A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(181)

“That must’ve fit you like a picture, all dressed up like you were. Did Mary Beth like the fancy ride?”

“I went on my own. Too late to fetch her. I wasn’t on time for the concert as it was. I was waiting for you. Thought for sure you’d just run out somewhere. Picking up medicine at the chemist for the big house or something.”

She made another pass across the top of the stock, removing a nonexistent slick of fat. Ruth wouldn’t eat soup with too much fat in it. She’d see the delicate ovals of it, and she’d push the bowl away. So Valerie had to be vigilant. She had to give the chicken stock all her attention.

“Cherie missed you,” Kevin persisted. “You were meant to go.”

“Mary Beth didn’t ask where I was, though, did she?”

Kevin didn’t answer.

“So...” Valerie said as pleasantly as she could. “Those windows of hers sealed up nicely in her house now, Kev? No more leaking?”

“Where were you?”

She went to the fridge and looked inside, trying to think what she could tell him. She pretended a survey of the fridge’s contents, but all the time her thoughts swarmed like gnats round overripe fruit. Kevin’s chair scraped on the floor as he got to his feet. He came to the fridge and shut its door. Valerie returned to the cooker and he followed her there. When she picked up the spoon to see to the stock, he took the spoon from her. He set it with care on the utensil holder. “It’s time to talk.”

“What about?”

“I think you know.”

She wouldn’t admit to that or to anything. She couldn’t afford to. So she directed them elsewhere. She did it knowing the terrible risk involved, the risk that put her in the position of repeating her mother’s misery: that curse of desertion that seemed to haunt her family. She’d lived her childhood and her girlhood in its shadow and she’d done everything in her power to ensure that she would never have to see the back of a spouse walking away. It had happened to her mother. It had happened to her brother. But she’d sworn it would never happen to her. When we work and strive and sacrifice and love, we are owed devotion in return, she’d believed. She’d had it for years and had it without question. Still, she had to risk losing it in order to give protection where it was now most needed. She readied herself and said, “You miss our boys, don’t you? That’s part of what happened. We did a good job with them, but they’re gone to their own lives and you miss the fathering. That started it. I saw the longing in you the first time those girls of Mary Beth’s were sitting here having their tea.”

She didn’t look at her husband and he didn’t say anything. In any other situation, she could have interpreted his silence as assent and let the rest of the conversation go. But in this situation she could not do so when letting one conversation go ran the risk of another conversation beginning. There were too few safe subjects to choose from at this point, so she chose this one, telling herself they would have come to it eventually. She said, “Isn’t it true, Kev? Isn’t that how everything started?” Despite her deliberate choice of subject, despite the fact that she was making the choice cold-bloodedly as a way to keep that other more terrible knowledge safeguarded forever, she remembered her mother and how it had been for her: the begging and the tears and the do not leave me I will do anything I will be anything I will be her if that’s what you ask of me. She promised herself if it came to that, she would not go the way of her mother.

“Valerie.” Kevin’s voice sounded hoarse. “What’s happened to us?”

“You don’t know?”

“Tell me.”

She looked at him. “Is there an us?”

He appeared so perplexed that for an instant she wanted to stop where they were, as far as they’d gone, so close to the border but still not crossing it. But she could not do that. “What’re you talking about?” he asked.

“Choices,” she said. “Walking away from them when they’re yours to make. Or making them and walking away from others. That’s what’s happened. I’ve been watching it happen. I’ve been looking round it, looking past it, trying not to see it. But it’s there all the same, and you’re right. It’s time we talked.”

“Val, did you tell—”

She stopped him from going in that direction. She said, “Men don’t stray unless there’s a barrenness, Kev.”

“Stray?”

“Somewhere, a barrenness. In what they already have. First I thought, Well he can act like their dad without becoming their dad, can’t he? He can give them what a dad gives his girls and we’ll be all right with that, Kev and me. He can stand in Corey’s place in their lives. He can do that much. It’ll be fine if he does.” She swallowed and wished she didn’t have to say it. But she knew that, like her husband, she had no real choice in the matter. “I thought,” she said, “when I thought about it, Kev: He doesn’t need to do the same for Corey’s wife.”

Kevin said, “Hang on. You’ve been thinking...Mary Beth...me?”

He looked appalled. She would have felt relieved had she not needed to press forward to make sure every other thought was obliterated from his mind save the thought that she had suspected him of falling in love with his brother’s widow. “Isn’t that how it was?” she asked him. “Isn’t that how it is? I want the truth here, Kev. I think I’m owed it.”