Elizabeth George - A Great Deliverance

“Caught me, Mum.” Barbara forced a smile, putting an arm round the woman’s bird-like shoulders and leading her to the table. “I had a bite at the Yard, so I wasn’t hungry. Should I have saved it for you or Dad?”

Mrs. Havers blinked quickly. The relief on her face was pathetic. “I…I suppose not. No, of course not. We wouldn’t want chicken and peas two nights in a row, would we?” She laughed gently and laid her album on the table. “ Dad got me Greece,” she announced.

“Did he?” So that’s what he was doing out of the cage . “All by himself?” Barbara asked casually.

Her mother looked away, fingering the edges of her album, picking nervously at the artificial gold leaf. She gave a sudden movement, a quick, brilliant smile, and pulled out a chair. “Sit here, lovey, let me show you how we went.”

The album was opened. Previous trips through Italy, France, Turkey-now there was a bizarre one-and Peru were fl ipped through quickly until they arrived at the newest section, devoted to Greece.

“Now, here’s the hotel we stayed at in Corfu. Do you see how it’s just right there on the bay? We could have gone down to Kanoni to a newer one, but I liked the view, didn’t you, lovey?”

Barbara’s eyes smarted. She refused to submit. How long will it take? Will it never end?

“You’ve not answered me, Barbara.” Her mother’s voice quivered with anxiety. “I did work so hard on the trip all today. Having the view was better than the new hotel in Kanoni, wasn’t it, lovey?”

“Much better, Mum.” Barbara forced the words out and got to her feet. “I’ve got a case tomorrow. Can we do Greece later?” Would she understand?

“What sort of case?”

“It’s a…bit of a problem with a family in Yorkshire. I’ll be gone a few days. Can you manage, do you think, or shall I ask Mrs. Gustafson to come and stay?” Wonderful thought, the deaf leading the mad.

“Mrs. Gustafson?” Her mother closed the album and drew herself stiffly upright. “I think not, my lovey. Dad and I can manage on our own. We always have, you know. Except that short time when Tony…”

The room was unbearably, stifl ingly hot. Oh God, Barbara thought, just a wisp of air. Just this once. For a moment. She went to the back door, which led out to the weed-choked garden.

“Where’re you going?” her mother asked quickly, that familiar note of hysteria creeping into her voice. “There’s nothing out there! You mustn’t go outside after dark!”

Barbara picked up the discarded chicken dinner. “Rubbish, Mum. I won’t be a moment. You can wait by the door and see I’m all right.”

“But I…By the door?”

“If you like.”

“No, I mustn’t be by the door. We’ll leave it open just a bit, though. You can shout if you need me.”

“That sounds the plan, Mum.” She picked up the package and went hurriedly out into the night.

A few minutes. She breathed the cool air, listened to the familiar neighbourhood sounds, and felt in her pocket for a crumpled pack of Players. She shook one out, lit it, and gazed up at the sky.

What had started the seductive descent into madness? It was Tony, of course. Bright, freckle-faced imp. Fresh, spring air in the constant darkness of winter. Watchme, watchme, Barbie! I can do anything! Chemistry sets and rugger balls. Cricket on the common and tag in the afternoon. And horribly, stupidly chasing a ball right onto the Uxbridge Road.

But he didn’t die from that. Just a stay in hospital. A persistent fever, a peculiar rash. And a lingering, etiolating kiss from leukaemia. The wonderful, delicious irony of it all: go in with a broken leg, come out with leukaemia.

It had taken him four agonising years to die. Four years for them to make this descent into madness.

“Lovey?” The voice was tremulous.

“Right here, Mum. Just looking at the sky.” Barbara crushed her cigarette out on the rock-hard ground and walked back inside.

Deborah St. James braked the car to a halt on a breath of laughter and turned to her husband. “Simon, have you never been told you’re quite the world’s worst navigator?”

He smiled and closed the road atlas. “Never once. But have a heart. Consider the fog.”

She looked out the windscreen at the large, dark building that loomed in front of them. “Poor excuse for not being able to read a road map, if you ask me. Are we at the right place? It doesn’t look as if a soul’s waited up for us.”

“I shouldn’t be surprised. I told them we’d arrive at nine and now it’s…” he peered at his watch in the weak interior light of the car, “good God, it’s half past eleven.” She heard the laughter in his voice. “Are you for it, my love? Shall we spend our wedding night in the car?”

“Teenagers grappling hotly in the backseat, do you mean?” She tossed her long hair back with a shake of her head. “Hmm, it is a thought. But I’m afraid in that case you should have hired something larger than an Escort. No, Simon, there’s nothing for it, I’m afraid, but banging on the doors and rousing someone. But you shall make all our excuses.” She stepped out into the chilly night air, taking a moment to study the building before her.

It was a pre-Elizabethan structure by initial design, but one which had undergone a number of Jacobean changes that added to its air of rakish whimsicality. Mullioned windows winked in the moonlight that fi ltered through the wispy fog which had settled on the moors and was now drifting down into the dales. Walls were covered with Virginia creeper, its leaves burning the old stone to rich russet. Chimneys germinated upon the roof in a helter-skelter pattern of capricious warts against the night sky. There was a contumacy about the building that denied the very existence of the twentieth century, and this quality spread to the grounds that surrounded it.

Here enormous English oaks stretched out their branches over lawns where statuary, encircled by flowers, interrupted the fl ow of the land. Pathways meandered into the woods beyond the house with a beckoning, siren charm. In the absolute stillness, the play of water from a fountain nearby and the cry of a lamb from a distant farm were the only auditory concomitants to the whisper of the breeze that soughed through the night. They might have been Richard and Anne, home to Middleham at last.

Deborah turned back to the car. Her husband had opened his door and was watching her, waiting in his usual patient fashion for her photographer’s reaction to the beauty of the place. “It’s wonderful,” she said. “Thank you, my love.”

He lifted his braced left leg from the car, dropped it with a thump onto the drive, and extended his hand. With a practised movement, Deborah helped him to his feet. “I feel as if we’ve been going round in circles for hours,” St. James remarked, stretching.

“That’s because we have ,” she teased. “‘Just two hours from the station, Deborah. A wonderful drive.’”

He laughed softly. “Well, it was, love. Admit it.”

“Absolutely. The third time I saw Rievaulx Abbey, I was positively enchanted.” She glanced at the forbidding oak door before them. “Shall we try it then?”

They crunched across the gravel drive to the dark recess into which the door was set. A pitted wooden bench was tipped drunkenly against the wall next to it, and two enormous urns stood on either side. With the perversity of plants, one urn held a burgeoning beauty of flowers while the other was home to a withering colony of geraniums whose dried leaves fluttered raspingly to the ground as Deborah and her husband passed.

St. James applied some considerable strength to the large brass fixture that hung in the centre of the door. Silence greeted its fading echoes. “There’s a bell as well,” Deborah noticed. “Have a go with that.”