Two panda cars, lights flashing and sirens howling, led the caravan of vehicles on a fl ight out of Cambridge, tearing down Lensfield Road, soaring over the Fen Causeway and up along the Backs to make the turn west towards Madingley. They left in their wake groups of staring students, bicycle riders veering out of the way, black-gowned fellows setting off to lectures, and two tourist buses disgorging Japanese visitors at the autumn-decked avenue which led to New Court at Trinity College.
Havers’ Mini was sandwiched between the second panda car and Sheehan’s own vehicle, onto which he had slapped a temporary warning light. Behind him charged the scenes-of-crime van and behind that, an ambulance in the futile hope that the word body didn’t necessarily mean death.
They powered across the flyover that bridged the M11 and swung through the collection of cottages that comprised the tiny village of Madingley. Beyond it, they shot along a narrow lane. It was a farming area, an abrupt change from town to country just minutes away from Cambridge. Hedgerows characterised it-hawthorn, briar, and holly- marking the boundaries of fields newly planted with winter wheat.
They rounded a curve beyond which a tractor stood half on and half off the verge, its enormous wheels crusted with mud. Atop it sat a man in a bulky jacket with its collar turned up round his ears and his shoulders hunched against the wind and the cold. He waved them to a halt and hopped to the ground. A border collie that had been lying motionless at the rear wheel of the tractor got to its feet upon the man’s sharp command and came to his side.
“Over here,” the man said after introducing himself as Bob Jenkins and pointing out his home about a quarter mile away, set back from the road and surrounded by barn, outbuildings, and fields. “Shasta found her.”
Hearing his name, the dog pricked up his ears, gave one extremely disciplined wag of the tail, and followed his master about twenty feet beyond the tractor where a body lay in a tangle of weeds and bracken along the base of the hedge.
“Never seen anything like it,” Jenkins said. “I di’ know what the ruddy world’s comin’ to.” He pulled at his nose, which was scarlet from the cold, and squinted against the northeast wind. It held the fog at bay-as it had done on the previous day-but it brought along with it the frigid temperatures of the grey North Sea. A hedgerow offered little protection against it.
“Damn” was Sheehan’s only remark as he squatted by the body. Lynley and Havers joined him.
It was a girl, tall and slender, with a fall of hair the colour of beechwood. She was wearing a green sweatshirt, white shorts, athletic shoes, and rather grimy socks, the left one of which had become rucked round her ankle. She lay on her back, with her chin tilted up, her mouth open, her eyes glazed. And her torso was a mass of crimson broken by the dark tattooing of unburnt particles of gunpowder. A single glance was enough to tell all of them that the only possible use the ambulance might serve would be to convey the corpse to autopsy.
“You haven’t touched her?” Lynley asked Bob Jenkins.
The man looked horrified by the very thought. “Didn’t touch nothing,” he said. “Shasta here snuffed her, but he backed up quick enough, didn’t he, when he caught the smell of the powder. Not one for guns, is Shasta.”
“You heard no shots this morning?”
Jenkins shook his head. “I was working over the engine of the tractor early on. I had it going off and on, playing with the carburettor and making a bit of a row. If someone took her down then-” He jerked his head at the body but didn’t look at it. “I wouldn’t have heard.”
“What about the dog?”
Jenkins’ hand automatically went for the dog’s head which was inches away from his own left thigh. Shasta blinked, panted briefl y, and accepted the caress with another single wag of his tail. “He did set to with a bit of barking,” Jenkins said. “I had the radio going over the engine noise and had to shout him down.”
“Do you remember what time this was?”
At first he shook his head. But then he lifted a gloved hand quickly-one fi nger skyward- as if an idea had suddenly struck him. “It was somewhere near half six.”
“You’re sure?”
“They were reading the news and I wanted to hear if the P.M.’s going to do something about this poll tax business.” His eyes shifted to the body and quickly away. “Girl could of been hit then, all right. But I have to tell that Shasta might of just been barking to bark. He does that some.”
Around them, the uniformed police were rolling out the crime scene tape and blocking off the lane as the scenes-of-crime team began unloading the van. The police photographer approached with his camera held before him like a shield. He looked a bit green under the eyes and round the mouth. He waited some feet away for the signal from Sheehan who was peering at the blood-soaked front of the dead girl’s sweatshirt.
“A shotgun,” he said. And then looking up, he shouted to the scenes-of-crime team, “Keep an eye out for the wad, you lot.” He rested on his thick haunches and shook his head. “This’s going to be worse than looking for dust in the desert.”
“Why?” Havers asked.
Sheehan cocked his head at her in surprise. Lynley said, “She’s a city dweller, Superintendent.” And then to Havers, “It’s pheasant season.”
Sheehan went on with, “Anyone wanting to have a bash at the pheasants is going to own a shotgun, Sergeant. The killings begin next week. It’s the time of year when every idiot with an itchy finger and a need to feel like some real blood sport’s just the way to get him back to his roots will be out blasting away at anything that moves. We’ll be seeing wounds every which way by the end of the month.”
“But not like this.”
“No. This was no accident.” He fumbled in his trouser pocket and brought out a wallet from which he extracted a credit card. “Two runners,” he said pensively. “Both of them women. Both of them tall, both fair, both long-haired.”
“You’re not thinking we’re looking at a serial killing?” Havers sounded a mixture of doubt and disappointment that the Cambridge superintendent might have reached such a conclusion.
Sheehan used the edge of his credit card to clean off a patch of dirt and leaves that clung to the front of the girl’s blood-soaked sweatshirt. Over the left breast the words Queens’ College, Cambridge were stencilled round the college coat of arms.
“You mean someone with a nasty little bent for bringing down fair-haired college runners?” Sheehan asked. “No. I don’t think so. Serial killers don’t vary their routines this much. The killing’s their signature. You know what I mean: I beat in another head with a brick, you coppers, are you any closer to fi nding me yet?” He cleaned off the credit card, wiped his fingers on a rust-coloured handkerchief, and pushed himself to his feet. “Shoot her, Graham,” he said over his shoulder, and the photographer came forward to do so. At that, the scenes-of-crime team began to move, as did the uniformed constables, beginning the slow process of examining every inch of the surrounding ground.
Bob Jenkins said, “Got to get in that fi eld, if you’ve a mind to let me,” and tilted his chin to direct their attention to where he had been heading in the first place when his dog had come upon the body.
Perhaps three yards away from the dead girl, a break in the hedge revealed a gate giving access to the nearest field. Lynley eyed it for a moment as the crime scene people began their work.
“In a few minutes,” he said to the farmer, and added to Sheehan, “They’ll need to look for prints all along the verge, Superintendent. Footprints. Tyre prints from a car or a bike.”
“Right,” Sheehan said, and went to speak with his team.
Lynley and Havers walked to the gate. It was only wide enough to accommodate the tractor, and hemmed in on both sides by a heavy growth of hawthorn. They climbed carefully over. The ground beyond was soft, trodden, and rutted as it gave way to the fi eld itself. But its consistency was crumbly and fragile, so although the imprints of feet were everywhere, nowhere did they leave an impression that was anything more than merely another indentation in the already choppy ground.
“Nothing decent,” Havers said as she scouted round the area. “But if it was a lying-in-wait-”
“Then the waiting had to be done right here,” Lynley concluded. He worked his eyes slowly over the ground, from one side of the gate to the other. When he saw what he was looking for-an indentation in the ground that didn’t fit with the rest-he said, “Havers.”
She joined him. He pointed out the smooth, circular impression in the earth, the barely discernible narrow, extended impression behind it, the sharp, deeper fissure that comprised its conclusion. As a unit, the impressions angled acutely perhaps two and a half feet beyond the gate itself, and less than a foot from the hawthorn hedge.
“Knee, leg, toe,” Lynley said. “The killer knelt here, hidden by the hedge, on one knee, resting the gun on the second bar of the gate. Waiting.”
“But how could anyone have known-”
“That she’d be running this way? The same way someone knew where to find Elena Weaver.”
Justine Weaver scraped a knife along the burnt edge of the toast, watching the resulting black ash speckle the clean surface of the kitchen sink like a fine deposit of powder. She tried to find a place inside her where compassion and understanding still resided, a place like a well from which she could drink deeply and somehow replenish what the events of the past eight months-and the last two days- had desiccated. But if a well-spring of empathy had ever existed at her core, it had long since dried up, leaving in its place the barren ground of resentment and despair. And nothing fl owed from this.
They’ve lost their daughter, she told herself. They share a mutual grief. But those facts did not eliminate the wretchedness she had felt since Monday night, a replay of an earlier pain, like the same melody in a different key.
They’d come home together in silence yesterday, Anthony and his former wife. They’d been to see the police. They’d gone on to the funeral home. They’d chosen a coffin and made the arrangements, none of which they shared with her. It was only when she brought out the plates of thin sandwiches and cake, only when she had poured the tea, only when she had passed them each the lemon and the milk and the sugar that either of them spoke in anything other than weary monosyllables. And then it was Glyn who fi nally addressed her, choosing the moment and wielding the weapon, a superficially simple declaration that was skilfully honed by time and circumstance.
As she spoke, she kept her eyes on the sandwich plate which Justine was offering her and which she made no move to accept. “I’d prefer you to stay away from my daughter’s funeral, Justine.”
They were in the sitting room, gathered round the low coffee table. The artifi cial fi re was lit, its flames lapping the false coals with a quiet hiss. The curtains were drawn. An electric clock whirred softly. It was such a sensible, civilised place to be.
At first Justine said nothing. She looked at her husband, waiting for him to voice a protest of some sort. But he was giving his attention to his teacup and saucer. A muscle pulled at the corner of his mouth.
He knew this was coming, she thought, and she said, “Anthony?”
“You had no real tie to Elena,” Glyn went on. Her voice was even, so extremely reasonable. “So I’d prefer you not to be there. I hope you understand.”
“Ten years as her stepmother,” Justine said.
“Please,” Glyn said. “As her father’s second wife.”
Justine set the plate down. She studied the neat array of sandwiches, nothing how she’d assembled them to form a pattern. Egg salad, crab, fresh ham, cream cheese. Crusts neatly removed, every edge of the bread cut as if it were a perfect plane. Glyn went on.
“We’ll take her to London for the service, so you won’t have to do without Anthony for longer than a few hours. And then afterwards, you can get directly back to the business of your lives.”
Justine merely stared, trying and failing to summon a response.
Glyn continued, as if following a course she’d determined in advance. “We never knew for certain why Elena was born deaf. Has Anthony told you that? I suppose we could have had studies done-some sort of genetic thing, you know what I mean-but we didn’t bother.”
Anthony leaned forward, put his teacup on the coffee table. He kept his fingers on its saucer as if in the expectation that it would slide to the fl oor.
Justine said, “I don’t see that-”
“The reality is that you might produce a deaf baby as well, Justine, if there’s something wrong with Anthony’s genes. I thought I ought to mention the possibility. Are you equipped- emotionally, I mean-to deal with a handicapped child? Have you considered how a deaf child might put a spanner in the works of your career?”
Justine looked at her husband. He didn’t meet her eyes. One of his hands formed a loose fist on his thigh. She said, “Is this really necessary, Glyn?”
“I should think you’d find it helpful.” Glyn reached for her teacup. For a moment, she seemed to examine the rose on the china, and she turned the cup to the right, to the left, as if with the intention of admiring its design. “That’s that, then, isn’t it? Everything’s been said.” She replaced the cup and stood. “I won’t be wanting any dinner.” She left them alone.
Justine turned to her husband, waited for him to speak, and watched him sit motionless. He seemed to be disappearing into himself, bones, blood, and flesh disintegrating into the ashes and dust from which all men were formed. He has such small hands, she thought. And for the first time she considered the wide gold wedding band round his finger and the reason she had wanted him to have it-the largest, the widest, the brightest in the shop, the most capable of heralding the fact of their marriage.
“Is this what you want?” she fi nally asked him.
His eyelids looked caked, their skin stretched and sore. “What?”
“That I stay away from the funeral. Is this what you want, Anthony?”
“It has to be that way. Try to understand.”
“Understand? What?”
“That she’s not responsible for who she is right now. She has no control over what she says and does. It goes too deep with her, Justine. You’ve got to understand.”
“And stay away from the funeral.”
She saw the movement of resignation-a simple lifting and lowering of his fi ngers-and knew the response he would make before he made it. “I hurt her. I left her. I owe her this much. I owe both of them this much.”
“My God.”
“I’ve already talked to Terence Cuff about a memorial service Friday at St. Stephen’s Church. You’ll be part of that. All of Elena’s friends will be there.”
“And that’s it? That’s all? That’s your judgement of everything? Of our marriage? Of our life? Of my relationship with Elena?”
“This isn’t about you. You can’t take it to heart.”
“You didn’t even argue with her. You could have protested.”
He fi nally looked at her. “It’s the way it has to be.”
She said nothing more. She merely felt the hard core of her resentment take on added weight. Still, she held her tongue. Be sweet, Justine, she could hear her mother say over her need to rail like a shrew against her husband. Be a nice girl.
She put the sixth piece of toast into the rack and the rack itself along with boiled eggs and sausage onto a white wicker tray. Nice girls muster up compassion, she thought. Sweet girls forgive and forgive and forgive. Don’t think of the self. Go beyond the self. Find a need greater than your own and fill it. That’s the Christian way to live.
But she couldn’t do it. Into the scales upon which she weighed her behaviour, she put the useless hours that she’d given over to trying to forge a bond with Elena, the mornings on which she’d run at her side, the evenings she’d spent helping her write her essays, the endless Sunday afternoons she’d waited for father and daughter to return from a jaunt which Anthony had declared essential to his recapturing of Elena’s love and trust.
She carried the tray into the glassed-in morning room where her husband and his former wife were sitting at the wicker table. They had been picking at grapefruit wedges and corn flakes for nearly half an hour, and now, she supposed, they would do the same with the eggs, the sausage, and the toast.
She knew she ought to say, “You need to eat. Both of you,” and another Justine might have managed the seven words and made them sound sincere. Instead, she said nothing. She sat in her accustomed place, with her back to the drive, across the table from her husband. She poured him coffee. He raised his head. He looked ten years older than he had two days ago.
Glyn said, “All this food. I can’t eat. It’s such a waste really,” and she didn’t lift her eyes from watching Justine tap off the top of her boiled egg. “Did you run this morning?” she asked, and when Justine didn’t reply, “I imagine you’ll want to start that up again soon. It’s important for a woman to keep working at her figure. Not a stretch-mark anywhere on you, is there?”
Justine stared down at the spoonful of tender white that she’d scooped from her egg. Every admonition from her past rose up to confront her, but they formed an insubstantial barrier that the previous night made easy to surmount. She said, “Elena was pregnant.” And then she looked up. “Eight weeks pregnant.”
Anthony’s face, she saw, went from drained to stricken. Glyn’s face offered a curiously satisfi ed smile.
“That Scotland Yard man was here yesterday afternoon,” Justine said. “He told me.”
“Pregnant?” Anthony repeated the word in a deadened voice.
“That’s what the autopsy showed.”
“But who…how…?” Anthony fumbled with a teaspoon. It slipped from his fingers and clattered on the fl oor.
“How?” Glyn gave a tittering laugh. “Oh, I’d think it was how babies usually get made.” She nodded at Justine. “What a moment of triumph for you, my dear.”
Anthony turned his head. The movement seemed sluggish, as if he were pulling against a great weight. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You think she doesn’t savour this moment? Just ask her if she already knew. Ask her if the information surprised her at all. In fact, you might ask her how she encouraged your daughter to have a man whenever she felt itchy.” Glyn leaned forward. “Because Elena told me all about it, Justine. About those heart-toheart chats, about how she was supposed to take care of herself.”
Anthony said, “Justine, you encouraged her? You knew?”
“Of course she knew.”
“That isn’t true,” Justine said.
“Don’t think for a moment that she didn’t want Elena to get pregnant, Anthony. She was willing to settle for anything to drive you away from her. Because if she did that, she’d get what she wanted. You. Alone. With no more distractions.”
“No,” Justine said.
“She hated Elena. She wanted her dead. I wouldn’t be surprised if she killed her herself.”
And for a moment-just the fraction of an instant-Justine saw the doubt on his face. She recognised the working of knowledge: she’d been alone in the house when the Ceephone call came, she’d gone out running alone in the morning, she hadn’t taken the dog, she could have beaten and strangled his daughter.
She said, “My God, Anthony.”
“You knew,” he replied.
“That she had a lover. Yes. But that’s all. And I spoke to her. Yes. About cleaning… about hygiene. About taking care that she didn’t-”
“Who was it?”
“Anthony.”
“God damn you, who was it?”
“She knows,” Glyn said. “You can see that she knows.”
“How long?” Anthony asked. “How long had this been going on?”
“Did they do it here, Justine? In the house? While you were home? Did you let them? Did you watch? Did you listen at the door?”
Justine pushed herself away from the table. She got to her feet. Her head felt empty.
“I want answers, Justine.” Anthony’s voice rose. “Who did this to my daughter?”
Justine fought to find the words. “She did it to herself.”
“Oh yes,” Glyn said, her eyes bright and knowing. “Let’s have at the truth.”
“You’re a viper.”
Anthony stood. “I want the facts, Justine.”
“Then take yourself off to Trinity Lane to fi nd them.”
“Trinity…” He turned from her to the wall of windows beyond which his Citroën stood on the drive. “No.” He was out of the room without another word, leaving the house without a coat, the sleeves of his striped shirt snapping in the wind. He got into the car.
Glyn reached for an egg. “It didn’t quite play out as you planned it,” she said.
Adam Jenn stared at the neat lines of his handwriting and tried to make sense out of his notes. The Peasants’ Revolt. The council of regency. A new query: Was the composition of the council of regency, rather than the imposition of new poll taxes, largely instrumental in the circumstances that led to the revolt of 1381?
He read a few phrases about John Ball and Wat Tyler, about the Statute of Labourers, and about the King. Richard II, well-intentioned but ineffectual, had lacked the skills and the backbone necessary for a man to be a leader. He had tried to please everyone but had succeeded only in destroying himself. He was historical proof of the contention that success requires more than merely a coincidental birthright. Political acumen is the key to arriving unscathed at a personal and professional goal.
Adam himself had been living his academic life according to that precept. He’d made his choice of advisor carefully, spending hours of his time scoping out the candidates for the Penford Chair. He finally made his move in Anthony Weaver’s direction only when he felt relatively assured that the St. Stephen’s medievalist would be the selection of the University search committee. To have the holder of the Penford Chair as his advisor would virtually guarantee him the benefits he found essential to labelling himself an eventual success-the initial position of academic supervisor to undergraduates, the consequent attainment of a research fellowship, the future movement to lecturer, and finally a professorship before his forty-fifth birthday. All of it seemed within the bounds of reasonable expectation when Anthony Weaver had taken him on as a graduate advisee. So cooperating with Weaver’s request that he take the professor’s daughter under his wing in order to make her second year at the University a smoother and more pleasant experience than her fi rst had appeared to be yet another fortuitous opportunity for him to demonstrate-if only to himself-that he possessed the requisite amount of political perspicacity to flourish in this environment. What he had not counted on when fi rst told about the professor’s handicapped daughter and first envisaging Dr. Weaver’s gratitude for the time he expended on smoothing the troubled waters of his daughter’s life was Elena herself.
He had been expecting to be introduced to a stoop-shouldered, concave-chested, pasty-skinned fading wild-flower of a girl, someone who sat miserably on the edge of a threadbare ottoman with her legs tucked back and clinging to its sides. She’d be wearing an old dress printed with rosebuds. She’d be wearing ankle socks and scruffy-looking brogues. And for Dr. Weaver’s sake, he’d do his duty with an appealing blend of gravity and graciousness.
He’d even carry a small notebook in the pocket of his jacket to make sure that they could communicate in writing at all times.
He’d held on to this fictional Elena all the way into the sitting room of Anthony Weaver’s house, even going so far as to scan the guests who were there for the history faculty’s Michaelmas drinks party. He’d had to give up the idea of the threadbare ottoman quickly enough when he saw the nature of the house’s furnishings-he doubted that anything threadbare or frayed would be allowed to remain for longer than five minutes in this elegant environment of leather and glass-but he did maintain his mental image of the cringing, retiring, handicapped girl alone in a corner and afraid of everyone.
And then she came swinging towards him, wearing a clingy black dress and dangling onyx earrings, her hair catching her movement and subtly duplicating the sway of her hips. She smiled and said what he took for “Hi. You’re Adam, aren’t you?” because her pronunciation wasn’t clear. He noted the fact that she smelled like ripe fruit, that she didn’t wear a bra, that her legs were bare. And that every man in the room followed her movement with his eyes, no matter the conversation in which he was engaged.
She had a way of making a man feel special. He’d learned that soon enough. Astutely, he realised that this feeling of being the sole interest in Elena’s life came from the fact that she had to look directly at people in order to read their lips whenever they spoke to her. And for a time he convinced himself that that was the entirety of his attraction to her. But even on the first evening of their acquaintance, he found his eyes continually dropping to the nubs of her nipples-they were erect, they pressed against the material of her dress, they asked to be sucked and moulded and licked- and he found his hands sore with the need to slide round her waist, cup her buttocks, and pull her against him.
He’d done none of that. Ever. Not once in the dozen or more times they’d been together. He’d not even kissed her. And the single time she’d reached out impulsively and ran her fi ngers the length of his inner thigh, he had automatically knocked her hand away. She laughed at him, amused and unoffended. And he wanted to strike her every bit as much as he wanted to fuck her. He felt the desire like a blaze of fire burning right behind his eyes, needing both at once: the violence of abuse and the sexual act itself; the sound of her pain and the satisfying knowledge of her unwilling submission.
It was always that way whenever he saw too much of a woman. He felt caught within a raging argument of desire and disgust. And perennially playing in the back of his mind was the memory of his father beating his mother and the sound of their frantic coupling afterwards.
Knowing Elena, seeing Elena, dutifully squiring her here and there had all been part of the political process of academic advancement and scholastic success. But like any act of egocentric machination, what posed as selfless cooperation was not without its attendant price.
He had seen as much in Dr. Weaver’s face whenever the professor asked him about time spent with Elena, just as he had seen it on the very first night when Weaver’s eyes followed his daughter round the room, shining with satisfaction when she paused to talk to Adam and not to someone else. It wasn’t long before Adam had realised that the price for success in a milieu in which Anthony Weaver played a major role was likely to be bound up intimately in how things developed in Elena’s life.
“She’s a wonderful girl,” Weaver would say. “She has a lot to offer a man.”
Adam wondered what twists and turns and rough roads lay in his future now that Weaver’s daughter was dead. For while he’d chosen Dr. Weaver as his advisor strictly for the potential benefits that might accrue from such a choice, he had come to know that Dr. Weaver had accepted him with his own set of benefi ts in mind. He harboured them in secret, no doubt calling them his dream. But Adam knew exactly what they were.
The study door opened as he was staring at his references to the fourteenth-century riots in Kent and Essex. He looked up, then pushed back his chair in some confusion as Anthony Weaver came into the room. He hadn’t expected to see him for at least another several days, so he hadn’t done much about straightening up the litter of teacups and plates and essays across the table and on the fl oor. Even had he done so, the appearance of his advisor directly upon the heels of his having been thinking about him caused the heat to seep up Adam’s neck and spread across his cheeks.
“Dr. Weaver,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting…” His voice drifted off. Weaver was wearing neither jacket nor overcoat, and his dark hair was curled and chaotic from the wind. He carried neither briefcase nor textbooks. Whyever he had come, it was not to work.
“She was pregnant,” he said.
Adam’s throat went dry. He thought about taking a sip of the tea which he’d poured but forgotten about an hour previously. But although he slowly got to his feet, he couldn’t manage any other movement, let alone getting his arm to reach out towards the cup.
Weaver shut the door and remained standing next to it. “I don’t blame you for it, Adam. Obviously, you were in love with each other.”
“Dr. Weaver-”
“I simply wished you’d used some precautions. It’s not the best way to start a life together, is it?”
Adam couldn’t formulate an answer. It seemed that his entire future depended upon the next few minutes and how he handled them. He danced between the truth and a lie, wondering which would better serve his interests.
“When Justine told me, I left the house in a rage. I felt like some eighteenth-century father storming out to demand satisfaction. But I know how these things happen between people. I just want you to tell me if you’d talked about marriage. Before, I mean. Before you made love to her.”
Adam wanted to say that they’d talked about it often, in the late of night typing back and forth furiously on the Ceephone, making plans, sharing dreams, and committing themselves to a life together. But from the roots of such a lie had to grow a convincing performance of grief over the next few months. And while he regretted Elena’s death, he did not actually mourn her passing, so he knew that a show of abject sorrow would prove itself more than he could manage.
“She was special,” Anthony Weaver was saying. “Her baby-your baby, Adam-would have been special as well. She was fragile and working hard to find herself, it’s true, but you were helping her grow. Remember that. Hold onto that. You were tremendously good for her. I would have been proud to see you together as man and wife.”
He found he couldn’t do it. “Dr. Weaver, I wasn’t the one.” He dropped his eyes to the table. He concentrated on the open texts, his notes, the essays. “What I mean is I never made love with Elena, sir.” He felt more colour burn its way into his flesh. “I never even kissed her. I hardly ever touched her.”
“I’m not angry, Adam. Don’t misunderstand. You don’t have to deny you were lovers.”
“I’m not denying. I’m just telling you the truth. The facts. We weren’t lovers. It wasn’t me.”
“But she saw only you.”
Adam hesitated to bring forth the single piece of information which he knew Anthony Weaver was avoiding, perhaps deliberately, perhaps unconsciously. He knew that giving it voice would also mean giving voice to the professor’s worst fears. Yet there seemed to be no other way to convince the man of the truth about his own relationship with Elena. And he was an historian, after all. Historians are supposed to be seekers of truth.
He could demand no less of himself. He said, “No, sir. You’ve forgotten. I wasn’t the only one Elena saw. There was Gareth Randolph.”
Weaver’s eyes seemed to unfocus behind his spectacles. Adam hurried on.
“She saw him several times a week, didn’t she, sir? As part of the deal she’d struck with Dr. Cuff.” He didn’t want to put anything more into words. He could see the grey curtain of knowledge and misery pass across Weaver’s features.
“That deaf-” Weaver’s words stopped. His eyes sharpened once again. “Did you reject her, Adam? Is that why she looked elsewhere? Wasn’t she good enough for you? Did she put you off because she was deaf?”
“No. Not at all. I just didn’t-”
“Then why?”
He wanted to say, “Because I was afraid. I thought she would suck the marrow from my bones. I wanted to have her and have her and have her but not marry her, God not marry her and live on the black edge of my own destruction for the rest of my life.” Instead, he said, “It just didn’t happen between us.”
“What?”
“The sort of connection one looks for.”
“Because she was deaf.”
“That wasn’t an issue, sir.”
“How can you say that? How can you even expect me to believe it? Of course it was an issue. It was an issue for everyone. It was an issue for her. How could it not be?”
Adam knew this was dangerous ground. He wanted to retreat from the confrontation. But Weaver was waiting for his answer, and his stony expression told Adam how important it was that he answer correctly.
“She was just deaf, sir. Nothing else. Just deaf.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“That there was nothing else wrong with her. Even being deaf wasn’t something wrong. It’s just a word people use to indicate something’s missing.”
“Like blind, like mute, like paralysed?”
“I suppose.”
“And if she’d been those things-blind, mute, paralysed-would you still be saying that it wasn’t an issue?”
“But she wasn’t those things.”
“Would you still be saying it wasn’t an issue?”
“I don’t know. I can’t say. I can only say that Elena’s being deaf wasn’t an issue. Not for me.”
“You’re lying.”
“Sir.”
“You saw her as a freak.”
“I didn’t.”
“You were embarrassed by her voice and pronunciation, by the fact that she couldn’t ever tell how loud she was speaking so that when you were out in public together, people would hear that odd voice. They’d turn, they’d be curious. And you’d feel embarrassed with all those eyes on you. And ashamed, of her, of yourself, of being embarrassed in the first place. Not the great liberal that you once thought you were. Always wishing that she were normal because if she were-if she just could hear-then you really wouldn’t feel as if you owed her something more than you were able to give.”
Adam felt his body going cold, but he didn’t respond. He wanted to pretend that he hadn’t heard, or at the very least, to keep his face from revealing the extent to which he comprehended the underlying meaning of what the professor had said. He saw that he failed to do so on both scores, for Weaver’s own face seemed to crumble in on itself and he said, “Oh God.”
He walked to the mantel where Adam had continued to place the gathering collection of envelopes and messages. With what appeared to be a tremendous effort, he swept them up and carried them to his desk and sat down. He began to open them, slowly, ponderously, his movements weighted by twenty years of denial and guilt.
Adam cautiously lowered himself into his chair. He went back to his notes, but he saw this time even less than he had managed to see before. He knew that he owed Dr. Weaver some sort of reassurance, a reaching out in fellowship and love. But nothing in his twenty-six years of limited experience provided him with the words to tell the other man that there was no sin in feeling what he felt. The only sin was in running away from it.
He heard the professor quake with a convulsive sound. He turned in his chair.
Weaver, he saw, had been opening the envelopes. And although the contents of at least three of them lay on his lap and another was crumpled into his fist, he was looking at nothing. He had removed his spectacles and covered his eyes with his hand. He was weeping.