Missing Joseph

by Elizabeth George

  He pressed his lips together. The lower one was full, the upper one thin. They formed a seam of sorrow on his face, and they seemed to be acting as inadequate containment for an inner turmoil. Fellow struggler, Deborah thought. She was touched by his suffering.

  “It’s a lovely drawing, isn’t it?” She spoke in the sort of hushed whisper one automatically uses in places of prayer or meditation. “I’d never seen it before today.”

  He turned to her. He was swarthy, older than he had seemed at first. He looked surprised to have been spoken to out of the blue by a stranger. “Nor I,” he said.

  “It’s awful of me when you think that I’ve lived in London for the last eighteen years. It makes me wonder what else I’ve been missing.”

  “Joseph,” he said.

  “Sorry?”

  He used the museum plan to gesture at the cartoon. “You’re missing Joseph. But you’ll always be missing him. Haven’t you noticed? Isn’t it always Madonna and Child?”

  Deborah glanced again at the artwork. “I’d never thought of that, actually.”

  “Or Virgin and Child. Or Mother and Child. Or Adoration of the Magi with a cow and an ass and an angel or two. But you rarely see Joseph. Have you never wondered why?”

  “Perhaps…well, of course, he wasn’t really the father, was he?”

  The man’s eyes closed. “Jesus God,” he replied.

  He seemed so struck that Deborah hurried on. “I mean, we’re taught to believe he wasn’t the father. But we don’t know for certain. How could we? We weren’t there. She didn’t exactly keep a journal of her life. We’re just told that the Holy Ghost came down with an angel or something and…Naturally, I don’t know how it was supposed to be managed but it was a miracle, wasn’t it? There she was a virgin one minute and pregnant the next and then in nine months—there was this little baby and she was holding him probably not quite believing he was real and counting his fingers and toes. He was hers, really hers, the baby she’d longed for…I mean, if you believe in miracles. If you do.”

  She hadn’t realised that she’d begun to cry until she saw the man’s expression change. Then the sheer oddity of their situation made her want to laugh instead. It was wildly absurd, this psychic pain. They were passing it between them like a tennis ball.

  He dug a handkerchief out of a pocket of his overcoat, and he pressed it, crumpled, into her hand. “Please.” His voice was earnest. “It’s quite clean. I’ve only used it once. To wipe the rain from my face.”

  Deborah laughed shakily. She pressed the linen beneath her eyes and returned it to him. “Thoughts link up like that, don’t they? You don’t expect them to. You think you’ve quite protected yourself. Then all of a sudden you’re saying something that seems so reasonable and safe on the surface, but you’re not safe at all, are you, from what you’re trying not to feel.”

  He smiled. The rest of him was tired and ageing, lines at the eyes and flesh giving way beneath his chin, but his smile was lovely. “It’s the same for me. I came here merely for a place to walk and think that would be out of the rain, and I stumbled on this drawing instead.”

  “And thought of St. Joseph when you didn’t want to?”

  “No. I’d been thinking of him anyway, after a fashion.” He tucked his handkerchief back into his pocket and went on, his tone becoming more determinedly light. “I’d have preferred a walk in the park, actually. I was heading to St. James’s Park when the rain began again. I generally like to do my thinking out of doors. I’m a countryman at heart and if ever there’re thoughts to be had or decisions to be made, I always try to get myself outside to think them or to make them. A proper tramp in the air clears the head, I find. And the heart as well. It makes the rights and wrongs of life—the yes’s and the no’s—easier to see.”

  “Easier to see,” she said. “But not to deal with. Not for me, at least. I can’t say yes just because people want me to, no matter how right it may be to do so.”

  He directed his gaze back to the cartoon. He rolled the museum plan tighter in his hands. “Nor can I always,” he said. “Which is why I head out for a tramp in the air. I was set on feeding the sparrows from the bridge in St. James’s, watching them peck at my palm and letting every problem find its solution from there.” He shrugged and smiled sadly. “But then there was the rain.”

  “So you came here. And saw there was no St. Joseph.”

  He reached for his trilby and set it on his head. The brim cast a triangular shadow on his face. “And you, I imagine, saw the Infant.”

  “Yes.” Deborah forced her lips into a brief, tight smile. She looked about her, as if she too had belongings to gather in preparation for leaving.

  “Tell me, is it an infant you want or one that died or one you’d like to be rid of?”

  “Be rid—”

  Swiftly, he lifted his hand. “One that you want,” he said. “I’m sorry. I should have seen that. I should have recognised the longing. Dear God in heaven, why are men such fools?”

  “He wants us to adopt. I want my child—his child—a family that’s real, one that we create, not one that we apply for. He’s brought the papers home. They’re sitting on his desk. All I have to do is fill out my part and sign my name, but I find that I just can’t do it. It wouldn’t be mine, I tell him. It wouldn’t come from me. It wouldn’t come from us. I couldn’t love it the same way if it wasn’t mine.”

  “No,” he said. “That’s very true. You wouldn’t love it the same way at all.”

  She grasped his arm. The wool of his coat was damp and scratchy beneath her fingers. “You understand. He doesn’t. He says there’re connections that go beyond blood. But they don’t for me. And I can’t understand why they do for him.”

  “Perhaps it’s because he knows that we humans ultimately love something that we have to struggle for—something that we give up everything to have—far more than the things that fall our way through chance.”

  She released his arm. Her hand fell with a thud to the bench between them. Unwittingly, the man had spoken Simon’s own words. Her husband may as well have been in the room with her.

  She wondered how she had come to unburden herself in the presence of a stranger. I’m desperate for someone to take my part, she thought, looking for a champion to bear my standard. I don’t even care who that champion is, just so long as he sees my point, agrees, and lets me go my own way.

  “I can’t help how I feel,” she said hollowly.

  “My dear, I’m not sure anyone can.” The man loosened his scarf and unbuttoned his coat, reaching inside to his jacket pocket. “I should guess you need a tramp in the air to think your thoughts and clear your head,” he said. “But you need fresh air. Wide skies and broad vistas. You can’t find that in London. If you’ve a mind to do your tramping in the North, you’ve a welcome in Lancashire.” He handed her his card.

  Robin Sage, it read, The Vicarage, Winslough.

  “The Vic—” Deborah looked up and saw what his coat and scarf had hidden before, the white solid collar encircling his neck. She should have realised at once from the colour of his clothes, from his talk of St. Joseph, from the very reverence with which he’d regarded the da Vinci cartoon.

  No wonder she’d found it so easy to reveal her troubles and her sorrows. She’d been confessing to an Anglican priest.

  BRENDAN POWER SPUN ROUND AS THE door creaked open and his younger brother Hogarth entered the glacial cold of the vestry of St. John the Baptist Church in the village of Winslough. Beyond him the organist, accompanied by a single, tremulous, and no doubt utterly uninvited voice, was playing “All Ye Who Seek for Sure Relief,” as a follow-up to “God Moves in a Mysterious Way.” Brendan had little doubt that both pieces constituted the organist’s sympathetic but unsolicited comment upon the morning’s proceedings.

  “Nothing,” Hogarth said. “Not a ginger. Not a git. And no vicar to be found. Everyone on her side’s in a real twist, Bren. Her mum was moaning about the wedding breakfast being
ruined, she was hissing about getting revenge on some ‘rotten sow,’ and her dad’s just left to ‘hunt that little rat down.’ Quite the folks they are, these Townley-Youngs.”

  “Maybe you’re off the hook, Bren.” Tyrone—his older brother and best man and, by rights, the only other person who should have been in the vestry aside from the vicar—spoke with guarded hope as Hogarth closed the door behind him.

  “No way,” Hogarth said. He reached in the jacket pocket of his hired morning coat that, despite all efforts by the tailor, failed to make his shoulders look like anything other than the sides of Pendle Hill incarnate. He took out a packet of Silk Cuts and lit up, flicking the match onto the cold stone floor. “She has him by the curlies, she does, Ty. Make no mistake about it. And let it be a lesson to you. Keep it in your trousers till it’s got a proper home.”

  Brendan turned away. They both loved him, they both had their own way of offering consolation. But neither Hogarth’s joking nor Tyrone’s optimism was going to change the reality of the day. Come hell or high water—and between the two it was more likely to be hell—he would be married to Rebecca Townley-Young. He tried not to think about it, which is what he’d been doing since she’d first dropped by his office in Clitheroe with the results of her pregnancy test.

  “I don’t know how it happened,” she said. “I’ve never had a regular period in my life. My doctor even told me that I’d have to go on some sort of medication just to get myself regular if I ever wanted a family. And now…Look where we are, Brendan.”

  Look what you did to me was the underlying message, as was And you, Brendan Power, a junior partner in Daddy’s own solicitor’s firm! Tsk, tsk. What a shame it might be to be given the sack.

  But she didn’t need to say any of that. All she needed to say, head lowered penitently, was, “Brendan, I simply don’t know what I’m going to tell Daddy. What shall I do?”

  A man in any other position would have said, “Just get rid of it, Rebecca,” and gone on with his work. A different sort of man in Brendan’s own position might have said the same thing. But Brendan was eighteen months away from St. John Andrew Townley-Young’s decision as to which of the solicitors would handle his affairs and his fortune when the current senior partner retired from the firm, and the perquisites that went with that decision were of the sort that Brendan could not turn from lightly: an introduction to society, the promise of other clients from Townley-Young’s class, and stellar advancement in his career.

  The opportunities promised by Townley-Young’s patronage had prompted Brendan to involve himself with the man’s twenty-eight-year-old daughter in the first place. He’d been with the firm just short of a year. He was eager to make his place in the world. Thus, when through the senior partner, St. John Andrew Townley-Young had extended an invitation to Brendan to escort Miss Townley-Young to the horse and pony sales of the Cowper Day Fair, it had seemed too much a stroke of good fortune for Brendan to demur.

  At the time, the idea hadn’t been repellent. While it was true that even under the best of conditions—after a good night’s sleep and an hour and a half with her make-up and her hair curlers and her very best clothes—Rebecca still tended to resemble Queen Victoria in her declining years, Brendan had felt he could tolerate one or two mutual encounters with good grace and the guise of camaraderie. He counted heavily on his ability to dissemble, knowing that every decent lawyer had at least several drops of dissimulation in his blood. What he did not count on was Rebecca’s ability to decide, dominate, and direct the course of their relationship from its very inception. The second time he was with her, she took him to bed and rode him like the master of the hunt with a fox in sight. The third time he was with her, she rubbed him, fondled him, skewered herself on him and came up pregnant.

  He wanted to blame her. But he couldn’t avoid the fact that as she panted and bobbed and bounced against him with her odd skinny breasts hanging down in his face, he had closed his eyes and smiled and called her God-what-a-woman-you-are-Becky and all the time thought of his future career.

  So they would indeed be married today. Not even the failure of the Reverend Mr. Sage to appear at the church was going to stop the tide of Brendan Power’s future from flooding right in.

  “How late is he?” he asked Hogarth.

  His brother glanced at his watch. “It’s gone half an hour now.”

  “No one’s left the church?”

  Hogarth shook his head. “But there’s a whisper and a titter that you’re the one who’s failed to show. I’ve been doing my part to save your reputation, lad, but you might want to pop your head into the chancel and give a bit of a wave to reassure the masses. I can’t say what that’ll do to reassure your bride, though. Who’s this sow she’s after? Are you already having a bit of stuff on the side? Not that I’d blame you. Getting it up for Becky must be a real treat. But you were always one for a challenge, weren’t you?”

  “Stow it, Hogie,” Tyrone said. “And put out the fag. This is a church, for God’s sake.”

  Brendan walked to the vestry’s single window, a lancet set deeply into the wall. Its panes were as dusty as was the room itself, and he cleared a small patch to look out at the day. What he saw was the graveyard, its cluster of stones like malformed slate thumbprints against the snow, and in the distance, the looming slopes of Cotes Fell that rose cone-shaped against a grey sky.

  “It’s snowing again.” Absently, he counted how many graves were topped by seasonal sprays of holly, their red berries glistening against the spiked, green leaves. Seven of them that he could see. The greenery would have been brought this morning by wedding guests, for even now the wreaths and sprays were only lightly sprinkled with snow. He said, “The vicar must have gone out earlier this morning. That’s what’s happened. And he’s caught somewhere.”

  Tyrone joined him at the window. Behind them, Hogarth ground his cigarette into the floor. Brendan shivered. Despite the fact that the church’s heating system was busily grinding away, the vestry was still unbearably cold. He put his hand to the wall. It felt icy and damp.

  “How are Mum and Dad doing?” he asked.

  “Oh, Mum’s a bit nervous but as far as I can tell, she still thinks it’s a match made in heaven. Her first child to get married and glory-to-God he’s hopping into the arms of the landed gentry, if only the vicar’ll show his face. But Dad’s watching the door like he’s had enough.”

  “He hasn’t been this far from Liverpool in years,” Tyrone noted. “He’s just feeling nervous.”

  “No. He’s feeling who he is.” Brendan turned from the window and looked at his brothers. They were mirrors of him and he knew it. Sloped shoulders, beaked noses, and everything else about them undecided. Hair that was neither brown nor blond. Eyes that were neither blue nor green. Jaws that were neither strong nor weak. They were all of them perfectly cast for potential serial killers, with faces that faded into a crowd. And that’s how the Townley-Youngs reacted when they’d met the whole family, as if they’d come face to face with their worst expectations and their most dreaded dreams. It was no wonder to Brendan that his father was watching the door and counting the moments till he could escape. His sisters were probably feeling the same. He even felt some envy for them. An hour or two and it would be over. For him, it was a lifetime proposition.

  Cecily Townley-Young had accepted the role of her cousin’s chief bridesmaid because her father had instructed her to do so. She hadn’t wanted to be part of the wedding. She hadn’t even wanted to come to the wedding. She and Rebecca had never shared anything other than their relative positions as the daughters of sons on a scrawny family tree, and as far as Cecily was concerned, things could have pretty much stayed that way.

  She didn’t like Rebecca. First, she had nothing in common with her. Rebecca’s idea of an afternoon of bliss was to crawl round four or five pony sales, talking about withers and lifting rubbery equine lips to have a sharp look at those ghastly yellow teeth. She carried apples and carrots like loo
se change in her pockets, and she examined hooves, scrotums, and eyeballs with the sort of interest most women give to clothes. Second, Cecily was tired of Rebecca. Twenty-two years of enduring birthdays, Easter, Christmas, and New Year’s on her uncle’s estate—all in the name of a spurious family unity that absolutely no one felt—had ground to gravel whatever affection she might have harboured for an older cousin. A few exposures to Rebecca’s incomprehensible extremes of behaviour had kept Cecily at a safe distance from her whenever they occupied the same house for more than a quarter of an hour. And third, she found her intolerably stupid. Rebecca had never boiled an egg, written a cheque, or made a bed. Her answer for every little problem in life was, “Daddy’ll see to it,” just the sort of lazy, parental dependence that Cecily loathed.

  Even today Daddy was seeing to it in finest form. They’d done their part, obediently waiting for the vicar in the ice-floored, snow-speckled north porch of the church, stomping their feet, with their lips turning blue, while the guests rustled and murmured inside among the holly and the ivy, wondering why the candles weren’t being lit and why the wedding march hadn’t begun. They’d waited for an entire quarter of an hour, the snow making its own lazy bridal veils in the air, before Daddy had stormed across the street and pounded furiously on the vicarage door. He’d returned, his usual ruddy skin gone white with rage, in less than two minutes.

  “He’s not even home,” St. John Andrew Townley-Young had snapped. “That mindless cow”—this was his manner of identifying the vicar’s housekeeper, Cecily decided—“said he’d already gone out when she arrived this morning, if you can believe it. That incompetent, foul little…” His hands formed fists in their dove-coloured gloves. His top hat trembled. “Get inside the church. All of you. Get out of this weather. I’ll handle the situation.”