Elizabeth George - A Great Deliverance

“And what happened?”

Roberta pressed her cracked lips together as if to stop herself from speaking. The corners of her mouth were spotted with blood. She gave a ragged cry and a flurry of words escaped as if of their own volition. “The Pharaoh put a chain on his neck and dressed him in fine linen and he ruled over Egypt and Joseph’s brothers came to see him and Joseph said I am supposed to save your lives by a great deliverance.”

Gillian spoke through her tears. “The Bible told you what to do, just as it always told Papa.”

“Dress in linens. Wear a chain.”

“What happened?”

“Got him in the barn.”

“How did you do that?” Dr. Samuels’s voice was low.

Roberta’s face quivered. Her eyes fi lled with tears. They began to spill down her acne-covered cheeks. “Tried twice. Didn’t work. Then…Whiskers,” she replied.

“You killed Whiskers to get your father to the barn?” the doctor asked.

“Whiskers didn’t know. Gave him pills. Papa’s pills. He was asleep. Cut…cut his throat. Called for Papa. Papa ran. Knelt by Whiskers.” She began to rock furiously, cradling her bloated body, accompanying the movement with low, tuneless humming. She was in retreat.

“And then, Roberta?” the psychiatrist asked. “You can take the last step, can’t you? With Gillian here?”

Rocking. Rocking. Savage and furious. Blindly determined. Her eyes on the wall. “Love Papa. Love Papa. Don’t remember. Don’t remember .”

“Of course you remember.” The psychiatrist’s voice was gentle but relentless. “The Bible told you what to do. If you hadn’t done it, your father would have done to that little girl all the things he had done to you and Gillian through the years. He would have molested her. He would have sodomised her. He would have raped her. But you stopped him, Roberta. You saved that child. You dressed in fine linens. You put on the gold chain. You killed the dog. You called your father to the barn. He ran in, didn’t he? He knelt down and-”

Roberta jumped off her chair. It fl ew across the room, striking the cabinet, and she went after it, moving like the wind. She picked it up, hurled it against the wall, dumped over the cabinet, and began to scream.

“I chopped off his head! He knelt down. He bent to pick up Whiskers. And I chopped off his head! I don’t care that I did it! I wanted him to die! I wouldn’t let him touch Bridie! He wanted to. He read to her just like he’d done to me. He talked to her just like he’d done to me. He was going to do it! I knew the signs! I killed him! I killed him and I don’t care! I’m not sorry! He deserved to die!” Slumping to the floor, she wept into her hands, large grey doughlike hands that covered her face, but pinched and brutalised it even as they protected. “I saw his head on the fl oor. And I didn’t care. And the rat came out of nowhere. And he sniffed at the blood. And he ate at the brains and I didn’t care !”

With a strangled cry, Sergeant Havers leapt to her feet and staggered from the room.

Barbara crashed into the lavatory, fell blindly into a stall, and began to vomit. The room swam round her. She was so ragingly hot that she was sure she would faint, but she continued, instead, to vomit. And as she retched- painfully, spasmodically-she knew that what was spewing forth from her body was the turbid mass of her own despair.

She clung to the smooth porcelain bowl, fought for breath to redeem her, and vomited. It was as if she had never seen life clearly until the last two hours and, suddenly faced with its filth, she had to get away from it, had to get it out of her system.

In that dark, stifling room the voices had come to her relentlessly. Not just the voices of the sisters who had lived the nightmare, but the voices of her own past and of the nightmare that remained. It was too much. She could no longer live with it; she could no longer bear it.

I can’t, she sobbed inwardly. Tony, I can’t any longer! God forgive me, but I can’t!

Footsteps entered the room. She struggled to pull herself together but the illness continued and she knew she would have to endure the further humiliation of being mortally ill in front of the fashionable competence of Lady Helen Clyde.

Water was turned on. More footsteps. The stall door opened and a damp cloth was pressed to the back of her neck, folded quickly, and then wiped across her burning cheeks.

“Please. No! Go away!” She was sick again and, what was even more despicable, she began to cry. “I can’t!” she wept. “I can’t! Please. Please! Leave me alone!”

A cool hand pushed her hair off her face and supported her forehead. “Life’s rotten, Barb. And the hell of it is that it doesn’t get much better,” Lynley’s voice said.

Horrified, she spun around. But it was Lynley, and in his eyes the compassion she had seen before: in his treatment of Roberta, in his conversation with Bridie, in his questioning of Tessa. And she suddenly saw what it was that Webberly had known she could learn from Lynley-the source of his strength, the centre of what she knew quite well was tremendous personal courage. It was that quiet compassion, nothing else, that finally broke her.

“How could he?” she sobbed. “If it’s your child…you’re supposed to love, not hurt. Not let him die. Never let him die! And that’s what they did!” Her voice spiralled hysterically and all the time Lynley’s dark eyes were on her face. “I hate…I can’t…They were supposed to be there for him. He was their son! They were supposed to love him and they didn’t. He was sick for four years, the last year in hospital.

They wouldn’t even go to see him! They said they couldn’t bear it, that it hurt too much. But I went. I went every day. And he asked for them. He asked why Mum and Dad wouldn’t come to see him. And I lied. I went every day and I lied. And when he died, he was all alone. I was in school. I didn’t get there in time. He was my little brother! He was only ten years old! And all of us- all of us-let him die alone.”

“I’m so sorry,” Lynley said.

“I swore that I would never let them forget what they’d done. I asked his teachers for the letters. I framed the death certificate. I made the shrine. I kept them in the house. I closed the doors and the windows. And every single day I made sure they had to sit there and stare at Tony. I drove them mad! I wanted to do it! I destroyed them. I destroyed myself!”

She put her head down on the porcelain and wept. She wept for the hate that had fi lled her life, for the guilt and the jealousy that had been her companions, for the loneliness that she had brought upon herself, for the contempt and disgust that she had directed towards others.

At the last, when Lynley wordlessly took her into his arms, she wept against his chest, mourning most of all the death of the friendship that could have lived between them.

Through the transom windows in Dr. Samuels’s orderly office, they could see the rose garden. It was designed in plots and descending terraces, the plants segregated by colour of flower and type. A few bushes still had blooms on them, despite the lateness of the year, the cold nights, the rare frost in the mornings. Soon, however, the heavy blossoms would die. Gardeners would cut the bushes back for a dormant winter. But they would renew themselves in the spring, and the circle of life would continue.

They watched the little party wander on the gravel paths among the plants. They were a study in contrasts: Gillian and her sister, Lady Helen and Sergeant Havers, and far behind them the two nurses, their forms hidden beneath the long capes they wore against the wind-blown afternoon.

Lynley turned from the sight and saw Dr. Samuels watching him thoughtfully from behind his desk, his intelligent face carefully devoid of expression.