Elizabeth George: Missing Joseph

He pressed his lips together. The lower one was full, the upper one thin. They formed a seam of sorrow on his face, and they seemed to be acting as inadequate containment for an inner turmoil. Fellow struggler, Deborah thought. She was touched by his suffering.

“It’s a lovely drawing, isn’t it?” She spoke in the sort of hushed whisper one automatically uses in places of prayer or meditation. “I’d never seen it before today.”

He turned to her. He was swarthy, older than he had seemed at first. He looked surprised to have been spoken to out of the blue by a stranger. “Nor I,” he said.

“It’s awful of me when you think that I’ve lived in London for the last eighteen years. It makes me wonder what else I’ve been missing.”

“Joseph,” he said.

“Sorry?”

He used the museum plan to gesture at the cartoon. “You’re missing Joseph. But you’ll always be missing him. Haven’t you noticed? Isn’t it always Madonna and Child?”

Deborah glanced again at the artwork. “I’d never thought of that, actually.”

“Or Virgin and Child. Or Mother and Child. Or Adoration of the Magi with a cow and an ass and an angel or two. But you rarely see Joseph. Have you never wondered why?”

“Perhaps…well, of course, he wasn’t really the father, was he?”

The man’s eyes closed. “Jesus God,” he replied.

He seemed so struck that Deborah hurried on. “I mean, we’re taught to believe he wasn’t the father. But we don’t know for certain. How could we? We weren’t there. She didn’t exactly keep a journal of her life. We’re just told that the Holy Ghost came down with an angel or something and…Naturally, I don’t know how it was supposed to be managed but it was a miracle, wasn’t it? There she was a virgin one minute and pregnant the next and then in nine months — there was this little baby and she was holding him probably not quite believing he was real and counting his fi ngers and toes. He was hers, really hers, the baby she’d longed for…I mean, if you believe in miracles. If you do.”

She hadn’t realised that she’d begun to cry until she saw the man’s expression change. Then the sheer oddity of their situation made her want to laugh instead. It was wildly absurd, this psychic pain. They were passing it between them like a tennis ball.

He dug a handkerchief out of a pocket of his overcoat, and he pressed it, crumpled, into her hand. “Please.” His voice was earnest. “It’s quite clean. I’ve only used it once. To wipe the rain from my face.”

Deborah laughed shakily. She pressed the linen beneath her eyes and returned it to him.

“Thoughts link up like that, don’t they? You don’t expect them to. You think you’ve quite protected yourself. Then all of a sudden you’re saying something that seems so reasonable and safe on the surface, but you’re not safe at all, are you, from what you’re trying not to feel.”

He smiled. The rest of him was tired and ageing, lines at the eyes and flesh giving way beneath his chin, but his smile was lovely. “It’s the same for me. I came here merely for a place to walk and think that would be out of the rain, and I stumbled on this drawing instead.”

“And thought of St. Joseph when you didn’t want to?”

“No. I’d been thinking of him anyway, after a fashion.” He tucked his handkerchief back into his pocket and went on, his tone becoming more determinedly light. “I’d have preferred a walk in the park, actually. I was heading to St. James’s Park when the rain began again. I generally like to do my thinking out of doors. I’m a countryman at heart and if ever there’re thoughts to be had or decisions to be made, I always try to get myself outside to think them or to make them. A proper tramp in the air clears the head, I find. And the heart as well. It makes the rights and wrongs of life — the yes’s and the no’s — easier to see.”

“Easier to see,” she said. “But not to deal with. Not for me, at least. I can’t say yes just because people want me to, no matter how right it may be to do so.”

He directed his gaze back to the cartoon. He rolled the museum plan tighter in his hands. “Nor can I always,” he said. “Which is why I head out for a tramp in the air. I was set on feeding the sparrows from the bridge in St. James’s, watching them peck at my palm and letting every problem find its solution from there.” He shrugged and smiled sadly. “But then there was the rain.”

“So you came here. And saw there was no St. Joseph.”

He reached for his trilby and set it on his head. The brim cast a triangular shadow on his face. “And you, I imagine, saw the Infant.”

“Yes.” Deborah forced her lips into a brief, tight smile. She looked about her, as if she too had belongings to gather in preparation for leaving.

“Tell me, is it an infant you want or one that died or one you’d like to be rid of?”

“Be rid— ”

Swiftly, he lifted his hand. “One that you want,” he said. “I’m sorry. I should have seen that. I should have recognised the longing. Dear God in heaven, why are men such fools?”

“He wants us to adopt. I want my child— his child — a family that’s real, one that we create, not one that we apply for. He’s brought the papers home. They’re sitting on his desk. All I have to do is fill out my part and sign my name, but I find that I just can’t do it. It wouldn’t be mine, I tell him. It wouldn’t come from me. It wouldn’t come from us. I couldn’t love it the same way if it wasn’t mine.”

“No,” he said. “That’s very true. You wouldn’t love it the same way at all.”

She grasped his arm. The wool of his coat was damp and scratchy beneath her fi ngers. “You understand. He doesn’t. He says there’re connections that go beyond blood. But they don’t for me. And I can’t understand why they do for him.”

“Perhaps it’s because he knows that we humans ultimately love something that we have to struggle for — something that we give up everything to have — far more than the things that fall our way through chance.”

She released his arm. Her hand fell with a thud to the bench between them. Unwittingly, the man had spoken Simon’s own words. Her husband may as well have been in the room with her.

She wondered how she had come to unburden herself in the presence of a stranger. I’m desperate for someone to take my part, she thought, looking for a champion to bear my standard. I don’t even care who that champion is, just so long as he sees my point, agrees, and lets me go my own way.

“I can’t help how I feel,” she said hollowly.

“My dear, I’m not sure anyone can.” The man loosened his scarf and unbuttoned his coat, reaching inside to his jacket pocket. “I should guess you need a tramp in the air to think your thoughts and clear your head,” he said. “But you need fresh air. Wide skies and broad vistas. You can’t find that in London. If you’ve a mind to do your tramping in the North, you’ve a welcome in Lancashire.” He handed her his card.

Robin Sage , it read, The Vicarage, Win-slough .

“The Vic—” Deborah looked up and saw what his coat and scarf had hidden before, the white solid collar encircling his neck. She should have realised at once from the colour of his clothes, from his talk of St. Joseph, from the very reverence with which he’d regarded the da Vinci cartoon.

No wonder she’d found it so easy to reveal her troubles and her sorrows. She’d been confessing to an Anglican priest.

BRENDAN POWER spon round as the door creaked open and his younger brother Hogarth entered the glacial cold of the vestry of St. John the Baptist Church in the village of Winslough. Beyond him the organist, accompanied by a single, tremulous, and no doubt utterly uninvited voice, was playing “All Ye Who Seek for Sure Relief,” as a follow-up to “God Moves in a Mysterious Way.” Brendan had little doubt that both pieces constituted the organist’s sympathetic but unsolicited comment upon the morning’s proceedings.