bunched into her stomach, his legs sticking straight out like a soldier’s at attention and his old mangled trunk prehensile no longer, but loved down to a stub from years of wear and tear.
Juliet eased the blankets back over her daughter and stood gazing down at her. The first steps, she thought, that odd, teetering baby walk of hers as she discovered what it was to be upright, clutching onto a handful of Mummy’s trousers and grinning at the miracle of her own awkward gait. And then the run, hair flapping and flying and chubby arms extended, full of confidence that Mummy would be there with her own arms outstretched to catch and to hold. That way of sitting, legs splayed out stiffly with the feet pointing northeast and northwest. That utterly unconscious posture of squatting, scooting her compact little body closer to the ground to pick a wildflower or examine a bug.
My child. My daughter. I don’t have all the answers for you, Margaret. Most of the time I feel that I’m merely an older version of a child myself. I’m afraid, but I cannot show you my fear. I despair, but I cannot share my sorrow. You see me as strong — the master of my life and my fate — while all the time I feel as though at any moment the unmasking will occur and the world will see me — and you will see me— as I really am, weak and riven by doubt. You want me to be understanding. You want me to tell you how things are going to be. You want me to make things right — life right — by waving the wand of my indignation over injustice and over your hurts, and I can’t do that. I don’t even know how.
Mothering isn’t something one learns, Maggie. It’s something one does. It doesn’t come naturally to any woman because there is nothing natural about having a life completely dependent upon one’s own. It’s the only kind of employment that exists in which one can feel so utterly necessary and at the same moment so entirely alone. And in moments of crisis — like this one, Maggie — there is no sagacious volume in which one looks up answers and thus discovers how to prevent a child from harming herself.
Children do more than steal one’s heart, my dear. They steal one’s life. They elicit the worst and the best that we have to offer, and in return they offer their trust. But the cost of all this is insurmountably high and the rewards are small and long in coming.
And at the end, when one prepares to release the infant, the child, the adolescent into adulthood, it is with the hope that what remains behind is something bigger — and more — than Mummy’s empty arms.
THE SINGLE MOST PROMISING sign was that when he reached out to touch her — smoothing his hand along the bare pathway of her spine — she neither flinched nor shrugged off the caress in irritation. This gave him hope. True, she neither spoke to him nor discontinued her dressing, but at the moment Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley was willing to accept anything that wasn’t an outright rejection leading to her departure. It was, he thought, decidedly the down side of intimacy with a woman. If there was supposed to be a happilyever-after associated with falling in love and having that love returned, he and Helen Clyde had not yet managed to fi nd it.
She hadn’t switched on a lamp. Nor had she opened the curtains to the watery morning light of a London winter. But despite these facts, he could see her plainly in what little sun managed to seep first through the clouds and then through the curtains. Even if this had not been the case, he had long ago committed to memory her face, each one of her gestures, and every part of her body. Had the room been dark, he could have described with his hands the curve of her waist, the precise angle at which she dipped her head a moment before she shook back her hair, the shape of her calves, her heels, and her ankles, the swell of her breasts.
He had loved before, more often in his thirty-six years than he would have liked to admit to anyone. But never before had he felt such a curious, utterly Neanderthal need to master and possess a woman. For the last two months since Helen had become his lover, he’d been telling himself that this need would dissolve if she agreed to marry him. The desire to dominate — and to have her submit — could hardly flourish in an atmosphere of power sharing, equality, and dialogue. And if these were the hallmarks of the sort of relationship he wanted with her, then the part of him that needed to control how things would be in the here and now was the part of him that was going to have to be immolated soon.
The problem was that even now when he knew that she was upset, when he knew the reason why and could not begin with any degree of honesty to fault her for it, he still found himself irrationally wanting to browbeat her into a submissive and apologetic admission of error, one for which the most logical expiation would be her willing return to bed. Which was, in and of itself, the second and more imperative problem. He’d awakened at dawn, aroused by the warmth of her sleeping body pressed against his. He’d run his hand along the curve of her hip, and even in sleep she’d turned into his arms to make slow, early-in-the-morning love. Afterwards, they’d lain among the pillows and the tousled blankets, and with her head on his chest and her hand on his breast and her chestnut hair spilling like silk between his fingers, she’d said:
“I can hear your heart.”
To which he’d answered: “I’m glad. That means you’ve not broken it yet.”
