The Mission Page 17

  The food was delicious, and she almost laughed when she saw the dessert: Mrs. Langan’s chocolate pudding.

  “I’m told it’s legendary,” Simon said.

  It was tasty enough to earn that reputation, she decided, the chocolate oozing out of the confection and spreading across her plate. Simon accepted only a taste, content with black coffee. She added to hers the milk the waiter brought, warm milk to keep the coffee from cooling too quickly.

  On the way home, she held his arm.

  “You still miss him?” he asked.

  “Yes, most of all at night. Simon, why did you do this for me?”

  “Didn’t want you alone,” he answered.

  “Thank you. You made a bad day bearable. My grief stalks me, but it was easier with you here.”

  He refused the coffee she offered him, citing early run in the morning, and turned to go.

  The lump in her throat grew.

  “Simon, could you – I mean – no, of course you can’t – you have Marcia – I’m sorry – I wish – you’ve done so much already – ”

  He stopped. “Jenny, what do you need?”

  Her shoulders tensed. She looked away, then at him, and away again.

  “Jenny?” he prompted.

  “Simon – ” Her voice caught. “Would you – hold me?”

  He opened his arms, and she walked into them and gripped him tightly. After a moment his loose hug became firmer, he pressed his lips against her hair, and she struggled not to cry. He wasn’t quite as tall as Colin, but he was solid. She felt his strength and knew she needed it. Feeling less lonely, she relaxed, and he stepped back.

  In the morning she woke warm and sluggish. She hadn’t been able to see his face, but the man in her dream had touched her just the way Colin had. The dream had ended, but the warmth between her thighs hadn’t, and she was filled with longing and guilt at the same time, because she was alive and he wasn’t.

  CHAPTER 35

  Sunday was the worst day of the week. And cold Sundays, like today, irritated Alcina the most. In the past she and Tony would have spent the morning in bed warming each other. He had been a good lover, not as selfish as some handsome men. Now he was a caged bird, his hair and brows as black as a raven’s feathers. His thinner frame made his features sharper, almost predatory.

  She looked no better. Her body now had angles where curves had been. Her hands were bony, and her fingernails more like talons than the instruments of seduction she had traced across Tony’s chest and stomach.

  She missed having a lover. She would even have welcomed Anatoli, Cecilia’s fiancé. Sunrise, his name meant, and he had risen for her that Sunday. Her parents and sisters had gone to church, and he had arrived early for lunch. A little wine, a few whispers in his ear, and he had betrayed the woman he called his only love. Afterward she had never been able to understand what her sister saw in him. His thighs were soft, his attentions short, and his lack of skill in stimulating her annoying. His guilt had not unmanned him, however.

  “He came, he left,” she reported to her family with a sweet smile when they returned from the service. “Felt ill, I think.” Cecilia had not been able to reach him until evening, but he had reassured her then with a host of flowery phrases. He had not confessed his infidelity.

  Tony’s advances had been adventurous, unpredictable, even aggressive. Until his prison sentence, he had never neglected her. She closed her eyes and imagined his beak-like nose brushing hers, his hands quick to strip her of her nightdress. He had slept nude. She now slept in warm nightwear to keep the chill of the cheap flat at bay.

  CHAPTER 36

  Jenny began her Christmas season with lies. She didn’t want to spend the holiday in Texas. Her mother was entirely too cheerful, and her mother’s insistence that she’d meet someone and marry again if she would just start dating insulted her. Had she thought so little of Colin that she was eager to replace him? She told her mother she was going to Kent. Then, knowing it would take too much energy to smile – smiles were no longer automatic – and more acting skills than she possessed to celebrate, she told Joanne that she would be in Texas. Who else would have expectations of her which she could not meet? Esther Hollister. She rang the bookshop and left a message that she would be gone over the holidays.

  She didn’t decorate for the holiday. Why put up a tree if no gifts from Colin would be under it? She didn’t even hang the wreath on the front door. Christmas: a noun synonymous with birth, joy, and hope. She didn’t need a reminder that her life held none of these.

  Christmas shopping was an agony, because the Christmas music that filled the department stores spoke of merriment, anticipation, and faith for the future, the antithesis of what she felt, and because the person she most wanted to shop for was gone. Her Christmas gift to herself was more space in the closet, because she had decided to go through Colin’s clothes. She kept most of his shirts, some of his ties and cufflinks, and all his handkerchiefs. The rest she gave to Oxfam and then regretted it. In the back of the closet she found the clothes she’d worn the day of Colin’s death, the ones stained with his blood, folded neatly in a clear plastic bag. Beth must have placed them there. She knew she should throw them away, but she couldn’t. She held the bag for a long time and then returned it to the closet unopened.

  She missed Simon, although he was not hers to miss. Last year she had bought a gift for him, but in this year’s desperate effort to downsize shopping, she hadn’t.

  A call from Colin’s boss, Chief Superintendent Higham, surprised her. “The Commissioner would like to hold a memorial service for your husband on the date of his death,” he said.

  “But there has already been a memorial ceremony, and Colin was included in it.”

  “Yes, but this additional one we would like to hold would remember your husband only. With your permission, we’ll plan the event, keeping you informed, of course.” She thanked him, and after asking about her health, he rang off.

  Christmas Day was chilly, the temperature hovering around fifty degrees Fahrenheit all day. She didn’t bother to dress completely, and she was alone. “But it’s my choice!” she said aloud, as if Neil Goodwyn were there, advising her to seek fellowship. Her parents had sent her a treasury of American music, and she selected the Rhapsody in Blue by Gershwin to play first. A rhapsody was one extended movement, the commentary said. This one had been composed early in 1924, before the Great Depression and between the world wars. There were blues in it but more – a contagious rhythm, an energy she saw as uniquely American. She didn’t have the exuberance the piece exuded. What would it have sounded like if it had been written after 9/11? A longer blues section. More cacophonous chords. Rhythms disturbed to show urgency and panic instead of energy. An uncertain resolution.

  A year ago Colin had been alive. They had spent Christmas in Kent with both their families, and love had surrounded them. Love and more: laughter, delight in the excitement his niece and nephew had exhibited opening their presents, and hope in Colin’s and her ability to begin their own family. He had given her a bracelet with jewels for charms: an emerald for her May birthday, a diamond J, an eagle with a sapphire eye, and two ruby hearts, one for each of their years together. It struck her now that never would another ruby be added to that bracelet; it was finished. But not complete, any more than her life was complete without the charm that he had added to it.

  In her jewelry box – another gift from him – she saw the bracelet, and next to it, the single emerald earring that remained from the blast and that she had worn on their anniversary. Was she the delicate remaining gem, or was Colin, even in his death, more whole than she? It was Christmas, and she felt torn into pieces. She went to bed early in one of his shirts with the Union Jack cufflinks he’d been wearing when they had celebrated their engagement.

  CHAPTER 37

  She didn’t leave the flat on Boxing Day, a secular holiday when in past times servants or those who were needy were given Christmas boxes of money or gifts. In mo
dern times it most resembled the day after Thanksgiving in the States, when retail stores opened early, offered huge sales, and earned more money than on any other single day during the year. She had no shopping to do, however, so she slept late, not even collecting the newspaper until it was nearly dark.

  When she read that a gunman in Hackney had fired on police and was being contained by them, she wasn’t very interested, assuming the incident would end quickly. The next day, however, the standoff continued. Because the offender had barricaded himself in his first floor bedsit, dozens of people in the neighborhood had to be evacuated, and others had to stay inside or leave their homes only with police escorting them. It was colder than it had been on Christmas, with snow on the ground and gusty winds, and she worried about the armed officers who had to remain on the scene outdoors. Just stepping on her porch to get the newspaper had chilled her through and through, and the passersby, even with their heavy coats, hats, and scarves, looked smaller as they hunched forward against the cold. Byron had claimed that the English winter ended in July and began again in August, but T. S. Eliot had described the “very dead of winter,” which she thought was more apt. Nature had no respect for people; rain and snow fell on the living as well as the dead. Was there snow on Colin’s grave in Kent? If so, she was glad she wasn’t there to see it.

  News that the gunman had a hostage upset her. Who was he? How had he gotten himself into this mess? Why? The newspapers didn’t say. The police were capable; surely they would be able to negotiate his release. Beth rang to tell her that Brian, Simon, and others were working seventeen-hour shifts, beginning either at five a.m. or five p.m., with an additional several hours to sort kit, be briefed, and drive to the site. The Technical Support Unit, or TSU, delivered a field phone, but the gunman, whom they now referred to as the “hostage taker,” did not want to negotiate.

  Days passed with no apparent progress. The police identified the gunman as a 32-year-old Jamaican named Eli Hall. The name of the hostage was not released. Reports said that he was alive and well, but Jenny worried all the same. He was being held against his will. Did he share her anger at the cruelty of fate? Which was worse, she wondered, having your life at the mercy of someone else’s whim, or feeling, as she did, that her future would never be free from the grip of grief? “Time does not bring relief,” Edna St. Vincent Millay had written. “You all have lied / Who told me time would ease me of my pain!” Darkness came early, both outside and in Jenny’s spirit, and she retired to bed earlier and earlier, exhausted from the effort it took to trudge through her sorrow, which rose like floodwaters, steadily and inexorably.

  By New Year’s Eve, the media referred to the incident as the “Hackney siege.” More shots were fired by the gunman on New Year’s Day. Electricity was turned off to the gunman’s flat. Jenny understood that the move was intended to make him so uncomfortable that he would come out, but she was concerned about the effect his increasing instability would have on the hostage.

  In the mornings she read the Telegraph. In the afternoons she read the Evening Standard or watched the news on TV for updates. On January 3, the temperature began to drop. Even with heavy uniforms and woolen scarves around their faces, police had to keep moving to combat the cold. Officers deployed in pairs and swapped positions to remain alert. Regular deliveries of food were made to Hall and his hostage.

  Jenny rang Beth. Nearly fifty officers were on the scene, Beth said, round the clock. Some nights Brian slept five or six hours on a camp bed at the base at Leman Street. When he did come home, he was worn out from the effort it took to maintain continual focus in the difficult conditions and convinced he’d never feel warm again. The marksmen had it worse, because they had to remain still for long periods. At least they were part of something, Jenny thought, and they had procedures to follow. She was isolated and had not found any way of subduing her sorrow.

  On the eleventh day of the siege, the hostage escaped. Temperatures were now below freezing at night and not much above during the day. How long would the hostage taker be able to withstand the cold? She knew the police didn’t want to kill him; they just wanted him to give up. “Give up!” she shouted as she read the newspaper accounts. “Show me that bad things can end well!” But still the hostage taker hid in his flat. He had blocked his window with a wardrobe and had only a narrow view of the outside world. Anxious to end the operation, the police placed a hose pipe on the roof and turned on the water to increase his discomfort. Jenny looked up. Her ceiling had no leaks, but her unhappiness far exceeded discomfort, and her world, too, had shrunk.

  Still the gunman would not surrender. His behavior became even more erratic. He began firing indiscriminately on the police, who responded with CS gas, a non-lethal chemical irritant that caused the eyes to tear and the skin to burn. Jenny’s eyes stung, too, and were red in the mornings from the colorless tears she had shed during the night. No more of this! she wept. Who was besieging whom? The gunman’s flat was surrounded by police, but they were just as tied to the site as he was, and the siege was taking a toll on everyone.

  Negotiations broke down entirely on the fourteenth day. Smoke was seen inside the flat. Because the police couldn’t allow the fire brigade to enter a dwelling with an armed occupant, they used Hatton rounds or rubber bullets to break the windows. Armed officers then brought the fire under control but were not able to extinguish it entirely. Beth called Jenny to report that Brian had been one of those who had carried the heavy fire equipment in addition to everything else, but he was all right. Police speculated that Hall had set his furniture on fire to keep warm.

  On the last day Hall fired three shots. A police marksman fired once. After again deploying CS gas, an assault team entered the flat and found him dead. The marksman’s shot had hit him, as had a round from his own gun. Jenny wondered if the bullets had killed him instantly, or if he had bled to death in the dark, frigid flat, gradually feeling colder and weaker. Was that how her siege of sorrow would end? With her death? Would she then be an inconvenience to those who found her, the way the citizens in Hackney had complained about the gunman causing the extended presence of the police?

  Following the siege, there seemed to be no news of consequence. The new year had come, but with it, no warmth, no sun, nothing to counteract her emotional undertow. When she woke in the morning, the fog of grief rested on her chest. She had become London weather: cold, cloudy, hazy, with precipitation likely.

  CHAPTER 38

  Alcina’s anger, her silent companion, had not abated. Frustration had magnified it. Business at the bakery had been brisk over the holiday season, but her quarry had not appeared. A new year had begun, and she had had no forward motion. Her encounter had increased her confidence, and she hungered for another encounter, somewhere, anywhere. Her craving was almost physical, but food and drink did not satisfy it. She had felt it coursing through her veins, and she was greedy for more.

  She knew she needed to develop patience, Tony told her so. “Timing is important,” he said. “If you rush, you’ll make a mistake.”

  “Like you did?” she snapped, causing him to scowl.

  “Trust no one,” he advised.

  Had that been her mistake? She had trusted him, and look where that had led her.

  “Plan everything,” Tony added.

  Yes, she was eager to progress, but she needed more information. Where did her target live? What could she discover about her routine? Eventually her enemy would enter the bakery, and when she did, Alcina would find a reason to leave for a few moments and follow her. If she hoped to succeed, she would have to make the most of chance meetings.

  CHAPTER 39

  The Hackney Siege had ended badly. Despite their best efforts, the police had been unable to resolve the conflict. Jenny knew that they would consider the entire operation a failure because it had not come to a peaceful conclusion. All would be affected, but the negotiator, who had had personal contact with the gunman, would feel deeply dispirited. The police, however
, would move on to other engagements, while she was stuck on the same battleground, and no matter how hard she fought, grief refused to retreat. Another year without Colin? How could she love a world that he was not a part of? And why should she? The days ahead looked as bleak as she did. She hadn’t worn makeup since her dinner with Simon early in December, and her hair obviously needed to be shaped and trimmed.

  Something drew Jenny to the children’s rooms. Rather than hiring someone to do the work, she and Colin had chosen the color schemes and wallpaper and finished them together. They had papered the rooms with hope, decorating one in blues and greens with a teddy bear border, because she had enjoyed the Little Bear books she had read to her brothers. The other showcased ducks – Make Way for Ducklings! she had exclaimed – with a yellow and orange background. They hadn’t chosen furniture or names, although she intended to honor Colin’s wish to continue his parents’ practice of naming the boys with the letter C and the girls with J. When she had pasted the last strip in place, she and Colin had celebrated with a glass of wine and a toast to Little C or Little J. He had suggested that they do their part to make sure the rooms were occupied soon, and she had laughed and kissed him to start the process.

  The rooms were empty. What should she do with them? Redecorate: The laughs and cries of children would not fill these spaces with life. She slipped her thumbnail under one low corner of the wallpaper and began to pull. The paper didn’t release its hold on the wall neatly or easily. Repeated tears required her to start again every yard or so, and the wallpaper beyond the reach of her hands refused to cooperate. She stepped back. She had created a beast with multiple drooping tails. Hardly an auspicious start, and her concentration was gone. Mañana: Maybe tomorrow she would resume work. Maybe not.