The Miracle Inspector (12 page)

But first, he had to find the family he wanted so desperately to help. So the next day – and the next day, and the day after that, if need be – he would come back to the pleasant 1930s villa and watch it, see where the occupants went and who visited them, and try to determine who among them might be Mrs Jesmond and the junior Jesmond(s), if such people even existed.

e He went

She didn’t dare tell Lucas but this afternoon, shortly after he came home unexpectedly and made a scene, she’d heard the flap on the letterbox open and then close again, quietly. Perhaps she’d heard footsteps walking away from the house or perhaps that’s just what she would have expected to hear. She’d thought absolutely nothing of it; another pizza delivery leaflet, another menu from a local curry house. She’d pick it up and recycle it next time she went past the front door, just as she did with all the others.

But when she went to pick up the piece of paper from the doormat, she was astonished by what she saw. It was a poem, handwritten, with her address at the bottom. She opened the door and looked out, as if he might still be there, even though he must have been out of sight by then.

Jesmond couldn’t have known that Lucas had burned his journal and his letters. He couldn’t have known that she had been reading them and that, without them, and without knowing what had happened between him and the woman he loved, she was feeling bereft. It was absurd to think that he had written the poem and brought it here for her and then, at the last minute, that perhaps he had been too shy or too nervous to ring the doorbell because he had sensed her growing affection for him. She knew he couldn’t have sensed anything of the sort. No doubt he hadn’t rung the doorbell because he’d seen Lucas’s car outside and couldn’t face another cold welcome. When he turned up, it was often in the daytime, when he knew he’d find Angela at home alone and could be sure of a polite chat and a meal. But perhaps his nerve had failed him this time.

While Lucas was upstairs changing his shirt for their visit to Christina, she looked again at the poem. It must be another piece for ‘the archive’. But still, she couldn’t shake the idea that he had written it just for her and crept up to the door and dropped it through the letterbox to console her for the loss of the letters.

She studied the piece of paper the poem was written on. The handwriting didn’t look the same as the writing on the letters. But then she had been reading the writing of a man twenty years younger. Perhaps he had written this one in a hurry, in a hand that had matured. Certainly, the poetry seemed to have matured. It seemed superior to Jesmond’s greatest hits, although maybe that was just because they were over-familiar and she took them for granted, like Beatles songs.

The poem, ‘her’ poem, didn’t seem to be revolutionary, it was a love song. It was rather solemn, like a hymn. She read it and she felt the tears start to come. She couldn’t have said whether it was because she was happy or sad. She had that shivery comforted feeling that came with redemptive happy endings, like learning that someone she cared about cared about her, or that Bambi’s mother hadn’t died after all, that sort of feeling. But she had never before cried because she was happy, so most likely she was crying now because she was sad.

She heard Lucas coming down the stairs. She stopped crying and picked up her handbag and found a tissue in it and blew her nose. She took a bottle of perfume from a pocket inside the bag and dabbed a bit of it on her wrists and on the hollow at the base of her neck at the front, just above her collarbone. She put the perfume back in the pocket in the bag and tucked the poem in next to it. She turned away to the mirror and touched up her lipstick while Lucas put his shoes on, then they went outside and got into the car with the tinted windows and he drove them to Maureen’s house. By the time they got there, both were sufficiently recovered. It would have been difficult to tell that they had spent most of the latter part of the day crying, independently of each other, off and on.

Maureen looked like shit. Lucas was surprised. OK, so she hadn’t been expecting them. But it was as if someone had set fire to her since the last time he’d seen her. And that didn’t mean that she was sparking and sizzling. It meant she looked like she had been reduced to a pile of ash. She was grey. She was smaller. Maybe Delilah Jenkins had been round and banged her upside the head with a frying pan. That’s how she looked. She didn’t even seem to recognise him. Why oh why hadn’t he called to tell her he’d be coming and that he’d be bringing his wife?

‘Maureen? It’s me. Are you OK?’ You look like shit.

Maybe the kid had died. Maybe the house had been burgled and someone had robbed all her stuff and raped the kid. That’s how she looked.

‘I’m so sorry. I wasn’t expecting you.’

‘We can come back. Don’t worry.’

‘Is that your wife?’

‘Yes, this is Angela.’

‘Oh, do come in. He said he might bring you but I never… people say it but they never mean it. How kind of you to come. How kind of you. Please come in.’

They went in. She tried to get them to eat some cake but they explained they had just eaten. Angela was very curious. He realised it was because she didn’t get out much and this was a great adventure for her. She didn’t normally even go out after dark. She’d seemed a bit jittery on the way here in the car. But now she looked around as if she wanted to remember every inch of Maureen’s home so they could discuss it afterwards. In future, he’d tell her about the places he visited, in the kind of detail she was taking in now. He did talk about his work, of course. He’d generally tell her a bit about the people, whether he liked them or not, what type of miracle they were reporting, his reaction (if it seemed witty to him): ‘Well, I’m sorry, Mrs So-and-So, but it’s clear to me that you’re the one who arranged those pieces of red pepper in that flan to look like Father Christmas. It’s a talent but it’s not a miracle.’ That sort of thing.

He saw her looking at Maureen’s house and realised he should have been telling her the colour of the paintwork, the pictures on the wall, what the women were wearing. That was what she was looking at now.

Maureen said, ‘Would you like to see Christina?’

Of course they would. He had tried to explain to Angela – he was at great pains to make sure she understood it – that this was not a miracle. He was only bringing her here because he felt sorry for the child and he had told the child’s mother that his wife could sing. So she wasn’t to get excited and expect too much. How often had he thought about discovering a miracle and keeping it for them both? Did she know? Did she suspect? But this wasn’t it. This wasn’t a miracle.

‘She’s awake,’ Maureen said. ‘I was just reading her a story.’

They went into the room where the child was kept. There she was, hair all shiny and brushed, lying in bed.

‘There,’ said Maureen. ‘She smiled. Did you see it? She only does that for people she likes.’

Angela went over to the bed, grasped Christina’s hand and stared at the little creature, right in the eyes.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I saw it. Hello, Christina. How are you, lovely girl?’

She turned her hand over and drew the backs of her fingers very, very softly along the child’s cheek, then down her arm, then across her bony hand.

‘Isn’t she adorable?’ Angela said to Lucas. The child didn’t look awful but she didn’t look particularly adorable, so he assumed she’d said it for Maureen’s benefit.

‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘Oh yes.’

It was a bit odd, the way Angela was taking charge. It was as if she’d brought him to see Christina and not the other way around. He tried to imagine what it would be like if women had jobs. What if a woman was the boss? He couldn’t imagine it, actually. What must have it been like, before? Were there women in Australia now in charge of banks or government departments or newspapers, ordering men about? Smelling nice and taking charge like this?

He was just thinking what an awful idea this whole thing was when Angela began to sing. She sat next to Christina and held her hand and looked into her eyes as if she was in love with her, and she began to sing. He and Maureen couldn’t help themselves, they exchanged a blissful look.

Angela had a lovely voice. Did a man always think his wife had a lovely voice, the way he always thought his wife had a prettier face than other men’s wives? Perhaps. Maureen wasn’t married to Angela but she seemed to admire her voice. Her sad old sooty face looked like a marshmallow melting on a bonfire; sweet and sad and ruined. She began to cry. Stop it, Maureen, he thought. You’ll make me cry. Stop it. It was as if a cartoon villain had squirted crying juice all over the place. He jabbed a pen lid into the palm of his hand and thought about genocide, and that pulled him up a bit. The death of millions, paraded in his imagination to stop him making a fool of himself in front of Maureen. Hopefully it was not the case that by airing such memories, he somehow made the people suffer again in some slight way – the shadows and ghosts of the people. No, he’d never heard that theory expounded. His father had considered himself something of a philosopher when he was drunk and he liked to sing Irish folk tunes but he never gave advice and he never gave voice to the theory that memories damage the people who are remembered. Shame, or he would remember his own father more. Ha!

Angela looked at him. She seemed to be expecting him to say something. Had she just asked him a question?

‘I love to hear you sing.’

‘But did you see her smile?’

‘Who?’

‘Christina.’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘You were day-dreaming again.’

Maureen was overcome. Angela gave her a hug. They stood and rocked together, Angela’s arms around Maureen, deeply emotional. He realised he wasn’t used to seeing women together. Was this how Maureen had carried on when she had worked for the television news? He hoped not.

But if Maureen wanted to cry and hug a stranger, well, OK. Life must be pretty tough for her. What was there to lose by letting her take comfort in Angela’s singing?

While Angela was in the shower the next morning, Lucas had a quick look through her underwear drawer. He had seen her slip a piece of paper into it from her handbag. It looked as though it had a poem written on it and he thought it likely she had palmed it from the journal he had burnt. If she was guarding it closely, it meant he didn’t need to worry too much from a security point of view; she probably wouldn’t get careless and try to show it to anyone. Still, he probably ought to get rid of it.

He looked it over. It didn’t seem to be subversive. It was a love song of some kind. It was written rather beautifully, actually. He allowed himself to dream, for a moment, that Angela had written it for him. But it was unlikely. It wasn’t in her handwriting, for a start. He couldn’t think of a reason she might have for dictating a love poem to someone else to write down – or not one that he could bear to think about.

He heard her come out of the bathroom. He was standing in the middle of the room in his underpants and, short of swallowing it, had nowhere to put the paper so that she wouldn’t see him with it and know he’d taken it and intended to destroy it. Reluctantly, he put it back in the drawer. He’d deal with it later.

While she got dressed, he went downstairs and looked for the scrapbook his father had made with cuttings of newspaper articles about his mother and her work. As he flipped through the pages, he was surprised at how familiar they were, even though he hadn’t looked at them for years, since his father died.

His mother had gone first. He hadn’t understood it then. He’d thought she’d run away from them. His father had let him believe it for some reason. Perhaps he’d thought it was better that his son believed she was living elsewhere, making art, perhaps married to another man and bringing up another family, than that he should know the truth of what was going on all over London. But it happened so many times, to so many families, in the end he couldn’t help but find out.

London was soon teeming with orphans, running the family home, in charge of the finances, eating what they wanted and going to bed late. Sales of computer games went up and academic results suffered. It was like one big exciting sleepover until the kids realised they had to make order out of the chaos, take care of siblings, get jobs, live carefully so they didn’t get a visit from the police and get carted off. Those early years should have been wild with joyful anarchy but instead they became unbelievably bleak and everyone lived fearfully. Partly it was because those left behind were so young that they didn’t understand the need to band together. They were inexperienced and they trusted the wrong people or they trusted no one. Acts of rebellion were mostly carried out by incautious individuals. Those who stood up and spoke out against the authorities were picked off. Those who remained learned quickly that it was better to keep their heads down and conform.

As he looked at the pages in the scrapbook, at his mother’s smiling face in the photos illustrating articles about her in lifestyle magazines, leaning against a wall or in the doorway of one of the derelict places she had transformed by the power of her imagination, he couldn’t help noticing the residual feelings of resentment that were still attached to his memories of her. She looked so elegant, resourceful, independent. She didn’t look as if she needed to be the mother of a little boy to feel happy and successful. He could see, too, why the interviewers gushed when they met her. She was an attractive woman, and in every picture the camera seemed to have caught her just as she was about to leap up, brush the rest of the world aside – the camera, the art works, the banal trappings of everyday life – and reveal a secret that would astonish and amuse everyone who heard it, and give them no choice but to fall in love with her.

But perhaps he was just feeling the way every man felt when he saw photos of his mother when she was young. Who could he ask about that? Not Jones or Jenkins. He had no friends, only Angela, and he couldn’t tell Angela how he felt. She might not understand.

Angela came up behind him and kissed him. She leaned around him to look at what he was looking at. Most of the articles in the scrapbook quoted Anna’s explanations of her latest projects:
‘Have you ever sat down and wondered how your life might have turned out if you’d made different choices? Of course you have. Have you ever sat down and wasted an afternoon following a strand all the way through that other life you could have had? Maybe not. But I have. Where would I have lived, who might I have married, what might I have achieved – or not achieved – if I had taken a different path, slept through a different afternoon, kissed a different man.’

Angela read about how Anna had ‘twinkled at’, ‘toyed with’ and ‘seemed wryly amused by’ her interviewers while possibly (Angela thought) mocking them.

One article was illustrated with a photo of Anna leaning in a doorway, arms folded, smiling. Behind her was a picture she had painted, a trompe l’oeil which had transformed the space she’d been working in. The interviewer was obviously smitten: ‘I’m looking at just one of many possible versions of the place the artist is standing in, one which she has created. And as I watch her pose for our photographer, I’m aware that I’m looking at just one version of all the possible versions of her, and I can’t help wondering how I can find my way to a version of Anna Gray who might be persuaded to care for a man like me.’

Angela tapped her finger on the paragraph, to point it out to Lucas so he could read it.

‘Eurggh,’ he said.

‘An artist who puts herself into her work,’ Angela said, quoting from snippets in the scrap book that caught her eye. ‘Blah blah, she often looks amused, as if sharing a joke… the transformation is what’s important, the process doesn’t matter… blah, blah blah… “The project might have had its germination in something we did when my son was small.” Ah, listen to this Lucas: “We’d leave dog food out for hedgehogs and the foxes, nuts and seeds for the birds. Everyone does it, if they want to encourage wildlife in their garden and help them survive. And then I started to think about what you might do if you wanted to encourage
possibilities
. So I’d study these derelict or difficult places and go back to my studio and create alternative versions of them. At first I’d paint a picture and I’d bring a photograph of it back to the original place and leave it lying about, like evidence of a parallel world. Later on, I got more ambitious and tried to transform the original space. That’s what I’m working on now. It’s tough though, with these new restrictions on women going about the city.”’

Lucas looked at the pictures. ‘Wherever she got to, I hope they appreciate her talents.’

‘Somewhere with a theatre, maybe? She’d have made a terrific set designer,’ said Angela. ‘Oh, look at that one. That’s nice.’

He suddenly felt rather irritable. He pointed out a paragraph in one of the interviews. Angela read it aloud: ‘“It’s not a makeover project. It’s not about leaving plastic flowers in a derelict building, although I have done that. It’s not decorating. You understand? It’s about exploring choices. It’s political. You think if a man did this, people would say ‘that’s nice’? No. They’d ask about the intention behind it.”’

Angela blushed. Sometimes, for all the crap that went with living in London, it was a bonus not to have to put up with mothers-in-law. Popular literature suggested that they sniped and were critical of the women their sons married – and this one had even found a way to have a pop at Angela from beyond the grave.

Lucas saw that he had upset her and he was sorry. Of course she was jealous of his mother, she was bored. She needed something to occupy her. A hobby or something. A friend.