Elizabeth George - In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

Nan had never understood her daughter, and she saw that now more clearly than she had done in all the years she'd waited for Nicola to emerge from the chrysalis of her troubled adolescence, fully formed as an adult made in the image and likeness of her progenitors. Thinking of her child, Nan felt settle upon her shoulders the mantle of a failure so profound that she wondered how she would ever be able to continue living. That she had produced such a daughter from her own body… that the years of self-sacrifice had brought her to this moment… that the cooking and cleaning and washing and ironing and worrying and planning and giving giving giving had resulted in her feeling like a starfish taken from the ocean and left to dry-and to rot-too far from the water to save herself… that the sweaters knitted and the temperatures taken and the scraped knees bandaged and the little shoes polished and the clothes kept neat and fresh and sweet had ultimately counted for nothing in the eyes of the single person for whom she lived and breathed… It was too much to bear.

She'd given the effort of motherhood everything she possessed, and she'd failed entirely, teaching her daughter nothing of substance. Nicola was who Nicola was.

Nan was only grateful that her own mother had died during Nicola's childhood. She would never have to see how Nan had failed where her female forebears had known nothing but success. Nan herself was the embodiment of her mother's values. Born into a time of terrible strife, she'd been schooled in the disciplines of poverty, suffering, generosity, and duty. In war, one did not seek to gratify the self. The self was secondary to the Cause. One's home became a haven for convalescing soldiers. One's food and clothing-and, dear God, even the gifts one received at an eighth-year birthday party when the little attendants had been told in advance that the guest of honour had no wants in comparison with what the dear soldiers needed-were gently but firmly removed from one's grasp and passed on to hands worthier than her own. It was a hard time, but it created her mettle on its forge. She had character as a result. This was what she should have passed to her daughter.

Nan had moulded herself in her own mother's image, and her reward had been a cool, unspoken but nonetheless treasured approval communicated by a single nod of the regal head. She'd lived for that nod. It said, “Children learn from their parents, and you have learned to perfection, Nancy.”

Parents gave their children's world both order and meaning. Children learned who they were-and how to be-at their parents' knees. So what had Nicola seen in her parents that resulted in who and what she had become?

Nan didn't want to answer that question. It brought her face-to-face with ghouls that she didn't wish to confront. She's so like her father, Nan's inner voice whispered. But no, but no. She turned from the window.

She climbed the stairs to the private floor of Maiden Hall. She found her husband in their bedroom, sitting in the armchair in the darkness, his head in his hands.

He didn't look up as she closed the door behind her. She crossed the room to him, knelt by the chair, and put her hand on his knee. She didn't say to him what she wanted to say, that Christian-Louis had accidentally burnt pine nuts into tiny lumps of charcoal weeks ago, that the ground floor took hours to lose the acrid scent of the burning, and that he-Andy-hadn't mentioned the odour because he hadn't noticed it in the first place. She didn't say any of this because she didn't want to consider what it implied. Instead, she said, “Let's not lose each other as well, Andy.”

At that, he looked up. She was struck by how the last days had aged him. His natural vibrancy was gone. She couldn't imagine the man she saw before her jogging from Padley Gorge to Hathersage, skiing hell for leather down Whistler Mountain, or tearing along the Tissington Trail on his mountain bike without raising a sweat. He didn't look as if he'd make it down the stairs.

“Let me do something for you,” she murmured, a hand at his temple to smooth back his hair.

“Tell me what you did with it,” he replied.

Her hand dropped. “With what?”

“I don't need to spell it out. Did you take it with you onto the moor this afternoon? You must have done. It's the only explanation.”

“Andy, I don't know what you-”

“Don't,” he said. “Just tell me. And tell me why you said you didn't know she had one. I'd like to know that most of all.”

Nan felt-rather than heard-an odd buzzing in her head. It was very much as if Nicola's pager were somewhere in the room with them. An impossibility, of course. It lay where she had deposited it: deep in a crevice created at the juncture of two pieces of limestone on Hathersage Moor.

“Dearest,” she said, “I really don't know what you're talking about.”

He examined her. She met his gaze. She waited for him to be more direct, to ask with an explicitness of language that she couldn't avoid. She had never been a particularly good liar; she could feign confusion and act ignorant of the facts, but she could do little else.

He didn't ask. Instead, he let his head sink back against the chair, and he closed his eyes. “God,” he whispered. “What have you done?”

She made no reply. He'd been invoking God, not her. And God's ways were a mystery, even to the faithful. Yet Andy's suffering was so excruciating to her that she wanted to give him an anodyne of some sort. She found it in a partial disclosure. He could make of it what he would.

“Things need to stay uncomplicated,” she murmured. “We need to keep things simple as best we can.”

Samantha came across her uncle Jeremy in the parlour when she was making her final rounds of the night. She'd been checking doors and windows-by virtue of habit rather than by virtue of the fact that the family had anything of value worth burgling at this point-and she'd marched into the parlour with the intention of seeing to the windows in there before she realised that he was present.

The lights were off, but not because Jeremy was sleeping. He was, instead, running an old eight-millimeter film through a projector that clacked and whirred as if on its last legs. The picture itself flickered not on a screen, because Jeremy couldn't be bothered setting that up. Rather, it moved against a bookshelf, where the curved backs of mildewing volumes distorted the figures whose images had been filmed.

He was reliving what appeared to be a long-ago birthday. Broughton Manor rose in the background-long before the building had fallen into ruinous disrepair-while in the foreground a floppy-hatted clown played the Pied Piper to a group of little children wearing party hats. The clown led them down the slope to the ancient footbridge that provided access to a meadow beyond the River Wye. And in that meadow a pony stood waiting, its reins in the hand of a man whose resemblance to the adult Jeremy told Samantha that she was looking at her maternal grandfather as a very young man. As she watched, the little boy her uncle once had been ran across the meadow and flung himself ecstatically into his fathers arms. He was lifted onto the pony's back as the other children-Samantha's own mother among them-clustered round and the clown danced a jig to soundless music.

The scene shifted in the way of home films, and they were under a tree where a table had been laid with a birthday cloth and decorations. The same children bobbed and squirmed on either side of the table, and a woman carried into the picture a cake on which five candles burned. The child Jeremy stood upon his chair to make his wish and extinguish the candles. He lost his balance and nearly toppled, to be saved from the fall by his mother. She laughed, waved at the camera, and dropped her arms to hold her son safely on the chair.