Elizabeth George - For the Sake of Elena

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 fi ngers 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 benefi ts 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 fl oor. 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.

“Dr. Weaver,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting…” His voice drifted off. Weaver was wearing neither jacket nor overcoat, and his dark hair was curled and chaotic from the wind. He carried neither briefcase nor textbooks. Whyever he had come, it was not to work.

“She was pregnant,” he said.

Adam’s throat went dry. He thought about taking a sip of the tea which he’d poured but forgotten about an hour previously. But although he slowly got to his feet, he couldn’t manage any other movement, let alone getting his arm to reach out towards the cup.

Weaver shut the door and remained standing next to it. “I don’t blame you for it, Adam. Obviously, you were in love with each other.”

“Dr. Weaver-”

“I simply wished you’d used some precautions. It’s not the best way to start a life together, is it?”

Adam couldn’t formulate an answer. It seemed that his entire future depended upon the next few minutes and how he handled them. He danced between the truth and a lie, wondering which would better serve his interests.

“When Justine told me, I left the house in a rage. I felt like some eighteenth-century father storming out to demand satisfaction. But I know how these things happen between people. I just want you to tell me if you’d talked about marriage. Before, I mean. Before you made love to her.”

Adam wanted to say that they’d talked about it often, in the late of night typing back and forth furiously on the Ceephone, making plans, sharing dreams, and committing themselves to a life together. But from the roots of such a lie had to grow a convincing performance of grief over the next few months. And while he regretted Elena’s death, he did not actually mourn her passing, so he knew that a show of abject sorrow would prove itself more than he could manage.

“She was special,” Anthony Weaver was saying. “Her baby- your baby, Adam-would have been special as well. She was fragile and working hard to find herself, it’s true, but you were helping her grow. Remember that. Hold onto that. You were tremendously good for her. I would have been proud to see you together as man and wife.”

He found he couldn’t do it. “Dr. Weaver, I wasn’t the one.” He dropped his eyes to the table. He concentrated on the open texts, his notes, the essays. “What I mean is I never made love with Elena, sir.” He felt more colour burn its way into his flesh. “I never even kissed her. I hardly ever touched her.”

“I’m not angry, Adam. Don’t misunderstand. You don’t have to deny you were lovers.”

“I’m not denying. I’m just telling you the truth. The facts. We weren’t lovers. It wasn’t me.”

“But she saw only you.”

Adam hesitated to bring forth the single piece of information which he knew Anthony Weaver was avoiding, perhaps deliberately, perhaps unconsciously. He knew that giving it voice would also mean giving voice to the professor’s worst fears. Yet there seemed to be no other way to convince the man of the truth about his own relationship with Elena. And he was an historian, after all. Historians are supposed to be seekers of truth.

He could demand no less of himself. He said, “No, sir. You’ve forgotten. I wasn’t the only one Elena saw. There was Gareth Randolph.”

Weaver’s eyes seemed to unfocus behind his spectacles. Adam hurried on.

“She saw him several times a week, didn’t she, sir? As part of the deal she’d struck with Dr. Cuff.” He didn’t want to put anything more into words. He could see the grey curtain of knowledge and misery pass across Weaver’s features.

“That deaf-” Weaver’s words stopped. His eyes sharpened once again. “Did you reject her, Adam? Is that why she looked elsewhere? Wasn’t she good enough for you? Did she put you off because she was deaf?”

“No. Not at all. I just didn’t-”

“Then why?”

He wanted to say, “Because I was afraid. I thought she would suck the marrow from my bones. I wanted to have her and have her and have her but not marry her, God not marry her and live on the black edge of my own destruction for the rest of my life.” Instead, he said, “It just didn’t happen between us.”

“What?”

“The sort of connection one looks for.”

“Because she was deaf.”

“That wasn’t an issue, sir.”

“How can you say that? How can you even expect me to believe it? Of course it was an issue. It was an issue for everyone. It was an issue for her. How could it not be?”

Adam knew this was dangerous ground. He wanted to retreat from the confrontation. But Weaver was waiting for his answer, and his stony expression told Adam how important it was that he answer correctly.

“She was just deaf, sir. Nothing else. Just deaf.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That there was nothing else wrong with her. Even being deaf wasn’t something wrong. It’s just a word people use to indicate something’s missing.”

“Like blind, like mute, like paralysed?”

“I suppose.”

“And if she’d been those things-blind, mute, paralysed-would you still be saying that it wasn’t an issue?”