In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner (Inspector Lynley, #10)(226)
“I doubt I would have listened if I'd known that what you were telling me was going to prove Barbara right.”
“As to that, darling …” Helen went to the vanity and took up a small bottle of lotion, which she began to smooth against her face. “What is it, really, that's bothered you about Barbara? About this North Sea business and her firing that gun. Because I know you know she's a fine detective. She may go her own way now and again, but her heart is always in the right place, isn't it?”
And there it was again, that word heart and everything it implied about the underlying reasons behind a person's actions. Hearing his wife use it, Lynley was reminded of another's use of it so many years before, of a woman weeping and saying to him, “My God, Tommy, what's become of your heart?” when he refused to see her, to speak to her even, in the aftermath of discovering her adultery.
And then he finally knew. He understood for the very first time, and the understanding made him recoil from who he had been and what he had done for the last twenty years. “I couldn't control her,” he said quietly, far more to himself than to his wife. “I couldn't mould her into the image I'd had of her. She went her own way and I couldn't bear it. He's dying, I thought, and she should damn well act like a wife whose husband is dying.”
Helen understood. “Ah. Your mother.”
“I thought I'd forgiven her long ago. But perhaps I haven't forgiven her at all. Perhaps she's always there—in every woman I have to deal with—and perhaps I keep trying to make her be someone she doesn't want to be.”
“Or perhaps you've simply never forgiven yourself for not being able to stop her.” Helen set down her lotion and came to him. “We carry such baggage, don't we, darling? And just when we think we've finally unpacked, there it all is again, waiting in front of our bedroom door, ready to trip us when we get up in the morning.”
She'd had her head wrapped in a turban, and she took this off and shook her hair out. She hadn't completely dried herself, so drops of water glistened on her shoulders and gathered in the hollow of her throat.
“Your mother, my father,” she said as she took his hand and pressed it to her cheek. “It's always someone. I was all in a muddle because of that ridiculous wallpaper. I'd decided that if I hadn't become the woman my father intended me to be—the wife of a man in possession of a title—I'd have known my own mind with regard to that paper. And because I didn't know my own mind, I blamed him. My father. But the truth of the matter is that I could always have gone my own way, as Pen and Iris did. I could have said no. And I didn't because the path laid out was so much easier and so much less frightening than forging my own would have been.”
Lynley smoothed her cheek fondly He traced her jaw and the length of her long and lovely neck.
“Sometimes I hate being a grown-up,” Helen told him. “There's so much more freedom in being a child.”
“Isn't there,” he agreed. He put his fingers to the towel that wrapped her body. He kissed her neck, her shoulders, and her mouth. “But there's more advantage in adulthood, I think.”
He loosened the towel and drew her to him.
[page]CHAPTER 31
t the sound of her alarm the next morning, Barbara Havers rolled out of bed with a blazing headache. She stumbled to the bathroom, where she rattled round for several aspirin and fumbled with the handles of the shower. Bollocks, she thought. She'd obviously been leading much too exemplary a life in the last few years. As a result, she'd become grossly out of condition in the partying arena.
It hadn't even been that much of a celebration. After they'd finished taking Matthew King-Ryder's statement, she and Nkata had gone out for a minor frolic. They'd visited only four pubs, and neither one of them had drunk the truly hard stuff. But what they'd drunk had been enough to do the trick. Barbara felt like a lorry had driven over her head.
She stood under the shower and let the water beat against her until the aspirin began to take effect. She scrubbed her body and washed her hair, swearing off everything even remotely alcoholic on week nights henceforth. She thought about phoning Nkata to see if he was experiencing a morning-after as well. But she considered how his mother would react to her favourite child's receiving a phone call from an unknown woman before seven in the morning, and she abandoned the idea. No need to worry Mrs. Nkata about her darling Winnie's purity of flesh and spirit. Barbara would see him at the Yard soon enough.
Her morning ablutions performed, Barbara padded over to her wardrobe and pondered what sartorial statement she could make today. She opted for discretion and pulled out a trouser suit that she hadn't thought to wear for at least two years.
She flung it onto the rumpled bed and went to the kitchen. The electric kettle plugged in and watermelon Pop-Tarts in the toaster, she toweled her hair dry and threw on her clothes. She turned on the BBC breakfast news to see that road works were delaying traffic into the City, there was a pile-up on the Ml just south of junction four, and a burst water main on the A23 had created a lake to the north of Streatham. It was another day of commuting hell.
The kettle clicked off, and Barbara toddled to the kitchen to spoon some coffee powder into a mug decorated with a caricature of the Prince of Wales: chinless head, bulbous nose, and flapping ears sitting on a diminutive tartan-clad body She grabbed her Pop-Tarts, plopped them onto a kitchen towel, and carried this well-balanced nutritional masterpiece over to the dining table.