Missing Joseph

Polly felt prickly heat on the back of her neck. She’d have chosen not to answer, but her mother’s power was becoming stronger every time she made a reply. She could feel it quite distinctly now, as if it were oozing from Rita’s fingers, slithering up the banister and through Polly’s palm.

“Venus,” she said miserably and tore her eyes from Rita’s face. She waited for the mockery.

It did not come. Instead Rita took her hand from the banister and studied her daughter thoughtfully. “Venus,” she said. “This i’n’t about making love potions, Polly.”

“I know that.”

“Then—”

“But it’s still about love. You don’t want me to feel it. I know that, Mum. But it’s there all the same and I can’t make it go away just because you’d have me. I love him. Don’t you think I’d stop it if only I could? Don’t you think I pray to feel nothing for him…or at least to feel for him nothing more’n what he feels for me? D’you think I choose to be tortured like this?”

“I think we all choose our tortures.” Rita lumbered to an ancient rosewood Canterbury made lopsided by the absence of two of its wheels. It leaned against one of the walls in the entry beneath the stairs, and with a grunt to rock her weight to one side, Rita bent as much as her legs would allow and wrestled open its single drawer. She brought out two rectangles of wood. “Here,” she said. “Take ’em.”

Without question or protest, Polly took the wood. She could smell its unmistakable odour, sharp but pleasant, a permeative scent.

“Cedar,” she said.

“Correct,” said Rita. “Burn it to Mars. Pray for strength, girl. Leave love to those who don’t have your gifts.”

CHAPTER THREE

MRS. WRAGG LEFT THEM immediately after making her announcement about the vicar. To Deborah’s dismayed “But what happened? How on earth did he die?” she said guardedly, “I couldn’t quite say. A friend of his, are you?”

No. Of course. They hadn’t been friends. They’d only shared a few minutes’ conversation in the National Gallery on a rainy, blowing November day. Still, the memory of Robin Sage’s kindness and his anxious concern made Deborah feel leaden — struck by a mixture of surprise and dismay — when she was told he was dead.

“I’m sorry, my love,” St. James said when Mrs. Wragg closed the door upon her own departure. Deborah could see the worry darkening his eyes, and she knew he was reading her thoughts as only a man who had known her all her life could have possibly read them. He didn’t go on to say what she knew he wanted to say: It isn’t you, Deborah. You haven’t death’s touch, no matter what you think…Instead, he held her.

They finally descended the stairs between the bar and the office at half past seven. The pub was apparently in the process of serving its regular evening crowd. Farmers leaned against the bar engaged in conversation. Housewives gathered at tables enjoying an evening out. Two ageing couples compared walking sticks while six noisy teenagers joked loudly in a corner and smoked cigarettes.

From the midst of this latter group— among which, accompanied by the ribald comments of their mates, one couple necked heavily, with an occasional pause from the girl to nip at a flask and from the boy to drag deeply on a cigarette — Josie Wragg emerged. She’d changed for the evening into what appeared to be a work uniform. But part of her black skirt’s hem was falling out and her red bow tie was hopelessly askew, dribbling a long, unravelling string down the prairie expanse of her chest.

She ducked behind the bar where she scooped up two menus, and she said formally, with a wary eye in the direction of the balding man who pulled the pub’s taps with the sort of authority that suggested he had to be Mr. Wragg the proprietor, “Good evening, sir. Madam. You’ve settled in good?”

“Perfectly,” St. James replied.

“Then I expect you’ll want to have a look at these.” She handed the menus over with a low-voiced “But mind you. Don’t forget what I said about the beef.”

They skirted past the farmers, one of whom was shaking a monitory fi st, red-faced and talking about “telling him tha’s a public footpath…public, you hear me” and wound their way through the tables to the fi replace where flames were rapidly working on a cone-shaped pile of silver birch. They met curious glances as they crossed the room — tourists were unusual in Lancashire at this time of year — but to their pleasant good evening, the men nodded brusquely in wordless greeting and the women bobbed their heads. And while the teenagers remained in their far corner of the pub, happily oblivious of everyone but themselves, it seemed less group-egocentricity than it was interest in the continuing entertainment provided by the blonde fl ask-nipper and her companion, who was at this moment busy snaking his hand under the bright yellow sweat shirt she wore. The material undulated as his fist rose like a mobile third breast.

Deborah sat on a bench beneath a faded and decidedly unpointillistic needlepoint rendering of A Sunday Afternoon on the Grand Jatte. St. James took the stool opposite her. They ordered sherry and whisky, and when Josie brought the drinks to their table, she positioned her body to block the young entwined lovers from their view.

“Sorry about that,” she said with a wrinkle of her nose as she placed the sherry in front of Deborah and adjusted it just so. She did the same with the whisky. “Pam Rice, that is. Playing tart for the night. Don’t ask me why.

She’s not a bad sort. Just when she gets with Todd. He’s seventeen.”

This last was offered as if the boy’s age explained all. But perhaps thinking it might not have done, Josie continued. “Thirteen. Pam, that is. Fourteen next month.”

“And thirty-five sometime next year, no doubt,” St. James noted drily.

Josie squinted over her shoulder at the young couple. Despite her previous look of disdain, her bony chest rose tremulously. “Yes. Well…” And then she turned back to them with what seemed like effort. “What’ll you have, then? Besides the beef. The salmon’s quite good. So’s the duck. And the veal’s”—The pub’s outer door opened, letting in a gust of cold air that puffed round their ankles like moving silk—“cooked with tomatoes and mushrooms, and we’ve got a sole tonight done with capers and…” Josie’s recitation faltered as, behind her, the hubbub from the Crofters Inn patrons dissolved with remarkable speed into silence.

A man and woman stood just inside the door, where an overhead light shone down upon the contrast they made. First hair: his roughly the colour of ginger; hers salt and pepper, thick, straight, and bluntly cut to touch her shoulders. Then face: his youthful and handsome but with a pugnacious prominence to the jaw and chin; hers strong and forceful, untouched by make-up to hide middle age. And clothes: his a barbour jacket and trousers; hers a worn navy pea jacket and faded blue jeans with a patch on one knee.

For a moment, they remained side by side in the entry, the man’s hand resting on the woman’s arm. He wore tortoiseshell spectacles whose lenses caught the light and effectively hid his eyes and his reaction to the hush that greeted his entrance. She, however, looked round slowly, making deliberate contact with every face that had the courage to hold her gaze.

“…capers and…and…” Josie appeared to have forgotten the rest of her prepared recitation. She poked the pencil into her hair and scratched it against her scalp.

From behind the bar, Mr. Wragg spoke as he scooped the froth off a glass of Guinness. “Evening to you, Constable. Evening, Missus Spence. Cold night, in’t it? We’re in for a bad snap, you ask me. You, Frank Fowler. Another stout?”

At last one of the farmers turned from the door. Others began to do the same. “Wouldn’t say no, Ben,” Frank Fowler replied, and knuckled his glass across the bar.

Ben pulled on the tap. Someone said, “Billy, you got some fags on you?” A chair scraped against the floor like an animal’s howl. The double ring of the telephone sounded from the office. Slowly the pub returned to normal.

The constable went to the bar where he said, “Black Bush and a lemonade, Ben,” while Mrs. Spence found a table set apart from the others. She walked to it without hurry, quite a tall woman with her head held up and her shoulders straight, but instead of sitting on the bench against the wall, she chose a stool that presented her back to the room. She removed her jacket. She was wearing an ivory wool turtleneck beneath it.