In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

But they didn't live in that world. And the world they did live in was one suggesting that a permanent soul mate was one little strip of celluloid away: boy meets girl, they fall in love, they have their troubles which are resolved by Act III, fade to black, and the credits roll. That world was maddening because Samantha knew if her cousin adhered to a belief in that sort of love, she was doomed to failure. I'm here, she found herself wanting to shout, hose pipe in hand. I have what you need. Look at me. Look at me.

As if he'd heard her silent cry, Julian glanced up at just that moment and caught her watching him. He leaned forward and swung the casement window fully open. Samantha crossed the courtyard to join him.

“You're looking grim. I couldn't help noticing. You caught me trying to design a cure for what ails you.”

“D'you think I have a future in counterfeiting?” he asked. The sun was shining directly on his face and he squinted into it. “That may be the only answer.”

“Do you think so?” she asked lightly. “No rich young thing waiting for seduction on your horizon?”

“It doesn't look like it.” He saw her observing the mass of documents and account books that were spread on his desk, certainly a far greater number than he usually went through when doing his sums for the coming week. “Trying to see where we stand,” he explained. “I was hoping to wring about ten thousand pounds out of… well, out of nothing, I'm afraid.”

“Why?” She noted the downhearted cast of his face and hastened to add, “Julie, is there an emergency of some sort? Is something wrong?”

“That's just the hell of it. Something's right. Or something could be made right. But there's not enough liquid cash to do much more than see us through to the end of the month.”

“I hope you know that you can always ask me-” She hesitated, not wanting to offend him, knowing that he was as proud a man as he was responsible. She put it another way. “We're family, Julie. If something's come up and you'd like some money… it wouldn't even be a loan. You're my cousin. You can have it.”

He looked horrified. “I didn't mean you to think-”

“Stop it. I'm not thinking anything.”

“Good. Because I couldn't. Not ever.”

“Fine. We won't discuss it. But please tell me what's happened. You look really cut up.”

He blew out a breath. He said, “Oh bugger it,” and in a quick movement he climbed onto the desk and out of the window to join her in the courtyard. “What're you up to? Ah. Windows. I see. Have you any idea how long it's been since they've had a wash, Sam?”

“When Edward chucked it all in for Wallis? Fool that he was.”

“That's a fair bet.”

“Which part of it? The guess itself? Or chucking it all in for her?”

He smiled resignedly. “I'm not sure at this point.”

Samantha didn't say what came first to her mind: that he wouldn't have answered in such a way a week ago. She merely gave a few moments’ consideration to what such an answer implied.

Companionably, they went at the windows. The old glazing was set into lead in far too fragile a fashion to blast away at it with the hose pipe, so they were reduced to a painstaking process of soaking away the grime with rags, one single pane at a time.

“This'll take till our dotage,” Julian noted grimly after ten minutes of silent cleaning.

“I dare say,” Samantha replied. She wanted to ask him if he was prepared for her to stay round that long, but she let the thought go. Something serious was on his mind, and she had to get to it, if only to prove to him her abiding concern for all aspects of his life. She sought a way in, saying quietly, “Julie, I'm sorry about your worries. On top of everything else. I can't do anything about… well…” She found that she couldn't even say Nicola Maiden's name. Not here and now. Not to Julian. “About what's happened in the last few days” was what she settled on. “But if there's ever anything else that I can do…”

“I'm sorry,” he replied.

“Of course you are. How could you be anything else but sorry?”

“I mean I'm sorry for what I said… how I acted… when I questioned you, Sam. About that night. You know.”

She gave particular attention to a window pane that was crusted with guano, which had dripped from a hundred years of birds’ nests tucked into a crevice above them. “You were upset.”

“I didn't need to accuse you though. Of… of whatever.”

“Of murdering the woman you loved, you mean.” She looked his way. The ruddy colour in his face had heightened.

“Sometimes I can't get a rein on the voices inside my head. I start talking and whatever the voices have been shouting pops out. It's nothing to do with what I believe. I'm sorry.”

She wanted to say, But she wasn't good for you anyway, Julie. Why did you never see that she wasn't good for you? And when will you see what her death can mean? To you. To me. To us, Julie. But she didn't say it because to say it would be to reveal what she couldn't afford-or even bear-to reveal to him. “Accepted,” she said instead.

“Thanks, Sam. You're a brick,” he said.

“Again.”

“I mean-”

She flashed him a smile. “It's okay. I understand. Hand me the hose pipe. These need dousing now.”

A burble of water was all they could risk against the old windows. Sometime in the future it would be necessary to have all the lead replaced or what was left of the ancient glass would definitely be destroyed. But that was a conversation for another time. With his present money worries, Julian didn't need to hear Samantha's prescription for saving another part of the family home.

He said, “It's Dad.”

She said, “What?”

“What's on my mind. Why I've been going through the books. It's Dad.” And then he explained, ending ruefully with, “I've been waiting for years for him to choose sobriety-”

“All of us have waited.”

“-and now he's done that, I got all caught up in trying to come up with a way to seize the moment before it passes. I know the truth of the matter. I've read enough about it to understand he has to do it for himself. He has to want it. But if you could have seen him, heard how he was talking… I don't think he's had a drink all day.”

“Hasn't he? No, I suppose he hasn't.” And she thought of her uncle as he'd been the previous night: slurring not a word and coaxing from her an admission that she didn't want to make. She felt a stillness come over her, one in which she knew that she too could seize the moment-could use it and mould it-or let it pass. She said carefully, “Perhaps he does want it this time, Julie. He's getting older. Facing his… well, his mortality.” His mortality, she thought, not his death. She wouldn't use that word, because in this instant it was crucial to maintain a delicate balance in the conversation. “I expect everyone comes face-to-face with… well, with the knowledge that nothing goes on forever. Perhaps he's feeling older all at once and he wants to sort himself out while he still has the chance.”

“But that's just it,” Julian said. “Does he have a chance? How can he do it without help when he's never been able to do it before? And now that he's finally asked for help how can I fail to give it? Because I want to give it. I want him to succeed.”

“We all do, Julie. The family. We want that.”

“So I went through the books. Because of the health insurance we have. I don't even need to read the small print to know there's no way…” He examined the pane he was working on, scraping his fingernail against the glass.

Nails on a chalkboard. Samantha shuddered. She turned her head from the sound.

Which was when she saw him, where he always was. He stood at the window in the parlour. He watched her talking to his son. And as she watched him watching her, Samantha saw her uncle raise his hand. One finger touched his temple and then his hand dropped. He might have been smoothing his hair from his face. But the reality was that the gesture looked very much like a mock salute.