The Silkworm

Beside her, Matthew leaned over to the Daily Express that Jonathan had left abandoned on a chair. He turned past the front three pages, where Strike’s name appeared several times in the text alongside Owen Quine’s, and began to read a piece on how a high street chain of stores had banned Cliff Richard’s Christmas songs.

“You’ve been criticized,” said the interviewer bravely, “for your depiction of women, most particularly—”

“I can hear the critics’ cockroach-like scurrying for their pens as we speak,” said Fancourt, his lip curling in what passed for a smile. “I can think of little that interests me less than what critics say about me or my work.”

Matthew turned a page of the paper. Robin glanced sideways at a picture of an overturned tanker, an upside-down Honda Civic and a mangled Mercedes.

“That’s the crash we were nearly in!”

“What?” said Matthew.

She had said it without thinking. Robin’s brain froze.

“That happened on the M4,” Matthew said, half laughing at her for thinking she could have been involved, that she could not recognize a motorway when she saw one.

“Oh—oh yes,” said Robin, pretending to peer more closely at the text beneath the picture.

But he was frowning now, catching up.

“Were you nearly in a car crash yesterday?”

He was speaking quietly, trying not to disturb Mrs. Ellacott, who was following Fancourt’s interview. Hesitation was fatal. Choose.

“Yes, I was. I didn’t want to worry you.”

He stared at her. On Robin’s other side she could feel her mother making more notes.

“This one?” he said, pointing at the picture, and she nodded. “Why were you on the M4?”

“I had to drive Cormoran to an interview.”

“I’m thinking of women,” said the interviewer, “your views on women—”

“Where the hell was the interview?”

“Devon,” said Robin.

“Devon?”

“He’s buggered his leg again. He couldn’t have got there by himself.”

“You drove him to Devon?”

“Yes, Matt, I drove him to—”

“So that’s why you didn’t come up yesterday? So you could—”

“Matt, of course not.”

He flung down the paper, pulled himself up and strode from the room.

Robin felt sick. She looked around at the door, which he had not slammed, but closed firmly enough to make her father stir and mutter in his sleep and the Labrador wake up.

“Leave him,” advised her mother, her eyes still on the screen.

Robin swung round, desperate.

“Cormoran had to get to Devon and he couldn’t drive with only one leg—”

“There’s no need to defend yourself to me,” said Mrs. Ellacott.

“But now he thinks I lied about not being able to get home yesterday.”

“Did you?” her mother asked, her eyes still fixed beadily upon Michael Fancourt. “Get down, Rowntree, I can’t see over you.”

“Well, I could’ve come if I’d got a first-class ticket,” Robin admitted as the Labrador yawned, stretched and resettled himself on the hearthrug. “But I’d already paid for the sleeper.”

“Matt’s always going on about how much more money you would have made if you’d taken that HR job,” said her mother, her eyes on the TV screen. “I’d have thought he’d appreciate you saving the pennies. Now shush, I want to hear about revenge.”

The interviewer was trying to formulate a question.

“But where women are concerned, you haven’t always—contemporary mores, so-called political correctness—I’m thinking particularly of your assertion that female writers—”

“This again?” said Fancourt, slapping his knees with his hands (the interviewer perceptibly jumped). “I said that the greatest female writers, with almost no exceptions, have been childless. A fact. And I have said that women generally, by virtue of their desire to mother, are incapable of the necessarily single-minded focus anyone must bring to the creation of literature, true literature. I don’t retract a word. That is a fact.”

Robin was twisting her engagement ring on her finger, torn between her desire to follow Matt and persuade him she had done nothing wrong and anger that any such persuasion should be required. The demands of his job came first, always; she had never known him to apologize for late hours, for jobs that took him to the far side of London and brought him home at eight o’clock at night…

“I was going to say,” the interviewer hurried on, with an ingratiating smile, “that this book might give those critics pause. I thought the central female character was treated with great understanding, with real empathy. Of course”—he glanced down at his notes and up again; Robin could feel his nerves—“parallels are bound to be drawn—in dealing with the suicide of a young woman, I expect you’re braced—you must be expecting—”

“That stupid people will assume that I have written an autobiographical account of my first wife’s suicide?”

“Well, it’s bound to be seen as—it’s bound to raise questions—”

“Then let me say this,” said Fancourt, and paused.