A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(12)
It was, unfortunately, exactly like him, and had St. James’s wife heard Helen Lynley’s comment, she would have been the first to make that declaration. The undercurrents of life with Deborah were treacherous. Like an inexperienced boatman in an unfamiliar river, St. James habitually steered clear of them.
He looked over his shoulder at the study. The firelight and the candles within provided the only illumination there. He should have thought to brighten the room, he realised. While the subdued lighting could have been construed as romantic in other circumstances, in these circumstances it seemed downright funereal.
But we have no corpse, he reminded himself. This isn’t a death. Just a disappointment.
His wife had worked on her photographs for nearly twelve months leading up to this night. She’d accumulated a fine array of portraits taken across London: from fishmongers posing at five in the morning at Billingsgate to upmarket boozers stumbling into a Mayfair nightclub at midnight. She’d captured the cultural, ethnic, social, and economic diversity that was the capital city, and it had been her hope that her opening in a small but distinguished Little Newport Street gallery would be well enough attended to garner her a mention in one of the publications that fell into the hands of collectors looking for new artists whose work they might decide to buy. She just wanted to plant the seed of her name in people’s minds, she’d said. She didn’t expect to sell many pieces at first. What she hadn’t taken into account was the miserable late-autumnverging-on-winter weather. The November rain hadn’t concerned her much. The weather was generally bad that time of year. But as it had segued relentlessly into the ceaseless downpour of December, she’d begun to voice misgivings. Maybe she ought to cancel her show till spring? Until summer, even, when people were out and about well into the night?
St. James had advised her to hold firm to her plans. The bad weather, he told her, would never last until the middle of December. It had been raining for weeks, and statistically speaking if nothing else, it couldn’t go on much longer.
But it had done exactly that. Day after day, night after night, until the city parks began to resemble swamps, and mould started growing in cracks in the pavement. Trees were toppling out of the saturated ground and basements in houses close to the river were fast becoming wading pools. Had it not been for St. James’s siblings—all of whom attended with their spouses, partners, and children in tow—as well as his mother, the only attendees at his wife’s gala exhibit opening would have been Deborah’s father, a handful of personal friends whose loyalty appeared to supersede their prudence, and five members of the public. Many hopeful glances were cast in the direction of this latter group until it became obvious that three of them were individuals seeking only to get out of the rain while two others were looking for relief from the queue that was waiting for a table at Mr. Kong’s.
St. James had attempted to put a good face on all this for his wife, as had the gallery’s owner, a bloke called Hobart, who spoke Estuary English as if the letter T did not exist in his alphabet. Deborah was “No’ ’o worry, darling,” Hobart said. “Show will be up for a month and i’ is quality, love. Look how many you’ve sold already!” To which Deborah had replied with her typical honesty, “And look how many of my husband’s relatives are here, Mr. Hobart. If he’d only had more than three siblings, we’d be sold out.”
There was truth in that. St. James’s family had been generous and supportive. But their purchase of her pictures couldn’t mean to Deborah what a stranger’s purchase would have meant. “I feel like they bought because they pity me,” she had confided in despair during the taxi ride home. This was largely why the company of Thomas Lynley and his wife was so welcome to St. James at the moment. Ultimately, he was going to have to act the part of advocate to his wife’s talent in the wake of the night’s disaster, and he didn’t yet feel equipped to do so. He knew she wasn’t going to believe a word he said, no matter how much he believed his own assertions. Like so many artists, she wanted some form of outside approbation for her talent. He wasn’t an outsider, so he wouldn’t do. Nor would her father, who’d patted her on the shoulder and said philosophically, “Weather can’t be helped, Deb,” on his way up to bed. But Lynley and Helen somewhat qualified. So when he finally got round to bringing up the topic of Little Newport Street with Deborah, St. James wanted to have them there.
It wasn’t to be, however. He could see that Helen was drooping with fatigue and that Lynley was determined to get his wife home. “Mind how you go, then,” St. James told them now.
“ ‘Coragio, bully-monster,’ ” Lynley said with a smile. St. James watched them as they headed up Cheyne Row through the downpour to their car. When they reached it safely, he closed the door and girded himself for the conversation awaiting him in his study. Aside from her brief remark in the gallery to Mr. Hobart, Deborah had put up an admirably brave front until that cab ride home. She’d chatted to their friends, greeted her in-laws with exclamations of delight, and taken her old photographic mentor Mel Doxson from picture to picture to listen to his praise and to receive his astute criticism of her work. Only someone who’d known her forever—like St. James himself—would have been able to see the dull glaze of dejection in her eyes, would have noted from her quick glances to the doorway how much she had foolishly pinned her hopes on an imprimatur that was given by strangers whose opinion she wouldn’t have cared a half fig for in other circumstances. He found Deborah where he’d left her when he’d accompanied the Lynleys to the door: She stood in front of the wall on which he always kept a selection of her photographs. She was studying those that hung there, her hands clasped tightly behind her back.