How could he tell William that it had been months since Annabelle had been willing to discuss their wedding, and that when he’d asked her point-blank to set a date, she’d refused? Lifting his cup with both hands, he sipped at the tea. It was too hot, but he welcomed the mingled sensations of pain and pleasure on the delicate tissues of mouth and tongue. Anything was better than numbness. Carefully, he said, “You and I know how headstrong Annabelle could be. And I’m sure we both learned that most of the time it was easier to let her have her own way than to fight a losing battle. But this time I let her go too far.…” His eyes filled with tears.
Reaching out awkwardly to pat him on the shoulder, William said, “You mustn’t blame yourself. It’s just as you said: Annabelle liked her own way about things. But she was a dear girl, all the same, everything a father could have wanted.” His face convulsed with emotion and he looked away, staring into the leafy rectangle of the kitchen window.
Reg gave him time. Without asking, he added a little milk to William’s cup, filled the cup with fresh tea from the pot, then rose and retrieved the still-steaming kettle from the hob. When he’d topped up the pot with hot water, he turned back to the cooker and stood gazing, like William, out of the window. He felt the air move round his face, heavy as a hand, warmer than his skin; it seemed to have no power to dry the sweat sliding under his collar.
Jo’s children were playing in her garden next door—he could hear their voices fading in and out intermittently, like a radio broadcast from a far-off country. It might have been himself he heard, his voice mingled with Jo’s and Annabelle’s as they played in this same garden.… Had it been this green when they were children? Perhaps it had, for he remembered suddenly that Annabelle had liked to pretend it was the jungle in Sri Lanka, and that her mother’s hedge of rhododendrons was a plantation of tea bushes. He wondered if there was some genetic factor involved in the inheritance of passions, for in Annabelle, William’s fascination with tea had appeared full-fledged and undiluted, while in Jo it had never aroused more than a mild interest.
When she’d been too young to read the more complicated text in her father’s books, Annabelle had demanded explanation of the pictures, and they’d fueled her imagination. One wet spring day in the garden, she’d decided they would pick tea. It would be the finest tea, a royal tea, she’d proclaimed as she armed Reg and Jo with baskets and instructed them to pluck only the bud and the first leaf from each stem.
They had not been discovered until the poor rhododendrons had been stripped of almost every tightly furled pink bud, and when confronted by her furious and baffled mother, Annabelle had shouted that she’d only been doing the job properly. She’d spent a week in her room after that.
“Do you remember when Annabelle plucked the rhododendrons?” he asked.
William smiled. “And when her mother allowed her out of her room, she nearly burned the shed to the ground, trying to dry the leaves.”
Reg walked round the table and sat again, slowly. He wrapped his hands round his Wedgwood teacup and stared at the skin forming on the surface of the tea, clouding it, just as time would cloud their memories and Annabelle’s sharpness would disappear beneath a film of kindly self-deception. She would become the “dear girl” William thought her, and her father’s illusions would remain unmarred by the less-than-perfect person Annabelle had been.
Looking up, he met William’s eyes.
JANICE COPPIN TOOK A LAST BITE of her donut, then brushed the flakes of sugar icing from her desk. Sipping her coffee to wash away the sweetness, she reshuffled her paperwork and scowled. She’d groused under her breath last night when Mr. Scotland Yard had sent her to Reg Mortimer’s flat. While she thought Mortimer a bit of a poser, she hadn’t relished seeing him white and ill with the news, suddenly bereft of all his charm.
But perhaps she hadn’t been quite fair to the superintendent. There were worse tasks, including the one Kincaid had undertaken himself last night—informing the dead woman’s sister and accompanying her to the morgue. And he
It was even remotely possible, she supposed, that when Kincaid had told her to go home last night and see to her family, he hadn’t been condescending to her because she was female. His sergeant had mentioned having a young son, so he would be familiar with the difficulty of making arrangements.
