Just One Evil Act

carefully considering her answer. “That’s just the problem. The think-but-not-know part. At any rate, it’s lovely to see you. C’n I help in some way? I mean, with the day?”

He found of a sudden that he didn’t want their evening to be about Barbara Havers and what she’d been up to. He found that he wished to let that sleeping dog lie, if only for the hours he had to spend with Daidre. So instead he asked her about the job she’d been offered at London Zoo. Had she reached a decision about transplanting herself, uprooting her life, and abandoning Boadicea’s Broads for the Electric Magic?

She said, “A lot depends on what Mark says about the contract. I’ve not heard from him yet.”

“How might Mark feel about your leaving Bristol if you’re leaning in that direction?”

“Well, obviously, there are thousands of solicitors in London waiting for someone like me to come along and hire them for the messy bits of life.”

“Yes. But that’s not what I meant.”

Their sparkling water arrived at the table, along with a bottle of wine. The ceremony of opening this, presenting the cork, tasting, and nodding approval was gone through. The wine was poured for both of them before Daidre replied.

“What’re you asking, Thomas?”

He rolled the stem of his wineglass in his fingers. “I suppose I’m asking if there’s any point to my seeing you . . . aside from our conversations which I do enjoy.”

She looked at her wine as she began her answer. It took a moment as she was not glib and did not pretend to be. “When it comes to you, I’m at war with my better judgement.”

“Meaning what?”

“That my better judgement has been insisting that my life is better kept in order through devotion to mammals who can’t speak. I became a veterinarian for a reason, you see.”

He took this in and evaluated it, turning it this way and that for every meaning he could wrest from it. He settled on saying, “But you can’t expect to go through life untouched by your fellow man, can you? You can’t want that.”

Their starters arrived: freshly smoked Irish salmon for her, a Caprese salad for him. It was far too large. What had he been thinking in ordering it?

She said, “Well, that’s just it, isn’t it? I can want that. Anyone can want it. There’s part of me, Tommy —”

“You’ve just called me Tommy.”

“Thomas.”

“I prefer the other.”

“I know. And please, it was inadvertent. You’re not meant to think—”

“Daidre, nothing is inadvertent.”

Her head lowered as, perhaps, she took this in. She seemed to be gathering her thoughts. She finally looked up, and her eyes were bright. Candlelight, he thought. It was only the candles. She said, “Let’s leave that for another discussion. What I was intending to say is that there’s a part of me that always fails within a relationship. Failure myself to thrive, failure to provide what the other person needs to thrive as well. It’s always come down to that in the end for me, and it probably always will, if my personal history is anything to go by. There’s a part of me that can’t be touched, you see, and that means defeat for anyone who tries to get at the heart of who I am.”

“Can’t or won’t?” he asked her.

“What?”

“Be touched. Can’t or won’t be touched?”

“Can’t, I’m afraid. I’m an independent sort. Well, I’ve had to be, coming into the middle-class world as I did.”

She didn’t amplify, but she didn’t need to. He knew her background because she’d shown it to him: the decrepit caravan from which she and her siblings had been removed by the government from the care of their parents, the fostering system into which they’d been placed, her own adoption and her change of identity. He knew it all, and it didn’t matter a whit to him. But that was hardly the point.

She said, “I’ll always have that part of me, and that’s what keeps me . . . untouchable, I suppose, is the word.”

“Because your family were travellers?”

“If they’d only been travellers, Tommy.”

He let the name go.

“At least there’s a culture involved with travellers. There’s a tradition, a history, families, whatever. We didn’t have that. All we had was my father’s . . . What do we want to call it? His compulsion? His mad insistence on what he was going to do with his life? That led us to where we ended up. That led us to why we were taken from him and from my mother and from that terrible place . . .” Her eyes grew brighter. She looked away from him at the empty fireplace.

Lynley said quickly, “Daidre. It’s perfectly—”

“No, it isn’t. It can never be. It’s part of who I am and this . . . this untouchable part of me seeks to honour it, I suppose. But it always gets in the way.”

He said nothing. He allowed her the moment to regain her composure, sorry that he had pushed her to this point, which was always the point of departure for the two of them even though he would not have it that way.

She looked back at him, her expression fond. “It isn’t you, you know. It isn’t who you are or how you grew up or what you owe to several hundred years of your family’s history. It’s me. And the fact that I have no family history at all. At least not one that I’m aware of or was told about. I suspect, on the other hand, that you can recite your forebears back to the time of the Tudors.”

“Hardly.” He smiled. “The Stuarts, perhaps, but not the Tudors.”

“You see,” she said. “You know the Stuarts. Tommy, there are actually people out there”—she waved her hand vaguely in the direction of the windows, by which she meant the outside world—“who have no idea who the Stuarts are. You do know that, don’t you?”

“Daidre, I read history. It’s nothing more than that. And you called me Tommy again. I think you’ve begun to protest too much. And yes, yes, I know it’s Hamlet’s mother and don’t tell me it signifies anything more than people saying ‘There’s the rub’ because you and I both know that it doesn’t. And even if it did, what does it matter at the end of the day?”

“It matters to me,” she said. “It’s what keeps me apart.”

“From whom?”

“From everyone. From you. And besides that . . . After what happened to you, you need—no, you deserve —someone who is one hundred percent there for you.”

He took some wine and thought about this. She worked on her salmon for a moment. He watched her. He finally said, “That hardly sounds healthy. No one actually wants a parasite. I tend to think it’s only in films that we get the idea men and women are supposed to find—what do they call it?—soul mates with whom they march into the future, blissfully joined at the hip.”

She smiled, it seemed, in spite of herself. “You know what I mean. You deserve someone who is willing and able to be one hundred percent for you, open to you, accepting of you . . . whatever you want to call it. I’m not that person, and I don’t think I could be.”

Her declaration felt like the thinnest of rapiers. It slid without effort under his skin, barely felt until the bleeding began. “So what are you saying, exactly?”

“I hardly know.”

“Why?”

She looked at him. He tried to read whatever he could on her face, but time and circumstance had made her guarded, and he couldn’t blame her for the walls she built. She said, “Because you’re not an easy man to walk away from, Tommy. So I’m very much aware of the necessity of walking away and the marked reluctance I feel about doing so.”

He nodded. For a moment they ate as the sounds of the dining room rose and fell around them. Plates were removed. Other plates came. He finally said, “Let’s leave it at that, for now.”