by Rebecca Wait
There was no reply. She was nervous now. Her plan didn’t seem as sound as it had done a few moments earlier. Perhaps he wouldn’t thank her for barging uninvited into his room. If he was asleep, she could still retreat without him ever knowing she’d been there. She pushed the door open a little further to check, and saw the empty bed. But even then she didn’t understand – not immediately. She went back into the corridor. A midnight walk? she thought. A few moments alone in the prayer room? She was only thinking these things to distract herself, because the truth was already pushing at the edge of her thoughts. She took a few steps back along the corridor. Closer to Esther’s door, she heard the sounds again. The truth slid into full view.
She returned to her own room and closed the door, getting back under the covers and pulling her knees up to her chin. She wrapped her arms around them and failed to sleep.
Stephanie forced herself to wait until the following afternoon to confront him, so she would have a chance to get things straight in her head. But the longer she waited, the more muddled she felt. Her rage and misery were the only clear things – but how she could adequately express them, and how he might respond, remained beyond her.
The values of the world, Nathaniel had shown her, were fatally distorted; sometimes her reaction felt like a trap she’d fallen into. And however carefully she tried to prepare what she would say to him, the words she practised seemed flat and meaningless, flimsy beneath Nathaniel’s imagined scrutiny.
She caught up with him outside the houses after lunch, when he was setting off for his afternoon walk.
‘Aren’t you helping the others clear up?’ he said.
‘No. I need to talk to you.’
He didn’t say anything to help her, just continued to look at her levelly, with that deliberate patience of his that wrong-footed her before she’d even spoken.
But the rage came back to help her. ‘I heard you,’ she said. ‘I heard you last night. You and Esther. You bastard.’
‘What did you hear?’ he said.
‘I heard – you know what I heard. You were sleeping with her, weren’t you?’
She’d expected him to deny it and had steeled herself against this, but Nathaniel was calm. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I visit Esther.’
He put his hand on her shoulder and it felt like a weight. She shrugged it off.
‘But you’re supposed to be with me! You bastard,’ she added again, but it came out feebly.
‘I am with you,’ he said. ‘You’re the centre of my life.’
‘Don’t say that!’ she said. ‘Not when you’re having sex with someone else.’ He put out his arms to her, but she moved out of his reach. ‘You’re a liar,’ she said. ‘I thought you loved me.’
‘I do.’
‘You can’t say that,’ she said. ‘You can’t say that now.’
‘Why not? What have my visits to Esther got to do with my feelings for you?’
The gentleness in his voice was almost too much for her. ‘You’re cheating on me,’ she burst out.
Nathaniel raised his eyebrows. ‘Cheating on you? A stupid, empty phrase. Have you thought it through at all? What does it even mean?’
She felt foolish, but pushed the feeling down. ‘It means you’re being unfaithful.’
‘How? I promised to love you, and I promised to look after you. I haven’t broken those promises, and I’ll never break them, not as long as I live. Anything I have with Esther is entirely separate. It goes back to long before I knew you.’
‘But you can’t be with two women at once,’ Stephanie said.
‘Why not?’
She was bewildered. ‘You just can’t.’
‘Oh, I see,’ Nathaniel said. ‘Because the shallow rules of the world say so. Because it’s what your women’s magazines say, and bitter, unsatisfied wives who’ve never been taught anything different, and an old, corrupt marriage institution that has no true links with God.’ He paused, seeing her face. ‘I’m not attacking you, my love. I’m just trying to make you see where your views come from. Just because you’ve been told something all your life doesn’t mean it’s true. Didn’t I say I’d free you from all that?’
The more she tried to hold the tears back, the more insistently they filled her eyes and overflowed down her cheeks. ‘I thought I was enough for you.’
‘You are,’ he said. ‘It isn’t that. Stop thinking about our relationship in the narrow terms of the world. If you need an example, look to the Bible instead. Just because Abraham had Hagar as well doesn’t mean he loved Sarah any less. Sarah was the love of his life, Hagar simply a helper. God gave me Esther many years ago, but He never intended her to be my love, to be my life. He wanted me to wait for you. I had to wait a long time, but now I’m so thankful I did.’
Stephanie was confused, as she always was, by his mention of God. She didn’t believe. She didn’t think she believed. But so often these days she thought she felt God watching her. His eyes were pale and fierce; they followed her everywhere.
All the same, she looked up at him and made herself go on. ‘But now I’m here, aren’t I? Doesn’t our relationship change things?’
‘It changes everything. I’ve never been happier. But Esther still needs me. I can’t abandon her.’
‘But – she has Thomas. She’s his wife.’
‘That’s different. She was my helper before anything else. But she was young and unsteady, and needed a husband to guide her. It was decided she should marry Thomas. That doesn’t eclipse her other role.’
Stephanie was at a loss for how to answer. ‘But you didn’t tell me,’ she said at last. ‘This isn’t fair.’
‘It had nothing to do with you,’ he said. ‘There was no reason to tell you. You must see that.’
Must she? She could no longer tell which of them was being unreasonable.
‘Little one.’ He touched her chin, tipping her face up towards him and then, when she didn’t resist, kissing her. ‘I love you. You know that. But I have certain responsibilities I can’t turn away from. Sometimes I wish I could, sometimes I wish it could just be you and me, but that’s wrong of me. It would be selfish to put my own desires ahead of everything else. I can’t turn my back on God’s will. I can’t turn away from my followers.’
‘But I can’t bear it,’ she said. ‘I can’t bear thinking of you with someone else. It makes me so jealous.’
He said, ‘Jealousy is a sin.’
‘I know, but – I can’t help it. It’s instinct. Isn’t it? When you love someone.’
He shook his head sadly. ‘Have I failed you? I believed so strongly in you. But you haven’t learnt a thing. You can’t bring yourself to trust me, even now. You’re still letting the world whisper to you. You talk about instinct. Don’t you realize that every single one of your instincts is wrong? You’ve been shaped by the world you lived in, and it’s almost ruined you. Do you know what God tells us in the book of Jeremiah? He tells us that, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.” I thought I could save you from that, free you of your broken instincts and wicked heart, and give you something better in their place. Maybe I was wrong.’
He’d leant in close to her throughout this speech, and she felt his breath on her neck. Now he moved away, putting a gulf between them. Stephanie put out her hand to him.
‘Nathaniel—’ She didn’t know what else to say. She couldn’t pretend she wasn’t distraught. But perhaps that was where this feeling of wrongness lay, not in what he was doing but in her reaction to it. If she could just get her reaction right perhaps things wouldn’t feel so awful any more. She needed a moment to be alone, to think clearly again, but she knew she couldn’t risk losing him when she’d come so far already, when she’d given up so much.
And if her own view was so wrong, being alone would only give her mind a chance to twist things further.
She said, ‘I don’t understand. I don’t know what to do.’
He took her hand. ‘Repent. Lea
rn that just because a thought comes into your head doesn’t mean it’s pure or true. For the most part, our thoughts exist to torment us, to lead us away from what’s right. You have to learn to master them.’
‘I want to be good,’ she said.
‘I know you do.’
‘This is – difficult for me.’
‘I know. And it’s partly my fault. I should have realized how trapped you still are in the mindset of the world.’
She nodded.
He put his arms round her. ‘I said I’d free you and I will. I said I’d make you happy, and I will. Trust me.’
‘Alright.’ She was so exhausted she felt she could sleep for days.
‘I wonder if I’ve been too hard on you,’ he said. ‘It’s a lot of change for you, all in one go.’
‘Yes,’ she said gratefully.
‘But there’s something you should remember,’ he said. He dipped his head to whisper in her ear. ‘I’ll always love you best.’
Stephanie became watchful after that. Every movement Esther made caught her attention, every look that shadowed her face. Stephanie watched her across rooms, across the table, until she had learnt her features by heart. She couldn’t pretend, even to herself, that Esther wasn’t beautiful. It was only her nose that marred the picture; narrow and neat around the nostrils, but bumpy at the top, pushed slightly to one side, throwing the rest of her face off-kilter. It had been broken, Deborah had informed her in passing, some years before.
It seemed absurd to Stephanie that she’d once thought she and Esther could be friends. Esther had known better. No wonder she’d been suspicious of Stephanie, and no wonder she’d taken the chance to report her when she could. Esther had understood the situation, and Stephanie had not – until now. They were set against each other, not because they wanted to be, but because that was the way things were.
Stephanie longed to know more about Esther’s life before the Ark, how she and Nathaniel had met, why she had been chosen. But no one would enlighten her. Rachael and Deborah reminded her gently when she tried to fish for information that it was sinful to dwell on their lives before the Ark. The past had been wiped out, the followers of the Ark reborn. But it wasn’t entirely wiped out, Stephanie thought. It hovered there still, half forgotten, mostly disregarded. Somehow it had led them all to this point and she would never know why. She saw that this was once more the whispering of her wicked heart, and she tried to curb it. But it made her feel disorientated, missing this knowledge the rest of them carried, as though she had stumbled out of the mist to meet them without ever having found the path they had used.
She felt God’s eyes on her again, and tried to close off the whispering.
Heaven is high, she recited, as Nathaniel had taught her. Heaven is high.
3
Where did he find her, anyway?
Esther had tried, as gently as possible, to discover this, but Thomas wouldn’t say much. She kept picturing Nathaniel going up to Sarah at a bus stop, but she could see this was absurd; just because it had happened this way for Esther didn’t mean people could only be saved whilst waiting for the 47 towards Catford.
‘God asked it of me,’ Nathaniel said, as they lay together that night. ‘What should I have done, Esther? Ignored Him? “No thanks, God. We’ve got our hands full at the moment”?’
She didn’t reply. He was trying to shake her out of her sadness; but she knew it would be a mistake to laugh. Remember the way he saved you, she told herself. Although she tried not to think about the old life, Esther couldn’t forget its misery and chaos. She hadn’t cared about anything after Toby died, and neither had her parents, so there was no one to notice that Esther had stopped going to school, was drinking in the daytime, sleeping with anyone who asked. She didn’t know what would have happened to her if she hadn’t met Nathaniel. So how could she begrudge someone else the same lifeline?
She remembered asking Nathaniel where he thought Toby was, not long after they first came to the Ark. ‘I know he wasn’t saved,’ she’d said. ‘But he can’t be in hell. Not Toby.’ Then, when Nathaniel didn’t reply, she added, ‘You’d have liked him if you met him. He was special.’
Though probably he hadn’t been that special. He’d just been her brother.
Nathaniel said, ‘Modern society has turned its back on God. People will suffer for it.’
‘No,’ Esther said. ‘He can’t be in hell.’ It was strange to remember this now, that there was a time when she’d openly defied him. Even the distant memory of it made her fearful, but Nathaniel hadn’t been angry. She’d been very young back then, and perhaps he’d taken pity on her.
He said, ‘I don’t have all the answers, Esther. But I think if I pray very hard for your brother, and if you make sure you always submit to God’s will, God may exempt him from the punishment He’s saved for other sinners.’
‘So I might see him again eventually?’
‘Perhaps.’
Tonight, remembering the peace he’d given her back then, Esther laid her head in the curve of his neck and kissed the skin behind his ear where it was soft and pale.
‘Love you,’ Nathaniel murmured.
‘Me too.’
They lay drowsily together for a while, then Nathaniel raised her gently off him and turned on his side to face her.
‘There’s something I need to say to you,’ he said.
She waited.
‘God wants me to have another child,’ he said. ‘It’ll be a symbol of hope.’ Then, when she still didn’t speak, he added, ‘I have to think about the others, as well as you.’
‘I know.’
‘We have to accept God’s will.’
‘I know. I do.’
‘Oh, my love. Don’t feel slighted. You have a different role here.’ He reached out, touched his fingers to her cheek. ‘Do you think I could carry on even for a single day without you? Leave the children to others. God clearly doesn’t want that from you.’
But if she’s just here to bear children, Esther thought, why does she have to be so pretty?
Stop.
Heaven is high.
Heaven is high.
Then she didn’t have to fight her thoughts any longer because he was pushing up her nightdress again. Esther was grateful for sex as a reminder of her true role. (Did you know vagina comes from the Latin word for sheath, he’d asked her once. And what purpose does a sheath have except to house the sword?)
After he’d left her to go back to his own room, she struggled for a long time to fall asleep. It was childish, but the truth was she was still afraid of the dark – even at her age. It didn’t seem to matter when she was with Thomas. Though she was relieved Nathaniel had called her back, she missed her husband on the nights the prophet asked for her. As long as she and Thomas were coiled together, a shared weight and warmth, the darkness backed off. But when Esther was alone it returned, gaining in strength and malevolence, hissing like a serpent.
She should tell Thomas things like this, that in his presence she didn’t fear the darkness. Now was the time when he most needed to hear it, because she knew he was suffering, knew also that he would never admit it in case it seemed like a reproach to her. Thomas had believed they would belong only to each other from now on. He hadn’t realized that Nathaniel still needed her as well. Esther wished there was a way to comfort him, but she couldn’t find the words.
It had been easier, she thought, before she came to love him so much. When she was first given to Thomas, back when she was eighteen, she had always been blurting out whatever came into her head. She’d confused it with honesty, saying everything out loud, as though transparency excused you from having to exercise control over your thoughts. (‘I don’t love you,’ she’d told him early on. ‘Nathaniel has all my love, all of it. But I’ll try to be a good wife to you.’ Remembering this, she winced at her cruelty.) Now she found that the more you loved someone, the harder it became to say what you really meant.
Going for her shower
the next morning, she met Sarah in the corridor, both of them still in their nightdresses.
They smiled cautiously at each other and said good morning. Esther added after a slight pause, ‘Did you sleep well?’
Sarah’s expression became guarded, and Esther regretted the question. Somehow, she could see, Sarah had interpreted this as a taunt; because it was Esther who’d spent the previous night with Nathaniel.
‘Yes,’ Sarah said. ‘Thanks.’
‘Bit of a storm, wasn’t there?’
‘I didn’t hear anything. I was asleep.’
Esther wrapped her arms around herself. She nodded to the shower door. ‘You go first. I’ll wait.’
‘No, it’s alright. You were here first.’
Esther was disconcerted by Sarah’s air of suspicion. She had a sudden, mad urge to do something to make Sarah like her, but she knew it wouldn’t help in the long run. Best if they kept their distance. And anyway, it would be too disloyal to mention it had been Rachael and not Esther who’d reported Sarah for wanting to take Judith to the town.
Esther said instead, ‘I think we’re on work task together today. Cleaning the downstairs rooms.’
‘OK.’
There was another pause. Esther was trying to work out which of them should have the first shower, which outcome would be less likely to annoy Sarah, when Sarah said suddenly, ‘How old were you when you met him?’
Esther studied her carefully. How long had she been waiting to ask that? She weighed up possible responses, and decided to play it safe. ‘We’re not supposed to talk about before. It’s unhelpful.’
She tried to soften her answer with a smile, but Sarah looked back at her coolly and didn’t reply.
4
Alone in the barn, Judith pressed her hands against her eyes and wept. She understood it all now: her mum was never planning on leaving. These sagging, dirty houses in the middle of the moors were supposed to be their home. Judith would be a grown-up before she was able to return to her real life. Nobody would remember her. Megan would have a new best friend.
