The sound of a door closing came from the front of the house. Morgan stopped his prowling about the empty room to listen. Some neighbor come to investigate lights in a vacant house, perhaps? God forbid he should have to be sociable, especially here, and now.
“Morgan, darling?”
Oh, Lord, it was Francesca. The last thing he’d meant to do was upset her. How in hell had she found him?
“In here,” he called out, and hurried to meet her in the more neutral territory of the hall. She stood beside the cold radiator at the bottom of the stairs, huddled in the old brown coat she kept for taking out the dogs.
He grasped her shoulders and looked down into her anxious face. “Fran, what are you doing here?”
“I came into town with Monica to get some knitting wool. I ran out of the indigo. And then when we drove by I saw the car.”
“The wool shop is nowhere near St. Barnabas Road,” he said gently. “Nor do you go to town in that old rag of a coat.” He put a finger under her chin and tilted her face up so that she had to look into his eyes. “How did you know?”
“I knew you’d have to come. And I knew you wouldn’t tell me.”
“Only because I didn’t want to worry you.”
Francesca reached up and pushed a stray lock of hair from his brow. “When will you ever get it through your thick head that the
not
knowing, the
not
talking about it only makes it worse? You’ve been moping about the house for days, working yourself up to this. I could feel it.”
“You’d think I’d have learned, by this time, that I can’t keep anything from you,” he said, forcing himself to smile. “But the house had to be attended to, and I didn’t see why you should be upset by it.”
“Then let it go this time, Morgan. Let
her
go. You’ve been picking at this scab for more than twenty years and it will never heal unless you stop. Call an estate agent tomorrow and you need never set foot in this place again. We have a good life together. Let us get on with it. Please.”
Morgan gathered his wife into his arms, her cheek pressed against his chest. He stroked the top of her head, then the thick plait of brown hair, now finely threaded with gray. Francesca had rescued him from the disaster of his first marriage, and he had loved her because she was everything Lydia was not. She had less pretension about her than anyone he had ever met, and though intelligent, she lacked any intellectual conceit. Steadfast, she had supported him in his battle with depression, buffered others from his moods and his temper, and she’d borne with grace and courage their failure to conceive the children she had wanted so badly.
They
had
made a good life. Francesca’s reputation as a textile artist had grown over the years, as had his as a photographer, and together they’d turned their renovated farmhouse studio in the countryside west of Cambridge into an artistic retreat. What more, he asked himself, could any man want?
And how could he possibly tell Francesca that he could not let Lydia go?
* * *
Afternoon tea at last, Daphne Morris thought with a sigh of relief as she heard the knock at her office door. She looked up from the history essays she’d been marking and called, “Come in,” as she pulled off her glasses and massaged the bridge of her nose.
“Sorry it’s a bit late,” Jeanette said as she maneuvered the tea tray through the heavy door. “What with one thing and another.”
Daphne smiled beneath her tented fingers. Jeanette was always “a bit” late, what with one thing or another. But she was so invaluable to the running of the school that Daphne had learned to adapt. After all, what did a few minutes matter?
“It’s that Muriel again,” Jeanette informed her as she set the tray on the desk and poured tea into Daphne’s favorite mug. “She’s been bothering Cook, telling her the girls have all decided to eat ‘lower down the food chain,’ or some such nonsense, and so apparently they’ve decided to boycott beef. Can you imagine?” She sank into the chair on the other side of Daphne’s desk and sighed. “I had to chase her out of the kitchen, then it took me a good half hour just to smooth Cook’s feathers.”
“I’m afraid I can imagine all too well.” Daphne rolled her eyes in exasperation. “Are you not having yours?” she added, nodding at the teapot as she sat back with her mug and nibbled on a Rich Tea biscuit.
“Had my tea with Cook. Seemed the best way to mend the bridges.”
Daphne smiled and made a mental note to add that to her collection of Jeanette’s mixed metaphors. “You’d better send Muriel on to me and I’ll sort her out,” she said without relish. “I’m sure this was all her idea, but still I suppose I’d better speak to the assembly about it. I wouldn’t mind if I thought this business was motivated by any genuine concern for the environment, but I smell the unpleasant odor of lemminglike political correctness.”
“I heard her instructing some of the more feebleminded girls, in a huddle under the staircase. Jarvis, and the new girl, what’s-her-name with the horn-rimmed spectacles and beetle brows.”
Daphne laughed. “Oh, Jeanette, you’re too awful. You know perfectly well her name is Quinta. You’re just being stubborn because
you think it’s affected. And anyway, it’s not the poor girl’s fault her parents gave her a dreadful name, and she’s really not that bad, just easily influenced.” The thought sobered Daphne, and brought her back to the matter under discussion. “The girls can certainly leave meat off their plates if they are so inclined, but I won’t have Muriel browbeating them into submission.”
Thank heavens this was Muriel Baines’s last year at St. Winifred’s, for the Head Girl had sorely tried Daphne’s policy of impartiality. Some of the teachers whose heads had been turned by Muriel’s flattery had coaxed Daphne into appointing her Head Girl, against her better judgment. She had never liked Muriel, with her bossy manner and jutting bosom, and closer acquaintance had done nothing to improve her opinion.
As difficult as it was not to show her dislike of Muriel and a few other girls, it was more difficult to disguise her affection for those she did like. But that, Daphne had learned early on, was something a good headmistress must never do. Girls were too vulnerable to crushes, and the slightest remark could be misinterpreted under the influence of adolescent longing, the simplest gesture mistaken for a declaration.
“Well, I’d best be getting back to the fray,” said Jeanette, pushing herself to the edge of the chair. “Rested my pins for long enough.”
Startled out of her reverie, Daphne said, “Oh, Jeanette, I’m sorry. Was I daydreaming? It’s been that sort of day, I’m afraid.”
“Never mind. It gave me a space to collect myself.” Jeanette smiled, and Daphne thought, as she often did, what a good, kind face her assistant had. She might never by any stretch of the imagination be called beautiful, with her pockmarked skin and the limp, fair hair which she wore chopped off at the chin and pulled back from her face with a hair slide, but when she smiled she looked beatific.
Jeanette was more than an assistant. In fact, in the years since Lydia’s death she had become a friend—someone to confide in, if not to love in the way Daphne had loved Lydia.
Turning back from the door, Jeanette said, “Don’t forget I’m going to ferret out that Muriel and send her to you. You’d best be prepared.”
As she watched her go, Daphne noticed that the cardigan she
wore over her navy polyester dress sagged in the back, and a sleeve had started to fray. Jeanette had a birthday coming up—perhaps she should buy her a new one. Of course Jeanette might interpret the gesture as criticism, and Daphne would never wish to hurt her feelings. Maybe she should just leave it alone.
Rising, Daphne went to the window. Her office was on the second floor, overlooking the circular drive and the parkland running down to the road. Even in the early evening dimness she could still see the splash of the daffodils in the grass under the spreading trees. They had been late this spring, hesitant to show their faces after a particularly harsh winter.
For a moment, she allowed herself the indulgence of imagining that nothing had changed, that she could spend this April evening as she had spent so many others. She would slip away after dinner in Hall and take out the little Volkswagen she kept parked behind the outbuildings. Down the drive, out into Hills Road, a right on Station Road, a jog into St. Barnabas. Then a precious hour or two with Lydia, curled up on the sofa in the study, drinking sherry, listening to music, talking about their respective days.
She would tell Lydia the latest Muriel anecdote—Lydia would laugh and they would spend a delicious few minutes inventing mythical punishments for the poor girl. Daphne smiled at the thought of Muriel chained to a windy crag, awaiting the arrival of a fire-breathing dragon. A lot of good her busty bossiness would do her then.
Lydia would read Daphne the poem she’d been working on that day and they would discuss it, tweaking it here and there until Lydia pronounced herself satisfied. Although Daphne’s field was history, she had a good ear, and Lydia often said that the mere act of reading a poem aloud let her see what it needed.
Their companionship had been easy, undemanding, yet more satisfying than any Daphne had ever known.
She turned away from the window and straightened her skirt. Enough was enough. Too much nostalgia quickly became a maudlin wallow, and she had business to attend to. A small framed mirror on her bookcase allowed her to pat her hair into place and adjust the collar of the white silk blouse she wore with her suit. She supposed
she had better put on the tailored navy coat, the better to intimidate Baines.
How could she possibly have imagined, in those long-ago Cambridge days, when they had defied anything and everything just for the sake of it, that she would become the very thing railed against?
Frowning, Kincaid sidestepped the group of giggling teenagers who had nearly cannoned into him. Hampstead High Street seemed exceptionally busy for a Thursday evening, and as he walked downhill from the Underground station, he negotiated the crowded pavement with less than his usual good humor.
He’d stalled at the office, finishing paperwork that could have been put off till tomorrow, hoping for a word with Gemma, only to discover she’d left for the day without telling him.
Now, as he made his way home in the twilight, he felt both exasperated and unsettled. Accustomed as he was to making professional decisions with ease, he found himself at a loss when it came to dealing with the polite distance Gemma had put between them. Was she waiting for an apology? he wondered as he turned into Carlingford Road. But why should he apologize when he’d done nothing deserving of censure?
Entering his building, he climbed the stairs without bothering to switch on the lights, relying on the faint illumination from the window in the upstairs landing. In the dim silence of the stairwell, he heard the pounding of his heart, and the small voice asking him if he were sure Gemma had no cause to be upset. What
did
he feel about Vic, seeing her again after all these years?
The question hung unanswered as he let himself into his flat. At the sound of the door opening Sid looked up from his position on the sofa, stretched, blinked, and promptly went back to sleep.
“So you’re not thrilled to see me, either,” Kincaid said, giving the inert cat a scratch behind the ears. He went on through the sitting room and out the French doors to the balcony. The garden lay in deep evening shadow, and the kitchen lights came on in the house opposite as he watched. He felt isolated, and suddenly the prospect of an evening alone in the flat with only the cat for company seemed very uninviting.
He remembered when he’d welcomed such evenings as a much-needed buffer from the demands of work, had even resented all but the occasional social obligation. But it seemed he had changed without realizing it. He missed Gemma, damnit, and to his surprise he found he missed Toby and the usual confusion of their evening routine.
A shadowy movement in the garden below caught his eye, and the shape coalesced into his downstairs neighbor, Major Keith, rising from a kneeling position. Although he and the Major had become friends upon the death of their neighbor, Jasmine Dent, and the Major often looked after Sid for him, Kincaid had seen him little the past few months. “Major! Come up for a drink,” he called on impulse. That omission, at least, was something he could rectify.
The Major waved at him in acknowledgment, and a few minutes later appeared at Kincaid’s door, looking freshly scrubbed and brushed. A short, stocky man, his skin had never lost the tropical sunburn acquired during his years in India, and his thinning, iron-gray hair still bristled with military correctness. Kincaid had found, however, that the man’s gruff and reticent manner concealed a kind heart and a keen perception, and he had come to both like and trust him.
When the Major had settled into Kincaid’s armchair with a generous whisky, he cleared his throat and drew his brows together. “So, Mr. Kincaid, I haven’t seen your young lady about much recently.”
It was as close to a direct question as Kincaid had ever heard the Major ask, and deserved an honest answer. “Um, she’s a bit put out with me, actually. My ex-wife rang me up out of the blue, asking a favor, and the whole business seems to have made Gemma cross.”
“Did you grant the favor, then?” asked the Major.
“As much as I could, yes. It was a professional matter, and I haven’t quite wrapped it up.”
The Major looked at him thoughtfully, and after a moment said, “Could it be that you’re not eager to wrap things up, as it were?”
Kincaid looked away from the Major’s direct gaze. Was he delaying things unnecessarily? In the beginning, he’d been motivated only by curiosity and courtesy, but now a simple phone call telling Vic what he’d learned would have discharged his obligation—had he really needed to arrange to see her again?
He had to admit he was intrigued by the contrast between the woman he’d known and the woman she’d become, and yet at the same time he was drawn by the familiarity of her. “I don’t know,” he said finally.