trusts.”
“She trusts in her God.”
“Perhaps you should try doing the same. It might give you some of her calm. Later, when the baby comes, I shall need your help. I certainly don’t need your anxiety.”
“Do you?” he asked.
She smiled, understanding the question. “Believe in God? No, it’s too late for me. I believe in Julian’s strength and courage and in my own skill. But if He gets us through this maybe I’ll change my mind, see if I can’t get something going with Him.”
“I don’t think He bargains.”
“Oh yes He does. I may not be religious but I know my Bible. My mother saw to that. He bargains all right. But He’s supposed to be just. If He wants belief He’d better provide some evidence.”
“That He exists?”
“That He cares.”
And still they stood, eyes watching that dark figure, hardly discernible against the darker trunk of which he seemed to be part, but quiet now, unmoving, resting against the tree as if in an extremity of exhaustion.
Theo said to Miriam, knowing the futility of the question even as he asked it: “Will he be all right?”
“I don’t know. How can I know?”
She moved from his side and walked towards Rolf, then stopped and stood quietly waiting, knowing that if he needed the comfort of a human touch, there was no one else to whom he could turn.
Julian got up from Luke’s body. Theo felt her cloak brush his arm but he did not turn to look at her. He was aware of a mixture of emotions, anger which he knew he had no right to feel, and relief, so strong that it was close to joy, that Rolf wasn’t the father of the child. But the anger was for the moment the stronger. He wanted to lash out at her, to say: “Is that what you were, then? Camp-follower to the group? What about Gascoigne? How do you know the child isn’t his?” But those words would be unforgivable and, worse, unforgettable. He knew that he had no right to question her but he couldn’t bite back the stark accusatory words nor hide the pain behind them.
“Did you love them, either of them? Do you love your husband?”
She said quietly: “Did you love your wife?”
It was, he saw, a serious question, not a retaliation, and he gave it a serious and truthful answer. “I convinced myself I did when I married. I willed myself into the appropriate feelings without knowing what the appropriate feelings were. I endowed her with qualities she didn’t have and then despised her for not having them. Afterwards I might have learned to love her if I had thought more of her needs and less of my own.”
He thought: Portrait of a marriage. Perhaps most marriages, good and bad, could be summed up in four sentences.
She looked at him steadily for a moment, then said: “That’s the answer to your question.”
“And Luke?”
“No, I didn’t love him, but I liked having him in love with me. I envied him because he could love so much, could feel so much. No one has wanted me with that intensity of emotion. So I gave him what he wanted. If I had loved him it would have been…” She paused for a moment, then said: “It would have been less sinful.”
“Isn’t that a strong word for a simple act of generosity?”
“But it wasn’t a simple act of generosity. It was an act of self- indulgence.”
It wasn’t, he knew, the time for such a conversation, but when would there be a time? He had to know, had to understand. He said: “But it would have been all right, ‘less sinful’ are the words you used, if you’d loved him. So you agree with Rosie McClure, love justifies everything, excuses everything?”
“No, but it’s natural, it’s human. What I did was to use Luke out of curiosity, boredom, perhaps to get back a little at Rolf for caring more for the group than he did for me, punishing Rolf because I’d stopped loving him. Can you understand that, the need to hurt someone because you can no longer love?”
“Yes, I understand that.”
She added: “It was all very commonplace, predictable, ignoble.”
Theo said: “And tawdry.”
“No. Not that. Nothing to do with Luke was tawdry. But it harmed him more than it gave him joy. But then you didn’t think I was a saint.”
“No, but I thought you were good.”
She said quietly: “Now you know that I’m not.”
Staring into the half-darkness, Theo saw that Rolf had detached himself from the tree and was walking back to join them. Miriam moved forward to meet him. The three pairs of eyes gazed at Rolf’s face, watching, waiting for his first words. When he got close, Theo saw that the left cheek and forehead were an open wound, the skin had been rubbed raw.
Rolf’s voice was perfectly calm but oddly pitched, so that, for one ridiculous moment, Theo thought a stranger had crept up on them in the darkness: “Before we move we must get him buried. That means waiting until it’s light. We’d better get his coat off before he stiffens too much. We need all the warm clothes we have.”
Miriam said: “Burying him won’t be easy without some kind of spade. The ground’s soft but we need to scrape a hole somehow. We can’t just cover him with leaves.”
Rolf said: “It can wait till morning. We’ll get the coat off now. It’s no use to him.”
Having made the suggestion, he took no action to carry it out and it was Miriam and Theo who between them rolled over the body and eased the coat from both arms. The sleeves were heavily bloodstained. Theo could feel them wet under his hands. They composed the body again on its back, the arms straight at the side.
Rolf said: “Tomorrow I’ll get hold of another car. In the meantime we’ll get what rest we can.”
They wedged themselves together in the wide fork of a fallen beech. A jutting branch, still thickly hung with the brittle bronze pennants of autumn, provided an illusion of security, and they huddled beneath it like children conscious of grave delinquencies, hiding ineffectively from the searching adults. Rolf took the outside place, with Miriam next to him, then Julian between Miriam and Theo. Their rigid bodies seemed to infect the air around them with anxiety. The wood itself was distraught; its ceaseless small noises hissed and whispered on the agitated air. Theo couldn’t sleep, and knew from the uneven breathing, suppressed coughs, and small grunts and sighs that the others shared his vigil. There would be a time for sleep. It would come with the greater warmth of the day, with the burial of that dark, stiffening shape which, out of sight on the other side of the fallen tree, was a living presence in all their minds. He was aware of the warmth of Julian’s body pressed against his and knew that she must feel from him a similar comfort. Miriam had tucked Luke’s coat around Julian and it seemed to Theo that he could smell the drying blood. He felt suspended in a limbo of time, aware of the cold, of thirst, of the innumerable small sounds of the wood, but not of the passing hours. Like his companions, he endured and waited for the dawn.
Daylight, tentative and bleak, stole like a chill breath into the wood, wrapping itself round barks and broken boughs, touching the boles of the trees and the low denuded branches, giving darkness and mystery form and substance. Opening his eyes, Theo couldn’t believe that he had actually dozed, although he must have momentarily lost consciousness since he had no recollection of Rolf getting up and
