Missing Joseph

Maggie’s lips trembled. She tried to control them and failed. “He loves me. Daddy loves me. And if you’d let me find him, I could prove it to you.”

“You want to prove it to yourself. That’s all. And if you can’t prove it with your father, you’re set to prove it with Nick.”

“No.”

“Maggie, it’s obvious.”

“That isn’t true! I love him. He loves me.” She waited for her mother to respond. When Juliet did nothing more than give the mug of tea a half turn on the table, Maggie felt herself harden. A small black place seemed to grow on her heart. “If there’s a baby, I’ll have it. Do you hear me? Only I won’t be like you. I won’t have secrets. My baby’ll know who her daddy is.”

She swept past the table and out of the room. Her mother made no attempt to detain her. Her anger and righteousness carried her to the top of the stairs where she finally paused.

Below in the kitchen, she heard a chair scrape back. The water went on in the sink. The cup clinked against the porcelain. A cupboard opened. The patter of dry cat nibbles poured into a bowl. The bowl clicked on the fl oor.

After that, silence. And then a harsh gasp and the words “Oh God.”

Juliet hadn’t said a prayer for nearly fourteen years, not because she had been without the need for theurgy — there had, in fact, been times when she was desperate for it — but because she no longer believed in God. She had at one time. Daily prayer, attendance at church, heartfelt communication with a loving deity, were as much a part of her as were her organs, her blood, and her fl esh. But she’d lost the blind faith so necessary to belief in the unknowable and the unknown when she began to realise that there was no justice, divine or otherwise, in a world in which the good were made to suffer torments while the bad went untouched. In her youth, she’d held on to the belief that there was a day of accounting for everyone. She had realised that perhaps she would not be made privy to the manner in which a sinner was brought before the bar of eternal justice, but brought before that bar he would be, in one form or another, in life or after death. Now she knew differently. There was no God who listened to prayers, righted wrongs, or attenuated suffering in any way. There was just the messy business of living,

and of waiting for those ephemeral moments of happiness that made the living worthwhile. Beyond that, there was nothing, save the struggle to ensure that no one and nothing endangered the possibility of those moments’ periodic advents in life.

She dropped two white towels onto the kitchen floor and watched the vinegar soak through them in growing blossoms of pink. While Punkin observed the entire operation from his perch on the work top, his expression solemn and his eyes unblinking, she dumped the towels in the sink and went for a broom and a mop. This latter was unnecessary — the towels had managed to absorb the mess and the broom would take care of the glass — but she had learned long ago that physical toil alleviated any bent towards rumination, which is why she worked in her greenhouse every day, clambered through the oak wood at dawn with her collection baskets, tended her vegetable garden with a zealot’s devotion, and watched over her flowers more with need than with pride.

She swept up the glass and dumped it in the rubbish. She decided to forgo the mop. Better to scrub the tile floor on her hands and knees, feeling the dull circles of ache centring on her kneecaps and beginning to throb the length of her legs. Below physical labour on the list of activities designed to serve as substitutes for thought, resided physical pain. When labour and pain were conjoined by either chance or design, one’s mental processes slowed to nothing. So she scrubbed the floor, pushing the blue plastic pail before her, forcing her arm out in wide sweeping motions that strained her muscles, kneading wet rags against tile and grout with such energy that her breath became short. When the job was completed, perspiration made a damp semicircle round her hairline and she wiped it away with the arm of her turtleneck. Colin’s scent was still on it: cigarettes and sex, the private dark musk of his body when they loved.

She pulled the turtleneck over her head and dropped it on top of her pea jacket on the chair. For a moment, she told herself Colin was the problem. Nothing would have happened to alter the substance of their lives had not she, in an instant of egocentric need, given in to the hunger. Dormant for years, she had long ago stopped believing she had the capacity to feel desire for a man. When it came upon her without expectation or warning, she found herself without adequate defence.

She railed against herself for not having been stronger, for forgetting the lessons that parental discourses from her childhood — not to mention a lifetime of reading Great Books — had laid before her: Passion leads inescapably to destruction, the only safety lies in indifference.

But none of this was Colin’s fault. If he had sinned, it was only in loving and in the sweet blindness of that loving’s devotion. She understood this. For she loved as well. Not Colin — because she would never be able to allow herself the degree of vulnerability necessary to allow a man to enter her life as an equal — but Maggie, for whom she felt all her lifeblood flowing, in a kind of anguished abandon that bordered on despair.

My child. My lovely child. My daughter. What wouldn’t I do to keep you from harm.

But there was a limit to parental protection. It made itself known the moment the child struck out on a path of her own devising: touching the top of the cooker despite having heard the word no! a hundred thousand times, playing too near the river in winter when the water was high, pinching a nip of brandy or a cigarette. That Maggie was choosing — wilfully, deliberately, with an inchoate understanding of the consequences — to forge her way into adult sexuality while she was still a child with a child’s perceptions of the world, was the single act of adolescent rebellion that Juliet had not prepared herself to face. She’d thought about drugs, about raucous music, about drinking and smoking, about styles of dress and ways of cutting hair. She’d thought about make-up, arguments, curfews, and growing responsibility and you don’t understand you’re too old to understand, but she had never once thought about sex. Not yet. There would be time to think of sex later. Foolishly, she didn’t connect it with the little girl who still had her mummy brush her hair in the morning, fixing back its long russet mass with an amber barrette.

She knew all the governing principles behind a child’s progression from infant to autonomous adult. She’d read the books, determined to be the best possible mother. But how to deal with this? How to develop a delicate balancing act between fact and fi ction to give Maggie the father she wanted and at the same time set her own mind at rest? And even if she was able to do that much for her daughter and herself — which she could not do and would not even consider doing, no matter the cost — what would Maggie have learned from her mother’s capitulation: that sex is not an expression of love between two people but a powerful ploy.

Maggie and sex. Juliet didn’t want to think about it. Over the years she’d grown more and more adept at the art of repression, refusing to dwell upon anything that evoked unhappiness or turmoil. She moved forward, she moved on, she kept her attention on the distant horizon where existed the promise of exploration in the form of new places and new experiences, where existed the promise of peace and sanctuary in the form of people who, through centuries of habit and custom, kept their distance from taciturn strangers. And until last August, Maggie had always been perfectly happy to keep her eyes on this horizon as well.

Juliet let the cat out and watched him disappear into the shadows cast by Cotes Hall. She went upstairs. Maggie’s door was closed, but she didn’t tap on it as she otherwise might on another sort of night, going in to sit on her daughter’s bed, smoothing back her hair, allowing her fingertips to graze against that peach-soft skin. Instead, she went to her own room across the landing and took off the rest of her clothes in the darkness. In doing so on another sort of night, she might have thought about the pressure and warmth of Colin’s hands on her body, allowing herself just fi ve minutes to relive their lovemaking and recall the sight of him etched above her in the semidarkness of his room. But tonight, she moved like an automaton, grabbing up her woollen dressing gown and making her way to the bathroom to draw a bath.

You smell of it, too.

How could she in conscience counsel her daughter against a behaviour she engaged in — looked forward to, longed for — herself? The only way to do it was to give him up and then to move on as they had done in the past, no looking back, cutting every tie. It was the only answer. If the vicar’s death had not been enough to bring her to her senses about what was and was not possible in her life — had she actually believed even for an instant that she might make a go of it as the loving wife of the local constable? — Maggie’s relationship with Nick Ware would.

Mrs. Spence, my name is Robin Sage. I’ve come to talk to you about Maggie.

And she’d poisoned him. This compassionate man who had meant only good to her and her daughter. What kind of life could she hope to have in Winslough now when every heart doubted her, every whisper condemned her, and no one save the coroner himself had had the courage openly to ask how she had come to make such a fatal