Belgrave Square - Anne Perry [105]
He felt a gulf between them with a pain so sharp it stopped him from laughing at himself for the idiocy of it. He was shut out. He had a past she knew nothing of: all his life, everything that had brought him to this day, the values, the loves and the griefs, Catriona’s death, his daughters, everything that mattered. To her he was simply a policeman.
And she had a life he could only imagine. All he knew was this desperate woman whose only concern was to help her husband.
“No,” he said abruptly, and heard his own words pour out while all the time his cooler brain was telling him to hold his tongue. “No—I think it is the quality of friendship which matters, not its length. One can have an acquaintance with people all one’s life, and never share a minute’s total understanding, or meet a stranger and feel with her some tremendous experience so deep you can never afterwards tell anyone else exactly how it was, and yet find, the moment your eyes meet, that she knows it as you do.”
She looked at him with surprise and then increasing wonder as the totally contradicting idea became clearer in her mind and she considered it. For seconds they stared at each other, the street outside forgotten, Weems and his murder, even Byam’s involvement with it. There was only the few square yards of the room in the amber sunlight through the big windows, the sofa and the chair they sat on, and the bright pattern on the carpet between them.
He saw her face as indelibly as if it were painted on his eyelids, the fine brow, the steady dark gray eyes with their shadowing lashes, the tiny lines woven by the years, the light on her hair, the softness of her lips.
“Perhaps you are right,” she said at last. “Maybe I have mistaken familiarity for understanding, and they are not the same.”
Now he was confused. He did not know what else to add. He had almost forgotten why they had spoken of friendship at all. It was something to do with Byam—yes—Byam and Anstiss. The pain of exposing Anstiss’s grief that Laura’s death had been suicide, because she loved another man.
“It is very horrible,” he said aloud. “I expect he would hesitate, whoever it was—an old friend or not. The friendship would simply make it the more painful to himself, it would not alter the other person’s grief.”
“Frederick?” She smiled very slightly and turned away. “No, of course not. Sometimes I think Sholto is overly protective of him—of his interests, I mean. He still feels this gnawing guilt for Laura’s death, and it colors his behavior, I am sure.” She smiled, but it was a sad, worried little gesture, without happiness. “Debts of honor can do strange things to people, can’t they? Especially if they can never be repaid.”
He said nothing, seeing from her expression that she had not completed her thought.
“I wonder at times,” she started again, “if perhaps Frederick is aware of it. He can be so funny, such an excellent companion, and then quite without warning he will say something thoroughly cruel, and I can see that Sholto is deeply hurt. Then it is all over again and they are the best of friends.” She shrugged, as if pushing the thought away as foolishness. “Then again, it is probably just that Frederick is less subtle with words. When people are close, sooner or later they will hurt each other, don’t you think? Simply because we use so many words, so easily, I suppose it is inevitable we should be clumsy, or take a meaning where it was not intended. I do it myself, and then wish I could have bitten my tongue out before being so stupid …”
She stopped, seemed to brace herself, and then began again, not looking at him but at the window and the deepening light on the trees rustling in the sunset wind. “If it is hurting Frederick that fills him with such horror, I can understand it very easily. But perhaps he will have no alternative, in the end, but to expose Weems’s murderer and risk his telling everything, at his trial,