Missing Joseph

To which she’d chuckled, gently bitten his nipple, then yawned and asked her question.

To which, like the utterly besotted fool he was, he’d given an answer. No prevarication. No equivocation. Just a hem and a haw, a clearing of the throat, and then the truth. From which rose their argument — if the accusation of “objectifying women, objectifying me, me, Tommy, whom you claim to love” could be called an argument. From which rose Helen’s present determination to be dressed and be gone without further discussion. Not in anger, to be sure, but in yet another instance of her need to “think things out for myself.”

God, how sex makes fools of us, he thought. One moment of release, and a lifetime to regret it. And the hell of it was that, as he watched her dressing — hooking together the bits of silk and lace that posed as women’s underwear— he felt the heat and tightening of his own desire. His body was itself the most damning evidence of the basic truth behind her indictment of him. For him, the curse of being male seemed to be entrenched inextricably in dealing with the aggressive, mindless, animal hunger that made a man want a woman no matter the circumstances and sometimes — to his shame — because of the circumstances, as if a half hour’s successful seduction were actually proof of something beyond the body’s ability to betray the mind.

“Helen,” he said.

She walked to the serpentine chest of drawers and used his heavy silver-backed brush to see to her hair. A small cheval mirror stood in the midst of his family photographs, and she adjusted it from his height to hers.

He didn’t want to argue with her, but he felt compelled to defend himself. Unfortunately, because of the subject she’d chosen for their disagreement — or if the truth be admitted, the subject which his behaviour and then his words had ultimately propelled her into choosing — his only defence appeared to have its roots in a thorough examination of her. Her past, after all, was no more unsullied than was his own.

“Helen,” he said, “we’re two adults. We have history together. But we each have separate histories as well, and I don’t think we gain anything by making the mistake of forgetting that. Or by making judgements based upon situations that might have existed prior to our involvement with each other. I mean, this current involvement. The physical aspect.” Inwardly, he grimaced at his bumbling attempt at putting an end to their contretemps. God-damn it, we’re lovers, he wanted to say. I want you, I love you, and you bloody well feel the same about me. So stop being so blasted sensitive about something which has nothing whatsoever to do with you, or how I feel about you, or what I want from you and with you for the rest of our lives. Is that clear, Helen? Is it? Is it clear? Good. I’m glad of it. Now get back into bed.

She replaced the hairbrush, rested her hand upon it, and didn’t turn from the chest of drawers. She hadn’t yet put on her shoes, and Lynley took additional, if tenuous, hope from that. As he did from the certainty of his belief that she no more wanted any form of estrangement between them than did he. To be sure, Helen was exasperated with him — perhaps only marginally more than he was exasperated with himself — but she hadn’t written him off entirely. Surely she could be made to see reason, if only through being urged to consider how in the past two months he himself could have easily misconstrued her own erstwhile romantic attachments should he ever have been so idiotic as to evoke the spectral presence of her former lovers as she had done with his. She would argue, of course, that she wasn’t concerned with his former lovers at all, that she hadn’t, as a matter of fact, even brought them up. It was women in general and his attitude towards them and the great ho-ho-ho-I’m- havinganother-hot-one-tonight that she believed was implied by the act of draping a tie on the outer knob of his bedroom door.

He said, “I haven’t lived as a celibate any more than have you. We’ve always known that about each other, haven’t we?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s just a fact. And if we start trying to walk a tightrope between the past and the future in our life together, we’re going to fall off. It can’t be done. What we have is now. Beyond that, the future. To my way of thinking, that ought to be our primary concern.”

“This has nothing to do with the past, Tommy.”

“It does. You said not ten minutes ago that you felt just like ‘his lordship’s squalid little Sunday-night score.’”

“You’ve misunderstood my concern.”

“Have I?” He leaned over the edge of the bed and scooped up his dressing gown which had fallen to the floor in a heap of blue paisley sometime during the night. “Are you angrier about a tie on the door knob—”

“About what the tie implies.”

“—or more specifically about the fact that, by my own extremely cretinous admission, it’s a device I’ve used before?”

“I think you know me well enough not to have to ask a question like that.”

He stood, shrugged his way into the dressing gown, and spent a moment picking up the clothing he’d been in such a tearing hurry to divest himself of at half past eleven on the previous night. “And I think you’re at heart more honest with yourself than you’re being at the moment with me.”

“You’re making an accusation. I don’t much like that. Nor do I like its connotation of egocentricity.”

“Yours or mine?”

“You know what I mean, Tommy.”

He crossed the room and pulled open the curtains. It was a bleak day outside. A gusty wind was scudding heavy clouds from east to west in the sky above, while on the ground a thin crust of frost lay like fresh gauze on the lawn and the rose bushes that comprised his rear garden. One of the neighbourhood cats perched atop the brick wall against which heavy solanum climbed. He was hunched into dual humps of head and body with his calico fur rippling and his face looking shuttered, demonstrating that singularly feline quality of being at once imperious and untouchable. Lynley wished he could say the same about himself.

He turned from the window to see that Helen was watching his movements in the mirror. He went to stand behind her.

“If I choose,” he said, “I could drive myself mad with thinking of the men you’ve had as your lovers. Then in direct avoidance of the madness, I could accuse you of using them to meet your own ends, to gratify your ego, to build your self-esteem. But my madness would still be there all the time, just beneath the surface, no matter the strength of my accusations. I’d merely be diverting and denying it by focusing all my attention — not to mention the force of my righteous indignation — on you.”

“Clever,” she said. Her eyes were on his.

“What?”

“This way of avoiding the central issue.”

“Which is?”

“What I don’t want to be.”

“My wife.”

“No. Lord Asherton’s little dolly bird. Detective Inspector Lynley’s hot new piece. The cause of a little wink and a smirk between you and Denton when he sets out your breakfast or brings you your tea.”

“Fine. Understandable. Then marry me. I’ve wanted that for the last twelve months and I want it now. If you’ll agree to legitimatising this affair in the conventional manner — which is what I’ve proposed from the first and you know it — then you’ll hardly have to concern yourself with idle gossip and potential derogation.”

“It’s not as easy as that. Idle gossip’s not even the point.”

“You don’t love me?”

“Of course I love you. You know that I love you.”

“Then?”

“I won’t be made an object. I won’t.”

He nodded slowly. “And you’ve felt like an object these past two months? When we’ve been together? Last night perhaps?”

Her glance faltered. He saw her fi ngers close round the handle of the brush. “No. Of course not.”

“But this morning?”

She blinked. “God, how I hate to argue with you.”

“We’re not arguing, Helen.”

“You’re trying to trap me.”

“I’m trying to look at the truth.” He wanted to run his fingers the length of her hair, turn her to him, cup her