He got up and dressed. He kissed her in a way that was meant to be tender only but became passionate because he couldn’t help himself. And he was rewarded with a kiss from her as long and desirous as his own. With that he had to be satisfied; with that and with the crumpled chiffon scarf he picked up as he left the room.
If only he would find his bungalow empty, he mused as be drove towards it. Just for tonight, he told him self guiltily. If only he could go into emptiness and solicitude, free of Grace’s gentle brisk demands and Pat’s castles in the air and John’s mathematics. But if he were going home to an empty house he wouldn’t be going home at all.
Grace had said she wanted to discuss something with him. The prospect was so dreary and so tedious that he forebore speculating about it. Why endure an agony twice over? He held the scented chiffon against his face for comfort before entering the house but instead of comfort it brought him only longing.
His son was hunched over the table, ineptly grasping a compass. “Old Mint Face,” he said when he saw his father, “told us that ‘mathema’ means knowledge and ‘pathema’ means suffering, so I said they ought to call it pathematics.”
Grace laughed a little too shrilly. She was flushed, Burden noticed, as if with excitement or perhaps trepidation. He sat down at the table, neatly drew the diagram for John and sent him off to bed. “May as well have an early night myself,” he said hopefully.
“Spare me just ten minutes, Mike. I want - there’s something I want to say to you. I’ve had a letter from a friend of mine, a girl - a woman - I trained with.” Grace sounded extremely nervous now, so unlike herself that Burden felt a small disquiet. She was holding the letter and seemed about to show it to him, but she changed her mind and stood clutching it. “She’s come into some money and she wants to start a nursing home and she . . .” The words tumbled out in a rush, “. . . she wants me to come in with her.”
Burden was beginning on a bored, “Oh, yes, that’s nice,” when suddenly he did a double-take and what she was actually saying came home to him. The shock was too great for thought or politeness or caution. “What about the children?” he said.
She didn’t answer that directly. She sat down heavily like a tired old woman. “How long did you think I would stay with them?”
“I don’t know.” He made a helpless gesture with his hands. “Till, they’re able to look after themselves, I suppose.”
“And when will that be?” She was hot now and angry, her nervousness swamped by indignation. “When Pat’s seventeen, eighteen? I’ll be forty.”
“Forty’s not old,” said her brother-in-law feebly.
“Maybe not for a woman with a profession, a career she’s always worked at. If I stay here for another six years I won’t have any career, I’d be lucky to get a job as a staff nurse in a country hospital.”
“But the children,” he said again
“Send them to boarding school,” she said in a hard voice. ‘Physically, they’ll be just as well looked after there as here, and as for the other side of their lives - what good do I do them alone? Pat’s coming to an age when she’ll turn against her mother or any mother substitute. John’s never cared much for me. If you don’t like the idea of boarding school, get a transfer and go to Eastbourne. You could all live there with Mother.”
“You’ve sprung this on me, all right, haven’t you, Grace?”
She was almost in tears. “I only had Mary’s letter yesterday. I wanted to talk to you yesterday, I begged you to come home.”
“My God,” he said, “what a thing to happen. I thought you liked it here, I thought you loved the kids."
“No, you didn’t,” she said fiercely, and her face was suddenly Jean’s, passionate and indignant, during one of their rare quarrels. “You never thought about me at all. You - you asked me to come and help you and when I came you turned me into a sort of house mother and you were the lofty superintendent who condescended to visit the poor orphans a couple of times a week.”
He wasn’t going to answer that, He knew it was true. “You must do as you please, of course,” he said.
“It isn’t what I please, it’s what you’ve driven me to. Oh, Mike, it could have been so different! Don’t you see? If you’d been with us and pulled your weight and made me feel we were doing something worth while together. Even now if you . . . I’m trying to say . . . Mike, this is very hard for me. If I thought you might come in time to . . . Mike, won’t you help me?”
She had turned to him and put out her hands, not impulsively and yearningly as Gemma did, but with a kind of modest diffidence, as if she were ashamed. He remembered what Wexford had said to him that morning in the lift and he recoiled away from her. That it was almost Jean’s face looking at him, Jean’s voice pleading with him, about to say things which to his old-fashioned mind no woman should ever say to a man, only made things worse.
“No, no, no!” he said, not shouting but whispering the words with a kind of hiss.
He had never seen a woman blush so fierily. Her face was crimson, and then the colour receded, leaving it chalk white. She got up and walked away, scuttling rather, for on a sudden she had lost all her precise controlled gracefulness. She left him and closed the door without another word.
That night he slept very badly. Three hundred nights had been insufficient to teach him how to sleep without a woman and, after them, two of bliss had brought back with savagery all the loneliness of a single bed. Like a green adolescent he held, pressed against his face so that he could smell it, the scarf of the woman he loved. He lay like that for hours, listening through the wall to the muffled crying of the woman he had rejected.
Chapter 15
The look of hair did not belong to Stella Rivers either. Enough of her own blond curls remained on what remained of her for them to make comparison. “A bracelet of bright hair about the bone,” Wexford thought, shuddering.
That proved nothing, of course. It was only to be expected, it was known, that the fur man - Wexford thought of his correspondent and his caller as the “fur man” now - was a liar. There was nothing for him to do but wait for news from the Lakes, and his temper grew sour. Burden had been unbearable for the last couple of days, hardly answering when you spoke to him and not to be found when most he was wanted. The rain fell unceasingly too. Everyone in the police station was irritable and the men, depressed by the weather, snapped at each other like wet, ill-tempered dogs. The black-and-white foyer floor was blotched all day by muddy footmarks and trickles from sodden rain-capes.
Marching briskly past the desk to avoid an encounter with Harry Wild, Wexford almost crashed into a red-faced Sergeant Martin who was waiting for the lift.
“I don’t know what the world’s coming to, sir, I really don’t. That young Peach, usually won’t say boo to a goose, flares up at me because I tell him he should be wearing a stouter pair of boots. Mind your own business, be has the nerve to say to me. What’s up, sir? What have I said?”