Faith Fox Read online

  When Toots and Dolly had asked The Missus how she had liked Andrew’s wife she had said only that she was the music-hall type.

  That first shrivelling winter when Jocasta had arrived, inert and beautiful in the corner of the kitchen, she had ignored The Missus. The Missus in turn had ignored her. Sour little rabbit. Even that pale scrag of a little lad she’s got has more life in him. The Missus hated children but Philip she noticed, and at length found herself disarmed. His eccentricity and honesty and good looks were what had drawn her to Jack; and so with Philip, but, unlike Jack, Philip had attached himself to The Missus like a rather delightful flea. She began by snapping at him, then giving him orders, screaming at him to clean himself up, he wasn’t in India now. She seized his shoes in exasperation and polished them, seized his hair and cut it with the kitchen scissors; in time she started playing cards with him. He called her Alice, as only Jack did, and she began to call him Phil, as only Jocasta did. The Smikes, who had known The Missus for years, would watch the quick-witted card games between the boy and the fierce old woman with wonder.

  The Missus saw to Philip’s school uniform as the years went by, had food ready for him when he got home, helped with his writing with an intense and astonishing patience, sometimes placing her claw of a hand over his and guiding it round the loops. Sometimes she thought, I dunno. He might be Jack’s own. ’E’s not slow, ’e’s original, that’s what ’e is. ’E’s ’imself. ‘Jocasta,’ she’d shout. ‘It’s four o’clock. Get off for that boy, you’ll be late.’

  The fact that Jack and Jocasta did not sleep together did not interest The Missus at all. But once, this winter, after six years, Jocasta had come floating through the kitchen and put her arms round Jack in her presence, and they had stood close—close, close, close—for so long that she had been disgusted. And a little afraid. What a show! Trying to tell me something. Nasty.

  She had stuck it out. She had gone on stirring at the porridge and her kitchen had survived undefiled. It had been Jocasta who had disentangled herself from Jack’s long arms and left the room. And The Missus had reigned on.

  Yet, three weeks later, The Missus, Alice Banks, was gone. After more than twenty years, gone. No note. No word. And why? And where?

  ‘There’ll be an explanation,’ Jack said, looking desperately round. He was frightened that perhaps he had been told and forgotten. Some visit. Some break.

  But The Missus never left the place, or just into Whitby or down into Teesside to see Dolly.

  ‘She’ll have gone to her family in Rochdale. There must be some trouble. We’ll get a letter. I must have been told. I must think what she said.’

  ‘She’d have said goodbye. Has she a family?’

  ‘She doesn’t say goodbye,’ said Jack. ‘I don’t think so. I expect there’s some family about somewhere. She’ll be back.’

  But then, her belongings? Her clothes? All were gone from the room over the gatehouse below the guest room in the hospitium. Alice Banks had been no jackdaw but Philip—who had often visited her room to tell her stories as she knitted and listened to Radio Two turned up full blast and said, ‘Very well, then, stop romancing. Let’s have a spot of truth’—Philip said there had been quite a lot of boxes and newspapers and shoes in rows. All gone now.

  Then Jimmie, the postman, stopped off and said that she’d passed him in her car down the ridge, going towards Teesside estuary, the Middlesbrough road. ‘She weren’t lookin’ herself,’ he said, ‘in a felt hat.’

  Andrew said that he and Jocasta would follow The Missus—go down to Toots and Dolly and find out if anything had been seen of her. It was afternoon by now. Philip, who had been taken to school by Andrew, would have to be brought back either by one of The Smikes, who said it was their day off again, or, heaven preserve the child, by Jack. Jack drove sketchily and often turned up at the wrong place, thinking it was a different day and a different mission. Jocasta said no. Not Jack. ‘Right?’ She had blazed up like a fire. Everyone stared. ‘Jack’s not to go for Philip. I’ll go. He’s not safe.’

  ‘But we have to talk,’ said Andrew, following her out to the car. ‘You must come with me to Dolly’s. It’s the only chance we’ll get.’

  ‘I can’t risk Philip. Jack’s driving’s lethal. I’ve risked everything else. I’ve risked everything for you, Andrew, from the minute I met you. Right up to last night. That’s it.’

  ‘Last night can be explained. If we can find her, we can tell her.’

  ‘Nobody explains to that woman. She knows everything, judges everything, forgives nothing. Always Jack, Jack—she’s obsessed by him. Oh you fool, fool, fool, Andrew! You knew her long before I did. Jack’s her reason for being. She’d die for him. To keep him from hurt is what she thinks she’s born for. You and I are nowhere. She’d cut our throats.’

  ‘Then how could she leave him?’

  ‘I don’t know. Shock. I think I’ll go for Philip.’

  ‘OK, then. I’ll go down to Toots. I’ll take the baby. They still haven’t seen her.’

  ‘Do what you like. I’ve had enough,’ she said.

  ‘So why did you come to me last night?’

  She drove off, Andrew watching as the car passed under the gatehouse arch and out of sight. Then he turned and went into the kitchen, where his brother was standing about wondering whether to make tea.

  ‘I suppose we might tell the police,’ Jack said, looking childish, with hanging hands, his face quite old. ‘Do you suppose . . . ’ there was a great pause ‘. . . that I have neglected Alice? I’ve never sat down with her to talk, you know, not for years. It’s possible that it has suddenly come to her that’—he looked up like a penitent—‘I am a very selfish man.’

  Andrew took the drooping teapot from his brother’s paw and made tea. He did not look at Jack.

  They sat and faced each other across the great oak table. A sense of The Missus, black with contempt, hung about the room.

  Andrew thought, I shall tell him now. There will never be a right time. We are alone, for once. It must be done.

  Yet he ought to ask Jocasta first. Jack ought to be told by them both together. He could not bear Jack to hear it from somewhere else and there would probably be a letter from the bloody Missus woman tomorrow, telling all. No, he must tell Jack now.

  If of course The Missus could bear to hurt Jack, by letter or in any way. Her flight surely meant that she could not. Her flight was the most abstruse hint that she could give. She would never be able to keep the great hurt that was being done to Jack to herself, to live with it, to watch it happen again and again whenever Andrew came up from London, to watch the unspeakable foulness of it grow familiar. To see Andrew grow easy, smug, sated; to see Jocasta’s lazy joy.

  The surprise was that The Missus, the night before, hadn’t charged him with the enormity of it there and then, head-on in the doorway of his bedroom as she stood there with her pathetic torch. A pointing finger, a loud Lancashire voice shouting, rage and disgust. But she had vanished. At one moment holding the door open wide, her black hair in ridges of metal clips, her midget body swathed in an old brown coat of Jack’s trailing on the floor over her nightie, Wellingtons on her feet, torch shining on the bed—and he had turned in the bed and seen it all, over his bare shoulder. He had been covering Jocasta, yet she might—must—have seen Jocasta’s face, sideways on the pillow, her hair loose, her eyes dreaming. Then the doorway empty and The Missus gone.

  And Jocasta had said, ‘Don’t worry. Stay with me.’

  Andrew had climbed out of bed and dressed. ‘Stay with me,’ she had kept saying. His horror had not been because of being found out or because of what he had done, but because Jocasta had said, ‘Stay with me.’

  Then fear had come flooding in. He had felt Alice Banks’s terrible unblinking eyes.

  ‘Stay with me, Andrew.’

  And he had said no and run for it.

>   Left her alone, not even shutting his door behind him. He had gone across the courtyard to Jocasta’s room and sat in it for the rest of the night, taking pleasure in growing colder and colder until dawn came sluggishly and he heard sounds about the place. Over in the dormitories the visitors were stirring and he thought he heard his daughter crying.

  The thought—more than the thought: the bright imprinted image—of Holly was suddenly there with him. She seemed to be waving from somewhere or other in a blue dress.

  They were in California, picnicking on a jaunt through the gold-rush towns on the way to the Big Trees. Rolls of airy cottonwood floated and scratched about the road ahead of them. Lean men with walnut-creased faces sold walnuts from roadside sacks. A hot fog had come down over the plain, then lifted and left blue air. They sat beside the road together with a thermos flask and sandwiches in the sun—Holly had never taken to American food though she never let on. She would ask scrawny, health-mad LA women to tea and give them little egg-and-cress sandwiches and butterfly cakes, little boat-shaped bridge rolls spread with the Gentleman’s Relish sent out by Thomasina from Piccadilly.

  ‘Darling—look!’ Far away to the east a snowy fluted blue-white feather lay across the sky.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘D’you know,’ he said, ‘it’s the High Chaparral—we are actually looking at the High Chaparral.’

  She licked Gentleman’s Relish off a roll in the sharp autumn air and they laughed like kids. They behaved as though they’d been granted a vision. ‘High Chaparral,’ they shouted.

  ‘Oh, I’m halfway to heaven, Andrew. All I want’s a baby to make one out of the two of us. We’ll call it High Chaparral.’

  ‘Or Klondyke Kate,’ he said, ‘or Cottonwood, or Redwood, or Gentleman’s Relish. You are the Gentleman’s Relish.’

  The air so clean and gold, the road so white. It stretched so straight and empty over the plain.

  Why ever did we come back? he thought. This bloody, shabby, threadbare, worn-out country. Grubby and poor as a Balkan republic. Medicine in chaos, hospitals closing, no bloody money, tiny, racist, divided North and South, living on its past.

  As he shivered in the crumbling medieval ruin that in the South or in Scotland, even in Ireland, might have had a spot of limewash to brighten it—on the Continent it would have been restored with plaster or pulled down—Andrew saw The Priors in its soggy hollow of the moors as a trashy place, a sentimental notion, cranky, quaint, nostalgic, a half-baked idea of a revival of early Christian asceticism.

  ‘Taking in the poor’—and who are they? Liverpool Tibetans, whatever that means. How could Tibetans get here? Phoneys. Frauds. The whole set-up run by a lunatic, and the lunatic my brother at that.

  As it grew light Andrew went looking for a bath but found someone ahead of him in the vaulted bathroom, the geyser roaring angrily. Instead he pulled on some clothes and went out into the first frost of the year, over the courtyard to the sheds. He thought he’d take a look at Faith and found her being dressed, lying on a mat in the steamy dormitory.

  Behind her on a shelf there were little lamps flickering. The air was scented with sweet oils. One of the women was praying over the lamps one by one. There were only four Tibetans now, and there were five lamps. Pema, who was bending over his child, looked up at Andrew and then away. Faith lay naked, arms and legs kicking in ecstatic jerks, eyes watching the flickering line of the lamps. She arched her back and complained about being fastened into the nappy, then flopped down again and raised her legs in the air. Far above were her pink feet. She examined her toes. She conversed with them. Her eyes reflected the lamplight. She looked as far back as she could over her head at the ceiling.

  ‘May I take her?’

  ‘No. She has her bottle now.’

  ‘Later?’

  ‘Oh yes. If you like. Come, come, come, pretty,’ said Pema.

  ‘She’s mine, you know.’

  ‘She’s her own girl, right?’ said the A-level girl.

  ‘She has good eyes,’ he said. ‘That right one’s cleared up well. Hospital didn’t do much good. Just needed time.’

  ‘She sees fine,’ said Pema, who had used a salve out of an old cough-sweet tin she kept about her. She’d smeared it over the eyelids every day for a fortnight. ‘She sees far away over the mountains.’

  And she’s mine, thought Andrew, walking fast up towards the ridge. I must remember.

  His total lack of feeling for the baby, Holly’s baby, frightened and shocked him. He tramped off piste into the frosted heather half hoping he could get lost in it.

  Oh my God, my God, the child is mine. No one can take her without my permission. I must get her away from here. Learn to like her. Have to, now. All over here now. Shall go today. End the thing with Jocasta. End this vile mess. Oh God, how terrible. But he could not say ‘End this sin.’ It was a great sin. To lie with a brother’s wife. He could not say it, only feel it deep, deep, far out of words.

  He saw The Smikes shambling about below him as he turned and set off bleakly back again. Philip, shoelaces trailing, school tie in a noose, crossed the yard. Then, not wanting to, trying not to, Andrew watched Jocasta and Jack walking side by side to breakfast together, Jocasta composed and neat, Jack tall above her, smiling down. Jocasta was walking calmly towards the kitchen, where reigned The Missus, who had confronted her in the night.

  I’ll leave now, Andrew thought. Just go. Send for the child later. Pammie Jefford might come for her. I could even . . . and, though he knew no reason for it, his eyes all at once brimmed with tears . . . I could even go to Thomasina. I could beg her.

  With a surge of longing, for some sort of absolution, for the chance of letting in a corner of light on the chasm left by the death of Holly not filled but deepened by the obsession for Jocasta, Andrew thought, I might tell Thomasina everything.

  He had seen her at the funeral of Pammie Jefford’s husband, which he’d gone to out of gratitude and respect for Pammie and hoping ridiculously that Jocasta might be there. And Jocasta had been there. And without Jack, who was tied by the farm, as ever. Afterwards he had spent the night with Jocasta in a hotel room and he had thought there had never been such abandon and happiness and anguish. As he had put her on the train back to The Priors, they had both been dazed, drained, drenched by the night.

  Now, the terror of The Missus with her gorgon head of steel, her terrifying passion for Jack, the voice of Jocasta saying, ‘Stay with me,’ and the sight of her walking unconcernedly beside Jack towards the kitchen for breakfast prepared and presided over by The Missus. And the memory of the child he could not love who stretched up confident arms to things he did not understand, had her eyes fixed on invisible things—all this, and physical exhaustion, too, gathered inside him a well of shame, a glut of shame, a need for cleansing.

  It was Thomasina’s face at the funeral of Pammie’s old man, the face he had known as cynical and witty over the betrothal champagne, bright and competent at her daughter’s wedding, unbearable to contemplate in the antiseptic gleam of the health farm, absent at Holly’s funeral, blank and lost as she passed him in the Jaguar on the ridge with the ancient boyfriend; the face that he had seen last at Jefford’s funeral was a face grown old. Thomasina an old woman. Yet alive now in some sense and perhaps ready now freely to receive, freely to give.

  I’ll go to Thomasina, now, he thought. She will take Faith now, I know she will. She will take me. We could live together near London, out of all this, the three of us.

  So right, so beautiful, so inevitable did this solution seem that the night hours, the knowledge of sin and chaos, went into the shadows, thinned, evaporated. He started walking down towards The Priors again as one shriven, even as one blessed.

  And he found a cold room, no fire in the stove, no table laid, no food to be seen, everyone gathered helpless and unbelieving.

  ‘Gone?’ he said
. ‘She can’t have gone.’

  Jocasta turned away and began to cut bread, which she passed round. Philip found some butter and jam and began to eat. Ernie Smike filled a kettle with cold water and slapped it on the cold stove, which had gone out. Nick Smike said there was an electric kettle somewhere, maybe over with the Tibetan lot, but did nothing to find out. Philip opened a can of Coke and swigged it from a hole in the top and said, ‘So, who’s getting me to school?’

  When Jocasta’s car had disappeared with Philip, Andrew had stood in the courtyard watching it away, thinking that he had seen Jocasta for the last time. For the last time.

  But he could not just go. This morning. Just leave the place and the baby—now. It would look suspiciously wild. He must speak to Thomasina first. Or to Pammie at any rate. He must see Jocasta again and discuss what to tell Jack. He must tell Jocasta, tell her that now that he and the baby and Thomasina would be living together in the south he would not be coming back up here again. Ever. Over. Except of course now and then to see his parents. They were getting old. He’d neglected them for a long time. But he could visit them without coming up to The Priors. No one need ever know of any rift between the brothers.

  And, come to that, was there, realistically, any need to tell Jack? Tell him everything? Or—well, anything at all? Jack’s shining soul, God help him, would never for an instant suspect. Never suspect his brother’s sin. There. He’d said it. Christ! Sin. Not much talk of sin these days. We don’t live in classical times. Oedipus. Phaedra. Jocasta. Vengeance of the gods—all unknown now.

  We’re all trivial now, thought Andrew, hardly Titans falling from heaven, lost gods lying blinded along a darkened plain. No one believes in heaven. Religion’s an affected joke, patchwork, ridiculous, easy to forget. ‘Love’ is talked about all the time, ‘adoration’ even, but not in relation to God. No eagles now. All sparrows.