Upstairs Irene was lying in bed, with Fin sitting in a chair at her side loosely holding her hand. They had not talked much, but the simple physical contact between them and the peace were extraordinarily comforting. They both heard the sound of Ivo and Helena moving about downstairs, but neither of them said anything. When Ivo’s footsteps had passed the bedroom door as he went up to his own room and Helena had shut the front door, Irene looked towards Fin.
‘How is all this going to affect you in your work?’
He frowned and wiped his face with his free hand.
‘I’m not altogether sure. I may have to resign. I thought I wouldn’t do anything for a week or two and then perhaps have a word with Geoffrey; see what he thinks. I’d trust his judgement on something like this.’
‘Resignation might be a bit dramatic, don’t you think? You love the law. It would be horribly unfair to make you leave it just because your son …’
‘I don’t suppose anyone would try to make me go. But having to sentence dealers and users might put me in a difficult position.’ Fin stared at her left hand and the small Victorian ring he had given her when she had agreed to marry him. ‘And parents who neglect and misuse their children,’ he added.
‘That’s nonsense,’ Irene said, sounding stronger than she had all day. ‘You did neither.’
Fin dropped her hand. She sat up and pushed her hair away from her face.
‘I mean it, Fin. That’s idiotically exaggerated. You were a good father.’
‘I thought,’ he said, not looking anywhere near her face, ‘that you would tell me that it was my insistence on keeping them short of money that made Ivo do this.’
Irene simply shook her head.
‘Why not?’
‘Why haven’t you told me that it was my lack of discipline?’ asked Irene. ‘Or perhaps my “wild talk” of freedom and the importance of individuals finding their own morality and all the other things that used to annoy you so?’
‘I’m not sure.’ He did look at her then and for the first time in years saw not the tormenting spoiler of his peace but the eager, vital, warmly affectionate girl who had burst into his grey, lonely world and transformed it. ‘Perhaps because this is so important that it makes our … our bickering seem so trivial.’
‘It hasn’t ever seemed trivial to me,’ said Irene unhappily. ‘There have been times when it’s seemed so huge and important that I haven’t been able to think of anything else. I’ve gritted my teeth waiting for the next bout, hating it, dreading it, knowing that it’ll come, unable to stop it. I was buggered if I was ever going to give in unless you admitted what you were doing to me.’
‘Yes, I know. I mean it’s seemed like that to me too.’ He frowned. ‘The cruelty of some of the things you’ve said, the need to make you see things my way and behave have occasionally made me almost ill.’
‘And very angry.’ It was not a question.
‘Yes.’ He smiled, not altogether happily, and for only the second time Irene remarked something of Helena in him. Recognizing the tightness of the small muscles above his nose, which she had seen often in Helena when she was screwing herself up to deal with something that worried her, Irene wondered why she had never noticed it before.
‘So angry,’ he went on, ‘that there were times when I was surprised I managed not to break something. Like you.’
‘Break something like me, or feel like me in wanting to break things?’ she asked, almost certain that she knew what his answer would be.
‘The second.’ He sighed.
‘What?’
‘I was just wondering,’ he said, looking down at her face as though he, too, were seeing properly for the first time in years, ‘how it happened; how we ever got like that.’
‘Just at this moment, I can’t imagine,’ she said, grabbing his hand again, ‘but at the time it seemed inevitable.’
She looked at the tiredness of his eyes, the lines around his chin and all the marks of pain and disillusion and sadness. The coldness, the anger, the withdrawal, and the deliberate provocation had all been wiped away by his likeness to the one person left whom she had never doubted that she loved.
‘It seemed so important to win,’ she said, sounding surprised by her own discoveries. Like Fin, she was trying to understand instead of simply react to what happened. ‘I suppose I thought I’d never be able to be happy unless I could make you offer some kind of formal surrender.’
‘And reparations?’
‘Yes,’ she admitted. ‘Those too.’
‘For what? I mean, what exactly? I know the general drift of it, and if I didn’t the play would have shown me, but now that we’re talking, perhaps you could give me some detail.’
‘Oh,’ she said, planning to brush it off with an insouciant, witty phrase that would not hurt him any more. Then she realized that there was too much at stake and that she would have to tell him. ‘For stealing my chance of having a real life, for keeping me from all the things I really wanted to do, for turning me into someone I was never meant to be.’
He did not say anything, but the pain in his face was comment enough.
‘And you?’ she said, stroking his arm. ‘What was it I did that needed so much punishment?’
For a moment she thought that he was not going to admit that he had ever felt like that or done anything deliberately to punish her, and the enormous amount of territory she had just given up to him extended itself before her as though in a nightmare battlefield of dead trees, corpses, mud and shell holes. Fin’s face tightened up as it had always done before his worst salvoes.
‘For being here – in the way – when Miranda wanted to come back. I think.’
‘As easy as that,’ Irene said as the rebellious, hurt, angry parts of her mind wanted to shriek out at him: that wasn’t my fault; I wasn’t the one who seduced anyone; you did that; then you asked me to marry you; you are an unutterable shit for having blamed me for what you made me do.
‘I don’t know that “easy” was quite the right word,’ said Fin with a surprising return of his Helena-like smile. ‘Neither the emotion nor the admitting of it was in the least easy. I don’t suppose yours were either.’
No, but mine were more reasonable than yours, said the angry voice over and over again, until Irene told it savagely to remember what she had learned from the rehearsals of her play.
‘It’s been such a waste, Irene. Although it seems obvious now, I hadn’t any idea of what I was doing or why at the time. All I knew was what you were doing. But now that I know – and you know – can we try again? A bit more honestly this time?’
‘All right, Fin,’ she said quietly, as the antagonistic voices in her mind at last gave her permission to cease fire, ‘let’s try.’
Upstairs, Ivo, perhaps bored with creeping about the house as though he had to apologize for his existence, or perhaps unable any longer to pretend that he did not care about what was going to happen to him, turned on his CD player and let loose ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’played at full blast.
Helena was locking the van when she heard heavy footsteps hurrying towards her.
That’s all I need, she thought, pulling her shoulder bag round so that it hung at the front of her body. A mugger on top of everything else. Perhaps the scene in Irene’s play didn’t reflect anything in her past but was just a prophecy of this. Oh, well, what does it matter now? What does anything matter any more?
She did not even look in the direction of the steps, just finished locking the door of the van and turned towards the house.
‘Helena!’
At the sound of the familiar voice, she did turn to see Mike, pounding along the pavement towards her. In a way, after everything she had been thinking as she drove back from Knightsbridge, he seemed a more worrying prospect than any mugger. She pushed the bag back to hang at her side and waited for him, her keys dangling from her hands.
‘Hi,’ she said.
‘What happened? What is it that was wrong? You look frightful.’ He took her arm and urged her towards her house. ‘Is it Irene? Your father?’
Helena shook her head. ‘How was the dinner?’ she said conversationally, trying to pretend that everything was still normal and the thoughts that had been biting into what was left of her serenity had never been formed. ‘Did it go all right? I was so sorry to have to duck out like that. I hope your client wasn’t angry.’
‘It was fine. Never mind that now. Helena, please tell me what’s happened.’
They had reached her front door and she was fully occupied undoing all the locks and dealing with the alarm. That done, she dropped her bag on the floor and headed straight for the kitchen. She took an opened bottle of white wine from the fridge, poured some into two glasses and handed one of them to Mike.
Almost unable to contain his impatience, he accepted it, but he did not drink. Instead he switched on the light and examined her pinched, angry, frightened face.
‘So?’ he said at last. ‘What’s making you look as though you’ve lost your shirt?’
‘My brother, Ivo, has been charged with making and selling Ecstasy,’ she said in a formal, neatly articulated voice as though she were speaking to a room full of strangers.
‘Is that all?’ said Mike. He drank some of the wine. ‘I thought someone must have died at least.’
‘All?’ She was standing stiffly in her chair with the full glass held between her hands like an offering.
‘Yes.’ Mike made her sit down at the table and then pulled out a chair for himself. ‘Making drugs, using them, dealing in them is stupid, dangerous, wicked even if you think in terms like that, but it’s manageable. It doesn’t mean your brother is a psychopath or even a devil, just a greedy law-breaker. That’s really not so bad, Helena.’
‘I suppose that could be true,’ she said after a long pause, during which she had been thinking: it sounds as though Mike understands; is that possible?
‘He’ll have to take his punishment, but he’ll get out of prison eventually, and then he’ll find a life for himself. He’s clever, healthy, probably bloody tough. He’ll make it. You don’t need to look so tragic. You haven’t actually lost anything important, you know.’
‘I’m not so sure about that.’ She looked at him and knew that she had to say it. ‘All the way home I’ve been thinking that if Ivo, whom I’ve known all his life, could turn out to be even more criminal than the worst of my panicky, neurotic anxieties suggested, then perhaps you …’
‘Perhaps I what?’ asked Mike wrathfully, beginning to understand at last.
‘Perhaps you aren’t as you’ve always seemed,’ she said, trying not to sound either provocative or stupid. ‘I don’t mean that I think you’ve been making drugs, but what do I know about you?’
For a moment he looked bitterly hurt and she hated herself. Then he seemed to get some kind of control and took her hands.
‘You don’t know anything more about me than I know about you. I love you. You’ve said you love me. That’s all we can actually know. We have to risk the rest.’
‘Then we’ll never be safe.’
‘Safety isn’t everything, Helena.’
She looked at him with the denial clear in her unhappy eyes.