William Monk 06 - Cain His Brother

boots clattering on the cold pavement.
    Monk closed the door and went back to his inner room. His landlady had gone. He sat down, the letter still in his hand, although he did not look at it anymore.
    It could not possibly refer to last night, or any other time over the last week. She could only mean some acquaintance they had had in the past.
    It always came back to the past, and that great void in his memory, the darkness where anything might exist.
    She had used the word
betrayal
. That implied trust. Was he really a man to do such a thing? He had never betrayed anyone since the accident. Honor was one virtue he possessed. He had never broken his word. He would not let himself down by such an act.
    Could he have changed so much? Had the blow to his head not only obliterated all the past from his mind, but also altered his nature? Was that possible?
    He paced the floor back and forth, trying to think of allthe things he had pieced together about himself from before the accident, the fragments that had come back to him, the flashes from his childhood in the north, glimpses of the sea, its violence and its beauty. He recalled his eagerness to learn, fleeting impressions; a face, a sense of injustice and desperation, the man who had been his mentor, and who had been deceived and ruined, and Monk had been unable to help. Nothing he could do had saved him. That was when he had abandoned commerce and dedicated himself to the police.
    That was not a man who would betray!
    In the police he had risen quickly. He knew from a dozen minor evidences, people’s faces when he met them again, remarks half heard. He had been cruel of tongue, critical, at times ruthless. Runcorn, his old superior, had hated him, and little by little Monk had learned it was not without cause. Monk had contributed to Runcorn’s failures and inadequacies, he had undermined him steadily, even if Runcorn had at least in part brought it upon himself with his petty hatreds and his personal ambitions, which he was prepared to achieve on the backs of others.
    Was that a kind of betrayal?
    No. It was cruelty, but it was not dishonest. Betrayal was always eventually a kind of deceit.
    He knew almost nothing about his relationships with women. The only one of whom he had any recollection was Hermione, whom he had thought he loved, and in that he was the loser. If anyone was betrayed it was he. It was Hermione who had been so much less than she promised, she who had been too shallow to grasp at love, who had preferred the comfortable, the unchallenging, the safe. He could still feel the hollowness of loss when he had found her again, so full of hope, and then the disillusion, the utter emptiness.
    But he must have known Drusilla! That hatred on her face had some terrible reason, some foundation in arelationship where she felt so wronged she had been prepared to do even this to be revenged.
    He had already read through all the letters and the bills he could find when he first returned home from the accident, trying then to reconstruct some framework to his life. There was little enough. He was careful with money, but extravagant as far as personal appearance was concerned. His tailor’s bills were high, as were his shirtmaker’s and bootmaker’s, even his barber’s.
    There had been no personal letters except from his sister, Beth, and he had obviously been remiss in writing back to her. Now he searched through them again, but there was nothing in the same hand as Drusilla’s letter. Admittedly there was nothing else personal.
    He put them all back. It was a sparse record for a lifetime. There was no sense of identity in it, no feeling for the nature and personality of a man. There must be so much that he did not know, and probably never would. There must have been loves and hates, generosities, injuries, hopes, humiliations and triumphs. They were all wiped out as if they had never happened.
    Except that for everyone else they were still there, sharp and real, still carrying all their emotion and pain.
    How could he have known a woman like Drusilla, with her vitality, beauty, wit and charm, and simply have forgotten her so totally that even on seeing her again, being so happy with her, he still had no hint of memory? Nothing was familiar. Rack his brain as he might, there was no chord, no flash of even momentary recollection.
    He stared out of the window at the street. It was still gray, but the carriage lamps were no longer lit.
    It would be a delusion to