Careless in Red (Inspector Lynley, #15)(162)
“You know,” she cried. “Oh, you bloody well know. You always believed I was the one who grassed you. I saw how you looked at me afterwards. I could see in your eyes…And then off to Truro you go and you leave me there with the consequences. God, I hated you. But then I didn’t because I loved you so much. And I love you now. And I hate you and why can’t you leave me alone?”
“You’re why the cops came back to me,” he said, hollowly. “That’s what you mean. You spoke to them.”
“I saw you with her. You wanted me to see you and I saw, and I knew you meant to f*ck her and how do you think I felt?”
“So you decided to go one better? You took him down to the cave, had him, left him, and?”
“I couldn’t be who you wanted me to be. I couldn’t give you what you wanted, but you had no right to end things between us, because I’d done nothing. And then with his sister…I saw because you wanted me to see because you wanted me to suffer and so I wanted you to suffer in turn.”
“So you f*cked him.”
“No!” Her voice rose to a scream. “I did not. I wanted you to feel how I felt. I wanted you to hurt like I hurt, how you made me hurt by wanting from me all those things that I could never give you. Why did you break with me? And why?why?won’t you leave me now?”
“So you accused me…?” There. He’d finally said it directly.
“Yes! I did. Because you’re so good. You’re so God damn bloody good, and it’s your miserable sainthood that I could not tolerate. Not then and not now. You keep turning the other God damn cheek and when you do that, I completely despise you. And whenever I despised you, you broke with me, and that’s when I loved you and wanted you most.”
He was left with saying only, “You’re mad.”
Then he had to get away from her. To remain in the bedroom meant he was going to have to come to terms with having built his life on a lie. For when the Newquay police had focused their enquiries upon him for week after week and month after month, he had turned to Dellen for comfort and strength. She made him whole, he’d thought. She made him what he was. Yes, she was difficult. Yes, they had their occasional troubles. But when it was right between them, weren’t they better than they could ever have been with anyone else?
So when she’d followed him to Truro, he’d embraced what he decided that meant. When her trembling lips had pronounced the words, “I’m pregnant again,” he’d embraced this announcement as if an angel had appeared before him in a dream, as if the imaginary walking staff he daily carried had indeed bloomed with lilies upon his waking. And when she got rid of that baby as well?just as she’d done with the babies before it, his and the offspring of two others?he’d soothed her and agreed that she wasn’t quite ready, that they weren’t quite ready, that the time wasn’t right. He owed her the allegiance she’d shown him, he decided. She was a troubled spirit. He loved her and he could cope with that.
When they finally married, he felt as if he’d captured an exotic bird. She was not to be held in a cage, however. He could only have her if he set her free.
“You’re the only one I truly want,” she would say. “Forgive me, Ben. It’s you that I love.”
Now on the top of the cliff, Ben’s breath returned to normal from the climb. The sheen of sweat he wore chilled him in the sea breeze, and he became aware of the lateness of the day. He realised that in making the abseil down the face of the cliff, he’d ultimately stood in the very spot where Santo had lain, dead or dying. And it came to him that, while walking in Santo’s footsteps along the path from the road, while fastening the sling to the old stone post, while rappelling down and preparing for the climb back up, he’d not thought of Santo once. He’d come to do so, and he’d still not managed it. His mind had been filled?as always?with Dellen.
This seemed to him the ultimate betrayal, the monstrous one. Not that Dellen had betrayed him by casting suspicion on him all those years ago. But that he himself had just betrayed Santo. A pilgrimage to the very spot where Santo had perished had not been enough to exorcise the boy’s mother from his thoughts. Ben realised that he lived and breathed her as if she were a contagion afflicting only him. Away from her, he might as well have been with her, which was the reason he’d kept returning.
He was in this, he thought, as sick as she was. Indeed, he was sicker. For if she could not help being the Dellen she was and had always been, he could stop being the perversely loyal Benesek who’d made it far too simple for her just to continue.
When he rose from the boulder on which he’d sat to catch his breath, he felt stiff from cooling down in the breeze. He knew he’d pay in the morning for the rapidity of the climb. He went to the stone post where the sling was looped, and he began drawing the rope back up the cliff, looping it carefully and just as carefully examining it for frays. Even in this he found he could not concentrate on Santo.
There was a moral question involved in all this, Ben knew, but he found he lacked the courage to ask it.
DAIDRE TRAHAIR HAD BEEN waiting in the public bar of the Salthouse Inn the better part of an hour when Selevan Penrule came through the door. He looked round the room when he saw that his daily drinking companion was not nursing a Guinness in the inglenook, which Selevan and Jago Reeth regularly commandeered for themselves, and he ventured over to join Daidre at her table by the window.