For the Sake of Elena (Inspector Lynley, #5)(119)
He said, as if there had been no break in their conversation, “But am I good for you, Helen? That’s the real question, isn’t it?” And although he managed to keep his voice light, his heart still beat rapidly at the back of his throat. “I wonder that. I put the sum of what I am into a balance and weigh it against what I ought to be, and I ask myself if I’m really enough.”
When she turned her head, the amber light shafting down from a window above them surrounded her like an aureole. “Why would you ever think you’re not enough?”
He pondered the question, tracing his thoughts and his feelings right back to their source. He found that both of them grew from her decision to remain with her sister’s family in Cambridge. He wanted her back in London, available to him. If he was good enough for her, she’d return at his request. If she valued his love, she’d bow to his wishes. He wanted her to do so. He wanted an overt manifestation of the love she claimed to feel for him. And he wanted to be the one to decide exactly what that manifestation would be.
But he couldn’t tell her this. So he settled on saying, “I think I’m struggling with a definition of love.”
She smiled and slipped her hand through his arm. “You and everyone else, Tommy darling.”
They rounded the corner into Trinity Lane and entered the college grounds where a blackboard sign had been decorated with the words Jazz Up Your Life Tooo-nite in coloured chalk, and construction paper arrows affixed to the pavement led the way through the main college court to the junior combination room in the northeast corner of the grounds.
Similar to St. Stephen’s College, the building that housed Trinity Hall’s JCR was modern, little more than alternating panels of wood and glass. In addition to the combination room, it contained the college bar, where a considerable crowd was gathered at small round tables, engaged in boisterous conversation that seemed to be revolving round the good-humoured harassment of two men who were playing darts with rather more intensity than usually accompanied the game. The apparent reason for their avid concentration seemed to be age. One player was a youth of no more than twenty, the other an older man with a close-cropped grey beard.
“Go for it, Petersen,” someone shouted when the younger man took position for his turn. “Junior fellows kick arse. Show him.”
The young man made an elaborate display of loosening up his muscles and assuming the correct stance before he flung the dart and missed the shot entirely. Jeers roared through the room. In response, he turned around, pointed to his backside meaningfully, and hefted a pint of beer to his mouth. The crowd hooted and laughed.
Lynley guided Lady Helen through the jostling group to the bar and from there they made their way towards the JCR, beers in hand. The JCR was built on several different levels accommodating a line of immovable sofas and a number of uninteresting chairs with lazy, slung backs. At one end of the room, the floor rose to what was being used as a small staging area where the jazz group was getting ready to perform.
There were only six of them, so they didn’t need room for anything more than the space required to set up a keyboard and drums, three straight-back chairs for the saxophone, the trumpet, and the clarinet players, and a roughly defined triangular area for the double bass. Electrical extension cords from the keyboard seemed to snake everywhere, and when she turned and saw Lynley and Lady Helen, Miranda Webberly tripped over one in her haste to say hello.
Regaining her footing with a grin, she dashed over to greet them. “You came!” she said. “This is absolutely grand. Inspector, will you promise to tell Dad I’m a musical genius? I’m after another trip to New Orleans, but he’s only likely to cooperate if he thinks I’ve a future playing the changes on Bourbon Street.”
“I’ll tell him you play like an angel.”
“No! Like Chet Baker, please!” She greeted Lady Helen and went on confidentially. “Jimmy—he’s our drummer—wanted to cancel tonight’s gig. He’s at Queens’, you know, and he thought with that second girl getting shot this morning…” She looked over her shoulder to where the drummer was moodily tapping his sticks in a light spitting rhythm against the cymbals. “‘We shouldn’t be out entertaining,’ he says. ‘It’s not right, is it? It doesn’t feel right.’ But he can’t come up with an alternative for us. Paul—he plays double bass—wanted to bash local heads in some Arbury pub. But all in all, it seemed best that we just go ahead and play. I don’t know what it’ll sound like, though. No one seems very much in the mood.” She glanced anxiously round the room as if in the need for some sort of contradiction to reassure her.
A respectable crowd had begun to gather, apparently drawn by the rapid scales and chords which the keyboard player was using to warm up. Lynley took the opportunity before the concert began to say:
“Randie, did you know Elena Weaver was pregnant?”
Miranda shifted on her feet, rubbing the right sole of her high-topped black gym shoe against her left ankle. “Rather,” she said.
“How’s that?”
“I mean, I suspected. She never told me.”
They’d trodden this ground together before. “You mean you didn’t know it for a fact.”
“I didn’t know it for a fact.”
“But you suspected? Why?”
Miranda sucked at the inside of her lower lip. “It was the Cocoa Puffs in the gyp room, Inspector. They were hers, the same carton. It’d been there for weeks.”