Missing Joseph

“I wouldn’t depend on that, Margaret.”

Then Mr. Sage died, just four days later. Who was really responsible? And what was the crime?

“Mummy’s good,” she said in a low voice to Nick. “She didn’t mean anything bad to happen to the vicar.”

“I believe you, Mag,” Nick replied. “But someone round here doesn’t.”

“What if they put her on trial? What if she goes to gaol?”

“I’ll take care of you.”

“Truly?”

“A fact.”

He sounded strong and certain. He was strong and certain. He felt good to be near. She worked one arm round his waist and rested her head on his chest.

“I want us to be like this always,” she said.

“Then that’s the way it’ll be.”

“Really?”

“Really. You’re my number one, Mag. You’re the only one. Don’t worry about your mum.”

She slid her hand from his knee to his thigh. “Cold,” she said and snuggled closer to him. “You cold, Nick?”

“Bit. Yeah.”

“I can warm you nice.”

She could feel his smile. “Bet you can at that.”

“Want me to?”

“Wouldn’t say no.”

“I can. I like to.” She did it just the way he had shown her, her hand making the slow, sinuous friction. She could feel It growing hard in response. “Feel good, Nick?”

“Hmm.”

She rubbed the heel of her hand from base to tip. Then her fingers lightly retraced the pathway. Nick gave a shaky sigh. He stirred.

“What?”

He was reaching in his jacket. There was crackling in his hand. “Got this from one of the blokes,” he said. “We can’t do it any more without a Durex, Mag. It’s crazy. Too risky.”

She kissed his cheek and then his neck. Her fingers sank between his legs where she remembered he felt the most. He lost his breath in a groan.

He lay back on the cot. He said, “We got to use the Durex this time.”

She worked the zip of his blue jeans, worked the jeans below his hips. She slipped off her tights, lay down next to him, and lifted her skirt.

“Mag, we got to use—”

“Not yet, though, Nick. In a minute. All right?”

She draped a leg over his. She began to kiss him. She began to caress and caress and caress It without using her hands.

“That good?” she whispered.

His head was thrown back. His eyes were closed. He moaned for reply.

A minute was more than enough time, she found.

St. James sat in the bedroom’s only chair, an overstuffed wingback. Aside from the bed, it was the most comfortable piece of furniture he’d yet to encounter at Crofters Inn. He drew his dressing gown round him against the pervasive chill descending from the glass of the bedroom’s two skylights and settled himself.

Behind the closed door of the bathroom, he could hear Deborah splashing away in the tub. She usually hummed or sang as she bathed, for some reason invariably choosing either Cole Porter or one of the Gershwins and rendering them with the enthusiasm of an undiscovered Edith Piaf and all the talent of a street hawker. She couldn’t carry a tune if King’s College Choir were trying to assist her. Tonight, however, she bathed in silence.

Normally, he would have welcomed any extended interlude between “Anything Goes” and “Summertime,” especially if he was trying to read in their bedroom while she was paying tribute to old American musicals in the adjoining bath. But tonight he would have preferred to hear her cheerful dissonance rather than listen to her quiet bathing and be forced to consider not only how best to interrupt it but also whether he wanted to do so.

Aside from a brief skirmish over tea, they’d declared and maintained an unspoken truce upon her return from her extended tramp on the moors that morning. It had been easy enough to effect, with Mr. Sage’s death to consider and Lynley’s arrival to anticipate. But now that Lynley was with them and the machinery of an investigation oiled and ready, St. James found that his thoughts kept returning to the unease in his marriage and what he himself was doing to contribute to it.

Where Deborah was all passion, he was all reason. He had liked to believe this basic difference in their natures constituted the bedrock of fire and ice upon which their marriage was soundly fixed. But they had entered an arena in which his ability to reason seemed not only a disadvantage but also the very spark that ignited her refusal to approach confl ict in any way other than pig-headedly. The words about this adoption business, Deborah were enough to send up every one of her defences against him. She moved from anger to accusation to tears with such dizzying speed that he didn’t know where to begin to contend with it or with her. And because of this, when discussions concluded with her banging out of the room, the house, or this morning the hotel, he more often breathed a sigh of relief than did he wonder what he himself could do to approach the problem from another angle. I tried, he would think, when the reality was that he’d gone through the motions without trying much at all.

He rubbed the stiff muscles at the base of his neck. They were always the primary indicator of the amount of stress he was currently refusing to acknowledge. He shifted in the chair. His dressing gown slid partially open with his movement. The cold air climbed his good right leg and forced his attention to his left, which as always felt nothing. He made a disinterested observation of it, an activity in which he’d engaged only rarely in the past several years, but one which he’d obsessively pursued day after day in the years before his marriage.

The object was always the same: to inspect the muscles for their degree of atrophy, intent upon fending off the disintegration that was the eventual by-product of paralysis. He’d regained the use of his left arm over time and through months of teeth-grating physical therapy. But the leg had been a different creature altogether, resistant to every effort at rehabilitation, like a soldier unable to heal from psychic war wounds as if they alone could prove he’d seen action.

“Many of the workings of the brain are still veiled in mystery,” the doctors had said in contemplative explanation of why the use of his arm would return but not that of his leg. “When the head undergoes as serious an injury as yours did, the prognosis for a full recovery has to be couched in the most guarded terms.”

Which was their way of beginning the list of perhapses. Perhaps he would regain complete use of it over time. Perhaps he would walk unassisted one day. Perhaps he would awaken one morning and have sensation restored, flexing muscles, moving toes, and bending the knee. But after twelve years, it wasn’t likely. So he held on to what was left after the fi rst four years of obstinate delusion had been stripped away: the appearance of normality. As long as he could keep atrophy from doing its worst to the muscles, he’d declare himself satisfied and dismiss the dream.

He’d fended off the disintegration with electrical current. The fact that this was an act of vanity was something which he never denied, telling himself that it wasn’t such a sin to want to look like a perfect physical specimen, even if he could no longer be one.

Still, he hated the oddity of his gait, and despite the number of years that he had lived with it, he sometimes still grew momentarily sticky on the palms when exposed to the curiosity in a stranger’s eyes. Different, they said, not quite one of us. And while he was different in the limited fashion described by his disability and he couldn’t deny it, in a stranger’s presence it was always underscored — even for an instant — a hundredfold.

We have certain expectations of people, he thought as he idly evaluated the leg. They’ll be able to walk, to talk, to see, and to hear. If they can’t — or if they do it in a way that defi es our preconceived notions about them — we label them, we shy away from contact, we force them to want to be part of a whole that is in itself without distinction.