Missing Joseph

by Elizabeth George

  Maggie crossed her legs Indian fashion and gave a pinch to the heel of her hand. It was the way she reminded herself to admit to nothing. She knew what information Pam wanted from her—she could see that Josie knew it as well—but she’d never sneaked on a soul in her life, and she wasn’t about to sneak on herself.

  Josie came to the rescue. “Did you say anything? After you saw them, I mean.”

  She hadn’t, not then at least. And when she finally brought it up, as a shrill accusation hurled half in anger and half in self-defence, Mummy had reacted by slapping her face. Not once but twice and as hard as she could. One second afterwards—and maybe it was seeing the expression of surprise and shock on Maggie’s face because Mummy had never hit her in her life—she’d cried out like she’d been struck herself, grabbed Maggie to her, and hugged her so fiercely Maggie felt her breath leave. But still, they hadn’t talked about any of it. “It’s my business, Maggie,” Mummy had said firmly.

  Fine, Maggie thought. And my business is mine.

  But it wasn’t, really. Mummy wouldn’t let it be. She had brought the sludgy tea to Maggie’s bedroom every morning for a fortnight after their row. She had stood and made sure Maggie drank every drop. To her protestations, she said, “I know what’s best.” To her whimpers when the pain cramped through her stomach, she said, “It will pass, Maggie.” And she wiped her brow with a cool, soft cloth.

  Maggie studied the inky shadows in her bedroom and listened again, concentrating in order to discern the sound of footsteps from the wind jostling an old plastic bottle against the gravel outside. She hadn’t turned on any of the lights upstairs, and she crept to the window and peered out into the night, feeling secure in the knowledge that she could see without being seen. Below her in the courtyard, shadows from the east wing of Cotes Hall made great caves of dark. Cast from the mansion’s gables, they loomed like open pits and offered more than ample protection for anyone wishing to hide himself. She squinted at them one by one, trying to distinguish whether a hulking form against a far wall was only a yew bush in need of clipping or a prowler trying the window. She couldn’t tell. She wished Mummy and Mr. Shepherd would return.

  She’d never minded being left alone in the past, but early on after their arrival in Lancashire, she’d developed a dislike of staying in the cottage by herself, either day or night. Perhaps it was baby-stuff to feel that way, but the minute Mummy drove off with Mr. Shepherd, the minute she slipped into the Opel to go off on her own, or headed in the direction of the footpath, or went into the oak wood on a search for plants, Maggie felt the walls start inching close about her. She was uniquely aware of being by herself on the grounds of Cotes Hall, and while Polly Yarkin lived just at the far end of the drive, it was nearly a mile away and no matter how she screamed and shouted, if she ever needed Polly’s help for any reason, she wouldn’t hear.

  It didn’t matter to Maggie that she knew where Mummy kept her pistol. Even if she had used it before for target practice—which she never had—she couldn’t imagine actually pointing it at anyone, let alone pulling the trigger. So instead, when she was by herself, she burrowed into her bedroom like a mole. If it was night, she kept the lights off and waited for the sound of a returning car or of Mummy’s key scraping in the locked front door. And while she waited, she listened to Punkin’s soft feline snores rising like steady puffs of auditory smoke from the centre of her bed. With her vision fixed on the small birch bookcase atop of which lumpy old Bozo the elephant presided among the other stuffed animals with comforting grace, she clutched her scrapbook to her chest. She thought about her father.

  He existed in fantasy, Eddie Spence, dead before he was thirty, his body twisted along with the wreckage of his racing car in Monte Carlo. He was the hero of an untold story Mummy had hinted at a single time, saying, “Daddy died in a car crash, darling” and “Please, Maggie. I can’t speak of it to anyone,” with her eyes filled with tears when Maggie tried to ask more. Maggie often tried to conjure up his face from her memory, but she failed in the effort. So what there was of Daddy she held in her arms: the pictures of formula-one race cars she clipped and collected, placing them into her Important Events Book along with careful notations about every Grand Prix.

  She plopped onto the bed, and Punkin stirred. He raised his head, yawned, and then pricked his ears. They turned like radar in the direction of the window, and he rose in a single, lissome movement and leapt silently from the bed to the sill. There, he hunkered, his tail making restless, tapping movements as it circled round his front paws.

  From the bed, Maggie watched him surveying the courtyard much as she had done, his eyes blinking slowly as his tail continued to tap in silence. She knew from studying up on the subject in his kitten-days that cats are hypersensitive to changes in the environment, so she rested more easily in the knowledge that Punkin would tell her the very moment there was anything outside that she ought to fear.

  An old lime tree stood just beyond the window, and its branches creaked. Maggie listened hard. Twigs scratched in vibrato against the glass. Something rasped on the old tree’s furrowed bark. It was only the wind, Maggie told herself, but even as she thought this, Punkin gave the signal that something wasn’t right. He rose with an arching back.

  Maggie’s heart thumped jerkily. Punkin launched himself from the window-sill and landed on the rag rug. He was through the door in a streak of orange locomotion before Maggie had time to realise that someone must have climbed the tree.

  And then it was too late. She heard the soft thud of a body landing on the slate roof of the cottage. The quiet tread of footsteps followed. Then came the sound of gentle rapping on the glass.

  This last made no sense. As far as she knew, housebreakers didn’t announce themselves. Unless, of course, they were trying to see if anyone was at home. But even then, it seemed more sensible to think that they’d just knock on the door or ring the front bell and wait for an answer.

  She wanted to shout, You’ve got the wrong place, whoever you are, you want the Hall, don’t you? But instead she lowered her scrapbook to the floor next to the bed and slid along the wall into the deeper shadows. Her palms felt itchy. Her stomach rolled. She wanted more than anything to call out for her mummy, but that would be of less than no use. A moment later she was glad of the fact.

  “Maggie? Are you there?” she heard him call softly. “Open up, will you? I’m freezing my bum off.”

  Nick! Maggie dashed across the room. She could see him, crouched on the slope of roof just outside the dormer window, grinning at her, his silky black hair brushing against his cheeks like soft bird’s wings. She fumbled with the lock. Nick, Nick, she thought. But just as she was about to fling up the sash, she heard Mummy saying, “I don’t want you alone with Nick Ware again. Is that clear, Margaret Jane? No more of that. It’s over.” Her fingers failed her.

  “Maggie!” Nick whispered. “Let me in! It’s cold.”

  She’d given her word. Mummy had been driven close to tears during their row, and the sight of her eyes red-rimmed and full over Maggie’s behaviour and Maggie’s stinging words had wrung the promise from her without a thought of what it would really mean to give it.

  “I can’t,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Nick, Mummy isn’t home. She’s gone into the village with Mr. Shepherd. I promised her—”

  He was grinning more widely. “Great. Excellent. Come on, Mag. Let me in.”

  She swallowed past a raw spot in her throat. “I can’t. I can’t see you alone. I promised.”

  “Why?”

  “Because…Nick, you know.”

  His hand was against the window glass, and he dropped it to his side. “But I just wanted to show you…Oh what the hell.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Forget it. Never mind.”

  “Nick, tell me.”

  He turned his head away. He wore his hair bobbed, overlong on the top the way the rest of the boys did, but it never looked trendy on h
im. It looked right, as if he’d been the style’s inventor.

  “Nick.”

  “Just a letter,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. Forget it.”

  “A letter? From who?”

  “It isn’t important.”

  “But if you’ve come all this way—” Then she remembered. “Nick, you’ve not heard from Lester Piggott? Is that it? Has he answered your letter?” It was hard to believe. But Nick wrote to jockeys as a matter of course, always adding to his collection of letters. He’d heard from Pat Eddery, Graham Starkey, Eddie Hide. But Lester Piggott was a plum, to be sure.

  She flung up the sash. The cold wind gusted like a cloud into the room.

  “Is that it?” she asked.

  From his ancient leather jacket—long claimed to be a gift to his great-uncle from an American bombardier during World War II—Nick took an envelope. “It isn’t much,” he said. “Just ‘nice to hear from you, lad.’ But he signed it real clear. No one thought he’d answer, remember, Mag? I wanted you to know.”

  It seemed mean-spirited to leave him outside when he’d come on such an innocent errand. Even Mummy couldn’t object to this. Maggie said, “Come in.”

  “Not if it’ll make trouble with your mum.”

  “It’s all right.”

  He squeezed his lanky frame through the window and made a deliberate point of not closing it behind him. “I thought you’d gone to bed. I was looking in the windows.”

  “I thought you were a prowler.”

  “Why’n’t you turn on the lights?”

  She dropped her eyes. “I get scared. Alone.” She took the envelope from him and admired the address. Mr. Nick Ware, Esq., Skelshaw Farm was written clearly in a firm, bold hand. She returned it to Nick. “I’m glad he wrote back. I thought he would.”

  “I remembered. That’s why I wanted you to see.” He flipped his hair off his face and looked round the room. Maggie watched, in dread. He’d be noticing all the stuffed animals and her dolls sitting upright in the wicker chair. He’d go to the bookshelves and see The Railway Children along with the other favourite titles from her childhood. He’d realise what a baby she was. He wouldn’t want to take her about then, would he. He probably wouldn’t want to know her at all. Why hadn’t she thought before letting him in?

  He said, “I’ve never been in your bedroom before. It’s real nice, Mag.”

  She felt dread dissolve. She smiled. “Ta.”

  “Dimple,” he said and touched his index finger to the small depression in her cheek. “I like it when you smile.” Tentatively, he dropped his hand to her arm. She could feel his cold fingers, even through her pullover.

  “You’re ice,” she said.

  “Cold outside.”

  She was acutely aware of being in the dark in forbidden territory. The room seemed smaller with him standing in it, and she knew the proper thing to do was to take him downstairs and let him out by the door. Except that now he was here, she didn’t want him to go, not without giving her some kind of sign that he was still hers in spite of everything that had happened in their lives since last October. It wasn’t enough to know that he liked it when she smiled and he could touch the dimple in her cheek. People liked babies’ smiles, they said so all the time. She wasn’t a baby.

  “When’s your mum coming home?” he asked.

  Any minute was the truth. It was after nine. But if she told the truth, he’d be gone in an instant. Perhaps he’d do it for her sake, to keep her from trouble, but he’d do it all the same. So she said, “I don’t know. She went off with Mr. Shepherd.”

  Nick knew about Mummy and Mr. Shepherd, so he knew what that meant. The rest was up to him.

  She made a move to close the window, but his hand was still on her arm, so it was easy enough for him to stop her. He wasn’t rough. He didn’t need to be. He merely kissed her, flicking his tongue like a promise against her lips, and she welcomed him.

  “She’ll be a while then.” His mouth moved to her neck. He gave her the shivers. “She’s been getting hers regular enough.”

  Her conscience told her to defend her mummy from Nick’s interpretation of the village gossip, but the shivers were running along her arms and her legs each time he kissed her and they kept her from thinking as straight as she’d like. Still, she was in the process of gathering her wits to make a firm reply when his hand moved to her breast and his fingers began to play with her nipple. He rolled it gently back and forth until she gasped with the hurt and the tingling heat and he relinquished the pressure and started the process all over again. It felt so good. It felt beyond good.

  She knew she ought to talk about Mummy, she ought to explain. But she couldn’t seem to hold on to that thought for longer than the instant in which Nick’s fingers released her. Once they began to tease her again, she could think only of the fact that she didn’t want to risk any discussion standing in the way of the sign that things were right between them. So she finally said from somewhere outside of herself, “We’ve got an understanding now, my mum and I,” and she felt him smiling against her mouth. He was a clever boy, Nick. He probably didn’t believe her for a moment.

  “Missed you,” he whispered and pulled her tight to him. “God, Mag. Give me some hard.”

  She knew what he wanted. She wanted to do it. She wanted to feel It through his blue jeans again, going rigid and big because of her. She pressed her hand against It. He moved her fingers up and down and around.

  “Jesus,” he whispered. “Jesus. Mag.”

  He slid her fingers along Its length to the tip. He circled them round It. He felt heavy against her. She squeezed It gently, then harder when he groaned.

  “Maggie,” he said. “Mag.”

  His breathing was loud. He tugged her pullover off. She felt the night wind against her skin. And then she felt only his hands on her breasts. And then only his mouth as he kissed them.

  She was liquid. She was floating. The fingers on his blue jeans weren’t even hers. She wasn’t the one easing down the zip. She wasn’t the one making him naked.

  He said, “Wait. Mag. If your mum comes home—”

  She stopped him with her kiss. She groped blindly for the sweet full weight of him, and he helped her fingers stroke down and round his globes of flesh. He groaned, his hands went under her skirt, his fingers rubbed hot circles between her legs.

  And then they were on the bed together, Nick’s body a pale sapling above her, her own body ready, hips lifted, legs spread. Nothing else mattered.

  “Tell me when to stop,” he said. “Maggie, all right? We won’t do it this time. Just tell me when to stop.” He put It against her. He rubbed It against her. The tip of It, the length of It. “Tell me when to stop.”

  Just once more. Just this once. It couldn’t be such a horrible sin. She pulled him closer, wanting him near.

  “Maggie. Mag, don’t you think we ought to stop?”

  She pressed It closer and closer with her hand.

  “Mag, really. I can’t hold off.”

  She lifted her mouth to kiss him.

  “If your mum comes home—”

  Slowly, deeply, she rotated her hips.

  “Maggie. We can’t.” He plunged It inside.

  Scrubber, she thought. Scrubber, slut, tart. She lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling. Her vision blurred as tears slid from her eyes, forking across her temples and down into her ears.

  I’m nothing, she thought. I’m a slut. I’m a tart. I’ll do it with anyone. Right now it’s only Nick. But if some other bloke wants to stick It in me tomorrow, I’ll probably let him. I’m a scrubber. A tart.

  She sat up and swung her legs over the edge of the bed. She looked across the room. Bozo the elephant wore his usual expression of pachydermatous bemusement, but there seemed to be something else in his face tonight. Disappointment, no doubt. She’d let Bozo down. But that was nothing compared to what she’d done to herself.

  She eased off the bed and onto the floor where she knelt, feeling t
he ridges of the worn rag rug pressing into her knees. She clasped her hands together in the attitude of prayer and tried to think of the words that would lead to forgiveness.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I didn’t mean it to happen, God. I just thought to myself: If only he’ll kiss me then I’ll know things’re still right between us, no matter what I promised Mummy. Except when he kisses me that way I don’t want him to stop and then he does other things and I want him to do them and then I want more. I don’t want it to end. And I know it’s wrong. I know it. I do. But I can’t help how I feel. I’m sorry. God, I’m sorry. Don’t let bad come out of this please. It won’t happen again. I won’t let him. I’m sorry.”

  But how many times could God forgive when she knew it was wrong and He knew she knew it and she did it anyway because she wanted Nick close? One couldn’t make endless bargains with God without Him wondering about the nature of the deal He was striking. She was going to pay for her sins in a very big way, and it was only a matter of time before God decided that an accounting was due.

  “God doesn’t work that way, my dear. He doesn’t keep score. He’s capable of endless acts of forgiveness. This is why He’s our Supreme Being, the standard after which we model ourselves. We can’t hope to reach His level of perfection, of course, and He doesn’t expect us to. He merely asks that we keep trying to better ourselves, to learn from our mistakes, and to understand others.”

  How simple Mr. Sage had made it all sound when he’d come upon her in the church that evening last October. She’d been kneeling in the second pew, in front of the rood screen, with her forehead resting on her two clenched fists. Her prayer had been much the same as tonight’s, only it had been the first time then, on a mound of paint-stiffened wrinkled tarpaulins in a corner of the Cotes Hall scullery. With Nick easing her clothes off, easing her to the floor, easing easing easing her ready. “We won’t actually do it,” he’d said, just like tonight. “Tell me when to stop, Mag.” And he kept repeating tell me when to stop Maggie tell me tell me while his mouth covered hers and his fingers worked magic between her legs and she pressed and pressed herself against his hand. She wanted heat and closeness. She needed to be held. She longed to be part of something more than herself. He was the living promise of all she desired, there in the scullery. She merely had to accept.