Still Waters (Charlie Resnick #9)(73)
Distressed by her mother’s tears, the girl clung to her leg while the younger one pressed his face against her chest. Resnick hovered on the verge of putting an arm around her, putting an arm around them all, but then Diane was wiping her face and smiling and promising ice cream on the way home and the moment had passed.
They stopped again near the end of the pier and leaned against the rail, the ruins of the abbey and the weather-beaten church high behind them on the East Cliff, below them the tide dragging the sea back along the Upgang Shore. Dogs and children ran and chased balls and a few intrepid souls swam in the nearer edges of the water. With a stick in the sand, someone had scratched the words I think and nothing more, having thought, presumably, better of it.
“Were you close, you and Jane?” Resnick asked.
Diane didn’t answer right away. “Not really close, no. When we were growing up, it was she and Margaret who were friends, did stuff together. I was … I was just the little one getting under everyone’s feet and getting in the way. Real runt of the litter. But there was a while, it must have been when Margaret had gone off to university and Jane was in the sixth form, I suppose, we became sort of close then.”
“And more recently? Since you’ve been here?”
“Oh, Jane would occasionally persuade Alex to drive up for the day. I mean, he hated it, just hated it. You could see it in everything about him from the minute they arrived—that supercilious manner of his, just the way he stood. It was all I could do to get him to sit down in the house. I think he was always afraid there’d be something organic and squashy beneath the cushions. And, of course, he didn’t know what to do with the kids, didn’t have a clue. Creatures from another planet, as far as he was concerned.” She gave a mock shudder. “No wonder children are afraid of dentists.”
“How about Jane,” Resnick said. “How was she with the kids? Did they get on okay? Did she like them?”
“She loved them. And they loved her. I remember once, it couldn’t have been so long after this one was born, Alex must have been off at some conference or something, anyway, Jane got to come over on her own for the whole day. It was wonderful. We just fooled around on the beach in the morning; made up a picnic and drove up onto the moors.” For a moment, Diane’s voice was breaking up. It must have been the last time she saw her sister; Resnick didn’t need to ask, and she didn’t need to say.
“It wasn’t her decision then, as far as you know, not to have children?”
Diane squeezed her hands around the metal of the rail. “Decision? In that relationship, there wasn’t much question of Jane making decisions. Oh, I dare say mustard or cranberry sauce with the turkey, two pints of milk or three, but that was about as far as it went.”
“Why did she put up with it?”
Diane shrugged, turned around, and leaned the small of her back against the railing. Her daughter was tugging at the uneven hem of her cut-offs, eager for ice cream. “Why does anyone put up with anything? Because we’re too lazy to do anything different? Too frightened.”
“You think she was frightened of Alex?”
Diane looked at him. “Probably. But that wasn’t what I meant. Frightened of the alternatives, that’s what I meant, all that great unknown.” She cuddled the smaller child to her, and nuzzled her chin down into his hair. “Frightened of being alone.”
“You don’t think,” Resnick said—they were walking now, back along the way they had come—“you don’t think she could have been having an affair?”
“God!” Diane said. “I wish she had. I wish she’d had the gumption, never mind anything else.”
“But you don’t think she was?”
Emphatically, Diane shook her head.
“Would she have said?”
“To me, you mean? I’m not certain. Once I might have said, yes. And maybe that day she was here, if anything had been going on …” A smile brightened Diane’s face. “The only time I can remember her going on about something like that, you know, boys, men, love, she was home from university and we went off into town, shopping for clothes. There was this lad she’d met and she just couldn’t stop talking about him. On and on and on. ‘I’ll never want anyone else,’ she said, ‘not as long as I live.’” They stopped at the curb and waited for a car to ease past. “Well, you say things like that, don’t you? Young and in love. It doesn’t mean anything.”
Back in the house, radio playing, children stalking the cat, Diane blew the top layer of dust away from a cardboard box she had pulled out from under the bed. Inside were photographs, old Christmas cards, torn concert tickets, letters, badges. Diane shuffled and sorted while Resnick watched.
“Here,” she said, finally, separating one small colored photograph from a batch of a dozen or so others. “Jane and Peter. Love’s young dream.”
Resnick looked down at two nineteen-year-olds, arms wound about each other on a white bridge, smiling not at the camera but at each other.
“Where’s this taken?” Resnick asked.
“Cambridge. It’s where they went to university.”
Resnick looked at the young man with a wide face and a shock of dark hair, unable to see anything other than the young woman beside him. Even in that small, slightly battered photograph, it was impossible not to respond to the adoration he was feeling, not to see her beauty through his eyes.