by Olivia Fane
Thomas put his hands on Josiah’s shoulders and steered a path through his fellow-tourists, of whom he was still quite oblivious. When Thomas was satisfied with a clear view of the adjacent wall, he began again at full volume: ‘Now take a look at what constitutes a good Government! How wonderful is that, the private virtues are all public virtues, when o when did we lose sight of such an obvious truth?’
An official tour was now congregating around the entrance to the room, and if at first the English guide – a most genteel and well-spoken lady in a cardigan with pearl buttons – was on the point of interrupting Thomas, she suddenly recognized his passion and respected it, and told her dozen or so British charges that he might be worth listening to. So Josiah and Thomas stood side by side, in wonder at the great frescoes of Lorenzetti, and a crowd gathered behind him while he spoke:
‘Now, Josiah, look at this Italian framing the border… I shall translate it for you. “This holy virtue, Justice, where she rules leads many spirits to unity. And they, gathered together, make a common good for God.” That is the thing about absolutes. Without them, we shall always be divided, there will always be wars.’
‘What a load of bunkum!’ piped up an English voice behind him. ‘Wars happen because people believe in absolutes.’ The speaker, who was young, bearded and insistent, began muttering about the Middle East, but Thomas barely gave him a second glance, nor the tour guide either, who by now was keen to intervene, and was tactfully trying to catch Thomas’s eye.
‘Justice is intuited at three years old, but we need another thirty years to understand it. First we must know temperance, fortitude and magnanimity. And look here at the figure of Peace –’
‘I love her!’ enthused the tour guide,
‘She’s fat!’ denounced Thomas’ enemy.
‘But she understands a thing or two,’ said Thomas. ‘And she’s stronger than you think. Peace and Concord! We must read Cicero, Josiah!’
Thomas’ voice displayed a new crescendo of excitement as he stood back to admire the fruits of Good Government: tall painted houses with balconies and large windows, pot plants and bird-cages, cobblers’ shops. ‘And a schoolmaster with his pupils! And that man’s selling kitchenware and wine-jugs…’
The tour guide stepped forward. ‘If you don’t mind,’ she began, gesturing towards the group of tourists behind her, ‘I’ll take over now, thank you very much.’
Thomas, visibly wounded, took a step backwards and said, ‘But I still have to show my son the countryside!’
‘By all means,’ said the guide, as though it were nothing to do with her, and she took her coterie back to the burning city behind her, back to the ruin and destruction ruled over by tyranny, where the only trade was in arms. Her voice was high-pitched and full of historical detail about the wars which would have been confronting Siena at the time; but Thomas took Josiah away from all that, and put his arm about his shoulders and said, sotto voce, as though he were telling the boy an intimate secret, ‘Take a look at this, Joe, you asked about farming, didn’t you? This is why it’s a subject for poetry!’
This time they were quiet. They stood together, side by side, an island far away from the crowd about them. In the foreground of the fresco are reapers, and a peasant taking his pig to market; there are noblemen setting out for their castles; donkeys laden with bales of wool, heading for the weaver’s shop in the city; a packhorse bridge over a river and a river flowing to a lake; in the background wheat is being gathered in and the hillsides are furrowed; there are prosperous farmsteads, and far in the distance a myriad of palaces with towers and crenellated walls. Then suddenly Josiah spotted a tiny white chapel on the brow of a hill.
‘That’s our chapel,’ he whispered to Thomas.
And Thomas replied, ‘Let’s go home.’
This time, they didn’t bother to take the bus. Somehow, it was too hot. Walking out of the city gates to hit the main Siena bypass wasn’t quite the experience those hunters on their noble steeds had promised it would be, but it was good enough for them. And Josiah did say, in appreciation of it, that if you spent your whole life looking at pictures and then walked out into the real world, what a weird and amazing place that world would seem.
‘For the thing we have which paintings don’t have is air,’ he said. ‘Air is hot or cool or damp or dry, air can blow over you or stultify you. Not only that, we breathe it in the whole time. And breathe it out. Like we’re breathing in the whole world, without realising it.’
‘In Latin you breathe out your spirit when you die, animam exhalare, or there’s a rather good phrase, exhalare mortiferum spiritum, to exhale your death-bearing spirit.’
‘Then can you do the opposite? Animam inhalare volo, inhalare vitaferum spiritum. I hope you got that. I want to inhale life-bringing spirit.’
‘You do that already, Josiah. Any more and you’d be dangerous.’
‘Have you ever lived dangerously?’
Thomas took the question seriously. They were negotiating a short cut over barbed wire to get out into the open countryside. ‘The truth is, not dangerously enough. I’ve been living in a flat-paged book. This air business is good for me.’
Thomas hadn’t bought a map with him; things hadn’t turned out quite how he’d thought they would, not that he was in the mood for caring. It was really too hot to care about anything.
‘Northern climes make people live too much in their heads,’ he said.
‘What?’ asked Josiah.
‘It’s not important,’ Thomas said to himself, and then to Josiah, ‘Wait.’
Josiah stood patiently, looking up at his mentor, Siena and her traffic murmuring beneath them. Thomas brushed the boy’s fringe aside with his hand and said, ‘You’ve caught the sun. You look well.’
Even Josiah was abashed and turned away.
‘No, look at me, Josiah. You are exquisitely beautiful. You are the pulse of life, not just mine, but all life. One day you’re going to make someone supremely happy.’
‘What about you?’
Thomas laughed. ‘I don’t count,’ he said. They walked on. Thomas was leading, though he didn’t know it. For a while they followed a path, but when the path petered out they followed a line of cypresses over a hill and walked down into the valley. A stream took them to a small lake, and they both swam naked, shamelessly, and lay on the bank to dry like washing.
‘I don’t think we’ll go back to Siena,’ said Thomas.
‘I thought we were going to the Palio.’
‘There’s no need. It’s just a horse race. We won’t be missed.’
‘I don’t get it,’ said Josiah.
Thomas rolled over to kiss Josiah and sighed. ‘One day you will.’
They didn’t get back to the chapel for three days. It was as though they were both under a spell which neither of them wished to break; there were no ‘oughts’ or ‘have tos’, no maps, of course, so they never took the wrong path. When they came to a village they sat outside under vines, eating large bowls of pasta and drinking red wine, yet Bacchus never took advantage of them, only let them sleep like babes under large acanthus leaves, hand in hand. At night they would find a decent haystack to sleep in, climbing up to the top and covering themselves with a duvet of hay. They would kiss, like a father and a son, a husband and a wife, a lover and his beloved, and every night they would somehow contrive a position which brought their sleeping bodies, if it were possible, even closer together.
There were the stars, of course. Josiah told Thomas that he’d never actually seen stars before, not a thousand billion of them, not like this. He’d never even known what darkness was like, and how black it was. Thomas told Josiah how the Romans believed there were sixteen celestial regions, each inhabited by some deity that took an interest in human affairs. They were an immensely superstitious lot, he said, far more interested in the art of astrology than the science of astronomy. Occasionally there was even a celestial marriage. And everything that happened amongst the stars somehow
left its mark among men.
‘Do you believe in destiny, Josiah? Do you believe that our future is already mapped out for us? Should we even bother to defy it?’
Josiah didn’t answer him the first time Thomas asked that question. But as August wore on, and the rhythmical meander of days became a march, and even vast constellations of stars followed their fixed course across the night sky, time began to matter again. No swimming, no reading of poetry, no Latin conversation, in which, incidentally, the two were getting superbly fluent, could compensate for the fact that the end was in sight.
It was the night before their return to Cambridge. They’d been swimming till late, and were now suffering for it, both shivering under blankets with their backs up against the still warm wall of their chapel.
‘I think we should stay here,’ said Josiah. ‘We don’t have to go back. No one’s making us go back.’
‘Life goes on. That’s not something we should be afraid of.’
‘But I am afraid,’ said Josiah.
‘We’ll still have weekends. And the holidays. Nothing’s going to change. We’re not going to die the moment we set foot in England. And as long as you’re not dead, and I’m not dead, how could things ever be different?’
‘What if they are? What if they’re terribly different?’
‘Come closer to me, Jo.’
And all night long, those two shivered into each other; neither could relinquish the stars. Thomas kissed Josiah’s cheeks, his mouth, his hair; and he told him that he loved him and would always love him, and that that, at least, would never change.
Chapter Thirteen
THEY WERE WAITING FOR THEM at the airport: four police officers, three social workers. Thomas suffered his fate humbly. Josiah could see his wrists, but not his face. He saw his wrists because Thomas held them up meekly to be handcuffed; but though he hungered for some reassuring glance, some conspiratorial understanding between them which might say, ‘These idiots, what do they know about us? What do they know about anything?’ Thomas gave him nothing. For even while they were on the plane, the air they were breathing in felt unreal, manufactured and bottled in canisters, a perfect temperature, a perfect pressure, evil stuff. The air separated them from what they had known, and because that knowledge had been transmitted via their skin rather than their intelligence, and because that kind of knowledge can never be written down or even talked about, it is liable to be forgotten, cast aside as a dream, as an illusion, when perhaps in the final counting of things it is as close to truth as we shall ever be.
The police investigation had been a straightforward one. By midday on the morning of Josiah’s abrupt departure on the first of August, they knew both the name of the man who had abducted him (there was even a note of it on Josiah’s file; June Briggs had always had her suspicions) and the time of their flight to Florence. They had interviewed Thomas Marius’ elderly neighbour (whose address Josiah had written in the signing-out book) and she confirmed that the boy whose photograph they showed her had indeed been a regular visitor at his house. She also told them that Dr Marius had had a lodger from the university, though regretted that she had never learnt his name. ‘The modern world!’ she sighed, as she twisted the corner of a cushion in her arthritic fingers, ‘All comes to no good in it! I should have suspected something bad was going on! I’m so sorry, gentlemen!’
By the afternoon, they had traced Greg Wright through the University Lodgings Syndicate; he was a more than happy witness. When the trail ran cold in Florence – after calling over fifty hotels and guest houses in the city – June Briggs hit upon the idea of visiting Josiah’s father in hospital. She was adamant that such an interview should be conducted with the utmost sensitivity; Gibson Nelson was not a well man, and had found, according to Daphne Field, the ward sister, his son’s visits acutely stressful. Nonetheless, if anyone could throw light on their whereabouts, surely it was Gibson; indeed, his role as their confidant might well have been the trigger for his recent intense bouts of weeping, which were as mysterious and as deep as groans coming out of a mountain. They all said to each other how notoriously difficult such cases were: the rights of a son to see his father, of a father to see his son; and now, should a sick man be protected from such terrible news as his own son’s abduction? Or were a child’s rights always paramount?
In this case, everyone was keen to see justice done. They needed information. June Briggs assigned two of her most experienced social workers to accompany a police officer to the hospital. The interview was sensitively and professionally conducted, but Gibson was not helpful, and told them nothing. He heaved and rocked, and was often short of breath. Within an hour of their departure he had had an aneurysm, and was admitted to Addenbrookes hospital. Early the following morning he was dead.
Gibson’s death was sobering. The police made inquiries at Corpus, but the Fellows there had never even heard of the boy Josiah, and did not know where Dr Marius was spending his summer. So in the end they decided to be patient. After all, there was no one to speak up for the poor boy, no tearful parents parading their loss on TV, and above all, there were no leads. The chances were, the man was a paedophile, not a murderer. They would simply catch him at the airport on their return journey.
The last time Josiah and June Briggs had come face to face was on that fateful morning eight years previously when she had taken him away from his parents and his home. Josiah didn’t remember, of course. He had been busy looking forward to his first day at school, not looking at the lady at the steering wheel. Likewise, June had barely registered Josiah: all she knew of that pale, earnest boy was that he had been both neglected and probably abused by his parents. Eve’s subsequent disappearance had only served to vindicate her suspicions: what mother could do that to her child? June was unaccustomed to feelings of a personal nature, so she surprised herself when she took Josiah’s hand into her own at the airport and gave it a wholesome pat.
‘Don’t worry, Josiah,’ she said to him, while he watched Thomas being taken away by the four policemen. ‘Things have a way of coming out all right in the end. The important thing is, you’re safe.’
Josiah would have preferred a snake bite and snatched his hand away.
Angela Day said, ‘You just don’t know how worried we’ve been about you. We all have. The younger children have been really upset.’
Kevin was Josiah’s latest field social worker. They hadn’t even met yet. He was sensitive enough not to introduce himself; he just said: ‘Right. Let’s get out of here.’
These three had previously decided that the most comfortable and appropriate place to debrief Josiah was in Angela Day’s private sitting-room at The Hollies. The police interviews, they had suggested, could wait until the following day. As he was still a minor, they were legally entitled to record Josiah without his knowledge, and this they fully intended to do. The police could then hear the tape before carrying on with their own interrogation.
The journey back to Cambridge took a mere forty minutes, during which not a word was spoken by any of them. Angela sat in the back of the car with Josiah, but Josiah turned his whole body away from her, and kept his face up against the window, as though the view between Stansted and Cambridge was one of the most fascinating in the world.
No one in The Hollies had been told to expect Josiah: so the elder children had gone into the centre of town to ‘doss’ while the younger ones had been taken on a trip to Linton Zoo. The house felt eerily empty; the windows were all open, and a breeze was blowing crisp packets across the stained carpet.
Angela Day said, ‘Come upstairs, let me get you some tea. Josiah, will you have a cup?’ Upstairs Angela unlocked the door which said ‘Private’, and they all went in. On a low table was a bowl of sugar and a box of tissues, ready for Josiah’s tears; round it were placed a sofa and two armchairs, in one of which June Briggs had already made herself at home. She was fiddling with the small tape recorder in her bag. Josiah was staring out of the window, his elbows leaning
on the sill. Angela was boiling a kettle in the kitchenette, and shouted out to them, ‘Does everyone take milk?’
‘Thank you,’ said Kevin. The other two ignored her, so Angela put a little jug of milk on the tray along with a comforting brown tea-pot of Tetleys and four mugs.
‘It’s a nice sitting-room they give you,’ said June. ‘I suppose they’ve got to give you some perks in this job.’
Angela sat down on the sofa and began pouring the tea.
‘I like it here,’ she said.
Kevin sat down beside her, and rummaged around in his briefcase: what for, no one ever knew, for he never found it.
‘Josiah, come and sit down, love,’ said June. To everyone’s faint surprise, he did. He took a cup of tea from the tray and added sugar.
They all felt encouraged, and smiled benignly. June switched the recorder on.
‘The first thing we want you to know,’ she said, ‘is that we absolutely don’t blame you for what happened. You have nothing to fear. Do you understand that?’
‘What do you mean, I have nothing to fear? How do you know what I fear?’ Josiah spoke easily; Kevin was impressed.
‘The small matter of duplicating keys, stealing your passport, absconding… you won’t get into trouble for any of it. In fact, we don’t even blame you for any of it.’
‘Is that what you think I fear?’
‘Then what do you fear?’
Josiah said nothing.
‘We need your account of what happened, Josiah. How long have you known this man?’
Josiah looked away.
‘How did you meet him?’
Silence.
‘Then let me tell you. You met him outside your school at the beginning of February. He offered to teach you Latin, and for a while you used to come on Saturday mornings. The lessons turned into days, into weekends, into holidays. Isn’t that how it was?’