A Suitable Vengeance

  St James turned to comment upon the room - what a far cry it was from the adolescent eclecticism of her bedroom at home - and caught sight of a small alcove to the left of the door. It comprised a kitchen where an undersized table was set with a china tea-service. Two places were laid.

  He should have realized the moment he saw her. It was hardly in character for her to be lolling around in the middle of the day, wearing a soft summer dress in place of her usual blue jeans.

  'You've someone coming. I'm sorry. I should have phoned.'

  'I'm not connected yet. It doesn't matter. Really. What do you think? Do you like it?'

  The entire bedsit was, he thought, pretty much what it was intended to be: a room of peace and femininity in which a man would want to lie at her side, throwing off the day's burdens for the pleasure of making love. But that was hardly the response Deborah wanted from him. To avoid having to give one, he walked to her pictures.

  Although more than a dozen hung on the wall, they were grouped in such a way that his eyes were drawn to a striking black and white portrait of a man standing with his back to the camera, his head turned in profile, his hair and skin - both lit with a shimmering cast of water -acting as contrast to an ebony background.

  'Tommy photographs well.'

  Deborah joined him. 'He does, doesn't he? I was trying to give some definition to his musculature. I'm not at all sure about it, though. The lighting seems off. I don't know. One minute I like it and the next I think it's about as subtle as a mug shot.'

  St James smiled. 'You're as hard on yourself as you ever were, Deborah.'

  'I suppose I am. Never satisfied with anything. That's always been my story.'

  'I'd say a piece was fine. Your father would agree. We'd bring in Helen for a third opinion. Then you'd celebrate your success by throwing it away and claiming we all were hopeless judges.'

  She laughed. 'At least I didn't fish for compliments.'

  'No. You didn't do that.' He turned back to the wall. The brief pleasure of their exchange withered to nothing.

  A different sort of study had been placed next to the black and white portrait. It, too, was of Lynley, seated nude in an old iron bed, rumpled bedlinen thrown over the lower part of his torso. With one leg raised, an arm resting on his knee, he gazed towards a window where Deborah stood, her back to the camera, sunlight gleaming along the swell of her right hip. Yellow curtains billowed back frothily, no doubt serving to hide the cable release that had allowed her to take the picture. The photograph looked completely spontaneous, as if she had awakened at Lynley's side and found an opportunity in a chance of light, in the contrast of curtains and morning sky.

  St James stared at the picture, trying to pretend he could evaluate it as a piece of art, knowing all the time it was affirmation that Cotter had guessed the entire truth about Deborah's relationship with Lynley. In spite of the sight of them together in his car last night, St James knew that he had been holding on to an insubstantial thread of hope. It snapped before his eyes. He looked at Deborah.

  Two spots of colour had appeared high on her cheeks. 'Heavens, I'm not a very good hostess, am I? Would you like something to drink? Gin and tonic? Or there's whisky And tea. There's tea. I've lots of tea. I was about to—'

  'No. Nothing. You've someone coming. I'll not stay long.'

  'Stay for tea. I can set another place.' She went to the tiny kitchen.

  'Please, Deborah. Don't,' St James said quickly, imagining the awkward civility of getting through tea and three or four digestive biscuits while Deborah and Lynley made polite conversation with him, all the time wishing he would be on his way. 'It's really not right.'

  Deborah paused at the kitchen cupboard, a cup and saucer in her hand. 'Not right? What d'you mean? It'll just be—'

  'Listen, little bird.' He wanted only to get everything said, do his miserable duty, keep his promise to her father, and be gone. 'Your father's worried about you.'

  With studied precision, Deborah put down the saucer, and then, even more carefully, the cup on top of it. She lined them up with the edge of the worktop. 'I see. You're here as his emissary, aren't you? It's hardly the role I'd expect you to play.'

  'I told him I'd speak to you, Deborah.'

  At that - perhaps it was the change in his tone - he saw the spots of colour deepen on her cheeks. Her lips pressed together. She walked to the daybed, sat down, and folded her hands.

  'All right. Go ahead.'

  St James saw the unmistakable flicker of passion cross her face. He heard the first stirring of temper in her voice. But he chose to ignore both, deciding to go on with what he had come to say. He assured himself that his motivation was his promise to Cotter. His given word meant commitment, and he could not leave without making certain Cotter's concerns were explained to his daughter in the most explicit terms.

  'Your father's worried about you and Tommy,' he began, in what he deemed a reasonable manner.

  'And what about you? Are you worried as well?'

  'It has nothing to do with me.'

  'Ah. I should have known. Well, now that you've seen me - and the flat as well - are you going to report back and justify Dad's worries? Or do I need to do something to pass your inspection?'

  'You've misunderstood.'

  'You've come snooping around to check up on my behaviour. What is it exactly I've misunderstood?'

  'It isn't a question of your behaviour, Deborah.' He was feeling defensive, decidedly uncomfortable. Their interview wasn't supposed to take this course. 'It's only that your relationship with Tommy—'

  She pushed herself to her feet. 'I'm afraid that's none of your business, Simon. My father may be little more than a servant in your life, but I'm not. I never was. Where did you get the idea you could come round here and pry into my life? Who do you think you are?'

  'Someone who cares about you. You know that very well.'

  'Someone who . . .' Deborah faltered. Her hands clenched in front of her as if she wished to stop herself from saying more. The effort failed. 'Someone who cares? You call yourself someone who cares about me? You, who never bothered to write so much as a single letter all the years I was gone. I was seventeen years old. Do you know what that was like? Have you any idea since you care so much?' She walked unevenly to the other side of the room and swung to face him again. 'Every day for months on end, there I was, waiting like an idiot - a stupid little fool - hoping for word from you. An answer to my letters. Anything! A note. A card. A message sent through my father. It didn't matter what as long as it was from you. But nothing came. I didn't know why. I couldn't understand. And in the end, when I could face it, I just waited for the news that you'd finally married Helen.'

  'Married Helen?' St James demanded incredulously. He didn't stop to consider how or why their conversation was escalating so rapidly into an argument. 'How in God's name could you even think that?'

  'What else was I to think?'

  'You might have had the sense to start out with what existed between the two of us before you left England.'

  Tears sprang into her eyes, but she blinked them back furiously. 'Oh, I thought of that all right. Every night, every morning, I thought of that, Simon. Lying in my bed, trying to come up with a single good reason to get on in my life. Living in a void. Living in hell. Are you pleased to know it? Are you satisfied now? Missing you. Wanting you. It was torture. A disease.'

  'With Tommy the cure.'

  'Absolutely. Thank God. With Tommy the cure. So get out of here. Now. Leave me alone.'

  'I'll leave all right. It would hardly do to have me here in the love-nest when Tommy arrives to claim what he's paid for.' He pointed crudely at each object as he spoke. 'Tea laid out nicely. Soft music playing. And the lady herself, ready and waiting. I can see I'd get just a bit in the way. Especially if he's in a rush.'

  Deborah backed away from him. 'What he's paid for? Is that why you're here? Is that what you think? That I'm too worthless and stupid to support myself? That this is
Tommy's flat? Who am I, then, Simon? Who bloody well am I? His bauble? Some scrubber? His tart?' She didn't wait for the answer. 'Get out of my flat.'

  Not yet, he decided. By God, not yet. 'You talk a pretty piece about torture, don't you? So what the hell do you think these three years have been like for me? And how do you imagine I felt waiting to see you last night, hour after hour - after three goddamn years - and knowing now you were here all that time with him?'

  'I don't care how you felt! Whatever it was, it couldn't come close to the misery you foisted on me.'

  'What a compliment to your lover! Are you sure misery is the word you want to use?'

  'It comes back to that, doesn't it? Sex is the issue. Who's screwing Deb. Well, here's your chance, Simon. Go ahead. Have me. Make up for lost time. There's the bed. Go on.' He didn't reply. 'Come on. Screw me. Have me for a quickie. That's what you want, isn't it? Damn you, isn't it?'

  When still he was silent, she reached in a fury for the first available object that came into her hand. She threw it at him with all her strength, and it crashed and splintered against the wall near his head. They both saw too late that in her rage she had destroyed his gift to a long-ago childhood birthday, a porcelain swan.

  The act ended anger.

  Deborah started to speak, a fist at her lips, as if she were seeking the first horrified words of apology. But St James felt beyond hearing another word. He looked down at the broken fragments on the floor and crushed them into powder beneath his foot, a single sharp movement with which he demonstrated that love, like clay, can be pitiably friable.

  With a cry, Deborah rushed across the room to where a few pieces lay beyond his reach. She picked them up.

  'I hate you!' Tears finally coursed down her cheeks. 'I hate you! This is just the sort of thing I'd expect you to do. And why not when everything about you is crippled? You think it's just your stupid leg, don't you, but you're crippled inside, and by God, that's worse.'

  Her words knifed the air, every nightmare come to life. St James flinched from their strength and moved towards the door. He felt numb, weak, and primarily conscious of the terrible awkwardness of his gait, as if it were magnified a thousand times for her to see.

  'Simon! No! I'm sorry!'

  She was reaching towards him, and he noted with interest that she'd cut herself on the edge of one of the pieces of porcelain. A hairline of blood ran from palm to wrist.

  'I didn't mean it. Simon, you know I didn't mean it.' He marvelled at the fact that all previous passion was quite dead in him. Nothing mattered at all, save the need to escape.

  'I know that, Deborah.'

  He opened the door. It was a mercy to be gone.

  The blood felt like rising floodwaters within his skull, the usual precursor of intolerable pain. Sitting in his old MG outside the Shrewsbury Court Apartments, St James fought it, knowing that if he gave it even a moment's sway the agony would be so excruciating that finding his way back to Chelsea without assistance would be impossible.

  The situation was ludicrous. Would he actually have to telephone Cotter for assistance? And from what? From a fifteen-minute conversation with a girl just twenty-one years old? Surely he, eleven years her senior with a world of experience behind him, ought to have emerged the victor from their encounter rather than what he was at the moment - shattered, weak-kneed and ill. How rich.

  He closed his eyes against the sunlight, an incandescence that seared his nerves, one that he knew did not really exist but was only the product of his heat-oppressed brain. He laughed derisively at the tortured convolution of muscle, bone, and sinew that for eight years had been his bar of justice, prison, and final retribution for the crime of being young and being drunk on a winding road in Surrey long ago.

  The air he drew in was hot, fetid with the scent of diesel fuel. Still, he sucked it in deeply. To master pain in its infancy was everything, and he did not pause to consider that doing so would then give him leave to examine the charges which Deborah had hurled against him and, worse, to admit to the truth of every one.

  For three years, he had indeed not sent her a message, not a single letter, not a sign of any kind. And the damnable fact behind his behaviour was that he could not excuse it or explain it in a way she might ever come to understand. Even if she did, what point would it serve for her to know now that every day without her he had felt himself growing just a bit more towards nothing? For while he had allowed himself to die by inches and degrees, Lynley had taken up position within the sweet circumference of her life, and there he had moved in his usual fashion, gracious and calm, completely self-assured.

  At the thought of the other man, St James made himself stir and felt for the car keys in his pocket, determined not to be found - looking like a puling schoolboy - in front of Deborah's block of flats when Lynley arrived. He pulled away from the kerb and joined the rush-hour traffic that was hurtling down Sussex Gardens.

  As the light changed on the corner of Praed Street and London Street, St James braked the car and let his glance wander forlornly with a heaviness that matched the condition of his spirit. Without registering any of them, his eyes took in the multifarious business establishments that tumbled one upon the other down the Paddington street, like children eager to grab one's attention on the pathway to the Tube. A short distance away, beneath the blue and white Underground sign, a woman stood. She was making a purchase of flowers from a vendor whose cart stood precariously, one wheel hanging over the kerb. She shook back her head of close-cropped black hair, scooped up a spray of summer flowers, and laughed at something the vendor said.

  Seeing her, St James cursed his unforgivable stupidity. For here was Deborah's afternoon guest. Not Lynley at all, but his very own sister.

  The knocking began at her door just moments after Simon left, but Deborah ignored it. Crouched near the window, she held the broken fragment of a fluted wing in her hand, and she drove it into her palm so that it drew fresh blood. Just a drop here and there where the edges were sharpest, then a more determined flow as she increased the pressure.

  Let me tell you about swans, he had said. When they choose a mate, they choose once and for life. They learn to live in harmony together, little bird, accepting each other just the way they are. There's a lesson in that for us all, isn't there?

  Deborah ran her fingers over the delicate moulding that was left of Simon's gift and wondered how she had possibly come to engage in such an act of betrayal. What possible triumph had she managed to achieve beyond a brief and blinding vengeance that had as its fountainhead his complete humiliation? And what, after all, had the frightful scene between them managed to prove at the heart of the matter? Merely that her adolescent philosophy - spouted to him so confidently at the age of seventeen - had been incapable of standing the test of a separation. I love you, she had told him. Nothing changes that. Nothing ever will. But the words hadn't proved true. People weren't like swans. Least of all was she.

  Deborah got to her feet, wiping at her cheeks roughly with the sleeve of her frock, uncaring if the three buttons at the wrist abraded her skin, rather hoping they would. She stumbled into the kitchen where she found a cloth to wrap round her hand. The fragment of wing she placed in a drawer. This latter she knew was fruitiess activity, carried out in the ridiculous belief that the swan itself might someday be mended.

  Wondering what excuse she could make to Sidney St James for her appearance, she went to the door where the knocking continued. Wiping her cheeks a second time, she turned the knob, trying to smile, but managing only a grimace.

  'What a mess. I'm perfectly . . .' Deborah faltered.

  A bizarrely clad, but nonetheless attractive, black-haired woman stood on the threshold. She held a glass of milky green liquid in her hand, and she extended it without a prefatory remark. Nonplussed, Deborah took it from her. The woman nodded sharply and walked into the flat.

  'Men are all the same.' Her voice was husky, with a regional accent she seemed to be trying to shed. She padded on
bare feet to the centre of the room and continued to speak as if she and Deborah had known each other for years. 'Drink it up. I go through at least five a day. It'll make you feel a new woman, I swear it. And, Christ knows, these days I need to feel like new after every—' She stopped herself and laughed, showing teeth that were extraordinarily white and even. 'You know what I mean.'

  It was hard to avoid knowing exactly what the woman did mean. In a black satin negligee with voluminous folds and flounces, she was a walking advertisement for her calling in life.

  Deborah held up the glass which had been pressed upon her. 'What is this?'

  A buzzer sounded, indicating the presence of someone in the street below. The woman walked to the wall and pressed the reciprocal bell for entry.

  'This place is as busy as Victoria Station.'

  She nodded to the drink, removed a card from the pocket of her dressing-gown and handed it to Deborah. 'Nothing but juices and vitamins, that. A few veggies thrown in. A little pick-me-up. I've written it all down for you. Hope you don't mind the liberty, but from the sound of today, you'll be needing a lot of it. Drink it. Go on.' She waited until Deborah had raised the glass to her lips before sauntering to her photographs. 'Very nice. This your stuff?'

  'Yes.' Deborah read the list of ingredients on the card. Nothing more harmful than cabbage, which she'd always loathed. She placed the glass on the worktop and smoothed her fingers across the cloth that was wrapped round her palm. She lifted her hand to her tangled mess of hair. 'I must look a sight.'

  The woman smiled. 'I'm a wreck myself until after nightfall. I never bother much in the light of day. What's the point, I say. Anyway, you're a perfect vision as far as I'm concerned. How d'you like the drink?'