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‘Yeah,’ said Strike, ‘and she was in love with it. It’s dangerous to make a cult of your own unhappiness. Hard to get out, once you’ve been in there too long. You forget how.’
He drank some more of his rapidly diminishing pint before saying,
‘I once quoted Aeschylus at her. “Happiness is a choice that requires effort at times.” Didn’t go down well.’
‘You did Classics as well?’ said Amelia, mildly surprised. She’d never shown much interest in him as a human being while he’d been with Charlotte. He’d been a misfit, a ne’er-do-well of mongrel breeding.
‘No,’ said Strike, ‘but there was an alcoholic ex-Classics teacher in one of the squats my mother took me to live in. He used to drop pearls of wisdom like that, mainly to patronise us all.’
When Strike had told Robin the story of this man, and how he, Strike, had stolen his Classics books in revenge at being condescended to, she’d laughed. Amelia merely looked at him as though he were talking about life on some faraway planet.
Their salads arrived. Both ate quickly, making forced conversation about the congestion charge, how often each of them got into the country and whether the Labour Party could win a general election under Jeremy Corbyn. Strike didn’t ask whether Charlotte had genuinely had breast cancer, though he suspected, from the absence of any mention of it from Amelia, that she hadn’t. What did it matter, now?
Neither ordered pudding or coffee. With perhaps equal relief, they rose from the table barely three quarters of an hour after sitting down.
Back on the pavement, Amelia said unexpectedly,
‘You’ve done wonderfully well with your business. I’ve been reading about that church… it sounds the most dreadful place.’
‘It was,’ said Strike.
‘You actually helped out a friend of ours, recently, with a nasty man who was taking advantage of his mother. Well… thank you for meeting me. It’s been… thank you, anyway.’
She looked up at him uncertainly, and he bent down to allow her to give him the standard upper-class farewell, an air kiss in the vicinity of each cheek.
‘Well – goodbye and – and good luck.’
‘You too, Amelia.’
Strike heard her sensible heels tapping away on the pavement as he turned to walk away. The sun slid out from behind its cloud, and it was that, surely, and nothing else, that made Strike’s eyes sting.
136
Confucius says… Life leads the thoughtful man on a path of many windings.
Now the course is checked, now it runs straight again.
Here winged thoughts may pour freely forth in words,
There the heavy burden of knowledge must be shut away in silence.
But when two people are at one in their inmost hearts,
They shatter even the strength of iron or of bronze.
The I Ching or Book of Changes
‘Oh, good,’ panted Robin, entering the office pink-faced, at speed. She’d just half-run along Denmark Street. ‘He’s not here yet – Ryan, I mean.’
‘He’s dropping by, is he?’ said Pat, typing with her e-cigarette jammed between her teeth as usual, and looking pleased at the prospect of seeing the handsome Murphy.
‘Yes,’ said Robin, taking off the jacket she didn’t need on such a warm September day. ‘He’s picking me up, we’re going away for a couple of days and I’m really late – but so’s he.’
‘Tick him off for it,’ said Pat, still typing. ‘You might get flowers.’
‘Pretty shady behaviour, Pat.’
The office manager removed her e-cigarette from between her teeth.
