Elizabeth George - A Great Deliverance

Deborah punched him lightly on the knee. “ I want to know. I insist upon knowing. Shall I have my life blighted because I’ve married a cynic? Tell me what to do, Danny, should I hear the baby.”

Gravely, Danny nodded. “’Tis always a’ night when the baby cries from the abbey grounds. You must sleep on your right side, your husband on his left. An’ you must hold on t’ one another close till the wailing stops.”

“That’s interesting,” St. James acknowledged. “Sort of an animated amulet. May we hope that this baby cries often?”

“Not terrible often. But I…” She swallowed, and suddenly they saw that this was no amusing legend for lovestruck honeymooners, for to her the fear and the story were real. “But I heard i’ myself some three years back! ’Tis not something I’ll soon forget!” She got to her feet. “You’ll remember what t’ do? You’ll not forget?”

“We’ll not forget,” Deborah reassured the girl as she vanished from the room.

They were quiet at her departure. Deborah rested her head against St. James’s knee. His long, thin fingers moved gently through her hair, smoothing the curly mass back from her face. She looked up at him.

“I’m afraid, Simon. I didn’t think I would be, not once this last year, but I am.” She saw in his eyes that he understood. Of course he did. Had she ever truly doubted that he would?

“So am I,” he replied. “Every moment today I felt just a little bit mad with terror. I never wanted to lose myself, not to you, not to anyone in fact. But there it is. It happened.” He smiled. “You invaded my heart with a little Cromwellian force of your own that I couldn’t resist, Deborah, and I find now that rather than lose myself, the true terror is that I might somehow lose you.” He touched the pendant he’d given her that morning, nestling in the hollow of her throat. It was a small gold swan, so long between them a symbol of commitment: choosing once, choosing for life. His eyes moved from it back to her own. “Don’t be afraid,” he whispered gently.

“Make love to me then.”

“With great pleasure.”

Jimmy Havers had little pig’s eyes that darted round the room when he was nervous. He might feel as if he were putting on the bravura performance of a lifetime, lying his way grandly out of everything from an accusation of petty larceny to being caught in flagrante delicto, but the reality was that his eyes betrayed him every time, as they were doing now.

“Didn’t know if you’d be home in time to get your mum the Greece stuff, so Jim went out himself, girl.” It was his habit to speak of himself in the third person. It allowed him to evade responsibility for virtually any unpleasantness that cropped up in his life. Like this one now. No, I didn’t go to the turf accountant.

Didn’t pick up snuff, either. If it was done at all, was Jimmy that done it, not me .

Barbara watched her father’s eyes dance their way round the sitting room. God, what a grim little death pit it was: a ten-by-fi fteenfoot room whose windows were permanently sealed shut by years of filth and grime, crammed with that wonderful three-piece suite so essential to delicate living, but this one a creation that had billed itself as “artifi cial horsehair” thirty-five years ago when even real horsehair was a hideous concept of comfort. The walls were papered with a maddening design of interlocking rosebuds that simpered their way to the ceiling. Racing magazines overflowed from tables onto the floor and argued there with the fi fteen simulated leather albums that assiduously documented every inch, every mile of her mother’s breakdown. And through it all Tony smiled and smiled and smiled.

A corner of the room held his shrine. The last picture of him before his illness-a distorted, unfocused little boy kicking a football into a temporary goal net set up in a garden that had once leapt with fl owers-was enlarged to beyond life-size proportions. On either side, suitably framed in mock oak, hung every school report he had ever done, every note of praise from every teacher he’d had, and-God have mercy on us all-given pride of place, the certificate of his death. Beneath this, an arrangement of plastic flowers did obeisance, a rather dusty obeisance considering the state of the room itself.

The television blared, as it always did, from the opposite corner, placed there “so Tony can watch it as well.” His favourite shows still played regularly to him, frozen in time, as if nothing had happened, as if nothing had changed. While the windows and doors were closed and locked, chained and barred to hold out the truth of that August afternoon and the Uxbridge Road.

Barbara strode across the room and switched off the set.

“Hey, girl, Jim was watching that!” her father protested.

She faced him. My God, he was a pig. When was the last time he’d had a bath? She could smell him from here-the sweat; the body oils that collected in his hair, on his neck, behind the creases of his ears; the unwashed clothing.

“Mr. Patel told me you were by,” she said, sitting down on the horrible couch. It prickled against her skin.

The eyes flicked around. From the dead television to the plastic flowers to the obscene roses scaling the wall. “Jim went to Patel’s, sure.” He nodded.

He grinned at his daughter. His teeth were badly stained, and along the gumline Barbara saw the liquid building within his mouth. The coffee tin was by his chair, inexpertly hidden by a racing form. She knew he wanted her to look away for a moment so that he’d have time to do his business without getting caught. She refused to play along.

“Spit it out, Dad,” she said patiently. “There’s no use swallowing it and making yourself sick, is there?” Barbara watched her father’s body sag in relief as he reached for the tin and spat the snuff-induced brown slime from his mouth.

He wiped himself off with a stained handkerchief, coughed into it heavily, and adjusted the tubes that fed the oxygen into his nose. Mournfully, he looked at his daughter for tenderness and found none. So his eyes quickly shifted and began their slither round the room.

Barbara watched him thoughtfully. Why wouldn’t he die? she wondered. He’d spent the last ten years decaying by degrees; why not one big jump into black oblivion? He’d like that. No more gasping for breath, no more emphysema. No more need for snuff to soothe his addiction. Just emptiness, nothingness, nothing at all.

“You’ll get cancer, Dad,” she said. “You know that, don’t you?”

“’Ey, Jim’s okay, Barb. Don’t you worry, girl.”

“Can’t you think of Mum? What would happen if you had to go into hospital again?” Like Tony . It hung unspoken in the air. “Shall I speak to Mr. Patel? I don’t want to have to do that, but I shall, you know, if you persist in this business with snuff.”

“Patel gave Jim the idea in the fi rst place,” her father protested. His voice was a whine. “After you told him to cut off Jim’s fags.”

“You know I did that for your own good. You can’t smoke round an oxygen tank. The doctors told you that.”

“But Patel said snuff was okay for Jim.”

“Mr. Patel is not a doctor. Now, give me the snuff.” She held out her hand for it.

“But Jim wants-”

“No argument, Dad. Give me the snuff.”

He swallowed. Twice. Hard. His eyes darted here and there. “Got to have something, Barbie,” he whimpered.

She winced at the name. Only Tony had called her that. On her father’s lips it was a malediction. Nonetheless, she moved to him, put her hand on his shoulder, and forced herself to touch his unwashed hair. “Dad, try to understand. It’s Mum we have to consider. Without you, she would never survive. So we’ve got to keep you healthy and fi t. Don’t you see? Mum…loves you so much.”