The Silkworm

His mobile rang again. For several seconds he weighed the offense he might cause if he answered it, versus the possibility that it might herald something more useful than Nina’s opinions about Jerry Waldegrave.

“Sorry,” he said and pulled it out of his pocket. It was his brother Al.

“Corm!” said the voice over a noisy line. “Great to hear from you, bruv!”

“Hi,” said Strike repressively. “How are you?”

“Great! I’m in New York, only just got your message. What d’you need?”

He knew that Strike would only call if he wanted something, but unlike Nina, Al did not seem to resent the fact.

“Wondering if you fancied dinner this Friday,” said Strike, “but if you’re in New York—”

“I’m coming back Wednesday, that’d be cool. Want me to book somewhere?”

“Yeah,” said Strike. “It’s got to be the River Café.”

“I’ll get on it,” said Al without asking why: perhaps he assumed that Strike merely had a yen for good Italian. “Text you the time, yeah? Look forward to it!”

Strike hung up, the first syllable of an apology already on his lips, but Nina had left for the kitchen. The atmosphere had undoubtedly curdled.

34

O Lord! what have I said? my unlucky tongue!

William Congreve, Love for Love

“Love is a mirage,” said Michael Fancourt on the television screen. “A mirage, a chimera, a delusion.”

Robin was sitting between Matthew and her mother on the faded, sagging sofa. The chocolate Labrador lay on the floor in front of the fire, his tail thumping lazily on the rug in his sleep. Robin felt drowsy after two nights of very little sleep and days of unexpected stresses and emotion, but she was trying hard to concentrate on Michael Fancourt. Beside her Mrs. Ellacott, who had expressed the optimistic hope that Fancourt might let drop some bons mots that would help with her essay on Webster, had a notebook and pen on her lap.

“Surely,” began the interviewer, but Fancourt talked over him.

“We don’t love each other; we love the idea we have of each other. Very few humans understand this or can bear to contemplate it. They have blind faith in their own powers of creation. All love, ultimately, is self-love.”

Mr. Ellacott was asleep, his head back in the armchair closest to the fire and the dog. Gently he snored, with his spectacles halfway down his nose. All three of Robin’s brothers had slid discreetly from the house. It was Saturday night and their mates were waiting in the Bay Horse on the square. Jon had come home from university for the funeral but did not feel he owed it to his sister’s fiancé to forgo a few pints of Black Sheep with his brothers, sitting at the dimpled copper tables by the open fire.

Robin suspected that Matthew had wanted to join them but that he had felt it would be unseemly. Now he was stuck watching a literary program he would never have tolerated at home. He would have turned over without asking her, taking it for granted that she could not possibly be interested in what this sour-looking, sententious man was saying. It was not easy to like Michael Fancourt, thought Robin. The curve of both his lip and his eyebrows implied an ingrained sense of superiority. The presenter, who was well known, seemed a little nervous.

“And that is the theme of your new—?”

“One of the themes, yes. Rather than castigating himself for his foolishness when the hero realizes that he has simply imagined his wife into being, he seeks to punish the flesh-and-blood woman whom he believes has duped him. His desire for revenge drives the plot.”

“Aha,” said Robin’s mother softly, picking up her pen.

“Many of us—most, perhaps,” said the interviewer, “consider love a purifying ideal, a source of selflessness rather than—”

“A self-justifying lie,” said Fancourt. “We are mammals who need sex, need companionship, who seek the protective enclave of the family for reasons of survival and reproduction. We select a so-called loved one for the most primitive reasons—my hero’s preference for a pear-shaped woman is self-explanatory, I think. The loved one laughs or smells like the parent who gave one youthful succor and all else is projected, all else is invented—”

“Friendship—” began the interviewer a little desperately.

“If I could have brought myself to have sex with any of my male friends, I would have had a happier and more productive life,” said Fancourt. “Unfortunately, I’m programmed to desire the female form, however fruitlessly. And so I tell myself that one woman is more fascinating, more attuned to my needs and desires, than another. I am a complex, highly evolved and imaginative creature who feels compelled to justify a choice made on the crudest grounds. This is the truth that we’ve buried under a thousand years of courtly bullshit.”

Robin wondered what on earth Fancourt’s wife (for she seemed to remember that he was married) would make of this interview. Beside her, Mrs. Ellacott had written a few words on her notepad.

“He’s not talking about revenge,” Robin muttered.

Her mother showed her the notepad. She had written: What a shit he is. Robin giggled.