The hands were rubbing oil into his brow, then a gentle finger eased his lips apart and placed a droplet of the same oil on his tongue. His taste-buds flinched in shock as the drop exploded in his mouth into a tingling shower of forbidden childhood sweets – marzipan and sherbet, sugared almonds, candyfloss. Nothing was forbidden to him now, not even the most sensuous touch. The hands continued their caress, stroking oil along his eyelids, then down behind his ears. He must genuinely have died, and this was the anointing. Strange how sweet death was – peaceful and sweet-scented.
He lay delighting in it – the pampering, the safety, the miraculous fact that his mother had time for him in a world where time had vanished. Whole decades sauntered by and he watched them pass in luxurious sloth, reaching out for the odd shining day as he might net a butterfly. Then, through the perfumed haze, he heard a familiar voice echoing from somewhere far away – a whole continent away – summoning him back.
Unseen hands helped him up, and he saw a blur of faces, a haze of flickering lights; the shadows in the background mingling with the phantoms from his past. He gazed up at the shrouding walls, trying to remember where he was. Only slowly did he realize that he was sitting in the circle; Margot stretched out on the ground still, with JB kneeling at her head, exactly as before. He rubbed his eyes, confused. Perhaps no time had passed at all, and he had merely dreamed his mother’s hands. Certainly, the atmosphere was dream-like. Although more candles had been lit and the fire was banked up with logs, the tepee was much darker; a stark contrast between the eager tongues of flame and the areas of murky gloom beyond. Smoke was swirling round the lodge, adding to the air of unreality, though no one appeared to notice. They were too engrossed in Margot, who suddenly began shivering and trembling, as if gripped by a high fever, or threatened by an attacker. Yet the healer himself sat motionless, his hands resting on her eyes again, and his face expressing such a ferocity of concentration that words like ‘con’ or ‘trickster’ seemed invidious. Daniel realized with a flash of insight that this was genuine work – and work which demanded total dedication. No charlatan would look like that: so ardent and committed, so utterly caught up in the intensity of his task. And all the rest were affected by his fervour; their faces rapt as they willed him to succeed.
JB began to speak, more slowly now, as if each word were being painfully chipped out like silver from a mine. ‘Margot – open your eyes. I can feel the power of sight returning, being channelled through my hands. It only needs you to accept it. Do you wish to see as you once did?’
Margot nodded, too overwrought to speak.
The healer lifted up his hands, addressing the whole gathering. ‘Do you all wish Margot to see?’
The response was so impassioned, Daniel had no choice but to add his own wary mutter of assent. He watched with growing consternation as Happy and the healer helped Margot to sit up. Far from opening her eyes, she was actually covering them with her hands, as if the risk of failure were too terrible to contemplate. George, however, crawled over to her side and prised her hands away, demanding in a hectoring tone, ‘Well, can you see? For God’s sake, Margot, put us out of our misery and tell us.’
Reluctantly she raised her head and looked falteringly around, blinking in the firelight. The next moment she burst out crying, hiding her face in her hands again. There was a shocked silence from the others; no noise except her muffled sobs – enough in themselves to damn this whole charade. Then a murmur of dismay began to buzz around the tepee; some scrambling to their feet to comfort Margot, one or two sitting rooted to the spot, too upset even to express their disappointment. George was clearly devastated, so that it took him a few minutes to realize that the source of all the uproar had conveniently fled.
‘Good God!’ he yelled in fury, lunging towards the entrance of the tent. ‘The blighter’s done a bunk. Well, he won’t get away from me so easily. Just you wait, you fraud!’
‘George, no! Please stop!’ called Margot, darting after her husband and pulling him back by the sleeve. ‘Don’t you understand, I’m crying for joy! I can see, I can see! It’s true – my sight’s returned.’
Claire too burst into tears of joy; Tony crushed Judith and Pippa in a wild exuberant bear-hug; Dylan and Gerard embraced each other, and Happy poured out praise and thanks in an ecstatic monologue. Only George stood rigid, staring at his wife with a mixture of wonder and disbelief. Suddenly, he fumbled in his blazer pocket and brought out a small diary, which he thrust in front of her.
‘Read that!’ he ordered, turning to the opening pages with their lists of public holidays and tables of weights and measures, all in tiny print.
Margot dabbed her eyes, half-laughing and half-crying as she took the diary from him and recited like an obedient child: ‘Good Friday, April the ninth; Easter Monday, April the twelfth; May Day Holiday, May the third; Spring Bank Holiday, May the thirty-first; Late Summer Holiday, August the thirtieth …’ She paused after each date to smile rapturously at her audience, and they smiled back, equally elated.
Daniel felt no elation, only a sense of shock and continuing suspicion. This could all be just a trick. Margot might know those holidays by heart, or simply have a good memory for dates. And surely JB had damned himself by sneaking out like that, unwilling to face the storm of disapproval? Rick appeared to share his misgivings. He was pulling a comic from the pocket of his jeans – a forbidden Beano he had saved from confiscation by folding it to passport size. He smoothed it out and handed it to Margot.
‘Here, have a go at Dennis the Menace,’ he urged.
First she had to dry her eyes again. She was still caught between laughing and crying; her face radiant beneath the tears. She scanned the tattered page, Rick hovering just behind her, jabbing an impatient finger at the text.
‘ “Snarl, snarl!” ’ she began, giving a sudden delighted chortle as she continued in her incongruously ladylike voice: ‘ “Let’s go and get those softies, Gnasher! Okay, chaps, let ’em have it! Take that! Take that! Yeuch! Blat! Splatter! Gneuch!” ’
‘Yeah, dead right!’ crowed Rick, his usual shyness overcome in the excitement of the moment.
‘Bravo!’ shouted Tony, and there was a spontaneous burst of applause; Margot submerged in a tide of hugs and congratulations. Even Pippa was doing a sort of triumphal jig with Judith, while the dog joined in with a fanfare of wild barks.
Daniel glanced at George. The man stood openly weeping, all his bluster and bombast ebbing away like sawdust from a stuffed lion. Everyone seemed to be crying, or hysterical in some way – Daniel alone as cold as ice.
Claire gripped his hand, her eyes suffused with tears behind her glasses. ‘Oh, Daniel, I’m so thrilled! Isn’t it absolutely amazing?’
‘No,’ he said, so softly only the shadows heard. ‘It’s absolutely terrifying,’ and he turned on his heel and bolted from the lodge.
Chapter Nineteen
Daniel hurled another stone into the water, welcoming the disturbance it made – the satisfying splash, the ring of ripples drifting away in slow motion. He needed to break the silence, which afforded no distraction from his thoughts. He must have been sitting here an hour or more, alone beneath the stars, looking out at the dark surface of the lake and trying to make sense of what he’d witnessed. ‘Miracle’ was so glib a word, yet he couldn’t deny that something had taken place – and something pretty shattering. But he had to be on his guard. Because he was living in a sort of tribe, close to nature, removed from all the usual rational restraints, it was all too easy to become prey to superstition. Even being in a country like Wales tended to influence one’s outlook, make one more susceptible to mystic (woolly) thinking. It was such a remote and enigmatic place, which had always believed in wizards, saints and seers, and famed since pagan times for its megaliths, its magic, its so-called supernatural powers. If JB did possess such powers, then might they not be a force for harm as well as simply for good, and should he allow Pippa to be mixed up with such things anyway?
&nb
sp; He longed to discuss it all with Penny, but she had made it depressingly clear that she didn’t want him with her in the tent tonight. The entire camp was buzzing with the news of Margot’s cure, and his wife had chosen to celebrate it with Happy and Corinna, rather than with him. Oh, she’d put it very tactfully: how he and she needed ‘space to grow’ – which made it sound as if they were runner beans, for God’s sake, instead of man and wife. The jargon was JB’s, of course, but he could guess the real reason for her rejection. If a husband couldn’t satisfy his wife, then it was only natural for her to seek companionship elsewhere.
He gazed up at the sky: the moon near-full and silvering the lake; the stars brilliant but inscrutable. That breathtaking expanse above made him a nonentity; impotent in a different sense. Already, he’d felt dwarfed by the surrounding blue-black hills as he climbed into their silence; his scrabbling footsteps as puny as a rabbit’s. There had been no sign of any rabbits, nor of any other life: no light-footed fox or lumbering sheep; no hooting, flapping night-birds. Yet the stillness was deceptive. The sky itself was a seething soup of electrons, quarks, neutrinos, and one of those apparently tranquil stars might be exploding as he watched it. He had been reading about star-deaths only a week or two ago – the reeling sense of shock when man first discovered that what had always been regarded as eternal and immutable could expire in such a catastrophic fashion. And now his own eternal verities seemed to be going the same way; debris from the collapse of reason choking his dazed mind.
He perched on a craggy boulder close to the lake’s edge. The moon was ogling the water; the flirtatious, shimmering water trembling in response. The stone felt cold beneath him, in contrast to the black velvet air, still warm from the day’s unbroken sun, as if the night were a vast storage-heater warding off the usual midnight chill. He was reluctant to return to his ruin of a bedroom, which he knew would seem oppressive in his present state of confusion. And anyway his legs ached from the climb – much more taxing at night, despite the generous moonlight and the ally of his torch. Yet he’d felt drawn towards this place, already regarding it as his own private lake – a sanctuary where he could escape the noise and shock-waves of the camp.
He craned his neck again, trying to picture the stars as he knew they were in reality: gigantic lumps of whirling white-hot matter or huge swathes of swirling gases, not the tiny pinpoints of light twinkling there above him. The last time he’d sat and star-gazed had been with Juliet some months ago. Returning from a dinner out, they’d stopped by the river near Putney Bridge, intent on finding Venus, then spent half an hour picking out the various constellations. He grinned to himself as he pictured her here in the camp: her immaculate high heels would sink into the mud, and she’d be lost without her hair-dryer, aghast at the thought of washing in a stream. He closed his eyes, felt her long and glossy hair brushing his bare body as she changed position in bed. It had excited him, her hair – its straight cascading smoothness after Penny’s wiry crop; the teasing way she had once shaken it across his thighs, enclosing his enraptured prick in a canopy of chestnut-brown.
He thrust his hands through his own hair as he recalled her angry letters – letters sent care of his office in response to his curt note, and bristling with hurt pride disguised as sarcasm. If things had turned out differently, they might be in Rome together now; that luxuriant hair enveloping him again as they savoured the pleasures of a double bed; the chimes from some church clock tolling a slow and sensuous midnight.
‘Daniel,’ breathed a voice behind him.
Startled, he wheeled round, half-expecting Juliet to have materialized in the flesh. But of course he should have known: there was only one person who crept up on him unawares like that, and who always knew his whereabouts, even when he was seeking to escape. And of course the man looked different again – in place of the dazzling white blouson an old and shapeless sweater; his hair tucked down inside the polo-neck, so that in the murky light it appeared conventionally short. Now he was just anyone – Joe Bloggs in reality – a bloke in muddy boots and Oxfam jeans. Except he’d just worked an almost-miracle, which put him on a par with Christ: Jesus Bloggs, in short. And already that mesmeric voice had sparked off the usual reaction of resentment, awe and fear, made stronger by the healing session.
‘I thought you might still be awake.’
Daniel shrugged, adopting a deliberately flippant tone to conceal his agitation. ‘Well, I suppose it’s not that easy to drop off to sleep after witnessing a miracle.’
JB squatted on the sand beside him, leaning against the rock. ‘I don’t think I’d call it a miracle.’
‘Oh, I see. So it was all an illusion, was it, or some sort of confidence trick? Well, congratulations. You almost had me fooled.’
JB said nothing, just shifted slightly on the sand. Daniel forced a laugh to show he was only joking. The silence was uncomfortable. Why did JB keep pursuing him, for heaven’s sake? Did he never sleep? And if he was suffering from insomnia, couldn’t he use his time productively by working a few more miracles – or whatever it was he called them? Take that poor soul with MS, for instance, or the logorrhoeic madwoman. Both were in dire need of help, whereas all he wanted was to be left in peace.
Perhaps Penny had sent him up here. She could have told ‘Stephen’ about his failings in the marital bed and begged him to effect a cure. Also, if she hoped to further her relationship with Corinna, it might suit her very well to have him out of the way. He lobbed another stone into the water, determined to wrest his mind away from sex of any sort. ‘Do you happen to know how deep it is, this lake?’
‘Unfathomable, apparently. They say there’s a whole drowned city at the bottom.’
‘And I’m expected to believe that, am I, on top of everything else?’
‘You’re not expected to believe anything.’
The quiet reply only accentuated his own unfriendly tone. Why the devil was he being so defensive? The man had done him no harm and had just transported George and Margot into a state of genuine bliss. Even if Margot’s sight deteriorated as soon as she got home, at least she had enjoyed one night of triumph.
‘Look,’ he said less brusquely. ‘D’you think there’s any chance of helping Pippa? I mean, in her case it’s not a simple illness or …’
‘Illness is rarely simple.’
‘No, I suppose it isn’t. What I meant was …’ What the hell did he mean? He had just resolved not to get his daughter mixed up in things he couldn’t understand. Yet his recent thoughts of Juliet had brought other painful memories surging back – Pippa sitting listlessly at the breakfast table, staring at her uneaten toast as if she could see horror-pictures in it; or behaving like a deaf-mute in the sports shop where they’d taken her to buy new trainers, showing not a spark of interest in any of the shoes. Yet she had lost her own expensive Reeboks which she had bought six months earlier – and bought with great excitement. That shopping expedition had been happy for them all: Pippa darting around the shop, pouncing with delight on neon-coloured leggings and garish satin cycling-shorts; trying on baseball caps and ski-goggles. So what had brought about the change in her, and why did she keep losing things? Could there be a link with the loss of her real father – the deprivation she’d suffered at the age of four causing symptoms only now? Or was it even possible that Phil had got in touch with her, written to her secretly from Bahrain and put her in some terrible dilemma – maybe suggested that she join him and Khadisha?
Appalled by the idea, Daniel glanced at JB’s face, now turned towards him with palpable concern. There was no trace of malice in it – that he had to admit – and if this extraordinary man could actually restore sight, then why not speech as well?
‘I’ve thought a lot about your daughter,’ he was saying, ‘and I have this feeling that the problem’s coming from outside. It’s as if another person is threatening her whole security and happiness – someone with his own problems, who is suffering in his turn.’
Daniel grazed his hand alo
ng the jagged surface of the rock. The pain was nothing compared with the sharp jolt in his mind. The ‘someone’ must be him. He had always feared he was to blame – that his own affair and betrayal had affected Pippa somehow – and now JB was confirming it. It was also increasingly obvious that Penny had been blabbing, using ‘Stephen’ as her confidant. She was probably more upset than he’d ever let himself admit. Or had she some suspicion about Juliet? What if she’d discovered an incriminating letter, or a restaurant bill he couldn’t explain away?
He jerked up from the rock and began pacing to and fro. He had come to Wales not just for Pippa’s sake, but in search of that idyllic peace his mother-in-law had lauded, to lure him from unhealthy, noisy Rome. Yet here he was in a state of utter turmoil, no nearer solving anything, either in his own life or in Pippa’s. If she needed a new father (a proper one this time, to replace the previous two incompetents) well, perhaps she’d better return to Leeds with Tony – a kind and jolly Dad who wouldn’t ‘threaten her whole security and happiness’. It was evident that he had failed his wife and daughter, and taking Juliet into account as well, had cast a blight on three separate lives.
Breaking and Entering Page 28
