Missing Joseph

by Elizabeth George

  “Nothing that you need to worry about,” he said. “Ever,” and he kissed her again.

  When she’d watched him drive off, when the sound of the Rover’s engine faded and was replaced by the night wind creaking in the trees, Juliet let the pea jacket fall from her shoulders and left it in a heap by the front cottage door. She dropped her scarf on top of it. She kept on her gloves.

  These she examined. They were made of old leather lined with rabbit fur, the skin feather-smooth with the years she had worn them, a thread unravelling along the inner right wrist. She pressed them against her cheeks. The leather was cool but she could feel nothing of her face’s temperature through the gloves, so it was much like being touched by someone else, like having her face cupped with tenderness, with love, with amusement, or with anything else that hinted remotely at romantic attachment.

  That’s what had started all this in the first place: her need for a man. She’d managed to avoid the need for years by keeping herself and her daughter isolated—just Mummy and Maggie taking on the human race in one part of the country or another. She’d diverted both the interior longing and the dull pain of desire by throwing her energies into Maggie, because Maggie was what her life was all about.

  Juliet knew she had bought and paid for this night’s anguish in coin she had minted from a part of her make-up that had never failed to give her grief. Wanting a man, hungering to touch the hard fierce angles of his body, longing to lie beneath him—to straddle or to kneel—and to feel that moment’s delight in their bodies’ joining…These were the voids that had started her on this current path to disaster. So it was utterly fitting that physical desire, which she had never been able to eradicate completely no matter how many years she refused to acknowledge it, should be what had brought her to losing Maggie tonight.

  There were dozens of if only’s barking in her head, but she fastened on one of them because, although she wanted to do so, she couldn’t lie to herself about its importance. She had to accept her involvement with Colin as the prime mover behind everything that had happened with Maggie.

  She’d heard about him from Polly long before she’d ever seen him. And she’d thought herself secure in the belief that since Polly was herself in love with the man, since he was so many years her own junior, since she rarely saw him—indeed, since she rarely saw anyone now that they’d found what she’d come to believe was an ideal location to get on with their lives at last—she stood little chance of involvement or attachment. Even when he came to the cottage that day on his official business and she saw him parked by the lavender on the lane and read the bleak despair on his face and recalled Polly’s story about his wife, even when she felt the ice of her detached composure receive its first rift in the face of his sorrow and for the first time in years she recognised a stranger’s pain, she’d not considered the danger he presented to the weakness in herself that she believed she had mastered.

  It was only when he was inside the cottage and she saw him looking round at the frivolous fittings of the kitchen with such ill-disguised yearning that she felt her heart stir. At first, getting ready to pour them each a glass of her homemade wine, she’d looked round herself to try to understand what was moving him. She knew it couldn’t be the superficials—cooker, table, chairs, cupboards—and she wondered at the fact that the rest might be touching him in some way. Could a man be moved by a rack of spices, African violets in the window, jars on the work top, two loaves of bread left to cool, a rack of washed dishes, a tea towel hanging from a drawer to dry? Or was it the finger-painted and oft-moved picture affixed with Blu-Tack to the wall above the cooker: two skirt-wearing stick figures—one with breasts that looked like lumps of coal—surrounded by flowers as tall as themselves and surmounted by the words I love you, Mummy in a five-year-old’s hand. He’d looked at it, looked at her, looked away, and finally didn’t seem to know where to look at all.

  Poor man, she had thought. And that had been her downfall. She knew about his wife, she began to speak, and she’d not been able to turn back from that moment. Sometime during their conversation, she’d thought just this once oh God to have a man that way just this once one more time he’s so hurting and if I control it if I’m the one if it’s only his pleasure with no thought of my own can it be such a wrong, and as he asked her about the shotgun and why she had used it and how, she had watched his eyes. She answered, keeping everything brief and to the point. And when he would have left—all information having been gathered, and thank you, madam, for your time—she decided to show him the pistol to keep him from going. She shot it and waited for him to react, to take it from her, to touch her hand as he removed it from her grip, but he wouldn’t, he kept the distance between them, and she realised with a sudden dawning of wonder that he was thinking those very same words just this once oh God just this once.

  It wouldn’t be love, she decided, because she was those ugly, gaping ten years older than he, because they didn’t even know each other and had not spoken before this day, because the religion she’d long ago forsaken declared that love didn’t grow from allowing the needs of the flesh to dominate the needs of the soul.

  She held on to those thoughts as that first afternoon together wore on, believing herself safe from loving. This would just be for pleasure, she decided, and then it would be forgotten.

  She should have recognised the extent of the danger he represented when she looked at the clock on her bedside table and realised that more than four hours had passed and she’d not even thought about Maggie. She should have ended it there—the moment guilt rushed in to replace the sleepy peace that accompanied her orgasms. She should have closed her heart and cut him out of her life with something abrupt and potentially hurtful like you’re almost a decent fuck for a copper. But instead she’d said, “Oh my God,” and he’d known. He’d said, “I’ve been selfish. You’re worried about your daughter. Let me clear out. I’ve kept you far too long. I’ve…” When he stopped speaking, she didn’t look his way, but she felt his hand graze her arm. “I don’t know how to name what I felt,” he said, “or what I feel. Except that being with you like that…it wasn’t enough. It’s not even enough now. I don’t know what that means.”

  She should have said drily, “It means you were randy, Constable. We both were. We still are in fact.” But she didn’t. She listened to him dressing and tried to work up something curt and unmistakably final with which to dismiss him. When he sat on the edge of the bed and turned her to him with his face caught somewhere between wonder and fear, she had the opportunity to draw the line. But she didn’t. Instead, she listened to him say,

  “Can I love you this quickly, Juliet Spence? Just like that? In an afternoon? Can my life change like that?”

  And because she knew more than anything else that life can change irrevocably in the instant one is forced to realise its malicious caprice, she said, “Yes But don’t.”

  “What?”

  “Love me. Or let your life change.”

  He didn’t understand. He couldn’t, really. He thought, perhaps, she was being coy. He said, “No one has control over that,” and when his hand moved slowly down her body and her body rose eagerly to meet it against her will, she knew he was right. He phoned her that night long after midnight, saying, “I don’t know what this is. I don’t know what to call it. I thought if I heard your voice…Because I’ve never felt…But that’s what men say, isn’t it? I’ve never felt like this before so let me get into your knickers and test the feeling out another time or two. And it’s that, I won’t lie, but it goes beyond and I don’t know why.”

  She had played the fool in the biggest way because she loved being loved by a man. Even Maggie couldn’t stop her: not with her white-faced knowledge—unspoken when she entered the cottage not five minutes after Colin’s initial departure, with her cat in her arms and her cheeks fresh-scrubbed from where she’d been brushing tears away; not with her silent appraisal of Colin when he came to dinner or took them for hikes with his
dog on the moors; not with her shrill pleas not to be left alone when Juliet went for an hour or two to be with Colin in his house. Maggie couldn’t stop her. And she didn’t really need to do so because Juliet knew there was no hope of permanency. She understood from the first that each minute was a memory stored against a future in which he and the love of him had no place. She merely forgot that while she had lived for the moment for so many years—on the edge of a tomorrow that always promised to bring the worst upon them—she’d made sure to create a life for Maggie that appeared normal. So Maggie’s fears of Colin’s permanent intrusion were real. To explain to her that they were also groundless would be to tell her things that would destroy her world. And while Juliet couldn’t bring herself to do that, she couldn’t bring herself to let Colin go either. Another week, she would think, please God just give me another week with him and I’ll end it between us, I promise I will.

  So she had bought this evening. How well she knew it.

  Like mother, like daughter in the end, Juliet thought. Maggie’s sex with Nick Ware was more than just an adolescent’s way of striking back at her mother; it was more than just a search for a man she could call daddy in the darkest part of her mind; it was the blood in her veins declaring itself at last. Yet Juliet knew that she might have been able to forestall the inevitable had she herself not taken up with Colin and given her daughter an example to follow.

  Juliet drew off the leather gloves a finger at a time and dropped them onto the pea jacket and scarf that lay heaped on the floor. She went not to the kitchen to prepare a dinner that her daughter wouldn’t eat, but to the stairs. She paused at the bottom with one hand on the banister, trying to gather the energy to climb. This stairway was a duplication of so many others over the years: worn carpeting on the flooring, nothing on the walls. She had always thought of pictures on the walls as one more thing to have to remove when they left a cottage, so there never seemed to be a point to hanging any up in the first place. Keep it plain, keep it simple, keep it functional. Following that credo, she had always refused to decorate in a way that might encourage affection for a set of rooms in which they lived. She wanted there to be no sense of loss when they moved on.

  Another adventure, she’d called each move, let’s see what’s what in Northumberland. She’d tried to make a game out of running. It was only when she’d stopped running that she’d lost.

  She mounted the stairs. A perfect sphere of dread seemed to be growing beneath her heart. Why did she run, Juliet wondered, what did they tell her, what does she know?

  The door to Maggie’s room was partially closed, and she swung it open. Moonlight shone through the branches of the lime tree outside the window and fell in a wavy pattern across the bed. On this Maggie’s cat was curled, head buried deeply between his paws, feigning sleep so that Juliet would take pity and not displace him. Punkin had been the first compromise Juliet had made with Maggie. Please, please c’n I have a kitten, Mummy had been such a simple request to grant. What she had not understood at the time was that seeing the joy of one small wish granted led inexorably to the longing to grant others. They’d been little nothings at first—a doss-round with her girlfriends, a trip to Lancaster with Josie and her mum—but they’d led to a budding sense of belonging that Maggie had never experienced before. In the end, they had led to the request to stay. Which, along with everything else, led to Nick, to the vicar, and to this night…

  Juliet sat on the edge of the bed and switched on the light. Punkin buried his head deeper in his paws although the tip of his tail twitched once to betray him. Juliet ran her hand over his head and along the mobile curve of his spine. He wasn’t as clean as he ought to be. He spent too much time prowling about the wood. Another six months and he’d no doubt be more feral than tame. Instinct, after all, was instinct.

  On the floor next to Maggie’s bed lay her thick scrapbook, its cover worn and cracked and its pages so dog-eared that their edges were crumbling to flakes in places. Juliet picked it up and rested it on her lap. A gift for her sixth birthday, it had Maggie’s Important Events printed in large block letters in her own hand on the first page. Juliet could tell by the feel of the book that most of the pages were full. She’d never looked through it before—it had seemed too like an invasion of Maggie’s small, private world—but she looked through it now, driven not so much by curiosity as by a need to feel her daughter’s presence and to understand.

  The first part comprised childhood mementos: a tracing of a large hand with a smaller one traced inside it and the words Mumy and me scrawled below; a fanciful composition about “My Doggie Fred” upon which a teacher had written “And what a lovely pet he must be, Margaret” across the top; a programme for a Christmas music recital at which she had been part of a chorus of children who sang—very badly but ambitiously—the Alleluia Chorus from Handel’s Messiah; a second-place ribbon from a science project on plants; and scores of pictures and postcards of their camping holidays together on the Hebrides, on Holy Island, far from the crowds in the Lake District. Juliet flipped through the pages. She touched her fingertips to the drawing, traced the edge of the ribbon, and studied each picture of her daughter’s face. This was a real history of their lives, a collection that spoke of what she and her daughter had managed to build upon a foundation of sand.

  The second part of the scrapbook, however, spoke of the cost of having lived that same history. It comprised a collection of newspaper clippings and magazine articles about automobile racing. Interspersed among these were photographs of men. For the first time, Juliet saw that he died in a car crash, darling had assumed heroic proportions in Maggie’s imagination, and from Juliet’s reticence on the subject had sprung a father whom Maggie could love. Her fathers were the winners at Indianapolis, at Monte Carlo, at Le Mans. They spun out in flames on a track in Italy, but they walked away with their heads held high. They lost wheels, they crashed, they broke open champagne and waved trophies in the air. They all shared the single quality of being alive.

  Juliet closed the book and rested her hands on its cover. It was all about protection, she said inside her head to a Maggie who wasn’t there. When you’re a mother, Maggie, the last thing you can bear of all the things that you have to bear anyway is losing your child. You can bear just about anything else and you usually have to at one time or another—losing your possessions, your home, your job, your lover, your husband, even your way of life. But losing a child is what will break you. So you don’t take risks that might lead to the loss because you’re always aware that the one risk you take might be the one that will cause all the horrors in the world to sweep into your life.

  You don’t know this yet, darling, because you haven’t experienced that moment when the twisting squeezing crush of your muscles and the urge to expel and to scream at once results in this small mass of humanity that squalls and breathes and comes to rest against your stomach, naked to your nakedness, dependent upon you, blind at that moment, hands instinctively trying to clutch. And once you close those fingers round one of your own…no, not even then…once you look at this life that you’ve created, you know you’ll do anything, suffer anything, to protect it. Mostly for its own sake you protect, of course, because all it is really is living, breathing need. But partly you protect it for your own.

  And that is the greatest of my sins, darling Maggie. I reversed the process and I lied in doing it because I couldn’t face the immensity of loss. But I’ll tell the truth now, here, and to you. What I did I did partly for you, my daughter. But what I did all those years ago, I did mostly for myself.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  I DON’T THINK WE SHOULD STOP YET, Nick,” Maggie said as stoutly as she could manage. Her jaw hurt awfully from locking her teeth together to keep them from chattering, and the tips of her fingers were numb despite the fact that she’d kept her hands balled into her pockets for most of the journey. She was tired of walking and muscle-weary from leaping behind hedges, over walls, or into ditches whenever they he
ard the sound of a car. But it was still relatively early, although it was dark, and she knew that in darkness lay their best hope of escape.

  They’d kept off the road whenever possible, heading southwest towards Blackpool. The going was rough on both farmland and moors, but Nick wouldn’t hear of setting foot to pavement until they’d put Clitheroe a good five miles behind them. Even then, he wouldn’t hear of taking the main road to Longridge where, the plan was, they would get a ride in a lorry to Blackpool. Instead, he said, they would stick to the twisty turny back lanes, skirting by farms, through hamlets, and over fields when necessary. The route he was taking made Longridge miles and miles farther away, but it was safer this way and she’d be glad they’d taken it. In Longridge, he said, no one would look at them twice. But until then, they had to keep off the road.

  She didn’t have a watch, but she knew it couldn’t be much more than eight or half past. It seemed later, but that was because they were tired, it was cold, and the food Nick had managed to bring back to the car park from the town had long since been consumed. There had been little enough of it in the first place—what could one reasonably be expected to purchase with less than three pounds?—and while they’d divided it evenly between them and talked about making it last until morning, they’d eaten the crisps first, moved on to the apples to quench their thirst, and devoured the small package of biscuits to answer their craving for a sweet. Nick had been smoking steadily since that time to take the edge off his hunger. Maggie had tried to ignore her own, which had been easy enough to do since it was more than convenient to concentrate on the bitter cold instead. Her ears ached with it.

  Nick was clambering over a drystone wall when Maggie said again, “It’s too early to stop, Nick. We haven’t gone nearly far enough. Where’re you going, anyway?”