It wasn’t until they’d wended their way from Bryanbarrow village to the main road through the Lyth Valley that Manette turned in her seat and spoke to them. She said, “What if you never came back at all, Gracie? What if you and Tim came to Great Urswick and lived with Freddie and me?”
Gracie looked at Tim. She looked back at Manette. Her eyes were round with expectation, but she turned her gaze to the window and the passing scenery it offered her. She said, “Could I bring my trampoline?”
Manette said, “Oh, I think we have room for that.”
Gracie sighed. She moved on the seat to be closer to Tim. She rested her cheek on his arm. “Lovely,” she said.
So the drive to Windermere was spent in a tangle of plans being laid. Tim closed his eyes and let the sounds of their conversation wash round him. Freddie slowed the car as they came to the town and Manette said something about the register office, which was when Tim opened his eyes again.
He said, “C’n I do something first? I mean, before the wedding?”
Manette turned to him and said of course he could, so he directed Freddie to the appliance repair shop where he’d left Bella. The doll had been seen to. Her arms and legs were reconnected. She’d been cleaned up. She wasn’t what she’d been before Tim had pounced upon her, but she was still unmistakably Bella.
“Thought you wanted it posted,” the woman behind the counter said to him.
“Things changed,” Tim said as he accepted the doll.
“Don’t they always,” the woman said.
In the car, he handed Bella to his sister. She clutched the doll to her budding little bosom and said, “You mended her, you mended her,” and cooed to the thing as if it were a live baby and not a realistic depiction of one.
He said, “I’m sorry. She’s not as good as new.”
“Ah,” Freddie said as he moved the car away from the kerb, “but which one of us is?”
12 NOVEMBER
CHELSEA
LONDON
When Lynley and Deborah arrived back in London, it was after midnight. They’d made the drive mostly in silence although Lynley had asked her if she wanted to talk. She knew he understood that she was carrying the heavier of both of their burdens because of her part in Alatea’s flight and her death, and he wanted to relieve her of at least part of the weight. But she couldn’t allow it. “May we just be quiet with each other?” she’d asked him. And so they had been, although from time to time he’d reached over and covered her hand with his own.
They hit traffic near the junction for Liverpool and Manchester. They came upon road works near Birmingham and a tailback from an accident at the junction for the A45 to Northampton. At this last, they got off the motorway for a meal and spent ninety minutes hoping the route would be less congested at the meal’s conclusion. They didn’t reach the Cricklewood roundabout until midnight and Chelsea at half past the hour.
Deborah knew that her husband was still up, despite the time. She knew he would be waiting for her in his study on the ground floor of the house because before she climbed the front steps to the door, she saw that the light was on.
She found him reading. He had the fire on, and Peach was snoozing in front of it on a cushion that Simon had placed there for her. The dachshund removed herself from this only slowly as Deborah entered, and she stretched her front legs and then her back legs before toddling over for a late-night greeting.
Simon set his book to one side. Deborah saw it was a novel, which was unusual for him. Simon was strictly a nonfiction reader, favouring biographies and the recounting of superhuman acts of survival in the wild. Shackleton was his foremost hero.
He got to his feet, always an awkward business for him. He said, “I wasn’t sure what time.”
She said, “Traffic was bad in places.” And then, “Tommy told you?”
He nodded, his grey eyes taking in her face and gauging— as he always would— her expression and what it said about her state of mind. He read upon her the heaviness she felt and he said, “He rang me when you stopped for petrol. I’m terribly sorry, my love.”
She stooped to pick up the dachshund, who squirmed in her arms and tried to climb to her face. “You were right about everything,” Deborah said to her husband as she rubbed her cheek against the dog’s silky head. “But then, you usually are.”
“It gives me no pleasure.”
“Which part? Being right always or being right just now?”
“Neither one gives me pleasure. And I’m not always right. In matters of science I feel fairly certain that the ground I’m walking on is solid. But in matters of the heart, in matters affecting you and me… Believe me, I have no idea, Deborah. I’m a wanderer in the dark.”
“It was Conception. It became some sort of obsession for me. I saw a sisterhood forming between us because of that magazine and I let that thought— the thought that someone was as determined as I was, as… as empty as I was— dominate everything else. So I’m responsible for her death. If I hadn’t made her feel so vulnerable. If I hadn’t frightened her. If I hadn’t pursued her. I thought she was talking about that mad journalist from The Source when all along she thought I’d come from the man who’d been searching for her.”
“The man she thought had been searching for her.” Simon corrected her gently. “When you hold your truths as close as she did, those truths can undermine your life. The world becomes a suspicious place. You were there at Tommy’s request, Deborah. The rest came from her.”
“But we both know that’s not quite the truth,” Deborah said. “I made more of what I saw in Arnside House because I wanted to. And both of us, Simon, know exactly why I did that.” She went to one of the armchairs and sat. Peach settled into her lap. Deborah caressed the dog and then said to her husband, “Why’s she not sleeping with Dad?”
“I required her presence. I didn’t want to wait for you alone.”
Deborah took this in. “How strange,” she finally said. “I wouldn’t have thought alone would bother you. You’ve always been so self-contained, so sure.”
“That’s how I’ve seemed to you?”
“Always. How else could you seem? So cool, so rational, so confident. Sometimes I just want you to explode, Simon, but you never do. And now even with this… There you stand. You’re waiting for something from me— I can feel that— but I simply don’t know what it is— ”
“Do you not?”
“— or how to give it to you.”
Simon sat then, not in the chair where he’d been sitting when she’d entered the room, but rather on the arm of hers. She couldn’t see his face, and he couldn’t see hers. She said, “I simply must get past this. I do understand that. But I don’t know how to do it. Why can I not get past this, Simon? How can I not be obsessed with something I want so much?”
“Perhaps to want it less,” he said.
“How do I manage that?”
“Through resignation.”
“But that means I’ve given up, that we’ve given up. So where does that leave me?”
“Wandering,” he said.
“Hungry,” she said. “That’s what it’s like. Inside of me, always. This… this hunger that nothing is able to assuage. It’s horrible. It’s why I always feel… well, empty. I know I can’t keep living this way, but I don’t know how to make the hunger stop.”
“Perhaps you’re not meant to,” he said. “Perhaps you’re meant to cope with it. Either that or to come to realise that the hunger and the appeasement of the hunger are two entirely different things. They’re unrelated. One will never quell the other.”