Missing Joseph Part 8

"Yes. Ever since this started, you've been making that clear. And I'm sorry about that. Because I don't hate you."

"You're doing the same." Maggie swung back to her mother. "You preach about being good and not having babies and all the time you're doing no better than me. You do it with Mr. Shepherd. Everyone knows."

"Which is what this is all about, isn't it? You're thirteen years old. During your entire life I've never taken a lover. And you're bound and determined that I won't take one now. I'm to go on living solely for you, just as you're used to. Right?"

"No."

"And if you have to get pregnant to keep me in line, then that's just fine."

"No!"

"Because what is a baby after all, Maggie? Just something you can use to get what you want. You want Nick tied to you? Fine, give him s.e.x. You want Mummy preoccupied with your concerns? Good. Get yourself pregnant. You want everyone to notice how special you are? Open your legs for any bloke who sniffs you up. You want-"

Maggie grabbed up the vinegar and hurled the bottle to the floor where it exploded against the tile. Gla.s.s shards shot the length of the room. At once the air was eye-stingingly sour. Punkin hissed, backing into the canisters, his fur on end and his tail a plume.

"I'll love my baby," she cried. "I'll love it and take care of it and it'll love me. That's what babies do. That's all babies do. They love their mummies and their mummies love them."

Juliet Spence ran her eyes over the mess on the floor. Against the tiles-which were cream coloured-the vinegar looked like diluted blood.

"It's genetic." She sounded worn out. "My G.o.d in heaven, it's inbred at your core." She pulled out one of the kitchen chairs and sank onto it. She cupped her hands round the mug of tea. "Babies aren't love machines," she said to the mug. "They don't know how to love. They don't know what love is. They only have needs. Hunger, thirst, sleep, and wet nappies. And that's the end of it."

"It's not," Maggie said. "They love you. They make you feel good inside. They belong to you. One hundred percent. You can hold them and sleep with them and cuddle them close. And when they get big-"

"They break you in pieces. One way or another. It comes down to that."

Maggie rubbed the back of her wrist across her wet cheeks. "You just don't want me to have something to love. That's what it is. You can have Mr. Shepherd. That's fine and good for you. But I'm not supposed to have anything at all."

"Do you really believe that? You don't think you have me?"

"You're not enough, Mummy."

"I see."

Maggie picked up the cat and cradled it against her. She saw defeat and sorrow in her mother's posture: slumped into the seat with her long legs outstretched. She didn't care. She pressed the advantage. What did it matter? Mummy could get comfort from Mr. Shepherd if she felt hurt. "I want to know about Daddy."

Her mother said nothing. She merely turned the mug in her hands. On the table lay a packet of snapshots that they'd taken over Christmas, and she reached for this. The holiday had fallen before the inquest, and they'd worked hard at good spirits and happiness, trying to forget what frightening possibilities the future held for them both if Juliet stood trial. She flipped through the pictures, all of the two of them. It had always been that way, years and years of the two of them, a relations.h.i.+p that had brooked no interference from any third party.

Maggie watched her mother. She waited for an answer. She'd been waiting like this for all of her life, afraid to demand, afraid to push, overcome with guilt and apologies if her mother's reaction verged upon tears. But not tonight.

"I want to know about Daddy," she repeated.

Her mother said nothing.

"He isn't dead, is he? He's never been dead. He's been looking for me. That's why we've kept on the move."

"No."

"Because he wants me. He loves me. He wonders where I am. He thinks about me all the time. Doesn't he?"

"This is fantasy, Maggie."

"Doesn't he, Mummy? I want to know."

"What?"

"Who he is. What he does. What he looks like. Why we're not with him. Why we've never been with him."

"There's nothing to tell."

"I look like him, don't I? Because I don't look like you."

"This sort of discussion won't do anything to make you miss having a father."

"Yes it will. It will. Because I'll know. And if I want to find him-"

"You can't. He's gone."

"He isn't."

"Maggie, he is. And I won't talk about it. I won't make up a story. I won't tell you lies. He's gone from both our lives. He's always been gone. Right from the first."

Maggie's lips trembled. She tried to control them and failed. "He loves me. Daddy loves me. And if you'd let me find him, I could prove it to you."

"You want to prove it to yourself. That's all. And if you can't prove it with your father, you're set to prove it with Nick."

"No."

"Maggie, it's obvious."

"That isn't true! I love him. He loves me." She waited for her mother to respond. When Juliet did nothing more than give the mug of tea a half turn on the table, Maggie felt herself harden. A small black place seemed to grow on her heart. "If there's a baby, I'll have it. Do you hear me? Only I won't be like you. I won't have secrets. My baby'll know who her daddy is."

She swept past the table and out of the room. Her mother made no attempt to detain her. Her anger and righteousness carried her to the top of the stairs where she finally paused.

Below in the kitchen, she heard a chair sc.r.a.pe back. The water went on in the sink. The cup clinked against the porcelain. A cupboard opened. The patter of dry cat nibbles poured into a bowl. The bowl clicked on the floor.

After that, silence. And then a harsh gasp and the words "Oh G.o.d."

Juliet hadn't said a prayer for nearly fourteen years, not because she had been without the need for theurgy-there had, in fact, been times when she was desperate for it-but because she no longer believed in G.o.d. She had at one time. Daily prayer, attendance at church, heartfelt communication with a loving deity, were as much a part of her as were her organs, her blood, and her flesh. But she'd lost the blind faith so necessary to belief in the unknowable and the unknown when she began to realise that there was no justice, divine or otherwise, in a world in which the good were made to suffer torments while the bad went untouched. In her youth, she'd held on to the belief that there was a day of accounting for everyone. She had realised that perhaps she would not be made privy to the manner in which a sinner was brought before the bar of eternal justice, but brought before that bar he would be, in one form or another, in life or after death. Now she knew differently. There was no G.o.d who listened to prayers, righted wrongs, or attenuated suffering in any way. There was just the messy business of living, and of waiting for those ephemeral moments of happiness that made the living worthwhile. Beyond that, there was nothing, save the struggle to ensure that no one and nothing endangered the possibility of those moments' periodic advents in life.

She dropped two white towels onto the kitchen floor and watched the vinegar soak through them in growing blossoms of pink. While Punkin observed the entire operation from his perch on the work top, his expression solemn and his eyes unblinking, she dumped the towels in the sink and went for a broom and a mop. This latter was unnecessary-the towels had managed to absorb the mess and the broom would take care of the gla.s.s-but she had learned long ago that physical toil alleviated any bent towards rumination, which is why she worked in her greenhouse every day, clambered through the oak wood at dawn with her collection baskets, tended her vegetable garden with a zealot's devotion, and watched over her flowers more with need than with pride.

She swept up the gla.s.s and dumped it in the rubbish. She decided to forgo the mop. Better to scrub the tile floor on her hands and knees, feeling the dull circles of ache centring on her kneecaps and beginning to throb the length of her legs. Below physical labour on the list of activities designed to serve as subst.i.tutes for thought, resided physical pain. When labour and pain were conjoined by either chance or design, one's mental processes slowed to nothing. So she scrubbed the floor, pus.h.i.+ng the blue plastic pail before her, forcing her arm out in wide sweeping motions that strained her muscles, kneading wet rags against tile and grout with such energy that her breath became short. When the job was completed, perspiration made a damp semicircle round her hairline and she wiped it away with the arm of her turtleneck. Colin's scent was still on it: cigarettes and s.e.x, the private dark musk of his body when they loved.

She pulled the turtleneck over her head and dropped it on top of her pea jacket on the chair. For a moment, she told herself Colin was the problem. Nothing would have happened to alter the substance of their lives had not she, in an instant of egocentric need, given in to the hunger. Dormant for years, she had long ago stopped believing she had the capacity to feel desire for a man. When it came upon her without expectation or warning, she found herself without adequate defence.

She railed against herself for not having been stronger, for forgetting the lessons that parental discourses from her childhood-not to mention a lifetime of reading Great Books-had laid before her: Pa.s.sion leads inescapably to destruction, the only safety lies in indifference.

But none of this was Colin's fault. If he had sinned, it was only in loving and in the sweet blindness of that loving's devotion. She understood this. For she loved as well. Not Colin-because she would never be able to allow herself the degree of vulnerability necessary to allow a man to enter her life as an equal-but Maggie, for whom she felt all her lifeblood flowing, in a kind of anguished abandon that bordered on despair.

My child. My lovely child. My daughter. What wouldn't I do to keep you from harm.

But there was a limit to parental protection. It made itself known the moment the child struck out on a path of her own devising: touching the top of the cooker despite having heard the word no! a hundred thousand times, playing too near the river in winter when the water was high, pinching a nip of brandy or a cigarette. That Maggie was choosing-wilfully, deliberately, with an inchoate understanding of the consequences-to forge her way into adult s.e.xuality while she was still a child with a child's perceptions of the world, was the single act of adolescent rebellion that Juliet had not prepared herself to face. She'd thought about drugs, about raucous music, about drinking and smoking, about styles of dress and ways of cutting hair. She'd thought about make-up, arguments, curfews, and growing responsibility and you don't understand you're too old to understand, but she had never once thought about s.e.x. Not yet. There would be time to think of s.e.x later. Foolishly, she didn't connect it with the little girl who still had her mummy brush her hair in the morning, fixing back its long russet ma.s.s with an amber barrette.

She knew all the governing principles behind a child's progression from infant to autonomous adult. She'd read the books, determined to be the best possible mother. But how to deal with this? How to develop a delicate balancing act between fact and fiction to give Maggie the father she wanted and at the same time set her own mind at rest? And even if she was able to do that much for her daughter and herself-which she could not do and would not even consider doing, no matter the cost-what would Maggie have learned from her mother's capitulation: that s.e.x is not an expression of love between two people but a powerful ploy.

Maggie and s.e.x. Juliet didn't want to think about it. Over the years she'd grown more and more adept at the art of repression, refusing to dwell upon anything that evoked unhappiness or turmoil. She moved forward, she moved on, she kept her attention on the distant horizon where existed the promise of exploration in the form of new places and new experiences, where existed the promise of peace and sanctuary in the form of people who, through centuries of habit and custom, kept their distance from taciturn strangers. And until last August, Maggie had always been perfectly happy to keep her eyes on this horizon as well.

Juliet let the cat out and watched him disappear into the shadows cast by Cotes Hall. She went upstairs. Maggie's door was closed, but she didn't tap on it as she otherwise might on another sort of night, going in to sit on her daughter's bed, smoothing back her hair, allowing her fingertips to graze against that peach-soft skin. Instead, she went to her own room across the landing and took off the rest of her clothes in the darkness. In doing so on another sort of night, she might have thought about the pressure and warmth of Colin's hands on her body, allowing herself just five minutes to relive their lovemaking and recall the sight of him etched above her in the semidarkness of his room. But tonight, she moved like an automaton, grabbing up her woollen dressing gown and making her way to the bathroom to draw a bath.

You smell of it, too.

How could she in conscience counsel her daughter against a behaviour she engaged in-looked forward to, longed for-herself? The only way to do it was to give him up and then to move on as they had done in the past, no looking back, cutting every tie. It was the only answer. If the vicar's death had not been enough to bring her to her senses about what was and was not possible in her life-had she actually believed even for an instant that she might make a go of it as the loving wife of the local constable?-Maggie's relations.h.i.+p with Nick Ware would.

Mrs. Spence, my name is Robin Sage. I've come to talk to you about Maggie.

And she'd poisoned him. This compa.s.sionate man who had meant only good to her and her daughter. What kind of life could she hope to have in Winslough now when every heart doubted her, every whisper condemned her, and no one save the coroner himself had had the courage openly to ask how she had come to make such a fatal mistake.

She bathed slowly, permitting herself only the immediate physical sensations attendant to the act: the flannel on her skin, the steam rising round her, the water in rivulets between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. The soap smelled of roses, and she breathed its fragrance to obliterate all others. She wanted the bathing to wash away memory and to free her of pa.s.sion. She looked to it for answers. She asked it for equanimity.

I want to know about Daddy.

What can I tell you, my dearest love? That running his fingers through your downy hair meant nothing. That the sight of your eyelashes lying like feathery shadows against your cheeks when you slept did not make him want to hold you close. That your grubby hand clutching a dripping ice lolly would never have made him laugh with delight and dismay. That your place in his life was quiet and sleeping in the rear seat of a car with no muss and no fuss and no demands, please. That you were never as real to him as he was to himself. You were not the centre of his world. How can I tell you that, Maggie? How can I be the one to destroy your dream?

Her limbs felt heavy as she towelled herself off. Her arm seemed weighted as she brushed her hair. The bathroom mirror wore a thin skin of steam, and she watched the movements of her silhouette in it, a faceless image whose only definition was dusky hair fast going to grey. The rest of her body she could not see in reflection, but she knew it well enough. It was strong and durable, firm of flesh and unafraid of hard work. It was a peasant's body, made for the easy delivery of children. And there should have been many. They should have tumbled round her feet and cluttered the house with their mates and belongings. They should have played, learned to read, skinned their knees, broken windows, and wept their confusion at life's inconsistencies in her arms.

But there had been only one life given into her care and one chance to mould that life into maturity.

Had it been her failure, she wondered not for the first time. Had she let parental vigilance lapse in the cause of her own desires?

She set her hairbrush on the edge of the basin and went across the landing to the closed door of her daughter's room. She listened. No light shone from beneath the door, so she turned the k.n.o.b quietly and entered.

Maggie was asleep, and she did not awaken when the dim oblong of light from the landing fell across her bed. As she so often did, she'd kicked off the blankets, and she was curled on her side, her knees drawn up, a child-woman wearing pink pyjamas with the top two b.u.t.tons of the jacket missing so that the crescent of a full breast showed, the nipple an aureole flushed against her white skin. She'd taken her stuffed elephant from the bookcase on which he'd resided since their coming to Winslough. He lay in a lump bunched into her stomach, his legs sticking straight out like a soldier's at attention and his old mangled trunk prehensile no longer, but loved down to a stub from years of wear and tear.

Juliet eased the blankets back over her daughter and stood gazing down at her. The first steps, she thought, that odd, teetering baby walk of hers as she discovered what it was to be upright, clutching onto a handful of Mummy's trousers and grinning at the miracle of her own awkward gait. And then the run, hair flapping and flying and chubby arms extended, full of confidence that Mummy would be there with her own arms outstretched to catch and to hold. That way of sitting, legs splayed out stiffly with the feet pointing northeast and northwest. That utterly unconscious posture of squatting, scooting her compact little body closer to the ground to pick a wildflower or examine a bug.

My child. My daughter. I don't have all the answers for you, Margaret. Most of the time I feel that I'm merely an older version of a child myself. I'm afraid, but I cannot show you my fear. I despair, but I cannot share my sorrow. You see me as strong-the master of my life and my fate-while all the time I feel as though at any moment the unmasking will occur and the world will see me-and you will see me- as I really am, weak and riven by doubt. You want me to be understanding. You want me to tell you how things are going to be. You want me to make things right-life right-by waving the wand of my indignation over injustice and over your hurts, and I can't do that. I don't even know how.

Mothering isn't something one learns, Maggie. It's something one does. It doesn't come naturally to any woman because there is nothing natural about having a life completely dependent upon one's own. It's the only kind of employment that exists in which one can feel so utterly necessary and at the same moment so entirely alone. And in moments of crisis-like this one, Maggie-there is no sagacious volume in which one looks up answers and thus discovers how to prevent a child from harming herself.

Children do more than steal one's heart, my dear. They steal one's life. They elicit the worst and the best that we have to offer, and in return they offer their trust. But the cost of all this is insurmountably high and the rewards are small and long in coming.

And at the end, when one prepares to release the infant, the child, the adolescent into adulthood, it is with the hope that what remains behind is something bigger-and more-than Mummy's empty arms.

Wha t Follows Suspicion

CHAPTER SIX.

HE SINGLE MOST PROMISING sign was that when he reached out to touch her-smoothing his hand along the bare pathway of her spine-she neither flinched nor shrugged off the caress in irritation. This gave him hope. True, she neither spoke to him nor discontinued her dressing, but at the moment Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley was willing to accept anything that wasn't an outright rejection leading to her departure. It was, he thought, decidedly the down side of intimacy with a woman. If there was supposed to be a happilyever-after a.s.sociated with falling in love and having that love returned, he and Helen Clyde had not yet managed to find it.

Early days, he tried to tell himself. They were still unused to the role of lover in each other's life after having, for more than fifteen years, been resolutely living the role of friend. Still, he wished she would stop dressing and come back to bed where the sheets were still warm from her body and the scent of her hair still clung to his pillow.

She hadn't switched on a lamp. Nor had she opened the curtains to the watery morning light of a London winter. But despite these facts, he could see her plainly in what little sun managed to seep first through the clouds and then through the curtains. Even if this had not been the case, he had long ago committed to memory her face, each one of her gestures, and every part of her body. Had the room been dark, he could have described with his hands the curve of her waist, the precise angle at which she dipped her head a moment before she shook back her hair, the shape of her calves, her heels, and her ankles, the swell of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

He had loved before, more often in his thirty-six years than he would have liked to admit to anyone. But never before had he felt such a curious, utterly Neanderthal need to master and possess a woman. For the last two months since Helen had become his lover, he'd been telling himself that this need would dissolve if she agreed to marry him. The desire to dominate-and to have her submit-could hardly flourish in an atmosphere of power sharing, equality, and dialogue. And if these were the hallmarks of the sort of relations.h.i.+p he wanted with her, then the part of him that needed to control how things would be in the here and now was the part of him that was going to have to be immolated soon.

The problem was that even now when he knew that she was upset, when he knew the reason why and could not begin with any degree of honesty to fault her for it, he still found himself irrationally wanting to browbeat her into a submissive and apologetic admission of error, one for which the most logical expiation would be her willing return to bed. Which was, in and of itself, the second and more imperative problem. He'd awakened at dawn, aroused by the warmth of her sleeping body pressed against his. He'd run his hand along the curve of her hip, and even in sleep she'd turned into his arms to make slow, early-in-the-morning love. Afterwards, they'd lain among the pillows and the tousled blankets, and with her head on his chest and her hand on his breast and her chestnut hair spilling like silk between his fingers, she'd said: "I can hear your heart."

To which he'd answered: "I'm glad. That means you've not broken it yet."

To which she'd chuckled, gently bitten his nipple, then yawned and asked her question.

To which, like the utterly besotted fool he was, he'd given an answer. No prevarication. No equivocation. Just a hem and a haw, a clearing of the throat, and then the truth. From which rose their argument-if the accusation of "objectifying women, objectifying me, me, Tommy, whom you claim to love" could be called an argument. From which rose Helen's present determination to be dressed and be gone without further discussion. Not in anger, to be sure, but in yet another instance of her need to "think things out for myself."

G.o.d, how s.e.x makes fools of us, he thought. One moment of release, and a lifetime to regret it. And the h.e.l.l of it was that, as he watched her dressing-hooking together the bits of silk and lace that posed as women's underwear- he felt the heat and tightening of his own desire. His body was itself the most d.a.m.ning evidence of the basic truth behind her indictment of him. For him, the curse of being male seemed to be entrenched inextricably in dealing with the aggressive, mindless, animal hunger that made a man want a woman no matter the circ.u.mstances and sometimes-to his shame-because of the circ.u.mstances, as if a half hour's successful seduction were actually proof of something beyond the body's ability to betray the mind.

"Helen," he said.

She walked to the serpentine chest of drawers and used his heavy silver-backed brush to see to her hair. A small cheval mirror stood in the midst of his family photographs, and she adjusted it from his height to hers.

He didn't want to argue with her, but he felt compelled to defend himself. Unfortunately, because of the subject she'd chosen for their disagreement-or if the truth be admitted, the subject which his behaviour and then his words had ultimately propelled her into choosing-his only defence appeared to have its roots in a thorough examination of her. Her past, after all, was no more unsullied than was his own.

"Helen," he said, "we're two adults. We have history together. But we each have separate histories as well, and I don't think we gain anything by making the mistake of forgetting that. Or by making judgements based upon situations that might have existed prior to our involvement with each other. I mean, this current involvement. The physical aspect." Inwardly, he grimaced at his b.u.mbling attempt at putting an end to their contretemps. G.o.d-d.a.m.n it, we're lovers, he wanted to say. I want you, I love you, and you b.l.o.o.d.y well feel the same about me. So stop being so blasted sensitive about something which has nothing whatsoever to do with you, or how I feel about you, or what I want from you and with you for the rest of our lives. Is that clear, Helen? Is it? Is it clear? Good. I'm glad of it. Now get back into bed.

She replaced the hairbrush, rested her hand upon it, and didn't turn from the chest of drawers. She hadn't yet put on her shoes, and Lynley took additional, if tenuous, hope from that. As he did from the certainty of his belief that she no more wanted any form of estrangement between them than did he. To be sure, Helen was exasperated with him-perhaps only marginally more than he was exasperated with himself-but she hadn't written him off entirely. Surely she could be made to see reason, if only through being urged to consider how in the past two months he himself could have easily misconstrued her own erstwhile romantic attachments should he ever have been so idiotic as to evoke the spectral presence of her former lovers as she had done with his. She would argue, of course, that she wasn't concerned with his former lovers at all, that she hadn't, as a matter of fact, even brought them up. It was women in general and his att.i.tude towards them and the great ho-ho-ho-I'm-havinganother-hot-one-tonight that she believed was implied by the act of draping a tie on the outer k.n.o.b of his bedroom door.

He said, "I haven't lived as a celibate any more than have you. We've always known that about each other, haven't we?"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It's just a fact. And if we start trying to walk a tightrope between the past and the future in our life together, we're going to fall off. It can't be done. What we have is now. Beyond that, the future. To my way of thinking, that ought to be our primary concern."

"This has nothing to do with the past, Tommy."

"It does. You said not ten minutes ago that you felt just like 'his lords.h.i.+p's squalid little Sunday-night score.'"

"You've misunderstood my concern."

"Have I?" He leaned over the edge of the bed and scooped up his dressing gown which had fallen to the floor in a heap of blue paisley sometime during the night. "Are you angrier about a tie on the door k.n.o.b-"

"About what the tie implies."

"-or more specifically about the fact that, by my own extremely cretinous admission, it's a device I've used before?"