A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(210)

Deborah poured the tea and gently eased a mug back over to China. She said, “I’m sorry how things turned out. I know how you felt about him. What you wanted. Hoped for. Expected. Whatever.”

“Yeah. Whatever. That’s the word, all right.” The sugar stood in a dispenser in the centre of the table. China upended this so that the white granules poured like snowfall into her cup. When it looked to Deborah as if the brew would be completely undrinkable, China finished with the dispenser.

“I wish it had worked out the way you wanted,” Deborah said. “But perhaps it still will.”

“The way your life worked out? No. I’m not like you. I don’t land on my feet. I never have. I never will.”

“You don’t know—”

“I ended it with one man, Deborah,” China cut in impatiently. “Believe me, okay? In my case there wasn’t another man—crippled or not— just waiting for things to go bust so he could step in and take over where the other left off.”

Deborah flinched from the sting behind her old friend’s words. “Is that how you see my life...how things turned out? Is that...Chi na, that’s not fair.”

“Isn’t it? There I was, struggling with Matt from the get-go. On again, off again. Great sex one day, big break-up the next. Get back together with the promise it’ll be ‘different this time.’ Fall into bed and screw our brains out. Break up three weeks later over something really stupid: He says he’ll be there at eight and he doesn’t show up till eleven-thirty and he doesn’t bother to call and let me know he’ll be late and I can’t deal with it a second longer so I say that’s it, get out, that’s it, I’ve had it. Then ten days later, he calls. He says, Look, baby, give me another chance, I need you. And I believe him because I’m so incredibly stupid or desperate, and we begin the process all over again. And all the time, there you are with a f*cking duke, of all things—or whatever he was. And when he’s out of the picture permanently, ten minutes later Simon steps in. Like I said. You always land on your feet.”

“But it wasn’t like that,” Deborah protested.

“No? Tell me how it was. Make it sound like my situation with Matt.”

China reached for her tea but she didn’t drink. Instead, she said, “You can’t do that, can you? Because your situation has never been like mine.”

“Men aren’t—”

“I’m not talking about men. I’m talking about life. How it is for me. How it’s God damn always been for you.”

“You’re seeing only the outside of it,” Deborah argued. “You’re comparing that—the superficial part of it—to how you feel inside. And that doesn’t make sense. China, I didn’t even have a mother. You know that. I grew up in someone else’s house. I spent the first part of my life frightened to death of my own shadow, bullied at school for having red hair and freckles, too shy to make a single request of anyone, even of my father. I was pathetically grateful if someone so much as patted me on the head like a dog. The only companions I had till I was fourteen were books and a third-hand camera. I lived in someone else’s house, where my father was little more than a servant, and I always thought Why couldn’t he have been someone? Why doesn’t he have a career, like a doctor or a dentist or a banker or something? Why doesn’t he go out to a proper job like other kids’ dads? Why—”

“Jesus. My dad was in prison, ” China cried. “That’s where he is now. That’s where he was then. He’s a dope dealer, Deborah. Do you hear me?

Do you get it? He’s a f*cking dope dealer. And my mom...How’d you like Miss USA Redwood Tree for a mother? Save the spotted owl or the three-legged ground squirrel. Stop a dam being built or a road going in or an oil well being drilled but don’t ever —ever— remember a birthday, pack a school lunch, make sure your kids have a decent pair of shoes. And for God’s sake don’t ever be around for a Little League game or a Brownie meeting or a teacher conference or anything as a matter of fact because God knows the loss of endangered dandelions might upset the whole f*cking ecosystem. So don’t —don’t— try to compare your poor life in some mansion—sniveling daughter of a servant—with mine.”

Deborah drew a shaky breath. There seemed nothing more to say. China took a gulp of her tea, her face averted.

Deborah wanted to argue that no one on earth ever got to put in a request for the hand of cards they were dealt in life, that it was how one played the hand that counted, not what the hand was. But she didn’t say this. Nor did she remark that she’d learned long ago with the death of her mother that good things could arise from bad. For saying that would smack of self-satisfaction and supercilious preaching. It would also lead them inevitably to her marriage to Simon, which would never have come about had his family not believed it necessary to get her grieving father away from Southampton. Had they not put Joseph Cotter in charge of renovating a run-down family house in Chelsea, she would never have come to live with, to grow to love, and ultimately to marry the man with whom she now shared her life. But that was dangerous ground for her to tread on in conversation with China. She had far too much to deal with right now. Deborah knew she possessed information that could alleviate some of China’s concerns—the dolmen, the combination lock on its door, the painting inside it, the state of the mailing tube in which that painting had been unwittingly smuggled into the UK and onwards onto Guernsey by Cherokee River, what the state of that mailing tube implied—but she knew she owed it to her husband not to mention any of this. So instead, she said, “I know you’re frightened, China. He’ll be okay, though. You’ve got to believe that.”