“Were you? Well, I was suitably impressed.”
He turned to look at her. He reached for her hand. In spite of the cold, she wasn’t wearing gloves, and he pressed her cool fi ngers against his cheek. He kissed her palm.
“I sat there and listened and realised that he may as well have been me,” he said, “because it all boils down to what men want, Helen. And what we want is women. But not as individuals, not as living, breathing, vulnerable human beings with a set of desires and dreams of their own. We want them-you-as extensions of ourselves. And I’m among the worst.”
Her hand moved in his, but she didn’t withdraw it. Rather, her fingers entwined with his.
“And as I listened to him, Helen, I thought of all the ways I’ve wanted you. As my lover, as my wife, as the mother of my children. In my bed. In my car. In my home. Entertaining my friends. Listening to me talk about my work. Sitting next to me quietly when I don’t feel like speaking. Waiting up for me when I’m out on a case. Opening your heart to me. Making yourself mine. And those are the operative words I kept hearing: I, me, my, mine.” He looked across the Backs to the smudgy forms of English oaks and common alders that were little more than shadows against a charcoal sky. When he turned back to her, her expression was grave, but her eyes were still on him. They were dark and kind.
“There’s no sin in that, Tommy.”
“You’re right,” he replied. “There’s only self in it. What I want. When I want it. And you’re meant to cooperate because you’re a woman. That’s how I’ve been, isn’t it? No better than your brother-in-law, no better than Troughton.”
“No,” she said. “You’re not like them. I’ve not seen you that way.”
“I’ve wanted you, Helen. And the hell of it is that I want you right now as much as I ever have. I sat there and listened to Troughton and had my own eyes opened in a thousand different ways about what goes wrong between men and women and it all comes down to the same damned fact with absolutely no change in it. I love you. I want you.”
“If you had me once, could you let it all go? Could you let me go?”
His answering laugh was mordant and painful. He looked away. “I wish it were as simple as taking you to bed. But you know it isn’t. You know I-”
“But could you, Tommy? Could you let me go?”
He turned back to her slowly, recognising something in her voice, an urgency, a plea, an inherent call for a degree of understanding he’d never been able to establish with her. It seemed to him as he studied her face-and saw the thin line of worry between her brows- that the attainment of every dream he’d ever harboured depended upon his ability to know what she meant.
He looked at her hand, still held in his own. So fragile, he could feel the bones of her fi ngers. So smooth that he could easily conceive of its tender passage against his skin.
“How do I answer that?” he said at last. “I feel you’ve placed my whole future on the line.”
“I don’t mean to do that.”
“But you’ve done it, haven’t you?”
“I suppose I have. In a way.”
He released her hand and walked to the low brick wall that edged the river terrace. Below, the Cam glinted in the darkness, green-black ink drifting lazily towards the Ouse. It was an inexorable progress-this movement of water-slow and sure and as unstoppable as time.
“My longings are the same as every other man’s,” he said. “I want a home, a wife. I want children, a son. I want to know at the end that my life hasn’t been for nothing, and the only way I can know that for a certainty is to leave something behind, and to have someone to leave it to. All I can say right now is that I finally understand what kind of burden that places on a woman, Helen. I understand that no matter how the load is shifted between partners, or divided or shared, the woman’s burden will always be greater. I do know that. But I can’t lie to you about the reality that remains. I still want those things.”
“You can have them with anyone.”
“I want them with you.”
“You don’t need them with me.”
“Need?” He tried to read the expression on her face, but she was just a pale blur in the darkness beneath the tree that threw a cavernous shadow over the terrace bench. He pondered the oddity of the word she had chosen, reflecting on her decision to remain with her sister in Cambridge. He considered the canvas of the fourteen years he had known Lady Helen. And finally, the realisation struck him.
He sank onto the concrete ledge that comprised the top of the brick river wall. He regarded her evenly. Faintly, he heard the click-clacking of a bicycle passing across Garret Hostel Bridge, the grinding clang of a lorry shifting gears as it made its way down the distant Queens’ Road. But neither sound did more than stir against his consciousness as he studied Lady Helen.
He wondered how he could have come to love her so much and all the time know her so very little. She had been before him for more than a decade, never attempting to disguise who and what she was. Yet for all that time, he had failed to see her in the light of reality, imbuing her instead with a set of qualities which he wished her to possess while all along, her every relationship had been acting as a cogent illustration of what she saw as her role, her way of getting on. He couldn’t believe he had been such a fool.
He spoke more to the night than to her. “It’s all because I can function by myself. You won’t marry me because I don’t need you, Helen, not the way you want me to. You’ve decided I don’t need you to stand on my own, or to get on in life, or even to be whole. And it’s the truth, you know. I don’t need you that way.”
“So you see,” she said.
He heard the finality in her three quiet words and felt his own quick anger in response to them. “I see. I do. I see that I’m not one of your projects. I see that I don’t need you to save me. My life is more or less in order now, and I want to share it with you. As your equal, your partner. Not as some emotional mendicant, but as a man who’s willing to grow at your side. That’s the beginning and end of it. Not what you’re used to, not even what you’ve had in mind for yourself. But it’s the best I can do. It’s the best I can offer. That and my love.
And God knows that I love you.”
“Love isn’t enough.”
“God damn it, Helen, when are you going to see it’s the only thing there is!”
In answer to his angry words, a light snapped on in the building behind them. A curtain flicked back and a disembodied face appeared at one window. Lynley pushed himself off the concrete ledge and rejoined Lady Helen beneath the tree.
“What you’re thinking,” he said to her, quietly now for he could see how she had begun to withdraw from him, “is that if I need you enough, I’ll never think of leaving you. You’ll always be safe. That’s how it is, isn’t it?”
She averted her head. Gently, he caught her chin with his fingers and turned her back towards him.
“Helen, isn’t it?”
“You’re not being fair.”
“You’re in love with me, Helen.”
“Don’t. Please.”
“Every bit as much as I’m in love with you. You want me as much, you long for me as much. But I’m not like all the rest of the men you’ve involved yourself with. I don’t need you in a way that makes it safe for you to love me. I don’t depend upon you. I stand on my own. If you take up life with me, you jump into the void. You risk it all, without a single guarantee.”
He felt her tremble slightly. He saw her throat work. He felt his heart open.
“Helen.” He drew her into his arms. He took strength from knowing each gentle curve of her, from feeling the rise and fall of her chest, from the feathering touch of her hair against his face, from the slender hand that caught at his jacket. “Darling Helen,” he whispered and ran his hand along the length of her hair. When she looked up, he kissed her. Her arms slipped round him. Her lips softened and opened beneath his. She smelled of perfume and Troughton’s cigarette smoke. She tasted of brandy.