A storm of dry sobs answered her, then Robin thought she heard him lay down the phone on some hard surface. At a distance from the mouthpiece he emitted moans of anguish interspersed with weeping. Heavy objects seemed to be falling over. Then there was a clatter and he picked up his mobile again.
“Robin, I’m so fuckin’ sorry… what’ve I done, what’ve I…? I thought… I should fucking kill myself… don’t… don’t tell Strike, Robin… I’m fuckin’ begging you… if I lose this job… don’t tell, Robin… I lose this, I lose fuckin’ everything… I can’t lose my little girls, Robin…”
He reminded her of Matthew, the day that she’d found out he was cheating. She could see her ex-husband as clearly as though he was there on the ice-crusted lawn, face in his hands as he gasped his apologies, then looking up at her in panic. “Have you spoken to Tom? Does he know?”
What was it about her that made men demand that she keep their dirty secrets?
“I won’t tell Strike,” she said, shaking more with rage than with cold, “because his aunt’s dying and we need an extra man. But you’d better never send me anything other than an update on a case again.”
“Oh God, Robin… thank you… thank you… you are such a decent person…”
He’d stopped sobbing. His gushing offended her almost as much as the picture of his dick.
“I’m going.”
She stood in the dark, barely feeling the cold, her mobile hanging at her side. As the light in the neighbor’s kitchen went off, her par-ents’ back door opened. Rowntree came lolloping over the frozen lawn, delighted to find her outside.
“You all right, love?” Michael Ellacott asked his daughter.
“Fine,” said Robin, crouching to fuss Rowntree to hide her sudden rush of tears. “It’s all fine.”
PART FOUR
Great enemy… is wicked Time…
Edmund Spenser
The Faerie Queene
31
Deare knight, as deare, as euer knight was deare,
That all these sorrowes suffer for my sake,
High heuen behold the tedious toyle, ye for me take…
Edmund Spenser
The Faerie Queene
Strike’s gastric upset added days to his illness, and he spent New Year’s Eve in bed, reliant on takeaway pizzas but hardly able to touch them when they arrived. For the first time in his life he didn’t fancy chocolate, because the truffles he’d consumed after his out-of-date chicken had been the first things to reappear during his prolonged vomiting. The only enjoyable thing he did was to watch the DVD of Tom Waits’s No Visitors After Midnight, the taped concerts Robin had bought him for Christmas, which he finally unwrapped on New Year’s Day. His text thanking her elicited a short “you’re welcome.”
By the time he felt fit enough to travel down to Cornwall, clutching his belated Christmas gifts, Strike had lost over a stone, and this was the first thing an anxious Joan commented on when he finally appeared at her house in St. Mawes, full of apologies for his absence at Christmas.
If he’d waited one more day to come down to Joan and Ted’s, he’d have been unable to reach them, because no sooner had he arrived than a vicious weather front crashed over the south of Britain. Storms lashed the Cornish coast, train services were suspended, tons of sand washed off the beaches and flooding turned the roads of coastal towns into freezing canals. The Cornish peninsula was temporarily cut off from the rest of England, and while St. Mawes had not fared as badly as Mevagissey and Fowey along the coast, sandbags had appeared at the entrances of buildings on the seafront. Waves smashed against the harbor wall, khaki and gunmetal gray. The tourists had melted out of sight like the seals: locals in sodden oilskins greeted each other with nods as they made their way in and out of local shops. All the gaudy prettiness of summertime St. Mawes was wiped away and, like an actress when the stage-paint is removed, the town’s true self was revealed, a place of hard stone and stiff backbone.
Though pelted with rain and pummeled by gales, Ted and Joan’s house was, mercifully, set on high ground. Trapped there, Strike remembered Lucy telling him he was better suited to a crisis than to keeping a commitment going, and knew that there was truth in the accusation. He was well suited to emergencies, to holding his nerve, to quick thinking and fast reactions, but found the qualities demanded by Joan’s slow decline harder to summon.
Strike missed the absence of an overriding objective, in pursuit of which he could shelve his sadness; missed the imperative to dismiss pain and distress in the service of something greater, which had sustained him in the military. None of his old coping strategies were admissible in Joan’s kitchen, beside the flowered casserole dishes and her old oven gloves. Dark humor and stoicism would be considered unfeeling by the kindly neighbors who wanted him to share and show his pain. Craving diversionary action, Strike was instead expected to provide small talk and homely acts of consideration.
Joan was quietly delighted: hours and days alone with her nephew were compensation for the Christmas he’d missed. Resigned, Strike gave her what she wanted: as much companionship as possible, sitting with her and talking to her all day long. Chemotherapy had been discontinued, because Joan wasn’t strong enough for it: she wore a headscarf over the wispy hair she had left, and her husband and nephew watched anxiously as she picked at food, and held themselves constantly ready to assist her when she moved between rooms. Either of them could have carried her with ease, now.
As the days went by, Strike noticed another change in his aunt that surprised him. Just as her storm-ravaged birthplace had revealed a different aspect in adversity, so an unfamiliar Joan was emerging, a Joan who asked open-ended questions that were not designed to elicit confirmation of her own biases, or thinly veiled requests for comforting lies.
“Why haven’t you ever married, Cormoran?” she asked her nephew at midday on Saturday morning, when they sat together in the sitting room, Joan in the comfiest armchair, Strike on the sofa. The lamp beside her, which they’d turned on because of the overcast, rainy day, made her skin look as finely translucent as tissue paper.
Strike was so conditioned to tell Joan what she wanted to hear that he was at a loss for an answer. The honest response he’d given Dave Polworth seemed impossible here. She’d probably take it as her fault if he told her that he wasn’t the marrying kind; she must have done something wrong, failed to teach him that love was essential to happiness.
“Dunno,” he said, falling back on cliché. “Maybe I haven’t met the right woman.”
“If you’re waiting for perfection,” said the new Joan, “it doesn’t exist.”
“You don’t wish I’d married Charlotte, do you?” he asked her. He knew perfectly well that both Joan and Lucy considered Charlotte little short of a she-devil.
“I most certainly don’t,” said Joan, with a spark of her old fight, and they smiled at each other.
Ted popped his head around the door.
“That’s Kerenza here, love,” he said. “Her car’s just pulled up.”
The Macmillan nurse, whom Strike had met on his first day there, was a blessing such as he could never have imagined. A slender, freckled woman his age, she brought into the house no aura of death, but of life continuing, simply with more comfort and support. Strike’s own prolonged exposure to the medical profession had inured him to a certain brand of hearty, impersonal cheerfulness, but Kerenza seemed to see Ted and Joan as individuals, not as simple-minded children, and he heard her talking to Ted, the ex-lifeguard, about people trying to take selfies with their backs to the storm waves while she took off her raincoat in the kitchen.
“Exactly. Don’t understand the sea, do they? Respect it, or stay well away, my dad would’ve said… Morning, Joan,” she said, coming into the room. “Hello, Cormoran.”
“Morning, Kerenza,” said Strike, getting to his feet. “I’ll get out of the way.”
“And how’re you feeling today, my love?” the nurse asked Joan.
“Not too bad,” said Joan. “I’m just a bit…”
She paused, to let her nephew pass out of earshot. As Strike closed the door on the two women, he heard more crunching footsteps on the gravel path outside. Ted, who was reading the local paper at the table, looked up.
“Who’s that, now?”
A moment later, Dave Polworth appeared at the glass panel in the back door, a large rucksack on his back. He entered, rainswept and grinning.
“Morning, Diddy,” he said, and they exchanged the handshake and hug that had become the standard greeting in their later years. “Morning, Ted.”
“What’re you doing here?” asked Ted.
Polworth swung his rucksack off, undid it and lifted out a couple of polythene-wrapped, frozen dishes onto the table.
“Penny baked a couple of casseroles. I’m gonna get some provisions in, wanted to know what you needed.”
The flame of pure, practical kindness that burned in Dave Polworth had never been more clearly visible to Strike, except perhaps on his very first day at primary school, when the diminutive Polworth had taken Strike under his protection.
“You’re a good lad,” said Ted, moved. “Say thanks very much to Penny, won’t you?”