Faith Fox Read online

  Jocasta had kept her thrilling distance from Jack until their wedding and straight after that she had caught some virus and they had still not slept together. Two nights later they had joined up with the ecumenical expedition to Nepal, where they had slept in sleeping sacks in community huts and he had scarcely been alone with her. He had been happy enough, though, seeing her so excited and grateful for being in the mountains.

  On that expedition everyone as usual fell for Jack, which he as usual accepted. He did not notice, because he was so taken up with her himself, that nobody talked easily to Jocasta or seemed to want her company. He would of course have expected them to keep their distance. She was his wife. ‘My wife,’ he kept saying, watching for reactions. There seemed to be none. Neither Jack nor Jocasta mentioned to anyone that they were on their honeymoon.

  Then home again. Sometimes Jack thought that his unprecedented continuing passion for her was only because she still would not sleep with him, and he half feared the moment she would change her mind. Thus the idea of possession was spiced with danger and he had to discipline himself not to think of it. It became in the end a superstition. He must not, must not, think of it or the worst would happen. All would be lost.

  During the latter part of the honeymoon trip she had seemed to be growing nearer to him and would smile up at him from the seat beside him on the truck. Leaning from a parapet over a road one day high above two tremendous ice-green rivers that converged at a place called Marriage she suddenly took his bony hand, and he kissed her small brown one, the hand with his ring on it. That day he risked buying her—he was no great one for presents—a necklace made of chunks of red amber, which she stroked and put against her face and let him hang round her neck, though she didn’t say thank you.

  When they got back to England she put the necklace away. She seemed cold and dismal and not quite well. Philip, who had spent the honeymoon with The Missus eating chips and learning Bridge, seemed unmoved by their return.

  In time they slept together, but it wasn’t a success. She was passive and apart and he was unnerved. She made him feel inexperienced and feeble. There was always the suggestion in her that she was living somewhere else, listening for another voice, waiting for a different caress. This made him unable to think her frigid, which was troubling, too, but more troubling was his fear, very secret, that, should she change and grant him the passion he knew she possessed, he might as usual back off, run for God again.

  And this he deplored. He loathed himself for it. Inactive. Timorous. Maybe masochistic. Perhaps he was that nastiest of monsters, the apologetic rapist?

  And so the balance was kept, and on he suffered, and soon Jocasta had told him of her wish to be celibate, at least for the present, and would he understand?

  But he was never unaware of her, wherever she was in The Priors or the studios or the fields. He prayed for her and for himself endlessly. Then was grateful. He was proud of having her, of the impact she made when people saw her first. ‘That astonishingly beautiful woman.’ He was always amazed that she was even supposedly his.

  And for six years they had lived like this, his obsession holding fast until for some reason—it was about the time of Holly Fox’s death—a cold wind began to blow from somewhere upon Jack. When he had heard of Holly’s death he had put down the phone, turned to Jocasta and told her before going off up the moor. And he’d seen something shocking in Jocasta’s eyes. He couldn’t place it. ‘Holly Fox is dead.’ What had he seen? Delight and fury, both together. It was very bewildering. Very terrible.

  Knowledge goes ahead of the expression of it as the blow strikes ahead of the pain and the axe drops ahead of the sound of the chop. When Jack had gone up to Jocasta’s room last night, at once after Philip had told him she was barren, he still imagined himself in love with her. Tired and cold and hungry after the ghastly day—even Philip turning and screaming at him down in the caravan park—as he sat on her bed he was still adoring the long hair loose on the pillow, the neat fingers folded over the back of the unread book.

  That night he had fallen into deep sleep and woken with the thought that some enormous trouble had come to an end, a huge stone tablet lifted off his chest just before it crushed him for ever. He felt dizzy. Not himself at all. He got up and walked over to the chapel but could not pray. He decided to prostrate himself full length before the altar as he had done at his ordination, offer himself utterly to God.

  Yet there he stood, unmoving, not even thinking. Standing. In the church there was no sense of any presence, not even his own. No love here. No godliness. He might have been an empty body, a creature long dead and forgotten, like a ghost of the monks who had lived here in the past.

  The air was icy. The wooden cross on the shabby altar very small. Meaningless. The dawn had not begun and though he stood for ages watching the east window, it scarcely lightened. He thought of summer mornings here after nights that scarcely happened, when the sky never really grew dark, one of the most beautiful things about the life of this place.

  I shall never leave it, he thought. I shall always need to be here. And the dark in the winter always shifts at last.

  He knelt to say the Office but it was evasive. He tried to say the Magnificat but it faded out. At length, instead, he said, ‘I do not love her. I have stopped. It is simple.’

  The window began to lighten above him and soon some sort of brightness struck through and fell across the stone floor. ‘It was an inordinate love,’ he said. ‘It was wrong. “Nought shall separate us from the love of God.” But she has separated me from it. She filled my being and my being should be filled only with God.’

  She was in the kitchen ahead of him, wearing a hefty grey sweater and old trousers, her hair on top of her head untidy, in a rubber band. Without The Missus, the stove was still sulky and cold. The electric kettle had disappeared and Jocasta was filling the heavy iron one to take to the fire in the refectory. Her cold fingers poked through the ends of her mittens.

  She said, ‘Not much bread. I’ll have to get some,’ and he thought, This is the woman. The woman who has tried to destroy me. I have been screaming for her and about her to God and now I’m screaming against her. But how ordinary she looks.

  ‘Sugar, Jack?’

  She is so quiet. So ordinary. It is only Jocasta. My Jocasta. I’ve manufactured a demon out of her.

  But as she made tea and came back and walked about the room, went over to the door and called across the courtyard to Philip to make him hurry, like any boy’s mother, Jack knew that something had happened. It had happened last night as they talked and she had said that she and Andrew had betrayed him. And her eyes had hated him for saying it didn’t matter. For being simple. ‘You can carry forgiveness too far,’ her look had said.

  So. She had reached the same conclusion as he. Long ago maybe. And it had taken him six years to be out of danger. Out of love.

  ‘Oh, Jocasta,’ he said now, ‘I’m out of danger.’

  And she looked over at him with her usual lack of curiosity. She yawned. ‘What?’

  ‘“Not as if you and Andrew had been having an affair,”’ he said, and stood watching her. She brought him the mug of tea and he drank it. He said, looking out of the window, ‘I’m in the clear, Jocasta. You’re free of me. I don’t love you any more,’ and when she looked at him he saw her eyes become unclouded, wide and alive.

  When she said, ‘Oh Jack, whatever are you on about now?’ he was silent. In the silence he saw her at length grow frightened and knew that he had come through to the unconcern that had so reliably ended his every passion every time.

  He swam again towards God, allowing himself one fleeting moment of avenged delight.

  And yet the day went on as usual. Not another word. ‘I’ll pick up the rest of the Christmas stuff after I’ve dropped Philip off,’ she said. ‘I can’t do anything about lunch. Can you find yourself a tin of something? Or could
you go over to the Tibs? They always have something even if it’s marshmallows. Or get them to come over here. I’ll bring something frozen for supper. I’ve some paint to get near the supermarket for the backdrop for Christmas Eve so I won’t be early back.’

  ‘Backdrop?’

  ‘I’ve told you. I tell you every day. Nativity tableau. Abstract thing. It’s going to look all right.’

  ‘Don’t be too late. It will snow today.’

  ‘I’ll stay in Whitby till it’s time to fetch Philip home again.’

  ‘Don’t worry about here,’ he said. ‘It may well be today that Pammie Jeffreys arrives. Jefford? Jefferson? If she broke the journey last night she might even be here by lunchtime. She’ll take over. I suppose there’s a room ready?’

  ‘Will she start in straight away, then? Are you paying her anything, Jack?’

  ‘Paying her?’

  ‘Well, why should she do it otherwise?’

  ‘D’you know, I never thought about it. She’s very well-off. I don’t think she’d accept money.’

  ‘But why should she come?’

  ‘I didn’t beg her. I scarcely asked. She jumped at it.’

  He remembered the reassuring voice over the phone. He remembered her capable kindness. Such a steady, sensible woman. He saw her open face. No hang-ups there at all. Pretty. Getting on a bit, but a delightful woman. Rather innocent. Deep Christian too, someone said. Surprising from that neck of the woods.

  (And she was taken with me.)

  ‘I’m off,’ said Jocasta.

  On the top road sleet was falling. The three giant golf balls were dirty white shadows above the clean snow.

  ‘Horrible drive,’ said Philip to his mother. ‘Jocasta, could I board next term?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said at once, ‘you certainly could. I thought you hated the place.’

  ‘Oh, it’s OK. They do go on a bit, but I know them now. The Head’s OK.’

  ‘You’d miss going down to D and T’s. Are you doing better?’

  ‘No. But they’re not bad.’

  ‘Are you sick of The Priors?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘I see.’

  She dropped him at the school gates and he went without glancing back or saying goodbye. Boys do that, she thought, girls don’t. Right up to being men they go without a backward glance. Until they’re old and then you have to prise away their fingers. Philip has never kissed me or put his arms round me or given me one present. In London he just dreamed about. Sometimes looked me over. Hardly knew who I was. That’s Communities for you. I thought they’d make us all stronger. His father the same. Beardless boy, saffron robe. Beads, pot, parents Maida Vale with chequebook to call him home. Mind-blown lazy lout now, I dare say. Maybe banker. Never heard of Philip. Never shall. Oh, I truly believed in all that, I truly did.

  Philip’s not like him, she thought. Not like me either. Nor anybody. My lamb. Could Jack afford boarding fees?

  Then the new knowledge flooded in. Jack would not be finding any more money for Philip now, or for anything else to do with her. The minute Pammie whatshername arrived, she and Philip would have to go.

  Last night’s conversation and this morning’s revelations had swept away the last six years. There had been a weight about Jack she had not felt before. She had seen him angry sometimes, but not sickened, almost poisoned with surprise. Could Andrew run to school fees? Would he if he could? Could Jack just order us to leave?

  Jocasta realised all at once and quite certainly as she eased the car down off the moor towards the treacherous hill into the town, peering forward through the clotted windscreen, which the wipers were trying frenziedly to clear, that Andrew didn’t want her either and that she had known it for some time. She had known it even when he packed her off up here six years ago, before he’d even met Holly Fox. He had found her a burden even then. A sexual delight, but a burden. He had enjoyed her as a serious temptation, the only thing in his life that had made him skid off course, the only unwise thing he’d ever done since he was born. He had needed it, his liberating rebellious act twenty years late, marking the moment when at last he stopped trying to please his Jack-crazed mother.

  But the returned desire for her, Jocasta, after Holly’s death had been self-pity. It was the reaction of any young man widowed, to take a woman as different as possible from the wife so that in bed there would be no comparisons and out of bed there need never be a loving thought.

  It was because he couldn’t bear to think of Holly he came back to me. So much for his scratching on the window the day he brought Faith. ‘I want you in my bed.’ In time, when her memory fades, he’ll find another Holly and in the end he’ll muddle which was which.

  Everything alters.

  And one by one we drop away.

  I don’t want either brother, thought Jocasta, and of the two I need Andrew even less. ‘Right,’ she said as the car slithered into the supermarket car park beyond the quay. He took away my womb but I don’t have to be grateful. Anyone could have done it. I wish it had been a woman surgeon—why are there no women surgeons?—a woman would not think of it as tissue and blood but my female gender, the source of life. Has Andrew ever considered the source of life? Poor Jack, of course, thinks of nothing else, and look where it’s got him. Holy poverty on the Yorkshire moors and sycophantic ladies from Surrey.

  Well, ‘We’re all mad here, said the mad hatter.’ The whole bloody wash-bag is mad. My trouble, I suppose, is I’m not mad enough. I brood and suffer but I’ve no mad passions. I never had. I was never born.

  At the supermarket checkout, paying for the turkey, she saw Ernie Smike standing by the doors, presumably waiting for the weather. He looked forlorn in black. He was alone. She said, ‘I thought you were working with sheep today,’ and he said, ‘Do us a favour,’ and nodded at the storm. ‘Anyway, it’s me day off.’

  ‘D’you want a lift home?’

  ‘I got me bike.’

  ‘You can’t bike in this. I’ll take you. Come and have some coffee.’

  They sat in the coffee shop, a strange pair, Jocasta almost invisible, but precise inside a huge duffle coat she had picked off the back of the kitchen door, Ernie towering above her, beringed in ears and nose, his hair short to nakedness, his weighty leather jacket somehow suggesting more nakedness beneath. His head jerked to the music playing inside the black discs over his ears. Tinny reverberations enclosed him.

  ‘Give it a rest, Ernie.’

  ‘Sorry.’ He switched himself off.

  ‘What’s the matter with you? You look more miserable every time I see you.’

  ‘D’yer wonder at it?’

  ‘You mean Nick going?’

  ‘Oh, let ’im. ’E’ll be back. That bitch won’t keep ’im.’

  ‘Something wrong somewhere with you, then?’

  ‘You could say.’

  ‘Love trouble?’

  ‘Nar. Is Philip goin’ down ’is gran’s this week? I can tek ’im.’

  ‘I don’t want him to. I don’t think he wants to, as a matter of fact. Something happened down there the last time he had a lift with you. He’s not himself. He’s forever washing his hands.’

  ‘Yeah—well.’

  ‘What happened? He went out with you and Nick, didn’t he?’

  “E just hung about. ’E got to ’is gran’s.’

  ‘Was he out with your lot first?’

  ‘’E went off to Dolly an’ Toots.’

  ‘There are things in your part of the forest, Ernie, I don’t want Philip to know about. I’m not having Philip going the way you went. I mean it. I’m not enlightened about gays. See?’

  ‘Thanks a bunch. So what about you, then?’

  ‘You are being insolent.’

  ‘You’re to be the model for ’im, are you? You and Andrew?’

  ‘Y
ou’re being insufferable.’

  ‘“In-siff-er-able.” You was an unmarried mother, wan’t yer? I’se no time for slags. Wan-parint families. An’ what yer do fer yer keep now?’

  ‘A great deal more than you do. And I teach.’

  ‘Teach wogs ’ow to colour pitchers.’

  ‘Ernie,’ she said, ‘don’t. Don’t say these awful things. It’s not like you. I’m sorry for what I said about gays, but—I’m all Philip’s got. It’s not like you to be foul to me. What have I done? It’s Nick going, isn’t it?’

  ‘It is not. Nick’s life’s ’is own. If you want to know, it’s Jack. An’ Toots an’ Dolly.’

  ‘Jack?’

  The way ’e’s bein’ used. Innocent, that’s Jack. I ’ates seein’ ’im made moonkey of and Dolly an’ Toots too, widout a clue. We’re not daft, you know. Nick an’ I ’ates yer—you and that Andrew. That’s why The Missus went.’

  She said, looking away, ‘I shall soon be going too. I shall be taking Philip. Andrew won’t be coming back. He’ll probably take Faith away.’

  ‘Get on. Don’ flatter thesen. What good does it do Jack everyone packin’ off—and Nick goin’ and wogs an’ all—who’s to look to Jack? That’s what you don’t give a fuck for.’

  ‘Somebody’s coming from Surrey.’

  ‘From down there? That bossy posh dyke? Gi’s a break, Jocasta, it’ll last five minutes.’

  ‘I’m going for Philip. Do you want a lift?’

  ‘I tellt thee, no. I’d not take no lift from thee.’

  She sat meekly as he lumbered off.

  She saw nothing but sorrow and mess, a pool of unhappiness. She tried to find some spark of meaning in their lives, in any of their lives, one by one, and she couldn’t. And yet she knew there was some central matter there if she could only catch hold of it. Sometimes, now and then, she had caught a breath of it. A sunlit day. A sigh of breeze. She nearly caught it now, here in the warm coffee place, people about, laughing and yattering on about Christmas. Happiness. Fading. Lost. She let it go.