A light went on in the room to the right of the front door, sending an insubstantial oblong of illumination onto the driveway through the mist. A baby began crying. A woman’s voice called out, “Just a moment.”
“Auntie Leen! Door!”
“I know, Christian.”
Above his head, the porchlight went on, and Lynley heard the sound of the deadbolt turning. “Step back, darling,” the woman said as she opened the door.
The four of them were framed by the architrave, and held in a sideways diffusion of gold light from the sitting room that would have done credit to Rembrandt. Indeed, just for a moment, they looked very much like a painting, the woman in a rose cowl-necked sweater against which she held an infant wrapped in a cranberry shawl while two toddlers clutched the legs of her black wool trousers, a boy with a misshapen bruise beneath his eye and a girl with the handle of some sort of wheeled toy in her hand. This, apparently, was the source of the popping sound Lynley had heard, for the toy was domed in transparent plastic and when the child pushed it along the fl oor, coloured balls fl ew up and hit the dome like noisy bubbles.
“Tommy!” Lady Helen Clyde said. She took a step back from the door and urged the two children to do the same. They moved like a unit. “You’re in Cambridge.”
“Yes.”
She looked over his shoulder as if in the expectation of seeing someone with him. “You’re alone?”
“Alone.”
“What a surprise. Come in.”
The house smelled strongly of wet wool, sour milk, talcum powder, and nappies, the odours of children. It was filled with the detritus of children as well, in the form of toys strewn across the sitting room fl oor, storybooks with torn pages gaping open on the sofa and chairs, discarded jumpers and playsuits heaped on the hearth. A stained blue blanket was bunched onto the seat of a miniature rocking chair, and as Lynley followed Lady Helen through the sitting room into the kitchen at the rear of the house, the little boy ran to this, grabbed it, and clutched it. He peered at Lynley with defi ant curiosity.
“Who’s he, Auntie Leen?” he demanded. His sister remained at Lady Helen’s side, her left hand fixed like an extra appendage to her aunt’s trousers while her right hand made the climb to her face and her thumb found its way into her mouth. “Stop that, Perdita,” the boy said. “Mummy says not to suck. You baby.”
“Christian,” Lady Helen said in gentle admonition. She guided Perdita to a child-sized table beneath a window where the little girl began to rock in the tiny ladder-back chair, her thumb in her mouth, her large dark eyes fi xed with what looked like desperation on her aunt.
“They’re not dealing with a new baby sister very well,” Lady Helen said quietly to Lynley, shifting the crying infant to her other shoulder. “I was just taking her up to be fed.”
“How’s Pen doing?”
Lady Helen glanced at the children. The simple look said it all. No better.
She said, “Let me take the baby up. I’ll be back in a moment.” She smiled. “Can you manage?”
“Does he bite?”
“Only girls.”
“That’s a comforting thought.”
She laughed and went back through the sitting room. He heard her footsteps on the stairs and the sound of her voice as she murmured to the baby, gentling its cries.
He turned back to the children. They were twins, he knew, just over four years old, Christian and Perdita. The girl was older by fifteen minutes, but the boy was larger, more aggressive, and, from what Lynley could see, unlikely to respond to friendly overtures from strangers. That was just as well, considering the times in which they lived. Nonetheless, it didn’t make for a comfortable situation. He had never been at his best with toddlers.
“Mummy’s sick.” Christian accompanied this announcement by bashing his foot into the door of a kitchen cupboard. One, two, three savage little kicks, whereupon he discarded his blanket on the floor, opened the cupboard, and began pulling out a set of copper-bottomed pots. “The baby made her sick.”
“That happens sometimes,” Lynley said. “She’ll get better soon.”
“I don’t care.” Christian pounded a pan against the floor. “Perdita cries. She wet the bed last night.”
Lynley glanced at the little girl. Curly hair tumbling into her eyes, she rocked without speaking. Her cheeks worked in and out round her thumb. “She didn’t mean to, I imagine.”
“Daddy won’t come home.” Christian selected a second pan which he banged unmercifully into the first. The noise was teeth-jarring, but it didn’t seem to bother either one of the children. “Daddy doesn’t like the baby. He’s cross with Mummy.”
“What makes you think that?”
“I like Auntie Leen. She smells good.”
Here, at least, was a subject about which they could converse. “She does indeed.”
“You like Auntie Leen?”
“I like her very much.”
Christian seemed to feel this planted the seeds of friendship between them. He scrambled to his feet and shoved a pot and its cover into Lynley’s thigh.
“Here,” he said. “You do this way,” and he demonstrated his skill at noise-making by slamming another cover onto a pot of his own.
“Really, Tommy! Are you encouraging him?” Lady Helen closed the kitchen door behind her and went to rescue her sister’s pots and pans. “Sit with Perdita, Christian. Let me get your tea.”
“No! I play!”
“Not at the moment, you don’t.” Lady Helen detached his fingers from the handle of a pot, lifted him up, and carried him to the table. He kicked and squalled. His sister watched him, round-eyed and rocking. “I’ve got to get their tea,” Lady Helen said to Lynley over Christian’s wailing. “He won’t settle till he’s eaten.”
“I’ve come at a bad time.”
She sighed. “You have.”
He felt his spirits sink. She knelt and began gathering the pots from the fl oor. He joined her. In the unforgiving kitchen light, he could see how pale she was. The natural blush of colour was faded from her skin, and there were faint smudges like newly bruised fl esh beneath her eyes. He said, “How much longer will you be here?”
“Five days. Daphne comes on Saturday for her two weeks. Then Mother for two. Then Pen’s on her own.” She brushed a lock of chestnut hair off her cheek. “I can’t think how she’s going to cope alone, Tommy. This is the worst she’s ever been.”
“Christian said his father’s not here much.”
Lady Helen pressed her lips together. “Quite. Well. That’s putting it mildly.”
He touched her shoulder. “What’s happened to them, Helen?”
“I don’t know. Some sort of blood score. Neither one of them will talk about it.” She smiled without humour. “The sweet bliss of a marriage made in heaven.”
Unaccountably stung, he removed his hand.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
His mouth quirked in a smile. He shrugged and put the last pot in its place.
“Tommy.” He looked her way. “It isn’t any good. You know that, don’t you? You shouldn’t have come.”
She got to her feet and began removing food from the refrigerator, carrying four eggs, butter, a wedge of cheese, and two tomatoes to the cooker. She rummaged in a drawer and dragged out a loaf of bread. Then quickly, without speaking, she made the children’s tea while Christian occupied himself by scribbling on the table top with a stubby pencil he’d removed from between the pages of a telephone directory on a jumble-covered work top nearby. Perdita rocked and sucked blissfully with her eyes at half-mast.
Lynley stood by the kitchen sink, watching Lady Helen. He hadn’t removed his overcoat yet. She hadn’t offered to take it from him.
What, he wondered, had he hoped to accomplish by coming to her at her sister’s house when she was plagued by worry and worn by the effort of caring for two children and an infant who were not even hers? What had he hoped? That she would fall gratefully into his arms? That she would see him as her blessed salvation? That her face would light with joy and desire? That her defences would crumble and her spirit surrender-fi nally, irrefutably, once and for all? Havers was right. He was such a fool.