A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(14)

“But you’ve got to know your work is good,” he said. “How can you go to Bermondsey and capture it like this”—with a gesture towards the wall—“and not know that your work is good? Better than good. Good God, it’s brilliant.”

“Because knowing all that happens here,” she replied. Her voice had become subdued now and her posture—so rigid a moment before—released its tension so that she seemed to sag in front of him. She pointed to her head upon the word here and she placed her hand beneath her left breast as she said, “But believing all that happens here. So far I’ve not been able to bridge the distance between the two. And if I can’t do that...How can I weather what I have to weather to do something that will prove me to myself?”

There it was, he thought. She didn’t add the rest, for which he blessed her. Proving herself as a woman through childbirth had been denied his wife. She was looking for something to define who she was. He said, “My love...” but had no other words. Yet those alone seemed to comprise more kindness from him than she could bear because the metal of her eyes went to liquid in an instant, and she held up a hand to prevent him from crossing the room to comfort her.

“All the time,” she said, “no matter what happens, there’s this voice inside me whispering that I’m deluding myself.”

“Isn’t that the curse of all artists? Aren’t those who succeed the ones who’re able to ignore their doubts?”

“But I haven’t come up with a way not to listen to it. You’re playing at pictures, it tells me. You’re just pretending. You’re wasting your time.”

“How can you think you’re deluding yourself when you take pictures like these?”

“You’re my husband,” she countered. “What else can you say?”

St. James knew there was no real way to argue against that point. As her husband, he wanted her happiness. Both of them knew that—aside from her father—he’d be the very last person to utter a word that might destroy it. He felt defeated, and she must have read that defeat on his face, because she said, “Isn’t the real proof in the pudding? You saw it for yourself. Next to no one came to see them.”

They were back to that again. “That’s owing to the weather.”

“It feels like more than the weather to me.”

How it did and didn’t feel seemed like a fruitless direction to take, as amorphous and groundless as an idiot’s logic. Always the scientist, St. James said, “Well, what result did you hope for? What would have been reasonable for your first showing in London?”

She considered this question, running her fingers along the white door-jamb as if she could read the answer there in Braille. “I don’t know,”

she finally admitted. “I think I’m too afraid to know.”

“Too afraid of what?”

“I can see my expectations were out of kilter. I know that even if I’m the next Annie Leibovitz, it’s going to take time. But what if everything else about me is like my expectations? What if everything else is out of kilter as well?”

“Such as?”

“Such as: What if the joke’s on me? That’s what I’ve been asking myself all evening. What if I’m just being humoured by people? By your family. By our friends. By Mr. Hobart. What if they’re accepting my pictures on suffrage? Very nice, Madam, yes, and we’ll hang them in the gallery, they’ll do little enough harm in the month of December, when no one’s considering art shows anyway in the midst of their Christmas shopping and besides, we need something to cover our walls for a month and no one else is willing to exhibit. What if that’s the case?”

“That’s insulting to everyone. Family, friends. Everyone, Deborah. And to me as well.”

The tears she’d been holding back spilled over then. She raised a fist to her mouth as if she knew fully well how childish was her reaction to her disappointment. Yet, he knew, she couldn’t help herself. At the end of the day, Deborah simply was who Deborah was.

“She’s a terribly sensitive little thing, isn’t she, dear?” his mother had remarked once, her expression suggesting that proximity to Deborah’s emotion was akin to exposure to tuberculosis.

“You see, I need this,” Deborah said to him. “And if I’m not to have it, I want to know, because I do need something. Do you understand?”

He crossed the room to her and took her in his arms, knowing that what she wept for was only remotely connected to their dismal night in Little Newport Street. He wanted to tell her that none of it mattered, but he wouldn’t lie. He wanted to take her struggle from her, but he had his own. He wanted to make their life together easier for both of them, but he had no power. So instead, he pressed her head against his shoulder.

“You have nothing to prove to me,” he said into her springy copper hair.

“If only it was as easy as knowing that” was her reply. He started to say that it was as easy as making each day count instead of casting lines into a future neither of them could know. But he got only as far as drawing breath, when the doorbell rang long and loud, as if someone outside had fallen against it.

Deborah stepped away from him, wiping her cheeks as she looked towards the door. “Tommy and Helen must have forgotten...Did they leave something here?” She looked round the room.