Missing Joseph (26 page)

“Nothing.”

“What did he say? What did he do?”

“We just talked. We ate some Jaffa Cakes. Polly made tea.”

“She was there?”

“Yes. She's always—”

“In the room?”

“No. But—”

“What did you talk about?”

“Stuff.”

“Such as?”

“School. God.” Mummy made a noise through her nose. Maggie countered it with “He asked did I ever go to London? Do I think I'd like to see it? He said I'd like London. He said he's been there lots. He even went for a two days' holiday last week. He says people who get tired of London oughtn't be alive. Or something like that.”

Mummy didn't reply. Instead, she watched her hands grating and grating and grating some cheese. So fast she held the block of cheddar that her knuckles were white. But not as white as her face.

Maggie felt comfortable with the advantage indicated by Mummy's silence, and she pressed it. “He said we might go to London sometime on an excursion with the youth group. He said there's families in London who'd let us stay so we wouldn't even have to find a hotel. He said London's grand and we could go to museums and see the Tower and go to Hyde Park and have lunch at Harrod's. He said—”

“Go to your room.”

“Mummy!”

“You heard me.”

“But I was only—”

Mummy's hand stopped her words. It moved in less than an eye-blink to slap her face. Shock and surprise, far more than pain, brought the tears to her eyes. Anger came with them, as did the desire to hurt back in kind.

“He's my friend,” she cried. “He's my friend and we talk and you don't want him to like me. You never want me to have any friends at all. That's why we move, isn't it? Over and over. So no one will like me. So I'll always be alone. And if Daddy—”

“Stop it!”

“I won't, I won't! If Daddy finds me, I'll go with him. I will. Wait and see. You won't be able to stop me, no matter what.”

“I wouldn't depend on that, Margaret.”

Then Mr. Sage died, just four days later. Who was really responsible? And what was the crime?

“Mummy's good,” she said in a low voice to Nick. “She didn't mean anything bad to happen to the vicar.”

“I believe you, Mag,” Nick replied. “But someone round here doesn't.”

“What if they put her on trial? What if she goes to gaol?”

“I'll take care of you.”

“Truly?”

“A fact.”

He sounded strong and certain. He
was
strong and certain. He felt good to be near. She worked one arm round his waist and rested her head on his chest.

“I want us to be like this always,” she said.

“Then that's the way it'll be.”

“Really?”

“Really. You're my number one, Mag. You're the only one. Don't worry about your mum.”

She slid her hand from his knee to his thigh. “Cold,” she said and snuggled closer to him. “You cold, Nick?”

“Bit. Yeah.”

“I can warm you nice.”

She could feel his smile. “Bet you can at that.”

“Want me to?”

“Wouldn't say no.”

“I can. I like to.” She did it just the way he had shown her, her hand making the slow, sinuous friction. She could feel It growing hard in response. “Feel good, Nick?”

“Hmm.”

She rubbed the heel of her hand from base to tip. Then her fingers lightly retraced the pathway. Nick gave a shaky sigh. He stirred.

“What?”

He was reaching in his jacket. There was crackling in his hand. “Got this from one of the blokes,” he said. “We can't do it any more without a Durex, Mag. It's crazy. Too risky.”

She kissed his cheek and then his neck. Her fingers sank between his legs where she remembered he felt the most. He lost his breath in a groan.

He lay back on the cot. He said, “We got to use the Durex this time.”

She worked the zip of his blue jeans, worked the jeans below his hips. She slipped off her tights, lay down next to him, and lifted her skirt.

“Mag, we got to use—”

“Not yet, though, Nick. In a minute. All right?”

She draped a leg over his. She began to kiss him. She began to caress and caress and caress It without using her hands.

“That good?” she whispered.

His head was thrown back. His eyes were closed. He moaned for reply.

A minute was more than enough time, she found.

St. James sat in the bedroom's only chair, an overstuffed wingback. Aside from the bed, it was the most comfortable piece of furniture he'd yet to encounter at Crofters Inn. He drew his dressing gown round him against the pervasive chill descending from the glass of the bedroom's two skylights and settled himself.

Behind the closed door of the bathroom, he could hear Deborah splashing away in the tub. She usually hummed or sang as she bathed, for some reason invariably choosing either Cole Porter or one of the Gershwins and rendering them with the enthusiasm of an undiscovered Edith Piaf and all the talent of a street hawker. She couldn't carry a tune if King's College Choir were trying to assist her. Tonight, however, she bathed in silence.

Normally, he would have welcomed any extended interlude between “Anything Goes” and “Summertime,” especially if he was trying to read in their bedroom while she was paying tribute to old American musicals in the adjoining bath. But tonight he would have preferred to hear her cheerful dissonance rather than listen to her quiet bathing and be forced to consider not only how best to interrupt it but also whether he wanted to do so.

Aside from a brief skirmish over tea, they'd declared and maintained an unspoken truce upon her return from her extended tramp on the moors that morning. It had been easy enough to effect, with Mr. Sage's death to consider and Lynley's arrival to anticipate. But now that Lynley was with them and the machinery of an investigation oiled and ready, St. James found that his thoughts kept returning to the unease in his marriage and what he himself was doing to contribute to it.

Where Deborah was all passion, he was all reason. He had liked to believe this basic difference in their natures constituted the bedrock of fire and ice upon which their marriage was soundly fixed. But they had entered an arena in which his ability to reason seemed not only a disadvantage but also the very spark that ignited her refusal to approach conflict in any way other than pig-headedly. The words
about this adoption business, Deborah
were enough to send up every one of her defences against him. She moved from anger to accusation to tears with such dizzying speed that he didn't know where to begin to contend with it or with her. And because of this, when discussions concluded with her banging out of the room, the house, or this morning the hotel, he more often breathed a sigh of relief than did he wonder what he himself could do to approach the problem from another angle. I tried, he would think, when the reality was that he'd gone through the motions without trying much at all.

He rubbed the stiff muscles at the base of his neck. They were always the primary indicator of the amount of stress he was currently refusing to acknowledge. He shifted in the chair. His dressing gown slid partially open with his movement. The cold air climbed his good right leg and forced his attention to his left, which as always felt nothing. He made a disinterested observation of it, an activity in which he'd engaged only rarely in the past several years, but one which he'd obsessively pursued day after day in the years before his marriage.

The object was always the same: to inspect the muscles for their degree of atrophy, intent upon fending off the disintegration that was the eventual by-product of paralysis. He'd regained the use of his left arm over time and through months of teeth-grating physical therapy. But the leg had been a different creature altogether, resistant to every effort at rehabilitation, like a soldier unable to heal from psychic war wounds as if they alone could prove he'd seen action.

“Many of the workings of the brain are still veiled in mystery,” the doctors had said in contemplative explanation of why the use of his arm would return but not that of his leg. “When the head undergoes as serious an injury as yours did, the prognosis for a full recovery has to be couched in the most guarded terms.”

Which was their way of beginning the list of perhapses. Perhaps he would regain complete use of it over time. Perhaps he would walk unassisted one day. Perhaps he would awaken one morning and have sensation restored, flexing muscles, moving toes, and bending the knee. But after twelve years, it wasn't likely. So he held on to what was left after the first four years of obstinate delusion had been stripped away: the appearance of normality. As long as he could keep atrophy from doing its worst to the muscles, he'd declare himself satisfied and dismiss the dream.

He'd fended off the disintegration with electrical current. The fact that this was an act of vanity was something which he never denied, telling himself that it wasn't such a sin to want to look like a perfect physical specimen, even if he could no longer be one.

Still, he hated the oddity of his gait, and despite the number of years that he had lived with it, he sometimes still grew momentarily sticky on the palms when exposed to the curiosity in a stranger's eyes.
Different
, they said,
not quite one of us
. And while he was different in the limited fashion described by his disability and he couldn't deny it, in a stranger's presence it was always underscored—even for an instant—a hundredfold.

We have certain expectations of people, he thought as he idly evaluated the leg. They'll be able to walk, to talk, to see, and to hear. If they can't—or if they do it in a way that defies our preconceived notions about them—we label them, we shy away from contact, we force them to want to be part of a whole that is in itself without distinction.

The water in the bathroom began to drain, and he glanced at the door, wondering if that's what was at the root of the difficulty he and his wife were having. She wanted what was her due, the norm. He had long believed normality had little intrinsic value.

He pushed himself to his feet and listened to her movements. The surge of water told him she had just stood. She would be stepping out of the tub, reaching for a towel, and wrapping it round her. He tapped against the door and opened it.

She was wiping the mirror free of steam, her hair spilling tendrils against her neck from the turban she'd fashioned from a second towel. Her back was to him, and from where he stood, he could see that her back was lightly beaded with moisture. As were her legs, which looked smooth and sleek, softened by the bath oil that filled the room with the scent of lilies.

She looked at his reflection and smiled. Her expression was fond. “I suppose it's well and truly over between us.”

“Why?”

“You didn't join me in the bath.”

“You didn't invite me.”

“I was sending you mental invitations all through dinner. Didn't you get them?”

“Was that your foot under the table, then? It didn't feel much like Tommy's, come to think of it.”

She chuckled and uncapped her lotion. He watched her smooth it against her face. Muscles moved with the circular motion of her fingers, and he made an exercise out of identification:
trapezius, levator scapulae, splenius cervicis
. It was a form of discipline to keep his mind heading in the direction in which he wished it to go. The prospect of deferring conversation with Deborah till another time was always heightened by the sight of her, freshly out of her bath.

“I'm sorry about bringing the adoption papers,” he said. “We made a bargain and I didn't keep my part of it. I was hoping to romance you into talking about the problem while we were here. Ascribe it to male ego and forgive me, if you will.”

“Forgiven,” she said. “But there isn't a problem.”

She capped the lotion and began to towel herself off with rather more energy than the task required. Seeing this, he felt the palm of caution flatten itself against his chest. He said nothing else until she had slid into her dressing gown and freed her hair from its towel. She was bent from the waist, combing her fingers through the tangles in lieu of using a brush, when he spoke again. He chose his words carefully.

“That's an issue of semantics. What else can we call what's been happening between us? Disagreement? Dispute? Those don't seem to hit the mark particularly well.”

“And God knows we can't stumble in the process of applying scientific labels.”

“That isn't fair.”

“No?” She raised herself and rooted through her make-up case to produce the slender jacket of pills. She popped one from its plastic casing, held it up in presentation to him between her thumb and index finger, and put it into her mouth. She turned on the tap with such decided force that the water hit the bottom of the basin and rose up like spume.