Lucy must have seen Hollis park up because she appeared on the porch as he made his way towards the house. Slight, slender and effortlessly beautiful, her long dark hair tied back with a ribbon, she was wearing an apron and clutching a wooden spoon. Hollis kissed her on the cheek.
‘You look very …’ He searched for the word.
‘Yes?’
‘Norman friggin’ Rockwell!’ shouted Abel from inside the house.
Hollis laughed. It was true, she was the very picture of benign domesticity, the smiling wife in the gingham apron, pure Saturday Evening Post front cover.
Abel appeared from the house and Lucy struck him with the wooden spoon, a playful but firm blow on the arm.
‘Jesus, Lucy!’
‘Any more of that and you won’t be eating tonight.’
‘Chance would be a fine thing,’ mumbled Abel, wisely backing out of range. Lucy headed inside.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Abel. ‘She insisted.’ He was referring to the fact that Lucy was wearing an apron. She was a woman of many talents; sadly, cooking wasn’t one of them. It was an inescapable truth that Lucy sought unsuccessfully to refute with recipes of ever-increasing ambition and complexity.
In her defense, the dish she’d prepared for them that evening was far better than it sounded. Tomato aspic with cloves and beef tongue was certainly a first for Hollis, and it wasn’t half bad, though there was no question it would have been far more appetizing had Lucy chosen to slice the tongue first. As it was, the pale, muscular appendage, spiked with cloves, lay suspended in its bed of rosy gelatin like some scientific curiosity preserved for posterity.
Abel was uncharacteristically restrained in his comments, even when Lucy cleared the plates and entered the house. They were eating at the table on the back terrace, the garden awash with warm evening light. Abel filled Hollis’ glass with wine.
‘You make any headway on the dead girl?’ he asked.
‘Name’s Lillian Wallace.’ From Abel’s expression, it rang no bells with him. ‘Her father’s some Wall Street whiz. I spoke to him earlier, broke the news. The family’s driving up tonight. There’s a formal identification of the body set for noon tomorrow.’
He didn’t tell Abel that he planned to be at the morgue a good hour earlier to scrutinize the results of Dr Hobbs’ autopsy before the body was released to the custody of the family.
‘Speaking of corpses,’ said Abel, reaching for his pack of cigarettes. ‘Any news from Lydia?’
‘She called a couple of nights back.’
‘Collect?’
Abel had never liked Hollis’ wife, a fact he had half-heartedly attempted to disguise while she’d been around. Now that she was gone, he felt no such compunction.
‘Still with that stoop-shouldered fucker, is she?’
‘Seems so.’
‘What did she want?’
‘A divorce.’
Abel looked at Hollis long and hard, weighing the news. ‘What did you say?’
‘What could I say?’
‘Knowing you – “Come back, dear, all is forgiven.”’
‘I said yes.’
‘You didn’t?’
Hollis nodded.
‘I’m trying not to smile.’
‘I can see that.’
‘Good on you, Tom,’ beamed Abel, raising his glass in a salute. ‘To the stoop-shouldered fucker. May he soon come to know that your loss is not his gain.’
The gentleman in question was a New Jersey artist of Scottish extraction, a competent watercolorist who had summered in East Hampton the previous year at a boarding house on Accabonac Road. Hollis had no idea how Lydia had come to meet Joe McBride. He didn’t wish to know. It pained him to think of the numerous liaisons the pair had doubtless contrived behind his back; and it still puzzled him that he hadn’t read the signs, the clues, he of all people. Hindsight offered no illumination. Even casting his mind back to that time, he could recall nothing out of the ordinary. Had she taken special care over her appearance? Had she been more remote or badtempered with him than usual? Had she shown any undue aversion to sex? Probably, but nothing he could remember. It had simply happened, without his awareness, almost in his very presence.
This was the saddest indictment of their relationship, the unspoken pact of mutual indifference they had allowed themselves to sign up to. He had been immune to her, even as her heart soared. Could he really blame her for leaving?
One small part of himself clung to the notion that ultimate responsibility lay with Lydia, that things would have been different if she had only supported him in his hour of need, rather than chiding him for destroying his career, and their lives with it, on a matter of principle.
In his heart, however, he knew it was he who had betrayed their childhood dream, hatched in the gloomy passageways of the four-flight walk-up tenement where their families lived, vowing to each other that life would be better for them – no bedbugs, no roaches, no shared hall toilet stinking of CN disinfectant, no El trains hammering past outside, drowning out their whispers, the flat, dead eyes of the passengers staring in on their wretched lives. And so it had proved, their first halting steps on the ladder of selfbetterment against the downdraft of the Depression years, ever upwards, until he had lost his footing, dragging her with him into the void.
At the age of twenty-nine, way before his time, Hollis had already faced the grinning demon all men must confront in their lives, the one who mocks you with the certain knowledge that you’ve climbed as high as you’re ever going to, that you’ve scaled the peak, that from here the only way is down.
They were doomed even before they moved out to Long Island, he knew that now. Life in East Hampton – the village, its people, the cloying parochialism – became just another rod to beat him with. Lydia waxed sentimental about the city they had been forced to leave behind them, the same city she had spent the past twenty years of her life lambasting. She dreamed of Manhattan stores she had never shown any inclination to visit when they lived there: Macy’s, Saks Fifth Avenue, Bonwit Teller. She subscribed to the New York Sunday Times, scouring its innumerable sections. Plaintively, she read aloud the reviews of Broadway plays as if theater were her greatest passion, and yet she showed no desire to attend the capable productions of the local Guild Hall Players.
Hollis had always tried to keep a wall between his work and his home life, to spare Lydia the daily round of depravity he witnessed as a detective. Since moving to East Hampton, he had maintained this wall, though for different reasons – to shield her from the banality of his work, to deny her the tools of further castigation.
As for himself, he had simply become inured to the desperate drudgery. He no longer bothered to return the smiles and waves while out on patrol. When called on to deal with some minor misdemeanor – the theft of a few hay bales or a family feud come
