Elizabeth George: Missing Joseph

With the rainwater beginning to drizzle through her hair to her scalp, Deborah hurried down the steps of the subway and through the pedestrian tunnel, emerging moments later in the square itself. This she crossed quickly, her black portfolio clasped hard to her chest, while the wind tore at her coat and drove the rain in steady waves against her. By the time she reached the door of the gallery, she was sloshing in her shoes, her stockings were spattered, and her hair felt like a cap of wet wool on her head.

Where to go. She hadn’t been inside the gallery in ages. How embarrassing, she thought, I’m supposed to be an artist myself.

But the reality was that she had always felt overwhelmed in museums, within a quarter of an hour a hopeless victim to aesthetic-overload. Other people could walk, gaze, and comment upon brushstrokes with their noses fixed a mere six inches from a canvas. But for Deborah, ten paintings into any visit and she’d forgotten the fi rst.

She checked her belongings in the cloakroom, picked up a museum plan, and began to wander, happy enough to be out of the cold, content with the thought that the gallery contained ample scope for at least a temporary respite. A diverting photographic assignment may have been out of her reach at the moment, but the exhibitions here at least held out the promise of continued avoidance for another few hours. If she was truly lucky, Simon’s work would keep him the night in Cambridge. Discussion between them couldn’t resume. She would have purchased more time in that way.

She quickly scanned the museum plan, looking for something that might engage her. Early Italian, Italian 15th Century, Dutch 17th Century, English 18th Century . Only one artist was mentioned by name. Leonardo , it said, Cartoon. Room 7 .

She found the room easily, tucked away by itself, no larger than Simon’s study in Chelsea. Unlike the exhibition rooms she had passed through to reach it, Room 7 contained only one piece, Leonardo da Vinci’s full-scale composition of the Virgin and Child with St. Anne and the infant St. John the Baptist. Additionally unlike the other exhibition rooms, Room 7 was chapel-like, dimly illuminated by weak protective lights directed upon only the artwork itself, furnished with a set of benches from which admirers could contemplate what the museum plan called one of da Vinci’s most beautiful works. There were, however, no other admirers contemplating it now.

Deborah sat before it. A tightness began to curl in her back and to form a coiled spring of tension at the base of her neck. She was not immune to the excellent irony of her choice.

It grew from the Virgin’s expression, that mask of devotion and selfless love. It grew from St. Anne’s eyes — deeply understanding in a face of contentment — cast in the Virgin’s direction. For who would understand better than St. Anne, watching her own beloved daughter loving the wondrous Infant she’d borne. And the Infant Himself, leaning out of His mother’s arms, reaching for His cousin the Baptist, leaving His mother even now, even now…

That would be Simon’s point, the leaving. That was the scientist speaking in him, calm, analytical, and given to looking at the world in terms of the objective practicalities implied by statistics. But his worldview — indeed, his world itself — was different from hers. He could say, Listen to me, Deborah, there are other bonds besides those of blood…because it was easy for him, of all people, to possess that particular philosophical bent. Life was defined in different terms for her.

Effortlessly, she could conjure up the image of the photograph that Rica’s chair leg had punctured and destroyed: how the spring breeze blew at her father’s sparse hair, how a tree branch cast a shadow like a bird’s wing across the stone of her mother’s grave, how the daffodils he was placing in the vase caught the sun like small trumpets and furled against the back of his hand, how his hand itself held the flowers with his fi ngers curled tightly round their stems just as they’d been curling every fifth of April for the last eighteen years. He was fifty-eight years old, her father. He was her only connection of blood and bone.

Deborah gazed at the da Vinci cartoon. Its two female figures would have understood what her husband did not. It was the power the blessing the ineffable awe of a life created and brought forth from one’s own.

I want you to give your body a rest for at least a year, the doctor had told her. This is six miscarriages. Four spontaneous abortions in the last nine months alone. We’re encountering physical stress, a dangerous blood loss, hormonal imbalance, and—

Let me try fertility drugs, she’d said.

You’re not listening to me. That’s beyond consideration at the moment.

In vitro, then.

You know impregnation isn’t the problem, Deborah. Gestation is.

I’ll stay in bed for nine months. I won’t move. I’ll do anything.

Then get on an adoption list, start using contraceptives, and try again this time next year. Because if you continue to carry on in this fashion, you’ll be looking at a hysterectomy before you’re thirty years old.

He wrote out the prescription.

But there has to be a chance, she said, trying to pretend the remark was casual. She couldn’t allow herself to become upset. There must, after all, be no demonstration of mental or emotional stress on the part of the patient. He would note it on the chart, and it would count against her.

The doctor was not unsympathetic. There is , he said, next year. When your body’s had an opportunity to heal. We’ll look at all the options then. In vitro. Fertility drugs. Everything else. We’ll do all the tests we can. In a year.

So dutifully she began with the pills. But when Simon brought home the adoption forms, she drew the line on cooperation.

There was absolutely no point in thinking of it now. She forced herself to study the cartoon. The faces were serene, she decided.

They seemed well-defined. The rest of the piece was largely impression, drawn like a series of questions that would remain forever unanswered. Would the Virgin’s foot be raised or lowered? Would St. Anne continue to point towards the sky? Would the Infant’s plump hand cradle the Baptist’s chin? And was the background Golgotha, or was that a future too unsavoury for this moment of tranquillity, something better left unsaid and unseen?

“No Joseph. Yes. Of course. No Joseph.”

Deborah turned at the whisper and saw that a man — still fully dressed for the out-of-doors in a great wet overcoat with a scarf round his neck and a trilby on his head — had joined her. He didn’t seem to notice her presence and had he not spoken she probably wouldn’t have noticed his. Dressed completely in black, he faded into the farthest corner of the room.

“No Joseph,” he whispered again, resigned.

Rugby player, Deborah thought, for he was tall and looked hefty beneath his coat. And his hands, clasping a rolled-up museum plan in front of him like an unlit candle, were square and blunt fingered and fully capable, she imagined, of shoving other players to one side in a dash down the fi eld.

He wasn’t dashing anywhere now, although he did move forward, into one of the muted cones of light. His steps seemed reverential. With his eyes on the da Vinci, he reached for his hat and removed it as a man might do in church. He dropped it onto one of the benches. He sat.

He wore thick-soled shoes — serviceable shoes, country shoes — and he balanced them on their outer edges as he dangled his hands between his knees. After a moment, he ran one hand through thinning hair that was the slow-greying colour of soot. It didn’t seem so much a gesture of seeing to his appearance as it did one of rumination. His face, raised to study the da Vinci, looked both worried and pained, with crescent bags beneath his eyes and heavy lines on his brow.