Elizabeth George - Careless in Red

She supplied it for him, using the former term. She added, And you weren’t that, were you?

He told her his brother was a narcotics user, because that was the truth of the matter. Tossed out of Oxford, his girlfriend dead with a needle in her arm, himself in and out of rehab ever since. He said he thought that he’d failed Peter altogether. When he should have been there for the boy-present, he meant, present in every possible way and not just a warm body occupying a sofa or something-he hadn’t been.

Well, these things happen, she said. And you had your own life.

As you have yours.

She didn’t say what another woman in her same position might have said at the end of the day they’d just spent together: And do you think this levels the playing field, Thomas? but he knew she was thinking it, for what else could she think upon his mentioning Peter in the midst of nothing vaguely related to the topic? In spite of that, he wanted to add more life details, piling them up so that she would be forced to see similarities instead of differences. He wanted to tell her that his brother-in-law had been murdered some ten years earlier, that he himself had been suspected of the crime and had even been carted off to gaol and held twenty-four hours for a grilling because he’d hated Edward Davenport and what Edward Davenport had wrought upon his sister, and he’d never made a secret of that. But to tell her that seemed too much a begging for something that she wasn’t going to be able to give him.

He deeply regretted the position he’d put her in because he could see how she would interpret his reaction to everything she’d revealed that day, no matter his declarations to the contrary. There was an enormous gulf between them created first by birth, second by childhood, and third by experience. That the gulf existed only in her head and not in his was something he could not explain to her. Such a declaration was facile, anyway. The gulf existed everywhere, and for her it was something so real that she would ever fail to see it was not equally real to him.

You don’t actually know me, he wanted to tell her. Who I am, the people I move among, the loves that have defined my life. But then, how could you? Newspaper stories-tabloids, magazines, whatever-taken up from the Internet reveal only the dramatic bits, the heartrending bits, the salacious bits. Those elements of life comprising the valuable and unforgettable everyday bits are not included. They lack drama even as ultimately they define who a person is.

Not that that mattered: who he was. It had ceased to matter with Helen’s death.

Or so he had told himself. Except that what he felt now indicated something different. That he should care for another’s suffering spoke of…what? Rebirth? He didn’t want to be reborn. Recovery? He wasn’t sure he wanted to recover. But a sense of who he was at the core of who he appeared to be prompted him to feel at least something of what Daidre herself was feeling: caught out in the spotlight, naked when she’d worked so hard to fashion clothing for herself.

I’d like to turn back time, he told her.

She looked at him and he saw from her expression that she thought he was talking of something else. Of course you would, she said. My God, who wouldn’t in your position?

Not about Helen, he said, although I’d give nearly anything to bring her back to me if I could.

Then, what?

This. What I’ve brought you to.

It’s part of your job, she said.

But it wasn’t his job. He wasn’t a cop. He’d walked away from that part of his life because he couldn’t bear it a moment longer, because it had taken him away from Helen, and had he known how many hours upon hours he’d be away from her and each of those hours trickling through a glass in which the remaining days of her life were contained… He would have called a halt to all of it.

No, he said. Not part of my job. That’s not why I was here.

Well, they asked you to. She asked you. I can’t think you did it all on your own. Came up with the plan, whatever.

I did. He said it heavily and he regretted having to say it at all. But I want you to know that if I’d known…because, you see, you don’t seem like…

Like them? she asked. I’m cleaner? More educated? More accomplished? Better dressed? More well-spoken? Well, I’ve had eighteen years to put them…it…that whole terrible…I want to call it an “episode” but it wasn’t an episode. It was my life. It made me who I am no matter who I try to be now. These sorts of things define us, Thomas, and that defined me.

Thinking that, he told her, negates the last eighteen years, doesn’t it? It negates your parents, what they did for you, how they loved you and made you part of their family.

You’ve met my parents. You’ve seen my family. And how we lived.

I meant your other parents. The ones who were your parents as parents are meant to be.

The Trahairs. Yes. But they don’t change the rest of it, do they. They can’t. The rest is…the rest. And it’s there as it always will be.

That’s no cause for shame.

She looked at him. She’d found the petrol station she was seeking, and they’d pulled into its forecourt. She’d turned off the ignition and rested her hand on the door handle. He’d done the same, ever the gentleman, unwilling to let her pump the petrol herself.

She said, That’s just it, you see.

What? he asked her.

People like you-

Please don’t, he said. There is no people-like-me. There are just people. There’s just the human experience, Daidre.

People like you, she persisted nonetheless, think it’s about shame because that’s what you would feel in the same circumstances. Travelling about. Living most of the time in a rubbish tip. Bad food. Cast-off clothing. Loose teeth and ill-formed bones. Shifty eyes and sticky fingers. Why read or write when one can steal? That’s what you think and you’re hardly wrong. But the feeling, Thomas, has nothing at all to do with shame.

Then…?

Sorrow. Regret. Like my name.

We’re the same, then, you and I, he told her. Despite the differences-

She laughed, a single weary note. We are not that, she replied. I expect you played at it, you and your brother and your sister and your mates. Your parents may have even found you a gipsy caravan and parked it somewhere quite hidden away on the estate. You could go there and play dress-up and act the part, but you couldn’t have lived it.

She got out of the car. He did the same. She went to the pumps and studied them, as if trying to decide which type of petrol she needed when she probably knew very well what was required for her car. As she hesitated, he went for the nozzle himself. He began to fill the tank for her.

She said, I expect your man does that for you.

He said, Don’t.

She said, I can’t help it. I’ll never be able to help it.

She shook her head in a fierce little movement, as if to deny or obliterate all that was left unspoken between them. She climbed back into the car and shut the door. He saw that she looked straight ahead afterwards, as if there was something in the window of the petrol station’s shop that she needed to memorise.

He went to pay. When he climbed in the car, he saw she’d put a neat stack of notes on his seat to cover the cost of the petrol. He took them, folded them neatly, and put them into the empty ashtray just above the gearshift.

She said, I don’t want you to pay, Thomas.

He said, I know. But I hope you can cope with the fact that I intend to do so.

She started the car. They reentered the road. They drove for some minutes in silence with the countryside passing and evening dropping round them like a shifting veil.