A Traitor to Memory (130 page)

Lynley swallowed. Deborah went back into the study. He followed her, found the glass of whisky where he'd left it, and took a momentary refuge in its depths. He said when he could, “We know how you want … And how you've tried … You and Simon …”

“Tommy,” she said firmly, “I'm pleased for you. You mustn't ever think that my situation—Simon's and mine … well, no … mine, really—would ever keep me from feeling happiness for yours. I know what this means to you both, and the fact that I'm not able to carry a baby … Well, it's painful, yes. Of
course
it's painful. But I don't want the rest of the world to wallow round in my grief. And I surely don't want to put anyone else in my situation just for the company.”

She knelt among her photographs. She seemed to have dismissed the subject, but Lynley could not because, as far as he was concerned, they had not yet come to the real topic. He went to sit opposite her, in the leather chair St. James used when he was in the room. He said, “Deb,” and when she looked up, “There's something else.”

Her green eyes darkened. “What else?”

“Santa Barbara.”

“Santa Barbara?”

“That summer when you were eighteen, when you were at school at the institute. That year when I made those four trips to see you: October, January, May, and July. July, especially, when we drove the coastal road into Oregon.”

She said nothing, but her face blanched, so he knew that she understood where he was heading. Even as he headed there, he wished that something would happen to stop him so he wouldn't have to admit to her what he could hardly bear to face himself.

“You said it was the car on that trip,” he told her. “You weren't used to so much driving. Or perhaps it was the food, you said. Or the change in climate. Or the heat when it was hot outside or the cool when it was cold indoors. You weren't used to being in and out of air-conditioning so much, and aren't Americans addicted to their air conditioners? I listened to every excuse you made, and I chose to believe you. But all the time …” He didn't wish to say it, would have given anything to avoid it. But at the last moment he forced himself to admit what he'd long pushed from his mind. “I knew.”

She lowered her gaze. He saw her reach out for the scissors and bubble-wrap, pulling one of her pictures towards her. She did nothing with it.

“After that trip, I waited for you to tell me,” he said. “What I thought was that when you told me, we'd decide together what we
wanted to do. We're in love, so we'll marry, I told myself. As soon as Deb admits that she's pregnant.”

“Tommy …”

“Let me go on. This has been years in the making, and now we're here, I have to see it through.”

“Tommy, you can't—”

“I always knew. I think I knew the night that it happened. That night in Montecito.”

She said nothing.

He said, “Deborah. Please tell me.”

“It's no longer important.”

“It
is
important to me.”

“Not after all this time.”

“Yes. After all this time. Because I did nothing. Don't you see? I knew, but I did nothing. I just left you to face it alone, whatever ‘it’ was going to be. You were the woman I loved, the woman I wanted, and I ignored what was happening because …” He became aware that still she wasn't looking at him, her face fully hidden by the angle of her head and the way her hair fell round her shoulders. But he didn't stop speaking because he finally understood what had motivated him then, what was indeed the source of his shame. “Because I couldn't sort out how to work it,” he said. “Because I hadn't planned it to happen like that and God help anything that stood in the way of how I planned my life to work out. And as long as you said nothing about it, I could let the entire situation slide, let everything slide, let my whole damned life slide right on by without the least inconvenience to me. Ultimately, I could even pretend that there was no baby. I could tell myself that surely if there was, you'd have said something. And when you didn't, I allowed myself to believe I'd been mistaken. When all the time I knew at heart that I hadn't. So I said nothing throughout July. In August. September. And whatever you faced when you finally made your decision to act, you faced alone.”

“It was my responsibility.”

“It was ours. Our child. Our responsibility. But I left you there. And I'm sorry.”

“There's no need to be.”

“There is. Because when you and Simon married, when you lost all those babies, what I had to think was that if you'd had that first child, ours—”

“Tommy, no!” She raised her head.

“—then none of this would have happened to you.”

“That's not how it was,” she said. “Believe me. That's
not
how it is. You've no need to punish yourself over this. You've no obligation to me.”

“Now, perhaps not. But then I did.”

“No. And it wouldn't have mattered, anyway. You could have spoken about it, yes. You could have phoned. You could have returned on the very next plane, and confronted me with what you believed was going on. But nothing would have changed with all that. Oh, we might have married in a rush or something. You might even have stayed with me in Santa Barbara so that I could finish at the institute. But at the end of it all, there still wouldn't have been a baby. Not mine and yours. Not mine and Simon's. Not mine and anyone's as it turns out.”

“What do you mean?”

She leaned back on her heels, setting the scissors and the tape to one side. She said, “Just what I say. There wouldn't have been a baby no matter what I did. I just didn't wait long enough to find that out.” She blinked rapidly and turned her head to look hard at the bookshelves. After a moment, she returned her gaze to him. “I would have lost our baby as well, Tommy. It's something called balanced translocation.”

“What is?”

“My … what do I call it? My problem? Condition? Situation?” She offered him a shaky smile.

“Deborah, what are you telling me?”

“That I can't have a baby. I'll never be able to have one. It's incredible to think that a single chromosome could hold such power, but there you have it.” She pressed her fingers to her chest, saying, “Phenotype: normal in every way. Genotype … Well, when one has ‘excessive foetal wastage’—that's what they call it … all the miscarriages … isn't that obscene?—there's got to be a medical reason. In my case, it's genetics: One arm of the twenty-first chromosome is upside down.”

“My God,” he said. “Deb, I'm—”

“Simon doesn't know yet,” she said quickly, as if to stop him from going on. “And I'd rather he not just now. I did promise him that I'd let a full year go by before having any more tests and I'd like him to think I've kept that promise. I intended to. But last June … that case you were working on when the little girl died …? I just had to
know after that, Tommy. I don't know why except that I was … well, I was so struck by her death. Its uselessness. The terrible shame and waste of it, this sweet little life gone … So I went back to the doctor then. But Simon doesn't know.”

“Deborah.” Lynley said her name quietly. “I am so terribly sorry.”

Her eyes filled at that. She blinked the tears back furiously, then shook her head just as furiously when he reached out to her. “No. It's fine. I'm fine. I mean, I'm all
right.
Most of the time I don't think about it. And we're going through the process of adoption. We've filled out so many applications … all this paperwork … that we're
bound
to … at some time. And we're trying in other countries as well. I just wish it could be different for Simon's sake. It's selfish and I know it, it's all sorts of ego, but I wanted us to create a child together. I think he wanted … would have liked that as well, but he's too good to say so directly.” And then she smiled despite one large tear that she couldn't contain. “You're not to think I'm not all right, Tommy. I
am.
I've learned that things work out the way they're meant to work out no matter what we want, so it's best to keep our wants to a minimum and to thank our stars, our luck, or our gods that we've been given as much as we have.”

“But this doesn't absolve me from my part in what happened,” he told her. “Back then. In Santa Barbara. My going off and never saying a word. This doesn't absolve me of that, Deb.”

“No, this doesn't,” she agreed. “It doesn't at all. But, Tommy, you must believe me. I do.”

Helen was waiting for him when he got home. She was already in bed with a book lying open in her lap. But she'd dozed off while she was reading, and her head rested back against the pillows she'd piled behind her, her hair a dark blur against white cotton.

Quietly, Lynley crossed to his wife and stood gazing down at her. She was light and shadow, perfectly omnipotent and achingly vulnerable. He sat on the edge of the bed.

She didn't start as some might have done, roused suddenly from sleep by someone's presence. Instead, her eyes opened and were immediately focused on him with preternatural comprehension. “Frances finally went to him,” she said as if they'd been talking all along. “Laura Hillier phoned with the news.”

“I'm glad,” he said. “It's what she needed to do. How is he?”

“There's no change. But he's holding on.”

Lynley sighed and nodded. “Anyway, it's over. We've made an arrest.”

“I know. Barbara phoned me as well. She said I should tell you all's right with the world at her end of things. She would have rung you on the mobile, but she wanted to check in with me.”

“That was good of her.”

“She's a very good person. She says Hillier's planning to give Winston a promotion, by the way. Did you know that, Tommy?”

“Is he really?”

“She says Hillier wanted to make sure she knew. Although, she says, he complimented her first. On the case. He complimented both of you.”

“Yes. Well, that sounds like Hillier. Never say ‘well done’ without pulling the rug out just in case you're feeling cocky.”

“She'd like her rank back. But, of course, you know that.”

“And I'd like the power to give it to her.” He picked up the book she'd been reading. He turned it over and examined its title.
A Lesson Before Dying
. How apt, he thought.

She said, “I found it among your novels in the library. I've not got far, I'm afraid. I dropped off to sleep. Lord. Why have I become so exhausted? If this goes on all nine months, by the end of the pregnancy I'll be sleeping twenty hours a day. And the rest of the time I'll spend being sick. It's supposed to be more romantic than this. At least, that's what I was always led to believe.”

“I've told Deborah.” He explained why he'd gone to Chelsea in the first place, adding, “She already knew, as things turned out.”

“Did she really?”

“Yes. Well, obviously, she knows the signs. She's very pleased, Helen. You were right to want to share the news with her. She was only waiting for you to tell her.”

Helen searched his face then, perhaps hearing something in his tone that seemed misplaced, given the situation. And something
was
there. He could hear it himself. But what it was had nothing to do with Helen and even less to do with the future Lynley intended to share with her.

She said, “And you, Tommy? Are
you
pleased? Oh, you've said that you are, but what else
can
you say? Husband, gentleman, and a party to the process, you can hardly go tearing from the room with your head in your hands. But I've had the feeling that something's
gone badly wrong between us lately. I didn't have that feeling before we made the baby, so it's seemed to me that perhaps you aren't as ready as you thought you were.”

“No,” he said. “Everything's right, Helen. And I
am
pleased. More than I can say.”

“I suppose we could have done with a longer period of adjustment together all the same,” she said.

Lynley thought of what Deborah had said to him, about the source of happiness coming from what's given. “We have the rest of our lives to adjust,” he told his wife. “If we don't seize the moment, the moment's gone.”

He set the novel on her bedside table then. He bent and kissed her forehead. He said, “I love you, darling,” and she pulled him down to her mouth and parted her lips against his. She murmured, “Talking of seizing the moment …” and she returned his kiss in a way, he realised, that connected them as they hadn't been connected since she'd first told him she was pregnant.

He felt a stirring for her then, that mixture of lust and love that always left him at once both weak and resolute, determined to be her master and at the same time completely within her power. He laid a trail of kisses down her neck to her shoulders, and he felt her shiver as he eased the straps of her nightgown gently down her arms. As he cupped her bare breasts and bent to them, her fingers went to his tie and unknotted it and began to work on the buttons of his shirt.

He looked up at her then, passion suddenly tempered by concern. “What about the baby?” he asked. “Is it safe?”

She smiled and drew him into her arms. “The baby, darling Tommy, will be fine.”