On Loving Josiah
Page 32
On the very same morning they went to fetch Thomas, Eve and Josiah paid a visit to the gutted barn near Caldecott. It was windy and raining.
‘I once set fire to a few schools in Cambridge,’ confided Eve, and they walked up the lane from the lay-by.
‘You never told me you were an arsonist, too.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Eve. ‘Though I never found out if I was a very good one. Was there some huge commotion after I left, can you remember? I mean, was your school still standing?’
‘I think so,’ said Josiah.
‘I once wrote a letter to this arsehole called June Briggs. She never replied.’
‘She is an arsehole, isn’t she?’ said Josiah, smiling.
‘The thing about fire is that it goes on burning in your head. Did you find that?’
‘I used to come back here, even before they found out it was me. I wanted to re-imagine it.’
‘In my own head the fires burned for days, months. I wasn’t left in peace a single night.’
‘But my fire gave me peace,’ said Josiah.
‘Didn’t you find, Josiah, that in the one simple gesture of throwing a match everything is contained, every layer of feeling that ever existed, every unacknowledged truth?’
‘Mother, I did.’
‘Ah!’ exclaimed Eve, admiringly, when they reached what was left of the barn. ‘It rather reminds me of Jervaulx. These great, black, charred structures are wonderful. Do you think a ruin has a greater soul if it’s left to the weather for hundreds of years or created in an instant?’
‘Do you really think this old barn has a soul?’ asked Josiah.
‘Darling,’ said his mother, tenderly, ‘it has yours.’
Love is, perhaps, the ultimate mystery. Who knows why we love those we do? Who knows what need, what hunger, what hope possesses us when we finally admit to loving another? Love is a kind of stretching out and touching something other, something beyond us, and therefore beyond our comprehension.
Thomas Marius had loved Eve once, not that she knew it; had gazed at her across the table in the University Library and yearned to be noticed by her. Does a mouth, a gesture, an act etch itself forever into our very being, and hold itself there long after any conscious memory of it?
He stood there at the gates of Bedford Prison, thin and hunched and pale, looking out for the Probation Officer who’d been visiting him for the last month or two. He wasn’t expecting a camper van. Even when it drew up within yards of him, the blonde hair, the waving, the smiling, took a while to impress themselves upon him.
Those two swooped upon him like angels, and they sat him between them on the front seat, and they said, ‘Where to, Thomas? You say.’
About the Author
OLIVIA FANE was born in 1960, studied Classics at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and trained as a probation officer. She went on to work as a psychiatric social worker with young offenders in Cambridge and now lives with her husband and five sons in West Sussex. Her first novel, Landing on Clouds, was received with critical acclaim, winning a Betty Trask prize, and her second and third novels, The Glorious Flight of Perdita Tree, and God’s Apology were published to excellent reviews by the Maia Press.
Copyright
First published in 2011
by Arcadia Books, 15-16 Nassau Street, London, W1W 7AB
This ebook edition first published in 2011
All rights reserved
© Olivia Fane, 2011
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ISBN 978–1–908129–69–7