Why was Resnick thinking of all this?
Betty Carter was singing
'Body and Soul' on the car stereo as he drove, mingling the words and tune with those of a second, similar song, so that the final, climactic chorus seemed forever delayed, but that wasn't it. Not exactly. More confusing still, the words of yet another song were worrying away at some part of Resnick's mind.
'Send in the Clowns.'
He had heard Betty Carter live just once. A rare trip to London, a weekend in early spring, and she had been at Ronnie Scott's. A striking black woman, not beautiful, not young; warm and confident, good-humoured, talking to the audience between numbers with that slight show- business bonhomie that set Resnick's teeth painfully on edge. But when she sang. He remembered
'But Beautiful',
'What's New?' the way she would move around the stage with the microphone, her body bending to the shapes of the words with a combination of feeling and control that was unsurpassable.
Scott himself, nose like a hawk and gimlet-eyed, his sixty-odd years showing only where the skin hung thinly at his neck, had been leading his quartet through the support slots on the same evening. Tenor saxophone, piano, bass and drums. After several rousing numbers, Scott had played a two-chorus version of Sondheim's 'Send in the Clowns', almost straight, bass and drums dropping out, the tone of his saxophone ravishing and hard, one of the best ballad performances Resnick had 162 ever heard, silencing the club and striking him straight to the heart.
Ben Riley's heart.
Resnick had never known his friend fall for any woman the way he had fallen for Sarah.
'Don't know what she sees in me, Charlie, but thank Christ that she does!' And soon after,
'Not going to believe this, Charlie, but I think we're going to do it. You know, yes, tie the knot.' During the preparations for the wedding, little by little, Resnick had sensed Sarah withdrawing; the way she would react sometimes when he saw them together, snatches of conversation that were reported back. He tried to say something about it once and it was the first and only time Ben had come close to hitting him. Three weeks before the ceremony, Sarah had told Ben there was somebody else.
When Ben had scraped himself back off the ground days later, he sent her flowers and a telegram / guess they sent in the clowns a line from the song, which was popular at the time. With Sarah, certainly.
She had bought Ben a record of it, Judy Collins.
He didn't know her response, whether she laughed or cried. He wouldn't talk to Resnick about her for months, years, wouldn't hear her name; then, one day, Ben said she had phoned him, from nowhere, out of the blue. Almost, he had failed to recognise the voice and the name; of course, it was no longer the same. Feeling low, lonely the way only marriage can make you feel, she had got to thinking about him. What he was doing. Where he was. They met once on a country road and she held his hand but turned aside from his kiss; there were things she wasn't telling him about the marriage, she made that clear, a tiny hook that bit deep. Then came the Christmas cards: With love from Sarah and family. The last few were returned to sender: Ben Riley had gone to the States.
Why was Resnick thinking of all this now?
She was out in the garden and hadn't heard the bell. Resnick let himself in through the side gate and walked along the gravel path.
Honeysuckle climbed the wall. She was bending over one of the flower-beds, using a tool Resnick recognised but couldn't have named, to lever out weeds. As she straightened, she put her hand, no more than a moment, against the small of her back.
'I didn't think you'd recognised me, Charlie,' Sarah Farleigh said.
'I hadn't' She smiled at the ground.
'When did you realise?'
'Today. Oh, no more than an hour ago.'
She paused in pulling off her rubber gloves to look at him, asking the question with her eyes.
'I don't know,' he said.
'I mean, exactly. It came to me suddenly, I don't know why.'
'Why don't we go inside?' Sarah said.
'It's getting cold.' This time the smile was fuller, more real, and for the first time he saw her as she had been, the woman with whom Ben Riley had fallen in love.
The interior of the house was not ostentatious, but neat. Comfortable furniture, wallpaper Resnick would have guessed came from Laura Ashley, not an Aga but something similar dominating the broad, flagstoned kitchen where they now stood.
'Do you really want tea?'
'Coffee?'
'All right,' she set the kettle to boil, balanced coffee filters over two green Apiico porcelain cups, and reached the sherry bottle down from between glass jars of puy lentils and flageolet beans. Resnick shook his head and she poured a good measure for herself, tilted the glass and poured again.
'You'll think I'm becoming an alcoholic,' she smiled.
'No.'
Her hair was thick the way it had always been, streaked now with grey. The skin around her eyes was red from too much crying, but the eyes themselves were green, the green of slate that has stood fresh in the rain, and bright. Her wrists were thin, but strong, and her calves and ankles fleshed out and solid. She had aged more heavily, more hastily than Resnick had ever imagined she would.
'Will you come to Peter's funeral, Charlie?'
He took a first sip of his coffee, surprised.
'Isn't that what they always do, Morse and the others? I've watched them on television, standing in the background at their victims' funerals, looking for suspects among the guests.'
'I don't think that would be appropriate,' Resnick said. 'Not in this case.' He looked into her eyes.
'But, yes, if that's what you want.
Yes, I'll be pleased to come. '
'Thank you,' she said. And then,
'Peter has family, of course, had, but I can't say we ever really got on.'
'You have children, though.' He had seen their photographs in the hallway and on the mantelpiece in the living room when they had walked past 'Yes, three.'
All grown up? '
'All grown.'
Sarah took her sherry to the window; it was darkening steadily outside and somewhere was getting rain.
'Do you ever hear from him at all?'
Ben? '
' Yes. '
'Not for a while. He's in America, you…'
'Yes, I know. Montana, isn't it? Nebraska? One of those western states.'
'Maine, he moved to Maine.'
'Married?'
'There's someone, yes.'
Children? '
Yes, there's a child. A boy. I. '
'Charlie, I don't want to know.' There were tears in her eyes, but she was damned if she was going to cry. There had been crying enough lately and with good reason. What was the point of crying over impossibilities? Spilt milk gone sour.
'Sarah, what happened to your husband, I couldn't be more sorry.'
'Thank you. I know.' She smiled again, a generous, smile, almost a laugh.
'You always were a sympathetic man.' Turning, she rinsed the sherry glass beneath the tap. 'Maybe I should have married you.'
