A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(21)

“I reacted badly,” she finally murmured. “Tonight. I’m sorry, my love. I do put you through it.”

Simon had no trouble following the line of her thinking. “Expectations destroy our peace of mind, don’t they? They’re future disappointments, planned out in advance.”

“I did have it all planned out. Scores of people with champagne glasses in their hands, standing awestruck in front of my pictures. ‘My God, she’s a genius,’ they declare to each other. ‘The very idea of taking a Polaroid...Did you know they could be black and white? And the size of them...Heavens, I must own one at once. No. Wait. I must have at least ten.’ ”

“ ‘The new flat in Canary Wharf demands them,’ ” Simon added.

“ ‘Not to mention the cottage in the Cotswolds.’ ”

“ ‘And the house near Bath.’ ”

They laughed together. Then they were silent. Deborah shifted her position to look at her husband.

“It still stings,” she admitted. “Not as much. Not nearly. But a bit. It’s still there.”

“Yes,” he said. “There’s no quick panacea for being thwarted. We all want what we want. And not getting it doesn’t mean we cease to want it. I do know that. Believe me. I know.”

She looked away from him quickly, realising that what he was acknowledging traveled a much greater distance than comprised the brief journey to this night’s disappointment. She was grateful that he understood, that he’d always understood no matter how supremely rational logical cool and incisive were his comments on her life. Her eyes ached with tears, but she wouldn’t allow him to see them. She wanted to give him the momentary gift of her tranquil acceptance of inequity. When she’d managed to displace sorrow with what she hoped would sound like determination, she turned back to him.

“I’m going to sort myself out properly,” she said. “I may strike out in a whole new direction.”

He observed her in his usual manner, an unblinking gaze that generally unnerved lawyers when he was testifying in court and always reduced his university students to hopeless stammers. But for her the gaze was softened by his lips, which curved in a smile, and by his hands, which reached for her again.

“Wonderful,” he said as he pulled her to him. “I’d like to make a few suggestions right now.”

Deborah was up before dawn. She’d lain awake for hours before falling asleep, and when she’d finally nodded off, she’d tossed and turned through a series of incomprehensible dreams. In them she was back in Santa Barbara, not as she’d been—a young student at Brooks Institute of Photography—but rather as someone else entirely: a sort of ambulance driver whose apparent responsibility it was not only to fetch a recently harvested human heart for transplant but also to fetch it from a hospital she could not find. Without her delivery, the patient—lying for some reason not in an operating theatre but in the car repair bay at the petrol station behind which she and China had once lived—would die within an hour, especially since his heart had already been removed, with a gaping hole left in his chest. Or it might have been her heart instead of his. Deborah couldn’t tell from the partially shrouded form that was raised in the repair bay on a hydaulic lift.

In her dream, she drove desperately through the palm-lined streets to no avail. She couldn’t remember a single thing about Santa Barbara and no one would help her with directions. When she woke up, she found that she’d thrown off the covers and was so damp with sweat that she was actually shivering. She looked at the clock and eased out of bed, padding over to the bathroom, where she bathed the worst of the nightmare away. When she returned to the bedroom, she found Simon awake. He said her name in the darkness and then, “What time is it? What are you doing?”

She said, “Terrible dreams.”

“Not art collectors waving their chequebooks at you?”

“No, sad to say. Art collectors waving their Annie Leibovitzes at me.”

“Ah. Well. It could have been worse.”

“Really? How?”

“It could have been Karsch.”

She laughed and told him to go back to sleep. It was early yet, too early for her dad to be up and about, and she herself certainly wasn’t going to trip up and down the stairs with Simon’s morning tea as her father did.

“Dad spoils you, by the way,” she informed her husband.

“I consider it only a minor payment for having taken you off his hands.”

She heard the rustle of the bedclothes as he changed his position. He sighed deeply, welcoming back sleep. She left him to it. Downstairs, she brewed herself a cup of tea in the kitchen, where Peach looked up from her basket by the cooker and Alaska emerged from the larder, where, from the snow-tipped look of him, he doubtless had spent the night on top of a leaking flour bag. Both animals came across the red tiles to Deborah, who stood at the draining board beneath the basement window while her water heated in the electric kettle. She listened to the rain continue to fall on the flagstones of the area just outside the back door. There had been only a brief respite from it during the night, sometime after three, as she lay awake listening not only to the wind and the waves of rainfall hitting the window but also to the committee in her head that was shrilly advising her what to do: with her day, with her life, with her career, and above all with and for Cherokee River. She eyed Peach as Alaska began to saunter back and forth meaningfully between her legs. The dog hated going out in the rain—walkies became carries whenever there was so much as a drop of precipitation—so a walk was out of the question. But a quick dash up into the back garden to do the necessary was completely in order. Peach seemed to read Deborah’s mind, however. The dachshund beat a hasty retreat back into her basket as Alaska began to mew.