Pat Barker - Double Vision

They sat in silence for a while. She wanted to get up and have a bath, but she knew he needed to sit there, keeping guard over his little girl. Only I’m not his little girl, she thought.

‘Dad, do you think I could have a lock on my door?’

‘Yes, of course.’ He brightened at once. It was something for him to do. ‘I’ll put one on tomorrow. Unless you’d rather I got one now?’

‘No, tomorrow’s fine.’ She didn’t want to be left in the house on her own. She’d have to face it sooner or later, but not yet. ‘Stephen’s taking me out tomorrow.’

He thought for a moment, then nodded. ‘Good.’

She got up, had a bath, intending to get dressed after it and resume normal life, but the hot water knocked her out. She was barely able to crawl back upstairs and into bed. I’m just resting, she told herself, but fell asleep immediately and slept for two hours, dreamlessly this time.

As soon as he was sure Justine was asleep, Alec went into his study and sat down at the desk, closing his eyes to block out the stale, overfamiliar room. He started to pray, using the Jesus Prayer: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner , repeating the words over and over again, pushing all extraneous thoughts gently aside, trying, with every repetition, to sink deeper into the awareness of God. Sometimes — but he had little hope that it would happen today — he was rewarded, after twenty minutes or so, by a sense of unity with all other living things. This brought with it a joy that illuminated the whole day. Now, the most he could hope for was surface calm, and a reminder that what separated him from God and from other human beings was his own sin.

On the phone this morning Stephen had given no details of the attack, saying only that Justine had been injured and was on her way to hospital. Alec’s ignorance was a black hole dragging him in. Rape. Stephen hadn’t said that, but Alec couldn’t get the possibility out of his mind. Images appeared, unsummoned, spawning other images. Rigid with fury, he beat his clenched fist on the steering wheel. No room now for Christian forgiveness. If he’d had the bastard tied up, he’d happily have taken a blowtorch to his balls.

He’d never been a peaceful man, though over the years he’d fought hard to control his anger. And sometimes all that repressed aggression had paid dividends, enabling him to forge bonds with young men newly released from prison, many of them violent. They sensed a hidden kinship, perhaps, where on the surface there was only difference.

Victoria had known. On their second wedding anniversary, she’d bought him a print of one of Edward Hicks’s Peaceable Kingdom series. ‘There,’ she’d said, pointing to a lion in the foreground. ‘That’s you.’

The print hung on the wall of his study now, the only memento of his marriage he had left, apart from Justine. Abandoning the attempt to pray, he went to look at it. The lion is surrounded by lambs, sheep, cows. They aren’t afraid of him — though one or two look wary — and he isn’t attacking them. God’s reign has begun. Only the lion’s eyes are full of anguish, the strain of denying his own nature, reinventing himself, second by second: an act of pure will. And the balance is precarious. He remembers the taste of blood. He’s afraid of himself. The pupils are huge, black, dilated with pain. On the left of the picture, William Penn is concluding his treaty with the Indians, sealed without an oath and never broken, but the struggle against violence has simply moved back into the individual human mind, and those eyes tell you that victory is far from certain.

‘That’s you,’ she’d said, and kissed him.

The fantasies of revenge hadn’t gone. They clung like bats to the inner walls of his skull, and no amount of prayer would dislodge them. His first sight of Justine, slumped in the chair like a broken and abandoned doll, had only reinforced them. He couldn’t bring himself to touch her, afraid that, if she had been raped, any man’s touch, even his, would fill her with disgust.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked, knowing the question was idiotic.

‘Yes,’ she said, after a pause. Everything she said had this pause in front of it. It was like dropping stones into a well.

‘Did you see him?’

A blank gaze. ‘Yes.’

‘It wasn’t somebody you knew?’

‘No.’

She sounded surprised and he breathed again. But then she said there’d been two men and she hadn’t seen the second. Then nothing — not the Jesus Prayer, not a lifetime of discipline and faith — had been able to stop him giving the second man a face.

My fault, he’d thought. I brought this into the house. He’d been so sure of himself, of his own righteousness, his power to do good — his , not God’s — when he should have been protecting his daughter. Sometimes, when the attempt to be ‘good’ backfires, you end up being nothing, not even a healthy animal. Any mammal knows to protect its own young, and he’d failed to do even that.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner …

Back at his desk, he closed his eyes, repeating the familiar words until he’d achieved a degree of calm.

When he opened them again, he saw the last thing he expected to see: a white van parked outside the gates with Peter Wingrave getting out, carrying a bunch of flowers.

Justine mustn’t see him. Praying for her not to wake, Alec went to the door and opened it. Peter, who’d been looking down the drive, turned and smiled.

It can’t be true, Alec thought. If Peter had been the second man, he’d never have dared come here carrying roses. They were roses. Now that he was close, Alec could see the red buds clustering inside the cone of white paper.

‘I heard the news,’ Peter said. ‘How is she?’

‘Asleep, at the moment.’

‘Not badly injured?’

‘Broken nose. Bruising. Two cuts to her head.’

A pause. They looked at each other, then, wearily, Alec stepped aside. A bit late now to keep him out. He felt Peter shadowing him down the corridor to the living room, almost treading on his heels. So much power this man had, and yet he seemed to have no identity, clingfilming himself round other people in order to acquire a shape. Anybody who impressed him got the treatment; once, not so many years ago, it had been Alec’s turn. He’d witnessed Peter’s taking on of his mannerisms, his way of speaking, even his religion — though perhaps that was genuine. He had no right to question the reality of another person’s faith — certainly not today, when he was doubting the foundations of his own. ‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘Would you like a cup of tea? Coffee?’

‘No, thanks. I’m all right.’

‘I’ll put those in water.’

In the kitchen Alec ran a bucket of water, dumped the roses into it, still wrapped, and got back to the living room as fast as he could. He didn’t know why he was hurrying — he wasn’t worried about Peter stealing anything, he trusted him absolutely in that respect. No — what worried him was that Justine might wake up and come down.

‘Do they know who did it?’ Peter asked.

‘No, but they seem to be quite optimistic — she gave a very good description of one of them.’ He steadied his voice. ‘The one who hit her.’

‘Oh, so there were two of them?’

‘Yes. She didn’t really see the other one.’ Alec was looking at Peter’s clothes. He was wearing a suit with a polo shirt underneath. ‘Not working today?’

‘No, I’ve been to London. I had lunch with Stephen Sharkey’s agent. You know Stephen?’

‘I’ve met him.’

‘I thought he and Justine were…?’

‘She’s nineteen. She does what she likes.’ He would have to have caught an early train to be in London for lunch. If he was telling the truth — and he was too clever to tell a lie that could be so easily detected — he couldn’t have been anywhere near the farmhouse this morning. ‘Which train did you catch?’