Missing Joseph

by Elizabeth George

  She looked up. He moved his eyes away. She said in a low, uncertain voice, “I cast the circle for you last night, Colin. To Mars. For strength. Rita wanted me to petition for myself, but I didn’t. I did it for you. I want the best for you, Colin.”

  “Polly…”

  “I remember things. We used to be such friends, didn’t we? We’d hike out by the reservoir. We’d see films in Burnley. We went to Blackpool once.”

  “With Annie.”

  “But we were friends as well, me and you.”

  He gazed at his hands so that he wouldn’t have to meet her eyes. “We were. But we made a mess of it all.”

  “We didn’t. We only—”

  “Annie knew. Directly I walked into the bedroom, she knew. She could read it all over me. And I could see that reading on her face. She said, How was your picnic, did you have a nice time, did you get some fresh air, Col? She knew.”

  “We didn’t mean to hurt her.”

  “She never asked me to be faithful. Did you know that? She didn’t expect it once she knew she was going to die. She reached for my hand one night in bed and she said, Take care of yourself, Col, I know how you’re feeling, I wish we could be that way again with each other but we can’t, dear lover, so you must take care of yourself, it’s all right.”

  “Then why don’t you see—”

  “Because that night I swore to myself that whatever it took, I wouldn’t betray her. And I did it anyway. With you. Her friend.”

  “We didn’t intend it. It wasn’t like it was planned.”

  He looked at her again, a sharp movement of lifting his head that she apparently didn’t expect him to make because she flinched in response. A bit of the sherry she held slopped over the side of her glass and onto her skirt. Leo sniffed at it curiously.

  “What does it matter?” he said. “Annie was dying. You and I were fucking in a barn on the moors. We can’t change either one of those facts. We can’t make them pretty and we can’t tart them up.”

  “But if she told you—”

  “No. Not…with…her…friend.”

  Polly’s eyes grew bright, but she didn’t shed the tears. “You closed your eyes that day, Colin, you turned your head away, you never touched me and barely spoke to me ever again. How much more do you want me to suffer for what happened? And now you…” She gulped for breath.

  “Now I?”

  She dropped her eyes.

  “Now I? What now?”

  Her answer sounded like a chant. “I burnt cedar for you, Colin. I put the ashes on her grave. I put the ring stone with them. I gave Annie the ring stone. It’s sitting on her grave. You can see it if you want. I gave up the ring stone. I did it for Annie.”

  “What now?” he asked again.

  She bent to the dog, rubbed her cheek against his head.

  “Answer me, Polly.”

  She raised her head. “Now you’re punishing me more.”

  “How?”

  “And it isn’t fair because I love you, Colin. I loved you first. I’ve loved you longer than her.”

  “Her? Who? How am I punishing you?”

  “I know you better than anyone ever could. You need me. You’ll see. Mr. Sage even told me.”

  Her final statement brought gooseflesh upon him. “Told you what?”

  “That you need me, that you don’t know it yet but you will soon enough if I just stay true. And I have been true. All these years. Always. I live for you, Colin.”

  Her avowal of devotion was less than important when the implication behind Mr. Sage even told me demanded exploration and action.

  “Sage talked to you about Juliet, didn’t he?” Colin asked. “What did he say? What did he tell you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “He gave you some sort of assurance. What was it? That she would end things between us?”

  “No.”

  “You know something.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Tell me.”

  “There’s nothing—”

  He stood. He was three feet from her but still she shrank back. Leo raised his head, his ears perking up, a growl in his throat as he sensed the tension. Polly set her sherry glass on the hearth and kept her eyes and one hand on its base, as if it might take flight should she not keep watch.

  “What do you know about Juliet?”

  “Nothing. I told you. I said that already.”

  “About Maggie?”

  “Nothing.”

  “About her father? What did Robin Sage tell you?”

  “Nothing!”

  “But you were sure enough about me and Juliet, weren’t you? He made you sure. What did you do to get the information from him, Polly?”

  Her hair sailed round her shoulders as her head flew up. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Did you sleep with him? You were alone with the man for hours in the vicarage every day. Did you try some kind of spell?”

  “I never!”

  “Did you see a way to ruin things between us? Did he give you an idea?”

  “No! Colin—”

  “Did you kill him, Polly? Is Juliet taking the blame?”

  She jumped to her feet, planted them apart, punched her fists to her hips. “Just listen to yourself. You talk about me. She’s got you bewitched. She put you in place, got you eating from her hand, murdered the vicar, and got away with it clean. And you’re so blinded by your own stupid lust that you can’t even see how she’s used you.”

  “It was an accident.”

  “It was murder, murder, murder and she did it and everyone knows she did it. No one can think you could be such a fool as to believe a single word that she says. Except we all know why you believe her, don’t we, we all know what you’re getting, we even know when, so don’t you imagine she might have been giving our precious little vicar just a bit of the same?”

  The vicar…the vicar…Colin felt it all at once: bones, blood, and heat. His muscles coiling and his mother’s voice shouting No, Ken, don’t! as his arm soared up right palm to left shoulder and he made the primary lunge to strike. Lungs full, heart raging, wanting contact and pain and retribution and—

  Polly cried out, staggered back. Her boot hit the sherry glass. It flew towards the fire and broke on the fender. The sherry dripped and sizzled. The dog began to bark.

  And Colin stood there at the ready, aching to strike. With Polly not Polly and himself not himself and the past and the present howling round him like the wind. Arm raised, features twisted into an expression he’d seen a thousand times but never felt on his face, never thought to feel, never dreamed to feel. Because he couldn’t actually be the man he’d sworn to himself would never exist.

  Leo’s barking turned to yelps. They sounded wild and fearful.

  “Quiet!” Colin snapped.

  Polly cringed. She took another step backwards. Her skirt skimmed the flames. Colin grabbed her arm to draw her from the fire. She jerked away. Leo backed off. His nails scraped on the floor. Aside from the fire and Colin’s torn breathing, they made the only sound in the room.

  Colin held his hand up at the level of his chest. He stared at the shaking fingers and palm. He’d never struck a woman in his life. He wouldn’t have thought he was even capable of doing so. His arm dropped like a weight.

  “Polly.”

  “I cast the circle for you. For Annie as well.”

  “Polly, I’m sorry. I’m not thinking right. I’m not thinking at all.”

  She began to button her coat. He could see that her hands were trembling worse than his, and he made a move to help her but stopped when she cried No! as if with the expectation of being struck.

  “Polly…” His voice sounded desperate, even to himself. But he didn’t know what he wanted to say.

  “She’s got you not thinking,” Polly said. “That’s what it is. But you don’t see that, do you? You don’t even want to. ’Cause how can you face it if the very same thing that makes you hate me is what keeps you from s
eeing the truth about her.” She took out her scarf, made a shaky attempt to fold it into a triangle, and flipped it over her head to hold down her hair. She knotted its ends beneath her chin. She moved past him without a glance, squeaking across the room in her ancient boots. She paused at the door and spoke without looking back.

  “While you were fucking that day in the barn,” she said quite clearly, “I was making love.”

  “On the sitting room sofa?” Josie Wragg asked incredulously. “You mean right here? With your mum and dad in the house? You never!” She got as close as she could to the mirror above the basin and applied the eyeliner with an inexpert hand. A blob of it went into her lashes. She blinked, then squinted when it made contact with her eyeball. “Ooooh. It stings. Oh crikey Moses. Now look what I’ve done.” She’d given herself a make-up black eye. She rubbed it with a tissue and spread the mess across her cheek. “You didn’t really,” she said. “I don’t believe it.”

  Pam Rice balanced on the edge of the bathtub and blew cigarette smoke towards the ceiling. To do it, she let her head hang back on her neck in a lazy movement that Maggie was sure she’d seen in an old American film. Bette Davis. Joan Crawford. Maybe Lauren Bacall.

  “Want to see the stain for yourself?” Pam asked.

  Josie frowned. “What stain?”

  Pam flicked ash into the bathtub and shook her head. “Lord. You don’t know anything, do you, Josephine Bean?”

  “I most certainly do.”

  “Really? Great. You tell me what stain.”

  Josie worked this one over. Maggie could tell she was trying to think up a reasonable answer even though she pretended to be concentrating on the mess she’d made of her eyes. This was second to the mess she’d already made of her nails last night, having purchased a do-it-yourself acrylic nail kit through the post when her mother had refused to allow her to make a trip to Blackpool in order to have artificial nails put on by a stylist. The result of Josie’s attempt to extend her own stubs to what she called drive-men-wild length looked like elephant-man-of-the-fingers.

  They were in the upstairs and only bathroom of Pam Rice’s terraced house, across the street from Crofters Inn. While directly below them in the kitchen Pam’s mummy fed the twins an afternoon tea of scrambled eggs and beans on toast—to the accompaniment of Edward’s happy shouting and Alan’s laughter—they watched Josie experiment with her most recent cosmetic acquisition: a half-bottle of eyeliner purchased from a fifth former who’d pinched it from his sister’s chest of drawers.

  “Gin,” Josie finally announced. “Everyone knows you drink it. We’ve seen the flask.”

  Pam laughed and did her smoke-at-the-ceiling routine again. She flipped her cigarette into the toilet. It made a sound like psst as it sank. She held on to the edge of the bathtub and leaned back again, farther this time so that her breasts jutted towards the ceiling. She still wore her school uniform—all three of them did—but she’d removed the jersey, unbuttoned the blouse to expose her cleavage, and rolled up the sleeves. Pam had the ability to make an inanimate white cotton blouse just scream to be stripped from her body.

  “God, I’m horny as a she-goat,” she said. “If Todd doesn’t want to do it tonight, I’m getting it off with some other bloke.” She swivelled her head in the direction of the door where Maggie sat on the floor, cross-legged. “How’s our Nickie?” she asked, casual and cool.

  Maggie rolled her cigarette in her fingers. She’d taken six obligatory puffs—in by the mouth, out through the nose, nothing in the lungs—and was waiting for the rest to burn itself down so that she could let it join Pam’s in the toilet. “Fine,” she said.

  “And big?” Pam asked, swinging her head so that her hair moved like a single curtain of blonde. “Just like a salami, that’s what I’ve heard. Is it true?”

  Maggie looked at Josie’s reflection in the mirror. She made a wordless plea for rescue.

  “Well, is it?” Josie said in Pam’s direction.

  “What?”

  “The stain. Gin. Like I said.”

  “Semen,” Pam said, looking largely bored.

  “See-what?”

  “Come.”

  “Where?”

  “Christ alive, you’re a twit. That’s what it is.”

  “What?”

  “The stain! It’s from him, okay? It drips out, all right? When you’re done, understand?”

  Josie studied her reflection, making another heroic attempt with the eyeliner. “Oh that,” she said and dipped the brush into the bottle. “From the way you were talking, I thought it was s’posed to be something weird.”

  Pam snagged up her shoulder bag that lay on the floor. She pulled out her cigarettes and lit up again. “Mum was frothing like a dog when she saw it. She even smelled it. Do you believe that? She started in with ‘You miserable little tart,’ went on to ‘You’re a real cheap piece for any one of these blokes,’ and finished with ‘I can’t hold my head up in the village any longer. Neither can your dad.’ I told her if I had my own bedroom, I wouldn’t have to use the sofa and she wouldn’t have to see the stains.” She smiled and stretched. “Todd goes on and on so long, he must come a bloody quart every time.” And with a sly look at Maggie, “What about Nick?”

  “All I can say’s I hope you’re taking precautions,” Josie put in quickly, ever Maggie’s friend. “Because if he does it as many times as you said and if he makes you—well, you know—get fulfilled each time, then you’re heading for trouble, Pam Rice.”

  Pam’s cigarette stopped midway to her lips. “What’re you talking about?”

  “You know. Don’t act like you don’t.”

  “I don’t, Jose. Explain it to me.” She took a deep drag, but Maggie could see that she did it mostly to hide her smile.

  Josie took the bait. “If you have a—you know—”

  “Orgasm?”

  “Right.”

  “What about it?”

  “It helps the swimmy things get up inside you more easy. Which is why lots of women don’t—you know—”

  “Have an orgasm?”

  “Because they don’t want the swimmy things. Oh, and they can’t relax. That too. I read it in a book.”

  Pam hooted. She swung off the bathtub and opened the window through which she shouted, “Josephine Eugene, the brains of a bean,” before dissolving into laughter and sliding down the wall to sit on the floor. She took another hit from her cigarette, pausing now and then to give in to the giggles.

  Maggie was glad she’d opened the window. It was getting harder and harder to breathe. Part of her knew it was just because of the amount of cigarette smoke in the little room. The other part knew it was because of Nick. She wanted to say something to rescue Josie from Pam’s fun-making. But she wasn’t sure what would serve to deflect the ridicule at the same time as it revealed nothing about herself.

  “When was the last time you read anything about it?” Josie asked, recapping her bottle of eyeliner and examining in the mirror the fruits of her labour.

  “I don’t need to read. I experience,” Pam replied.

  “Research is as important as experience, Pam.”

  “Really? And exactly what sort have you done?”

  “I know things.” Josie was combing her hair. It made no difference. No matter what she did to it, it flopped right back into the same frightful style: fringe high on the forehead, bristles on the neck. She should never have tried to cut it herself.

  “You know things from books.”

  “And observation. Imperial evidence, that’s called.”

  “Provided by?”

  “Mum and Mr. Wragg.”

  This piece of information seemed to strike Pam’s fancy. She kicked off her shoes and drew her legs beneath her. She flicked her cigarette into the toilet and made no comment when Maggie took the opportunity of doing the same. “What?” she asked, eyes dancing happily at the potential for gossip. “How?”

  “I listen at the door when they’re having relations.
He keeps saying, ‘Come on, Dora, come on, come on, come on, baby, come on, love’ and she never makes a sound. Which is also, by the way, how I know for a fact that he isn’t my dad.” When Pam and Maggie greeted this news blankly, she went on with, “Well, he can’t be, can he? Look at the evidence. She’s never once been—you know, fulfilled by him. I’m her only kid. I was born six months after they got married. I found this old letter from a bloke called Paddy Lewis—”

  “Where?”

  “In the drawer where she keeps her knickers. And I could tell she’d done it with him. And been fulfilled. Lots. Before she married Mr. Wragg.”

  “How long before?”

  “Two years.”

  “So what were you?” Pam asked. “The longest pregnancy on record?”

  “I don’t mean they only did it once, Pam Rice. I mean they were doing it regular two years before she married Mr. Wragg. And she kept the letter, didn’t she? She must still love him.”

  “But you look exactly like your dad,” Pam said.

  “He isn’t—”

  “All right, all right. You look like Mr. Wragg.”

  “That’s just coincidence,” Josie said. “Paddy Lewis must look like Mr. Wragg as well. And that makes sense, doesn’t it? She’d be looking for someone to remind her of Paddy.”

  “So then Maggie’s dad must look like Mr. Shepherd,” Pam announced. “All her mum’s lovers must have looked like him.”

  Josie said, “Pam,” in a pained fashion. Fair was only fair. One could speculate indefinitely about one’s own parents, but it wasn’t proper to do the same about anyone else’s. Not that Pam ever worried much about what was proper before she opened her mouth.

  Maggie said softly, “Mummy never had a lover before Mr. Shepherd.”

  “She had at least one,” Pam corrected.

  “She didn’t.”

  “She did. Where else did you come from?”

  “From my dad. And Mummy.”

  “Right. Her lover.”

  “Her husband.”

  “Really? What was his name?”

  Maggie picked at a loose thread on her jersey. She tried to poke it through the knitting to the other side.