For the Sake of Elena (33 page)

Justine turned to her husband, waited for him to speak, and watched him sit motionless. He seemed to be disappearing into himself, bones, blood, and flesh disintegrating into the ashes and dust from which all men were formed. He has such small hands, she thought. And for the first time she considered the wide gold wedding band round his finger and the reason she had wanted him to have it—the largest, the widest, the brightest in the shop, the most capable of heralding the fact of their marriage.

“Is this what you want?” she finally asked him.

His eyelids looked caked, their skin stretched and sore. “What?”

“That I stay away from the funeral. Is this what you want, Anthony?”

“It has to be that way. Try to understand.”

“Understand? What?”

“That she’s not responsible for who she is right now. She has no control over what she says and does. It goes too deep with her, Justine. You’ve got to understand.”

“And stay away from the funeral.”

She saw the movement of resignation—a simple lifting and lowering of his fingers—and knew the response he would make before he made it. “I hurt her. I left her. I owe her this much. I owe both of them this much.”

“My God.”

“I’ve already talked to Terence Cuff about a memorial service Friday at St. Stephen’s Church. You’ll be part of that. All of Elena’s friends will be there.”

“And that’s it? That’s all? That’s your judgement of everything? Of our marriage? Of our life? Of my relationship with Elena?”

“This isn’t about you. You can’t take it to heart.”

“You didn’t even argue with her. You could have protested.”

He finally looked at her. “It’s the way it has to be.”

She said nothing more. She merely felt the hard core of her resentment take on added weight. Still, she held her tongue. Be sweet, Justine, she could hear her mother say over her need to rail like a shrew against her husband. Be a nice girl.

She put the sixth piece of toast into the rack and the rack itself along with boiled eggs and sausage onto a white wicker tray. Nice girls muster up compassion, she thought. Sweet girls forgive and forgive and forgive. Don’t think of the self. Go beyond the self. Find a need greater than your own and fill it. That’s the Christian way to live.

But she couldn’t do it. Into the scales upon which she weighed her behaviour, she put the useless hours that she’d given over to trying to forge a bond with Elena, the mornings on which she’d run at her side, the evenings she’d spent helping her write her essays, the endless Sunday afternoons she’d waited for father and daughter to return from a jaunt which Anthony had declared essential to his recapturing of Elena’s love and trust.

She carried the tray into the glassed-in morning room where her husband and his former wife were sitting at the wicker table. They had been picking at grapefruit wedges and corn flakes for nearly half an hour, and now, she supposed, they would do the same with the eggs, the sausage, and the toast.

She knew she ought to say, “You need to eat. Both of you,” and another Justine might have managed the seven words and made them sound sincere. Instead, she said nothing. She sat in her accustomed place, with her back to the drive, across the table from her husband. She poured him coffee. He raised his head. He looked ten years older than he had two days ago.

Glyn said, “All this food. I can’t eat. It’s such a waste really,” and she didn’t lift her eyes from watching Justine tap off the top of her boiled egg. “Did you run this morning?” she asked, and when Justine didn’t reply, “I imagine you’ll want to start that up again soon. It’s important for a woman to keep working at her figure. Not a stretch-mark anywhere on you, is there?”

Justine stared down at the spoonful of tender white that she’d scooped from her egg. Every admonition from her past rose up to confront her, but they formed an insubstantial barrier that the previous night made easy to surmount. She said, “Elena was pregnant.” And then she looked up. “Eight weeks pregnant.”

Anthony’s face, she saw, went from drained to stricken. Glyn’s face offered a curiously satisfied smile.

“That Scotland Yard man was here yesterday afternoon,” Justine said. “He told me.”

“Pregnant?” Anthony repeated the word in a deadened voice.

“That’s what the autopsy showed.”

“But who…how…?” Anthony fumbled with a teaspoon. It slipped from his fingers and clattered on the floor.

“
How?
” Glyn gave a tittering laugh. “Oh, I’d think it was how babies usually get made.” She nodded at Justine. “What a moment of triumph for you, my dear.”

Anthony turned his head. The movement seemed sluggish, as if he were pulling against a great weight. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You think she doesn’t savour this moment? Just ask her if she already knew. Ask her if the information surprised her at all. In fact, you might ask her how she encouraged your daughter to have a man whenever she felt itchy.” Glyn leaned forward. “Because Elena told me all about it, Justine. About those heart-to-heart chats, about how she was supposed to take
care
of herself.”

Anthony said, “Justine, you encouraged her? You knew?”

“Of course she knew.”

“That isn’t true,” Justine said.

“Don’t think for a moment that she didn’t want Elena to get pregnant, Anthony. She was willing to settle for anything to drive you away from her. Because if she did that, she’d get what she wanted. You. Alone. With no more distractions.”

“No,” Justine said.

“She hated Elena. She wanted her dead. I wouldn’t be surprised if she killed her herself.”

And for a moment—just the fraction of an instant—Justine saw the doubt on his face. She recognised the working of knowledge: she’d been alone in the house when the Ceephone call came, she’d gone out running alone in the morning, she hadn’t taken the dog, she could have beaten and strangled his daughter.

She said, “My God, Anthony.”

“You knew,” he replied.

“That she had a lover. Yes. But that’s all. And I spoke to her. Yes. About cleaning…about hygiene. About taking care that she didn’t—”

“Who was it?”

“Anthony.”

“God damn you, who was it?”

“She knows,” Glyn said. “You can see that she knows.”

“How long?” Anthony asked. “How long had this been going on?”

“Did they do it here, Justine? In the house? While you were home? Did you let them? Did you watch? Did you listen at the door?”

Justine pushed herself away from the table. She got to her feet. Her head felt empty.

“I want answers, Justine.” Anthony’s voice rose. “Who did this to my daughter?”

Justine fought to find the words. “She did it to herself.”

“Oh yes,” Glyn said, her eyes bright and knowing. “Let’s have at the truth.”

“You’re a viper.”

Anthony stood. “I want the facts, Justine.”

“Then take yourself off to Trinity Lane to find them.”

“Trinity..” He turned from her to the wall of windows beyond which his Citroën stood on the drive. “No.” He was out of the room without another word, leaving the house without a coat, the sleeves of his striped shirt snapping in the wind. He got into the car.

Glyn reached for an egg. “It didn’t quite play out as you planned it,” she said.

Adam Jenn stared at the neat lines of his handwriting and tried to make sense out of his notes. The Peasants’ Revolt. The council of regency. A new query: Was the composition of the council of regency, rather than the imposition of new poll taxes, largely instrumental in the circumstances that led to the revolt of 1381?

He read a few phrases about John Ball and Wat Tyler, about the Statute of Labourers, and about the King. Richard II, well-intentioned but ineffectual, had lacked the skills and the backbone necessary for a man to be a leader. He had tried to please everyone but had succeeded only in destroying himself. He was historical proof of the contention that success requires more than merely a coincidental birthright. Political acumen is the key to arriving unscathed at a personal and professional goal.

Adam himself had been living his academic life according to that precept. He’d made his choice of advisor carefully, spending hours of his time scoping out the candidates for the Penford Chair. He finally made his move in Anthony Weaver’s direction only when he felt relatively assured that the St. Stephen’s medievalist would be the selection of the University search committee. To have the holder of the Penford Chair as his advisor would virtually guarantee him the benefits he found essential to labelling himself an eventual success—the initial position of academic supervisor to undergraduates, the consequent attainment of a research fellowship, the future movement to lecturer, and finally a professorship before his forty-fifth birthday. All of it seemed within the bounds of reasonable expectation when Anthony Weaver had taken him on as a graduate advisee. So cooperating with Weaver’s request that he take the professor’s daughter under his wing in order to make her second year at the University a smoother and more pleasant experience than her first had appeared to be yet another fortuitous opportunity for him to demonstrate—if only to himself—that he possessed the requisite amount of political perspicacity to flourish in this environment. What he had not counted on when first told about the professor’s handicapped daughter and first envisaging Dr. Weaver’s gratitude for the time he expended on smoothing the troubled waters of his daughter’s life was Elena herself.

He had been expecting to be introduced to a stoop-shouldered, concave-chested, pasty-skinned fading wildflower of a girl, someone who sat miserably on the edge of a threadbare ottoman with her legs tucked back and clinging to its sides. She’d be wearing an old dress printed with rosebuds. She’d be wearing ankle socks and scruffy-looking brogues. And for Dr. Weaver’s sake, he’d do his duty with an appealing blend of gravity and graciousness. He’d even carry a small notebook in the pocket of his jacket to make sure that they could communicate in writing at all times.

He’d held on to this fictional Elena all the way into the sitting room of Anthony Weaver’s house, even going so far as to scan the guests who were there for the history faculty’s Michaelmas drinks party. He’d had to give up the idea of the threadbare ottoman quickly enough when he saw the nature of the house’s furnishings—he doubted that anything threadbare or frayed would be allowed to remain for longer than five minutes in this elegant environment of leather and glass—but he did maintain his mental image of the cringing, retiring, handicapped girl alone in a corner and afraid of everyone.

And then she came swinging towards him, wearing a clingy black dress and dangling onyx earrings, her hair catching her movement and subtly duplicating the sway of her hips. She smiled and said what he took for “Hi. You’re Adam, aren’t you?” because her pronunciation wasn’t clear. He noted the fact that she smelled like ripe fruit, that she didn’t wear a bra, that her legs were bare. And that every man in the room followed her movement with his eyes, no matter the conversation in which he was engaged.

She had a way of making a man feel special. He’d learned that soon enough. Astutely, he realised that this feeling of being the sole interest in Elena’s life came from the fact that she had to look directly at people in order to read their lips whenever they spoke to her. And for a time he convinced himself that that was the entirety of his attraction to her. But even on the first evening of their acquaintance, he found his eyes continually dropping to the nubs of her nipples—they were erect, they pressed against the material of her dress, they asked to be sucked and moulded and licked—and he found his hands sore with the need to slide round her waist, cup her buttocks, and pull her against him.

He’d done none of that. Ever. Not once in the dozen or more times they’d been together. He’d not even kissed her. And the single time she’d reached out impulsively and ran her fingers the length of his inner thigh, he had automatically knocked her hand away. She laughed at him, amused and unoffended. And he wanted to strike her every bit as much as he wanted to fuck her. He felt the desire like a blaze of fire burning right behind his eyes, needing both at once: the violence of abuse and the sexual act itself; the sound of her pain and the satisfying knowledge of her unwilling submission.

It was always that way whenever he saw too much of a woman. He felt caught within a raging argument of desire and disgust. And perennially playing in the back of his mind was the memory of his father beating his mother and the sound of their frantic coupling afterwards.

Knowing Elena, seeing Elena, dutifully squiring her here and there had all been part of the political process of academic advancement and scholastic success. But like any act of egocentric machination, what posed as selfless cooperation was not without its attendant price.

He had seen as much in Dr. Weaver’s face whenever the professor asked him about time spent with Elena, just as he had seen it on the very first night when Weaver’s eyes followed his daughter round the room, shining with satisfaction when she paused to talk to Adam and not to someone else. It wasn’t long before Adam had realised that the price for success in a milieu in which Anthony Weaver played a major role was likely to be bound up intimately in how things developed in Elena’s life.

“She’s a wonderful girl,” Weaver would say. “She has a lot to offer a man.”

Adam wondered what twists and turns and rough roads lay in his future now that Weaver’s daughter was dead. For while he’d chosen Dr. Weaver as his advisor strictly for the potential benefits that might accrue from such a choice, he had come to know that Dr. Weaver had accepted him with his own set of benefits in mind. He harboured them in secret, no doubt calling them his dream. But Adam knew exactly what they were.

The study door opened as he was staring at his references to the fourteenth-century riots in Kent and Essex. He looked up, then pushed back his chair in some confusion as Anthony Weaver came into the room. He hadn’t expected to see him for at least another several days, so he hadn’t done much about straightening up the litter of teacups and plates and essays across the table and on the floor. Even had he done so, the appearance of his advisor directly upon the heels of his having been thinking about him caused the heat to seep up Adam’s neck and spread across his cheeks.