Elizabeth George - Missing Joseph

Dragged up to Lancashire on false pretences, she thought and gave a weak chuckle at the idea, she who had been the ultimate betrayer.

She had found the sheaf of adoption papers tucked between his pyjamas and his socks, and she’d felt indignation pinch at her spine at the thought of his deception and at this intrusion into their time away from their real life in London. He wanted to talk about it, he explained when she flung the papers on the chest of drawers. He felt it was time that they sorted things out.

There was nothing to sort. To talk about it was to engage in the kind of conversation that spun like a cyclone, gathering speed and energy from misunderstanding, wreaking destruction from words hurled in anger and self-defence. A family isn’t blood, he would say so reasonably because God knew that Simon Allcourt-St. James was scientist, scholar, and reason incarnate. A family is people. People bond to one another out of time, exposure, and experience, Deborah. We form our connections from the give and take of emotion, from the growing sensitivity to another’s needs, from mutual support. A child’s attachment to his parents has nothing to do with who gave him birth. It comes from living day to day, from being nurtured, from being guided, from having someone there— someone consistent — that he can trust. You know this. You do.

It isn’t that, it isn’t that, she would want to say, even as she felt the tears which she so much despised cutting off her ability to speak.

Then what is it? Tell me. Help me understand.

Mine…it wouldn’t be…yours. It wouldn’t be us. Can’t you see that? Why won’t you see?

He would look at her without speaking for a moment, not to punish her with withdrawal as she’d once thought his silences meant, but to think and to problem-solve. He would be considering a recommendation on a course of action for them to take when all she wanted was that he too would weep and display through his tears that he understood her grief.

Because he’d never do that, she couldn’t say the final unsayable to him. She hadn’t even yet said it to herself. She didn’t want to feel the sorrow that would accompany the words. So she fought against their encroachment on her consciousness and she fended them off by railing against what she knew very well was his greatest strength: that he never allowed a single circumstance to defeat him, that he took life as he found it and bent it to his will.

You don’t even care, would be the words she chose. This means nothing to you. You don’t want to understand me.

What a convenience a cyclone-argument was.

She’d gone walking that morning to avoid confrontation. Out on the moors with the wind in her face, hiking across the uneven ground, dodging the occasional spines of furze and tramping through heather gone brown with winter, she’d kept everything at bay but the exercise itself.

Now, however, the quiet church admitted no such means of avoidance. She could examine the memorials, watch the dying light darken the colours in the windows, read the bronze Ten Commandments that formed the reredos and decide how many she’d broken so far. She could scrape her feet across the age-warped fl oor of the Townley-Young pew and count the moth holes dotting the red mantle on the pulpit. She could admire the woodwork of the rood screen and the tester. She could wonder about the tonal quality of the bells. But she could not avoid the voice of her conscience that spoke the truth and forced her to hear it:

Filling out those papers means I’m giving up. It’s admitting defeat. It tells me I’m a failure, not a woman at all. It says the ache will fade but it’ll never end. And it isn’t fair. This is the one thing that I want…this single, simple, unattainable thing.

Deborah stood and pushed open the boxpew’s gate. With the sound of its creaking came Simon’s words:

Are you punishing yourself, Deborah? Does your conscience say you’ve sinned and the only expiation is to replace one life with another which you yourself create? Is that what you’re doing? And are you doing it for me? Do you think you owe me that?

Perhaps, in part. For he was, if anything, forgiveness itself. If he had been some other kind of man — railing occasionally or throwing into her face the fact that she was at fault in this failure — she might have been able to bear it more easily. It was because he did nothing save look for solutions and express his growing alarm about her health that she found it so difficult to forgive herself.

On the worn red carpet, she retraced her steps down the aisle to the north door of the church. She stepped outside. She shivered in the growing cold and tucked her scarf inside the collar of her coat. Across the street, two cars were still parked in the constable’s drive. A light was on in the porch. But no one was stirring behind the front window.

Deborah turned away and entered the graveyard. It was lumpy like the moorland, tangled at the edges with blackberry and bramble, the stark red of dogwood growing in a thicket round one tomb. On top of this an angel stood with head bowed and arms extended, as if in final readiness to throw himself into the fi re-coloured stems.

Nothing much had been done to see to the upkeep of the graves. Mr. Sage had been dead for a month, but the lack of concern for the church’s immediate surroundings seemed to have its genesis further back in time than that. The path was overgrown with weeds. The graves were mottled with black, dead leaves. The stones were splattered with mud and green with lichen.

Among them, one grave lay like a soundless reproach to the state to which time and lack of interest had reduced the others. It was swept clean. Its blanket of tough, moorland grass was clipped. Its stone was unblemished. Deborah went to inspect it.

Anne Alice Shepherd , the carving read. She’d been twenty-seven years old at her death. She’d also been someone’s dearest wife in life, and if the condition of her grave was any indication, she was someone’s dearest wife in death as well.

A glint of colour caught Deborah’s eye. It seemed as misplaced as did the red dogwood in the otherwise chromatic congruence of the graveyard, and she bent to examine the base of the gravestone where two bright pink interlocking ovals shone against a nest of something grey. Upon her first inspection, the grey seemed to flow out of the marble marker as if the stone were disintegrating to dust. But on a closer look, she saw that it was a small mound of ashes into whose centre an even smaller, smooth stone had been carefully laid. On this were painted the interlocking ovals which had first caught her eye, two rings of neon pink, perfectly executed, each the same size.

It seemed an odd offering to make to the dead. Winter called for holly wreaths and made do with juniper. At the worst, it accepted those ghastly plastic flowers encased in plastic cases that grew mildew inside. But ashes and stone and, she now saw, four slivers of wood holding the stone in place?

She touched her finger to it. It was smooth as glass. It was almost perfectly flat as well. It had been placed on the ground directly at the centre of the gravestone, but it lay among the ashes like a message for the living and not a fond remembrance of the dead.

Two rings, interlocked. Gently, without disturbing the ashes in which the stone lay, Deborah picked it up, its size and weight no more than that of a pound coin in her hand. She removed one mitten and she felt the stone lie cold, like a pool of standing water in her palm.

Despite their odd colour, the rings reminded her of wedding bands, the sort one saw engraved in gold or embossed on invitations. Like their counterparts on paper, they were the same sort of perfect circles that priests always seemed to speak of, perfect circles of both the union and the unity that a strong marriage was supposed to embody. “A union of bodies, of souls, and of minds,” the minister had said at her own wedding more than two years ago. “These two before us shall now become one.”