Missing Joseph

by Elizabeth George

“So what? You smell of it, too.”

  Her mother’s fingers contracted convulsively, her short nails creating sharp pressure points of pain on the soft underside of Maggie’s wrist. Maggie cried out and tried to pull away but only succeeded in flinging their locked hands against the plastic bottle so that it slipped into the sink. The pungent mixture arced out to form an oleaginous pool. As it drained away, it left red and gold beads against the white porcelain.

  “I suppose you think I deserve that remark,” Juliet said. “You’ve decided sex with Nick is the perfect way to get an eye for an eye. Which is what you want, isn’t it? Isn’t it what you’ve been wanting for months? Mummy’s taken a lover and you’ll fix her good if it’s the last thing you do.”

  “It’s nothing to do with you. I don’t care what you do. I don’t care how you do it. I don’t even care when. I love Nick. He loves me.”

  “I see. And when he makes you pregnant and you’re faced with having his baby, will he love you then? Will he leave school in order to support the two of you? And how will it feel, Margaret Jane Spence—motherhood before your fourteenth birthday?”

  Juliet released her and went into the old-fashioned larder. Maggie rubbed her wrist and listened to the angry pop and snap of airtight containers being opened and closed on the chipped marble work top. Her mother returned, brought the kettle to the sink, set it to boil on the cooker. “Sit down,” she said.

  Maggie hesitated, running her fingers through the oil and vinegar that remained in the sink. She knew what was to follow—it was exactly what had followed her first encounter with Nick in the Hall in October—but unlike October, this time she understood what those two words presaged, and the understanding was a sickness to her that quickly ran ice down her back. How stupid she’d been just three months ago. What had she been thinking? Each morning Mummy had presented her with the cup of thick liquid she passed off as her special female tea, and Maggie had screwed up her face and drunk it obediently, believing it was the vitamin supplement Mummy claimed it to be, something every girl needed when she became a woman. But now, in conjunction with her mother’s words this evening, she remembered a hushed conversation that Mummy had had with Mrs. Rice in this very kitchen nearly two years ago, with Mrs. Rice begging for something to “kill it, stop it, I beg you, Juliet” and with Mummy saying, “I can’t do that, Marion. It’s a private oath, to be sure, but it’s an oath nonetheless, and I mean to keep it. You must go to a clinic if you want to be rid of it.” At which Mrs. Rice began to weep, saying, “Ted won’t hear of it. He’d kill me if he thought I did anything at all…” And then six months later her twins were born.

  “I said sit down,” Juliet Spence repeated. She was pouring the water over the dried, crushed bark root. Its acrid odour wafted up with the steam. She added two tablespoons of honey to the drink, stirred it vigorously, and took it to the table. “Come here.”

  Maggie felt the angry cramps without use of the stimulant, a phantom pain that grew from her memory. “I won’t drink that.”

  “You will.”

  “I won’t. You want to kill the baby, don’t you? My baby, Mummy. Mine and Nick’s. That’s what you were doing before, in October. You said it was vitamins, to make my bones strong and to give me more energy. You said women need more calcium than little girls and I wasn’t a little girl any longer so I needed to drink it. But you were lying, weren’t you? Weren’t you, Mummy? You wanted to make sure I didn’t have a baby.”

  “You’re being hysterical.”

  “You think it’s happened, don’t you? You think there’s a baby inside me, don’t you? Isn’t that why you want me to drink?”

  “We’ll make it un-happen if it’s happened. That’s all.”

  “To a baby? My baby? No!” The edge of the work top dug into her spine as Maggie backed away from her mother.

  Juliet set the mug on the table, resting a hand on her hip. With the other hand, she rubbed her forehead. In the kitchen light, her face looked gaunt. The streaks of grey in her hair seemed at once duller and more pronounced. “Then what exactly is it that you were planning to do with the oil and vinegar if not try—no matter how ineffectively—to stop a baby’s conception?”

  “That’s…” Maggie turned miserably back to the sink.

  “Different? Why? Because it’s easy? Because it washes things away without any pain, stopping things before they start? How convenient for you, Maggie. Unfortunately, that’s not the way it’s going to be. Come here. Sit down.”

  Maggie pulled the oil and vinegar towards her in a protective and largely meaningless gesture. Her mother continued.

  “Even if oil and vinegar were efficacious contraceptives—which they are not, by the way—a douche is completely useless much more than five minutes after intercourse.”

  “I don’t care. I wasn’t using it for that. I just wanted to be clean. Like you said.”

  “I see. Fine. Whatever you wish. Now, are you going to drink this, or are we going to argue, deny, and play with reality for the rest of the night? Because neither of us is leaving this room until you’ve drunk it, Maggie. Depend upon that.”

  “I won’t drink it. You can’t make me. I’ll have the baby. It’s mine. I’ll have it. I’ll love it. I will.”

  “You don’t know the first thing about loving anyone.”

  “I do!”

  “Really? Then what does it mean to make a promise to someone you love? Is it just words? Is it something you say to get you through the moment? Something without meaning mouthed to soothe feelings? Something to get what you want?”

  Maggie felt tears building behind her eyes, in her nose. Everything on the work top—a dented toaster, four metal canisters, a mortar and pestle, seven glass jars—shimmered as she began to cry.

  “You made a promise to me, Maggie. We had an agreement. Shall I recall it for you?”

  Maggie grabbed on to the kitchen sink’s tap and shoved it back and forth, having no purpose for doing so other than experiencing the certainty of contact with something that she could control. Punkin leapt to the work top and approached her. He wove in and out of the bottles and jars, pausing to sniff at some crumbs on the toaster. He gave a plaintive mew and rubbed against her arm. She reached for him blindly and lowered her face to the back of his neck. He smelled of wet hay. His fur adhered to the trail her tears were making on her cheeks.

  “If we didn’t leave the village, if I agreed that we wouldn’t move on this time, you’d see I never regretted it. You’d make me proud. Do you remember that? Do you remember giving me your solemn word? You were sitting at this very table last August, crying and pleading to stay in Winslough. ‘Just this once, Mummy. Please don’t let’s move again. I’ve got such good mates here, special mates, Mummy. I want to finish school. I’ll do anything. Please. Let’s just stay.’”

  “It was the truth. My mates. Josie and Pam.”

  “It was a variation on truth, less than a half-truth if you will. Which is no doubt why within the next two months you were having it off on the floor in Cotes Hall with a fifteen-year-old farmboy and God knows who else.”

  “That isn’t true!”

  “Which part, Maggie? Having it off with Nick? Or pulling down your knickers for any one of his randy little mates who wanted to give you a poke?”

  “I hate you!”

  “Yes. Ever since this started, you’ve been making that clear. And I’m sorry about that. Because I don’t hate you.”

  “You’re doing the same.” Maggie swung back to her mother. “You preach about being good and not having babies and all the time you’re doing no better than me. You do it with Mr. Shepherd. Everyone knows.”

  “Which is what this is all about, isn’t it? You’re thirteen years old. During your entire life I’ve never taken a lover. And you’re bound and determined that I won’t take one now. I’m to go on living solely for you, just as you’re used to. Right?”

  “No.”

  “And if you have to get pregnant to keep me in lin
e, then that’s just fine.”

  “No!”

  “Because what is a baby after all, Maggie? Just something you can use to get what you want. You want Nick tied to you? Fine, give him sex. You want Mummy preoccupied with your concerns? Good. Get yourself pregnant. You want everyone to notice how special you are? Open your legs for any bloke who sniffs you up. You want—”

  Maggie grabbed up the vinegar and hurled the bottle to the floor where it exploded against the tile. Glass shards shot the length of the room. At once the air was eye-stingingly sour. Punkin hissed, backing into the canisters, his fur on end and his tail a plume.

  “I’ll love my baby,” she cried. “I’ll love it and take care of it and it’ll love me. That’s what babies do. That’s all babies do. They love their mummies and their mummies love them.”

  Juliet Spence ran her eyes over the mess on the floor. Against the tiles—which were cream coloured—the vinegar looked like diluted blood.

  “It’s genetic.” She sounded worn out. “My God in heaven, it’s inbred at your core.” She pulled out one of the kitchen chairs and sank onto it. She cupped her hands round the mug of tea. “Babies aren’t love machines,” she said to the mug. “They don’t know how to love. They don’t know what love is. They only have needs. Hunger, thirst, sleep, and wet nappies. And that’s the end of it.”

  “It’s not,” Maggie said. “They love you. They make you feel good inside. They belong to you. One hundred percent. You can hold them and sleep with them and cuddle them close. And when they get big—”

  “They break you in pieces. One way or another. It comes down to that.”

  Maggie rubbed the back of her wrist across her wet cheeks. “You just don’t want me to have something to love. That’s what it is. You can have Mr. Shepherd. That’s fine and good for you. But I’m not supposed to have anything at all.”

  “Do you really believe that? You don’t think you have me?”

  “You’re not enough, Mummy.”

  “I see.”

  Maggie picked up the cat and cradled it against her. She saw defeat and sorrow in her mother’s posture: slumped into the seat with her long legs outstretched. She didn’t care. She pressed the advantage. What did it matter? Mummy could get comfort from Mr. Shepherd if she felt hurt. “I want to know about Daddy.”

  Her mother said nothing. She merely turned the mug in her hands. On the table lay a packet of snapshots that they’d taken over Christmas, and she reached for this. The holiday had fallen before the inquest, and they’d worked hard at good spirits and happiness, trying to forget what frightening possibilities the future held for them both if Juliet stood trial. She flipped through the pictures, all of the two of them. It had always been that way, years and years of the two of them, a relationship that had brooked no interference from any third party.

  Maggie watched her mother. She waited for an answer. She’d been waiting like this for all of her life, afraid to demand, afraid to push, overcome with guilt and apologies if her mother’s reaction verged upon tears. But not tonight.

  “I want to know about Daddy,” she repeated.

  Her mother said nothing.

  “He isn’t dead, is he? He’s never been dead. He’s been looking for me. That’s why we’ve kept on the move.”

  “No.”

  “Because he wants me. He loves me. He wonders where I am. He thinks about me all the time. Doesn’t he?”

  “This is fantasy, Maggie.”

  “Doesn’t he, Mummy? I want to know.”

  “What?”

  “Who he is. What he does. What he looks like. Why we’re not with him. Why we’ve never been with him.”

  “There’s nothing to tell.”

  “I look like him, don’t I? Because I don’t look like you.”

  “This sort of discussion won’t do anything to make you miss having a father.”

  “Yes it will. It will. Because I’ll know. And if I want to find him—”

  “You can’t. He’s gone.”

  “He isn’t.”

  “Maggie, he is. And I won’t talk about it. I won’t make up a story. I won’t tell you lies. He’s gone from both our lives. He’s always been gone. Right from the first.”

  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 floor.

  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 flesh. 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 compl
eted, 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.