Missing Joseph

That’s what had started all this in the fi rst place: her need for a man. She’d managed to avoid the need for years by keeping herself and her daughter isolated — just Mummy and Maggie taking on the human race in one part of the country or another. She’d diverted both the interior longing and the dull pain of desire by throwing her energies into Maggie, because Maggie was what her life was all about.

Juliet knew she had bought and paid for this night’s anguish in coin she had minted from a part of her make-up that had never failed to give her grief. Wanting a man, hungering to touch the hard fierce angles of his body, longing to lie beneath him — to straddle or to kneel — and to feel that moment’s delight in their bodies’ joining…These were the voids that had started her on this current path to disaster. So it was utterly fitting that physical desire, which she had never been able to eradicate completely no matter how many years she refused to acknowledge it, should be what had brought her to losing Maggie tonight.

There were dozens of if only’s barking in her head, but she fastened on one of them because, although she wanted to do so, she couldn’t lie to herself about its importance. She had to accept her involvement with Colin as the prime mover behind everything that had happened with Maggie.

She’d heard about him from Polly long before she’d ever seen him. And she’d thought herself secure in the belief that since Polly was herself in love with the man, since he was so many years her own junior, since she rarely saw him — indeed, since she rarely saw anyone now that they’d found what she’d come to believe was an ideal location to get on with their lives at last — she stood little chance of involvement or attachment. Even when he came to the cottage that day on his offi cial business and she saw him parked by the lavender on the lane and read the bleak despair on his face and recalled Polly’s story about his wife, even when she felt the ice of her detached composure receive its first rift in the face of his sorrow and for the first time in years she recognised a stranger’s pain, she’d not considered the danger he presented to the weakness in herself that she believed she had mastered.

It was only when he was inside the cottage and she saw him looking round at the frivolous fittings of the kitchen with such ill-disguised yearning that she felt her heart stir. At first, getting ready to pour them each a glass of her homemade wine, she’d looked round herself to try to understand what was moving him. She knew it couldn’t be the superficials — cooker, table, chairs, cupboards — and she wondered at the fact that the rest might be touching him in some way. Could a man be moved by a rack of spices, African violets in the window, jars on the work top, two loaves of bread left to cool, a rack of washed dishes, a tea towel hanging from a drawer to dry? Or was it the fi nger-painted and oft-moved picture affixed with Blu-Tack to the wall above the cooker: two skirt- wearing stick figures — one with breasts that looked like lumps of coal — surrounded by fl owers as tall as themselves and surmounted by the words I love you, Mummy in a fi ve-year-old’s hand. He’d looked at it, looked at her, looked away, and finally didn’t seem to know where to look at all.

Poor man, she had thought. And that had been her downfall. She knew about his wife, she began to speak, and she’d not been able to turn back from that moment. Sometime during their conversation, she’d thought just this once oh God to have a man that way just this once one more time he’s so hurting and if I control it if I’m the one if it’s only his pleasure with no thought of my own can it be such a wrong, and as he asked her about the shotgun and why she had used it and how, she had watched his eyes. She answered, keeping everything brief and to the point. And when he would have left — all information having been gathered, and thank you, madam, for your time — she decided to show him the pistol to keep him from going. She shot it and waited for him to react, to take it from her, to touch her hand as he removed it from her grip, but he wouldn’t, he kept the distance between them, and she realised with a sudden dawning of wonder that he was thinking those very same words just this once oh God just this once.

It wouldn’t be love, she decided, because she was those ugly, gaping ten years older than he, because they didn’t even know each other and had not spoken before this day, because the religion she’d long ago forsaken declared that love didn’t grow from allowing the needs of the flesh to dominate the needs of the soul.

She held on to those thoughts as that fi rst afternoon together wore on, believing herself safe from loving. This would just be for pleasure, she decided, and then it would be forgotten.

She should have recognised the extent of the danger he represented when she looked at the clock on her bedside table and realised that more than four hours had passed and she’d not even thought about Maggie. She should have ended it there — the moment guilt rushed in to replace the sleepy peace that accompanied her orgasms. She should have closed her heart and cut him out of her life with something abrupt and potentially hurtful like you’re almost a decent fuck for a copper. But instead she’d said, “Oh my God,” and he’d known. He’d said, “I’ve been selfish. You’re worried about your daughter. Let me clear out. I’ve kept you far too long. I’ve…” When he stopped speaking, she didn’t look his way, but she felt his hand graze her arm. “I don’t know how to name what I felt,” he said, “or what I feel. Except that being with you like that…it wasn’t enough. It’s not even enough now. I don’t know what that means.”

She should have said drily, “It means you were randy, Constable. We both were. We still are in fact.” But she didn’t. She listened to him dressing and tried to work up something curt and unmistakably final with which to dismiss him. When he sat on the edge of the bed and turned her to him with his face caught somewhere between wonder and fear, she had the opportunity to draw the line. But she didn’t. Instead, she listened to him say,

“Can I love you this quickly, Juliet Spence? Just like that? In an afternoon? Can my life change like that?”

And because she knew more than anything else that life can change irrevocably in the instant one is forced to realise its malicious caprice, she said, “Yes But don’t.”

“What?”

“Love me. Or let your life change.”

He didn’t understand. He couldn’t, really. He thought, perhaps, she was being coy. He said, “No one has control over that,” and when his hand moved slowly down her body and her body rose eagerly to meet it against her will, she knew he was right. He phoned her that night long after midnight, saying, “I don’t know what this is. I don’t know what to call it. I thought if I heard your voice…Because I’ve never felt…But that’s what men say, isn’t it? I’ve never felt like this before so let me get into your knickers and test the feeling out another time or two. And it’s that, I won’t lie, but it goes beyond and I don’t know why.”

She had played the fool in the biggest way because she loved being loved by a man. Even Maggie couldn’t stop her: not with her white-faced knowledge — unspoken when she entered the cottage not five minutes after Colin’s initial departure, with her cat in her arms and her cheeks fresh-scrubbed from where she’d been brushing tears away; not with her silent appraisal of Colin when he came to dinner or took them for hikes with his dog on the moors; not with her shrill pleas not to be left alone when Juliet went for an hour or two to be with Colin in his house. Maggie couldn’t stop her. And she didn’t really need to do so because Juliet knew there was no hope of permanency. She understood from the first that each minute was a memory stored against a future in which he and the love of him had no place. She merely forgot that while she had lived for the moment for so many years — on the edge of a tomorrow that always promised to bring the worst upon them — she’d made sure to create a life for Maggie that appeared normal. So Maggie’s fears of Colin’s permanent intrusion were real. To explain to her that they were also groundless would be to tell her things that would destroy her world. And while Juliet couldn’t bring herself to do that, she couldn’t bring herself to let Colin go either. Another week, she would think, please God just give me another week with him and I’ll end it between us, I promise I will.

So she had bought this evening. How well she knew it.

Like mother, like daughter in the end, Juliet thought. Maggie’s sex with Nick Ware was more than just an adolescent’s way of striking back at her mother; it was more than just a search for a man she could call daddy in the darkest part of her mind; it was the blood in her veins declaring itself at last. Yet Juliet knew that she might have been able to forestall the inevitable had she herself not taken up with Colin and given her daughter an example to follow.

Juliet drew off the leather gloves a fi nger at a time and dropped them onto the pea jacket and scarf that lay heaped on the fl oor. She went not to the kitchen to prepare a dinner that her daughter wouldn’t eat, but to the stairs. She paused at the bottom with one hand on the banister, trying to gather the energy to climb. This stairway was a duplication of so many others over the years: worn carpeting on the flooring, nothing on the walls. She had always thought of pictures on the walls as one more thing to have to remove when they left a cottage, so there never seemed to be a point to hanging any up in the fi rst place. Keep it plain, keep it simple, keep it functional. Following that credo, she had always refused to decorate in a way that might encourage affection for a set of rooms in which they lived. She wanted there to be no sense of loss when they moved on.