Lynley reflected on the veiled implication behind that simple group of words. Nonentity, they declared, someone he painted and took to his bed. She was consigned to history as Whistler’s mistress. If she’d ever had a self, it was long forgotten.
He got up restlessly, walked across the room to the fireplace with its display of photographs lined up on the mantel. They depicted Penelope with Harry, Penelope with the children, Penelope with her parents, Penelope with her sisters. But there was not a single picture of Penelope alone.
“Tommy?”
He turned to see that Helen had come into the room. She stood near the door, dressed in brown wool and ivory silk with a trim camel jacket slung over her arm. Penelope was just behind her.
He wanted to say to them both, “I think I understand. Now. In this moment. I think I finally understand.” But instead, feeling the depth and breadth of his own inadequacy defined and conditioned by the fact that he was male, he said, “Harry’s getting himself something to eat. Thanks for your help, Pen.”
Her acknowledgement of this was tentative and brief: a movement of her lips that might have passed for a smile, a quick bob of the head. Then she walked to the sofa and began closing her books. She stacked them on the floor and picked up the baby.
“She’s due to be fed,” Penelope said. “I can’t think why she hasn’t begun to fuss.” She wandered from the room. They heard her climbing the stairs.
They didn’t say anything until they were in the car, driving the short distance to Trinity Hall where the jazz concert was scheduled to be performed in the junior combination room. And then it was Lady Helen who broke the silence between them.
“She actually came to life, Tommy. I can’t tell you what a relief it’s been.”
“Yes. I know. I could see the difference.”
“All day she was involved in something beyond the scope of that house. It’s what she needs. She knows it. They both do. They must.”
“Have you talked to her about it?”
“‘How can I leave them?’ she asks me. ‘They’re my children, Helen. What kind of mother am I if I want to leave them?’”
Lynley glanced at her. Her face was averted. “You can’t solve this problem for her, you know.”
“I don’t see how I can leave her if I don’t.”
The determination behind her words plunged his spirits. He said, “You’re planning to stay on here, aren’t you?”
“I’ll phone Daphne tomorrow. She can put off her visit for another week. God knows she’d be happy enough to do so. She has a family of her own.”
Without a thought, he said, “Helen, damn it all, I wish you would-” and then he stopped himself.
He felt her turn in her seat, knew she was watching him. He said nothing more.
“You’ve been good for Pen,” she said. “I think you’ve made her face something she didn’t want to see.”
He took no pleasure from the information. “I’m glad I’m good for someone.”
He parked the Bentley in a narrow space on Garret Hostel Lane, a few yards away from the gentle rise of the footbridge that crossed the River Cam. They walked back towards the porter’s lodge of the college, just down the street from the entrance to St. Stephen’s.
The air was cold, it seemed hung with moisture. A heavy cover of clouds obscured the night sky. Their footsteps echoed against the pavement, a brisk sound like the sharp tattoo of drums.
Lynley glanced at Lady Helen. She was walking near enough at his side that her shoulder brushed his, and the warmth of her arm, the fresh, crisp scent of her body, acted in concert as a call to action which he tried to ignore. He told himself that there was more to life than the immediate gratification of his own desires. And he tried to believe this even as he felt himself grow lost in the simple contemplation of contrast offered by the dark fall of her hair as it swung forward to touch the pearl of her skin.
He said, as if there had been no break in their conversation, “But am I good for you, Helen?
That’s the real question, isn’t it?” And although he managed to keep his voice light, his heart still beat rapidly at the back of his throat. “I wonder that. I put the sum of what I am into a balance and weigh it against what I ought to be, and I ask myself if I’m really enough.”
When she turned her head, the amber light shafting down from a window above them surrounded her like an aureole. “Why would you ever think you’re not enough?”
He pondered the question, tracing his thoughts and his feelings right back to their source. He found that both of them grew from her decision to remain with her sister’s family in Cambridge. He wanted her back in London, available to him. If he was good enough for her, she’d return at his request. If she valued his love, she’d bow to his wishes. He wanted her to do so. He wanted an overt manifestation of the love she claimed to feel for him. And he wanted to be the one to decide exactly what that manifestation would be.
But he couldn’t tell her this. So he settled on saying, “I think I’m struggling with a defi nition of love.”
She smiled and slipped her hand through his arm. “You and everyone else, Tommy darling.”
They rounded the corner into Trinity Lane and entered the college grounds where a blackboard sign had been decorated with the words Jazz Up Your Life Tooo-nite in coloured chalk, and construction paper arrows affi xed to the pavement led the way through the main college court to the junior combination room in the northeast corner of the grounds.
Similar to St. Stephen’s College, the building that housed Trinity Hall’s JCR was modern, little more than alternating panels of wood and glass. In addition to the combination room, it contained the college bar, where a considerable crowd was gathered at small round tables, engaged in boisterous conversation that seemed to be revolving round the good-humoured harassment of two men who were playing darts with rather more intensity than usually accompanied the game. The apparent reason for their avid concentration seemed to be age. One player was a youth of no more than twenty, the other an older man with a close-cropped grey beard.
“Go for it, Petersen,” someone shouted when the younger man took position for his turn. “Junior fellows kick arse. Show him.”
The young man made an elaborate display of loosening up his muscles and assuming the correct stance before he flung the dart and missed the shot entirely. Jeers roared through the room. In response, he turned around, pointed to his backside meaningfully, and hefted a pint of beer to his mouth. The crowd hooted and laughed.
Lynley guided Lady Helen through the jostling group to the bar and from there they made their way towards the JCR, beers in hand. The JCR was built on several different levels accommodating a line of immovable sofas and a number of uninteresting chairs with lazy, slung backs. At one end of the room, the floor rose to what was being used as a small staging area where the jazz group was getting ready to perform.