There was a moment’s silence.
Brandy’s face broke into a dazzling smile and his hand moved for a moment as if he would reach across the table and touch her.
“How very pious,” Christina said with delicate contempt. “You sound as if you were still in the schoolroom. You really must learn not to be so unimaginative, my dear. It’s such a bore! And, above everything else in the world, Society hates a bore!”
The color drained out of Brandy’s face. “But it usually forgives a hypocrite, darling.” He turned on his sister. “So you will remain a success, as long as you are careful not to become too obvious-which you are doing at the moment. A clumsy hypocrite is worse than a bore-it is insulting!”
“You know nothing about Society.” Christina’s voice was brittle, her face hot. “I was trying to be helpful. After all, Jemima is my sister-in-law. No one wishes to sound like a governess, even if one thinks like one! Good heavens, Brandy-we have all had more than enough of the schoolroom!”
“Of course we have.” Augusta came to life again at last. “No one wishes to be instructed about social ills, Brandy. Take a seat in Parliament if you are interested in such things. Christina is right. But it is not poor Jemima who is a bore-she is merely being loyal to you, as a wife should be. It is you who are being extremely tedious. Now please either entertain us with something pleasant or else hold your tongue and allow someone else to do so.”
She turned to Alan Ross, ignoring Balantyne at the end of the table. He was still unhappy, and sought the words to convey his sense that the subject could not so easily be dismissed. Its comfort or discomfort was irrelevant; it was its truth that mattered.
“Alan,” Augusta said with a slight smile. “Christina tells me you have been to see the exhibition at the Royal Academy? Do tell us what was interesting? Did Sir John Millais show a picture this season?”
There was no alternative but to answer. Ross gave in gracefully, offering her a light and delicately humorous description of the paintings at the Academy.
Balantyne thought again how much he liked the man.
After the dessert had been cleared away, Augusta rose and the ladies excused themselves to the withdrawing room, leaving the gentlemen free to smoke, if they chose, and to drink the port that the footman Stride brought in in a Waterford crystal decanter, with a silver neck and an exquisite fluted stopper. He left it on the table and retired discreetly.
Without knowing why he said it-the subject had been a ghost on the edge of his mind for days-Balantyne returned to Max and the Devil’s Acre. “It was our old footman who was murdered.” He filled his glass and picked it up, turning it, looking at the light on the ruby-reflecting facets. “Pitt came here. He asked me to go and identify the body.”
Ross’s face was blank. He was a very private man; it was not often easy to know what he thought or felt. Balantyne remembered Helena Doran, whom Ross had loved before Christina, and the painful idea occurred to him that possibly he had never entirely stopped loving her. It hurt him for both of them-for Ross himself and for Christina. Perhaps that was why she was so-so fragile at times, and so unkind. Jemima’s happiness must be like caustic in the wound.
And yet the happiness of how many marriages is based on anything else than a certain sharing of time, of experience that welds a couple together simply because it is something held in common? The fortunate marriages mellow into a kind of friendship. Had Christina even tried to win Alan Ross’s love? She had all the wit and beauty it could have needed; the gentleness, the generosity of spirit were her duty to acquire, and then to show him. Again the thought intruded that he must have Augusta speak to her.
Brandy was staring at him. “Pitt came here? Didn’t they know who he was?”
Balantyne brought his mind back to Max. “Apparently not. He was using several names, but Pitt recognized his face, or thought he did.”
They sat in silence. Perhaps in some obscure way they had half imagined it was not really the same man. Now it was different. It was undeniably a person they had known, had lived with and seen every day, even if as a servant he was merely a part of the household appurtenances, not an individual like themselves.
“Poor devil,” Brandy said at last.
“Do you think they’ll ever find who did it?” Ross asked, turning to look at Balantyne. His expression was very intense. “If he was trading in women, one has a certain understanding for whoever killed him. It has to be as low as a man can sink, this side of insanity.”
“The trade in children is the lowest,” Brandy said quietly. “Especially in boys.”
Ross winced. “Oh, God!” he breathed out. “I hadn’t even thought of that. How criminally ignorant we are! I cannot imagine what brings a human being to do such things. And yet there must be thousands who do, here in my own city. And I may pass them in the street every day of my life.”
“In boys,” Balantyne repeated, not entirely as a question. After thirty years in the army, he could not help being aware of the appetites and aberrations of men far from home, under pressure of war. Presumably such hungers were latent before loneliness and the absence of women brought them to the point of physical indulgence. But he had not thought of anyone earning a living by selling the bodies of children for such acts. It was beyond his capacity to comprehend the mind of such a person.
“Did Max deal in boys?” he asked.
“Women, I think,” Brandy replied. “At least that’s what the newspapers said. But perhaps they would have avoided mentioning it if he had used boys. People don’t want to know about the trade in children. Adult women we can blame, say they are immoral, and anything that happens to them is beyond society’s responsibility. Prostitution is as old as mankind, and will probably last as long. We can wink at that-even well-bred women affect not to know. That way they are not required to react. Ignorance is a most effective shield.”
Balantyne suddenly thought how little he really knew Brandy. There was anger in him, and bitterness he had never recognized before. Years had slipped by, and because Balantyne himself felt that he had barely changed, he assumed that Brandy had not changed either. The difference between forty-five and fifty was nothing; the difference from twenty-three to twenty-eight could be all the world.
He looked at his son, at the line of his brow and nose, utterly different from Alan Ross: very dark, smooth straight lines, and that stubborn, emotional mouth. One imagines vaguely that one’s son will be like oneself. But had Brandy ever been much like him? Thinking about it now-perhaps not?
“Are we as shallow as that?” he said aloud.
“Defensive,” Brandy answered. “Self-preserving.”
Alan Ross ran his hand over his hair. “Most of us avoid looking at the unbearable,” he said so quietly they could only just hear him. “Especially when there is nothing we can do about it. You can’t blame a woman who doesn’t choose to know that her husband uses a prostitute-particularly if that prostitute is a child. To accept that the child is also a boy would force her to leave him. We all know that divorce ruins a woman. Even to quite moderate society she ceases to exist. She would be an object of intolerable pity, not to mention the obscene imaginations and suggestions of the less charitable. No.” He shook his head in a fierce little gesture. “Her only option is to connive at his secrecy, and never in any circumstances allow herself to kill the last precious doubt. There is nothing else she can afford to do.”
For once, Brandy was silenced.
Balantyne stared at the flames of a candelabra. He tried to imagine what it might be like, trapped in such a relationship, suspecting and yet knowing you dare not acknowledge such a truth. In fact, for your own survival, and perhaps the survival of your children, you must be the most ardent accomplice in hiding it. It had never occurred to him that Augusta was anything but a virtuous and satisfied wife. Was that insufferably complacent of him-blindly, stupidly insensitive? Or was it simply a measure of his trust in her, even perhaps a kind of happiness? He had never used a prostitute in his life, even in his early army days. There had been the occasional lapse, of course, before he was married-but for mutual pleasure, never for money. But after that he had not ever questioned his moral duty to abstinence when either he or Augusta were away from home or indisposed. Augusta was not a passionate woman; perhaps decency precluded it? And he had long ago disciplined himself to master his own body and its demands upon him; such control was part of the mind of a soldier. Exhaustion, pain, and loneliness must be governed.