St James watched her walk towards him in the light of the embankment lamps with Peach dancing along at her side. She carried no umbrella against the mist that was creating a net of bright beads on her hair. Her only protection was a lamb's wool coat, its collar turned up so that it framed her face like an Elizabethan ruff. She looked lovely, like someone out of a sixteenth-century portrait. But there was a change to her face, something that hadn't been there six weeks ago, something aching and adult.
'Your dinner's ready,' she said when she reached him. 'You're out late for a walk, aren't you?' She joined him at the wall. It felt like a commonplace sort of meeting, as if nothing had happened between them, as if in the last month she hadn't faded in and out of his life without greeting or farewell.
'I wasn't thinking of the time. Sidney told me she went with you to Wales.'
‘We had a lovely weekend on the coast.'
He nodded. He had been watching a family of swans on the water and would have pointed them out to her – their presence at this section of the river was certainly unusual – but he did not do so. Her manner was too distant.
Apparently, however, she saw the birds herself, caught in silhouette in the lights that sparkled from the opposite bank. 'I've never seen swans in this part of the river before,' she said. 'And at night. D'you suppose they're all right?'
There were five of them – two adults and three nearly grown cygnets – floating peacefully near the piers of Albert Bridge.
'They're all right,' he said and saw how the birds gave him a small opening to speak. 'I was sorry you broke the swan that day in Paddington.'
'I can't come home,' she said in reply. 'I need to make peace with you somehow. Perhaps take a step towards being friends again some day. But I can't come home.'
This was the difference then. She was maintaining that kind of careful emotion-sparing distance that people develop to protect themselves when things come to an end between them. It reminded him of himself three years ago, when she had come to say goodbye and he had listened, too afraid to speak lest saying one word might cause the floodgates to open and everything he felt to spill forth in a humiliating wave of entreaty that both time and circumstance would have forced her to deny. They had come full circle, it seemed, to goodbye again. How simple just to say it and get on with living.
He looked from her face to her hand resting on the embankment wall. It was bare of Lynley's ring. He lightly touched the finger that had worn it. She didn't pull away, and it was that absence of movement which prompted him to speak.
'Don't leave me again, Deborah.'
He saw that she hadn't expected a response of that kind. She'd come without a line of defence. He pressed the advantage.
'You were seventeen. I was twenty-eight. Can you try to understand what it was like for me then? I'd cut myself off from caring about anyone for years. And all of a sudden I was caring for you. Wanting you. Yet all the time believing that if we made love-'
She spoke quickly, lightly. 'All that's passed, isn't it? It doesn't matter really. It's much better forgotten.'
'I told myself that I couldn't make love to you, Deborah. I manufactured all sorts of mad reasons why. Duty to your father. A betrayal of his trust. The destruction of our friendship – yours and mine. Our souls couldn't bond together if we became lovers, and I wanted a soulmate, so we couldn't make love. I kept repeating your age over and over. How could I live with myself if I took a seventeen-year-old girl to bed?'
'What does it matter now? We're beyond that. After all that's happened, what does it matter that we didn't make love three years ago?' Her questions weren't so much cold as they were cautious, as if whatever careful reasoning she'd gone through in her decision to leave him were under attack.
'Because if you're going to make this leaving of yours a permanent arrangement, then at least you'll leave this time knowing the truth. I let you go because I wanted peace. I wanted you out of the house. I reasoned that if you were gone I'd stop feeling torn. I'd stop wanting you. I'd stop feeling guilty for wanting you. I'd get the whole issue of sex driven out of my mind. You'd been gone less than a week when I saw the truth of the matter.'
'It doesn't-'
He persisted. 'I'd thought I could exist quite nicely without you, and my own hypocrisy slapped me right in the face. I wanted you back. I wanted you home. So I wrote to you.'
As he was speaking, she'd kept her attention on the river, but now she turned to him. He didn't wait for her to ask the question.
'I didn't post the letters.'
'Why?'
And now he had come to it. So easy to sit alone in the study and rehearse for a month all the things he had needed to say to her for years. But now that he had the opportunity to say them he found himself faltering all over again and he wondered why it had always been so frightening that she should know the truth. He drew in air like resolution.
'For the same reason I wouldn't make love to you. I was afraid. I knew that you could have any man in the world.' 'Any man?'
'All right. You could have Tommy. Given that choice, how could I expect that you might want me?'
'You?'
'A cripple.'
'So there it is, isn't it? We end up at cripple no matter where we begin.'
'We do. Because it's a fact of who I am and we can't ignore it. I've spent the last three years considering all the things I could never do at your side, things that any other man – Tommy – could do with ease.'
'What's the point of that? Why keep torturing yourself?'
'Because I had to work through it. It had to stop mattering so much that I couldn't even hold you if I were unattached to this cursed brace. It had to stop mattering so much that I'm crippled. And that's what you need to know before you leave me. That it doesn't matter any longer. Crippled or not. Half a man. Three-quarters. It doesn't matter. I want you.' And then he added unfairly but without a regret since there are no rules that govern affairs of the heart, 'Once and for life.'
It was done. In whatever fashion she would judge them, the words had been said. Three years too late, but said all the same. And, even if she chose to leave him now, at least she chose knowing the worst he was and the best. He could live with that.
'What do you want of me?' she asked.
'You know the answer to that.'
Peach moved restlessly at their feet. Someone shouted from the patch of green across Cheyne Walk. Deborah watched the river. He followed the direction of her gaze to see that the swans had cleared the final piers of the bridge. They were floating unchanged as they had done before, as they always would do, seeking the safety of Battersea.
'Deborah,' he said.
The birds gave her the answer. 'Like the swans, Simon?'
It was more than enough. 'My love, like the swans.'
ELIZABETH GEORGE
