In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner (Inspector Lynley, #10)(98)

“It's only sex to me as well,” Nicola said frankly. She brightened as if she suddenly realised why her mother was harbouring such concerns. “Mum! Were you thinking I love him? That I want to marry him or something like that? Lord, no, Mum. I promise you. I just like the way he makes me feel.”

“And when the happiness of being with him makes you long for more and you're not able to have it?”

Nicola picked up her gel soap and applied it to the sponge, dribbling it out like custard over a cake. She looked confused for a moment, then her expression cleared and she said, “I don't mean that kind of feel, that heart kind of feel. I mean physically. The way he makes my body feel. That's all. I like what he does and how I feel when he does it. That's what I want from him and that's what he gives me.”

“Sex.”

[page]“Right. He's quite good, you know.” She'd cocked her head, given an impish grin, and winked at her mother. “Or do you know already? Have you had him as well?”

“Nicola!”

She squirmed in the water and hung her head appealingly on the side of the tub. “Mum, it's okay. I wouldn't tell Dad. God, have you done it with him? I mean when I'm away at college, he must need someone else to … Come on. Tell me.”

Nan had longed to strike her, to mark the lovely elfin face as Christian-Louis had marked the lithe young body. She wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake until her teeth rattled in her head and pebbled from her mouth into the water. She wasn't supposed to be like this. Confronted by her mother with the accusation, she was supposed to deny, to break down when the evidence was presented, to plea for forgiveness, and to ask for understanding. But the last thing she was supposed to do was to confirm her mother's worst suspicions with the same ease that might have gone into answering a question about what she'd eaten for breakfast.

“Sorry,” Nicola said when her mother didn't reply to her light-hearted questions. “It's different for you. I can see that. I shouldn't have intruded. I'm sorry, Mum.”

She'd taken a razor from the bathtub tray and she was applying this to her right leg. It was deeply tanned and long, with a well-shaped calve and muscles taut from hiking. Nan watched her run it along her flesh. She waited for a nick, for a scrape, for the blood. None came.

She said, “What are you, exactly? What do I call you? A scrubber? A slag? A common tart?”

The words didn't wound. They didn't even touch. Nicola set down the razor and gazed at her. “I'm Nicola,” she said. “The daughter who loves you very much, Mummy.”

“Don't say that. If you loved me, you wouldn't be—”

“Mum, I made a decision to do this. Eyes wide open and knowing all the facts. I didn't make the decision to hurt you. I made it because I wanted him. And when this ends—because all things do—how I'll feel is my responsibility. If I'm hurt, I'm hurt. If I'm not, I'm not. I'm sorry you found out about it, because obviously it's upset you. But I'd like you to know that we did try to be discreet.”

The voice of reason, her lovely daughter. Nicola was who Nicola was. She called aces as she saw them and spades the same. And as Nan saw her so vividly—a spectral figure whose image seemed to form on the glass panes of the window at which her mother now stood—she tried not to think, let alone to believe that the girl's forthright honesty was what had killed her.

Nan had never understood her daughter, and she saw that now more clearly than she had done in all the years she'd waited for Nicola to emerge from the chrysalis of her troubled adolescence, fully formed as an adult made in the image and likeness of her progenitors. Thinking of her child, Nan felt settle upon her shoulders the mantle of a failure so profound that she wondered how she would ever be able to continue living. That she had produced such a daughter from her own body … that the years of self-sacrifice had brought her to this moment … that the cooking and cleaning and washing and ironing and worrying and planning and giving giving giving had resulted in her feeling like a starfish taken from the ocean and left to dry—and to rot—too far from the water to save herself … that the sweaters knitted and the temperatures taken and the scraped knees bandaged and the little shoes polished and the clothes kept neat and fresh and sweet had ultimately counted for nothing in the eyes of the single person for whom she lived and breathed …. It was too much to bear.

She'd given the effort of motherhood everything she possessed, and she'd failed entirely, teaching her daughter nothing of substance. Nicola was who Nicola was.

Nan was only grateful that her own mother had died during Nicola's childhood. She would never have to see how Nan had failed where her female forebears had known nothing but success. Nan herself was the embodiment of her mother's values. Born into a time of terrible strife, she'd been schooled in the disciplines of poverty, suffering, generosity, and duty. In war, one did not seek to gratify the self. The self was secondary to the Cause. One's home became a haven for convalescing soldiers. One's food and clothing—and, dear God, even the gifts one received at an eighth-year birthday party when the little attendants had been told in advance that the guest of honour had no wants in comparison with what the dear soldiers needed—were gently but firmly removed from one's grasp and passed on to hands worthier than her own. It was a hard time, but it created her mettle on its forge. She had character as a result. This was what she should have passed to her daughter.