On Loving Josiah (36 page)

‘I don’t know,’ said Josiah, honestly.

‘Why do you think he’s chosen to land on the apex of the highest arch?’

‘To be close as he can to heaven?’

‘I should think so,’ said Eve.

They walked on further, skirting round gorse bushes and tripping over dips and large stones, and then they came to the step before the altar and sat down there, and listened to the occasional crow.

Eve said to her son, ‘Now, I used to know the whole of this poem off my heart, but hear this, and see if it makes any sense to you:

There was a pause, and then Eve said, ‘It’s a shame we missed the sunset.’

‘It’s okay. The dark is okay,’ said Josiah.

‘Do you think the music of humanity is sad?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Do you think you’ve ever known the sublime, just for a moment or two?’

‘Yes,’ said Josiah, ‘I have.’

It was nine at night and the two were cosily ensconced in their camper van, up to their necks in blanket after blanket, and quiet as dormice, at least for an hour.

Suddenly Eve said, ‘Tell me about Thomas Marius.’

Josiah said nothing.

‘The man who lent you, or perhaps even gave you, those fine books. I noticed his name on one or two of the flyleaves. He won a fifth form prize, I noticed.
The Pilgrim’s Progress.
Who is he, Josiah?’

And when Josiah still didn’t answer her, she said, ‘Did he take you to Florence? The tag’s still on your holdall.’

Nothing.

‘Is he a classicist? I’m sure I know his name.’

‘He taught me Latin,’ said Josiah.

‘I love him already,’ said his mother. ‘Will you introduce him to me?’

It was only in the middle of the night when, sleepless and
shivering
, his mother watching him, he found his way to an answer for her. He kept Thomas’ letter bound up in a pair of socks, which he retrieved from his bag and handed to his mother with a torch.

‘You can read this, if you like,’ he said.

She took it. The paper was small, thin and cheap; the address was Bedford Prison. It was dated November 21st 1999.

Dearest Josiah, (she read)

I shall never as long as I live forgive myself for what I have done to you. The month you gave me of your young life was
inconceivably
precious to me, but moments are moments, they can never be caught again, and I shall never be who I was and you shall never be who you were.

I think of you constantly, dear Josiah. I suddenly realized last week that you’ll be in the sixth form now and I don’t even know what A-Levels you’re taking, nor how you did in your exams in the summer. I so want to know how you’re getting on, but don’t write if you don’t feel like it. In fact, you mustn’t write, and nor must I.

We shall probably never see each other again, and I’m
convincing
myself that it’s better that way. I only pray that ultimately, when you’re a man, you will look back on our time together with
understanding
, if not forgiveness.

With love, Thomas

At 3 p.m. on Friday 2nd March, Elspeth was sitting in her office smoking, waiting for Josiah. At 3.05 p.m. she balanced a piece of paper over her coffee cup and thrust the stub down into the middle of it, and watched, mesmerized, while the burning edge became a glowing ribbon.

Josiah had never been late before. Even now she looked towards her closed door and felt Josiah on this side of it, his lankiness, his stillness, his power. And then she remembered, she had lost him, and
she folded her arms on her desk and lay her head on top of them, as though the softness of her jumper could provide some comfort to her.

Her reverie was broken at 3.15. ‘I’ve got Josiah Nelson on the phone for you,’ said the receptionist.

‘What, is he here?’

‘He’s on the phone. I’m putting the call through.’

Elspeth feigned lightness. ‘Josiah, why aren’t you here? I’ve been expecting you, you naughty boy.’

‘Elspeth, I need you to help me,’ said Josiah. ‘I want you to find something out for me. I’m going to ring you back in fifteen minutes, is that all right?’

‘Where are you speaking from?’

‘We’re in Yorkshire,’ said Josiah.

‘How are you getting on with your Mum?’

‘It’s great, really great, but we need your help.’

That word ‘we’ was unbearable.

‘Fire away,’ said Elspeth, and she wished with all her heart she were talking to a firing squad and not her boy.

‘When is Thomas Marius going to be released? Do you think you could find that out? I mean, it’s normally one of you lot that would pick him up, isn’t that right?’

‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Elspeth.

‘So when shall I ring you back?’

‘Hold on. I can find out right now.’

Elspeth typed Thomas’s name into the client box of the Probation Service Portal and the details of his prison sentence and aftercare programme were conjured up before her.

‘He’s out in five days,’ she said. ‘Midday’.

‘We’re going to pick him up,’ said Josiah, happily. ‘And thank you, Elspeth, thank you for everything you’ve ever done for me.’

It was, as farewells go, quite a tactful one, thought Elspeth, as her forehead slumped forward onto her desk.

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.’

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.