Breaking and Entering (37 page)

He thrust his hands through his own hair as he recalled her angry letters – letters sent care of his office in response to his curt note, and bristling with hurt pride disguised as sarcasm. If things had turned out differently, they might be in Rome together now; that luxuriant hair enveloping him again as they savoured the pleasures of a double bed; the chimes from some church clock tolling a slow and sensuous midnight.

‘Daniel,' breathed a voice behind him.

Startled, he wheeled round, half-expecting Juliet to have materialized in the flesh. But of course he should have known: there was only one person who crept up on him unawares like that, and who always knew his whereabouts, even when he was seeking to escape. And of course the man looked different again – in place of the dazzling white blouson an old and shapeless sweater; his hair tucked down inside the polo-neck, so that in the murky light it appeared conventionally short. Now he was just anyone – Joe Bloggs in reality – a bloke in muddy boots and Oxfam jeans. Except he'd just worked an almost-miracle, which put him on a par with Christ: Jesus Bloggs, in short. And already that mesmeric voice had sparked off the usual reaction of resentment, awe and fear, made stronger by the healing session.

‘I thought you might still be awake.'

Daniel shrugged, adopting a deliberately flippant tone to conceal his agitation. ‘Well, I suppose it's not that easy to drop off to sleep after witnessing a miracle.'

JB squatted on the sand beside him, leaning against the rock. ‘I don't think I'd call it a miracle.'

‘Oh, I see. So it was all an illusion, was it, or some sort of confidence trick? Well, congratulations. You almost had me fooled.'

JB said nothing, just shifted slightly on the sand. Daniel forced a laugh to show he was only joking. The silence was uncomfortable. Why did JB keep pursuing him, for heaven's sake? Did he never sleep? And if he was suffering from insomnia, couldn't he use his time productively by working a few more miracles – or whatever it was he called them? Take that poor soul with MS, for instance, or the logorrhoeic madwoman. Both were in dire need of help, whereas all
he
wanted was to be left in peace.

Perhaps Penny had sent him up here. She could have told ‘Stephen' about his failings in the marital bed and begged him to effect a cure. Also, if she hoped to further her relationship with Corinna, it might suit her very well to have him out of the way. He lobbed another stone into the water, determined to wrest his mind away from sex of any sort. ‘Do you happen to know how deep it is, this lake?'

‘Unfathomable, apparently. They say there's a whole drowned city at the bottom.'

‘And I'm expected to believe that, am I, on top of everything else?'

‘You're not expected to believe anything.'

The quiet reply only accentuated his own unfriendly tone. Why the devil was he being so defensive? The man had done him no harm and had just transported George and Margot into a state of genuine bliss. Even if Margot's sight deteriorated as soon as she got home, at least she had enjoyed one night of triumph.

‘Look,' he said less brusquely. ‘D'you think there's any chance of helping Pippa? I mean, in her case it's not a simple illness or …'

‘Illness is rarely simple.'

‘No, I suppose it isn't. What I meant was …' What the hell
did
he mean? He had just resolved not to get his daughter mixed up in things he couldn't understand. Yet his recent thoughts of Juliet had brought other painful memories surging back – Pippa sitting listlessly at the breakfast table, staring at her uneaten toast as if she could see horror-pictures in it; or behaving like a deaf-mute in the sports shop where they'd taken her to buy new trainers, showing not a spark of interest in any of the shoes. Yet she had lost her own expensive Reeboks which she had bought six months earlier – and bought with great excitement.
That
shopping expedition had been happy for them all: Pippa darting around the shop, pouncing with delight on neon-coloured leggings and garish satin cycling-shorts; trying on baseball caps and ski-goggles. So what had brought about the change in her, and why did she keep losing things? Could there be a link with the loss of her real father – the deprivation she'd suffered at the age of four causing symptoms only now? Or was it even possible that Phil had got in touch with her, written to her secretly from Bahrain and put her in some terrible dilemma – maybe suggested that she join him and Khadisha?

Appalled by the idea, Daniel glanced at JB's face, now turned towards him with palpable concern. There was no trace of malice in it – that he had to admit – and if this extraordinary man could actually restore sight, then why not speech as well?

‘I've thought a lot about your daughter,' he was saying, ‘and I have this feeling that the problem's coming from outside. It's as if another person is threatening her whole security and happiness – someone with his own problems, who is suffering in his turn.'

Daniel grazed his hand along the jagged surface of the rock. The pain was nothing compared with the sharp jolt in his mind. The ‘someone' must be him. He had always feared he was to blame – that his own affair and betrayal had affected Pippa somehow – and now JB was confirming it. It was also increasingly obvious that Penny had been blabbing, using ‘Stephen' as her confidant. She was probably more upset than he'd ever let himself admit. Or had she some suspicion about Juliet? What if she'd discovered an incriminating letter, or a restaurant bill he couldn't explain away?

He jerked up from the rock and began pacing to and fro. He had come to Wales not just for Pippa's sake, but in search of that idyllic peace his mother-in-law had lauded, to lure him from unhealthy, noisy Rome. Yet here he was in a state of utter turmoil, no nearer solving anything, either in his own life or in Pippa's. If she needed a new father (a proper one this time, to replace the previous two incompetents) well, perhaps she'd better return to Leeds with Tony – a kind and jolly Dad who wouldn't ‘threaten her whole security and happiness'. It was evident that he had failed his wife and daughter, and taking Juliet into account as well, had cast a blight on three separate lives.

He stopped his pacing to slump down on the rock again. There was no point in asking help for Pippa. If she could find her tongue for a different set of parents – dance a jig with Judith, let Tony hold her hand – then it wasn't healing she needed, but the love and understanding he had withheld from her himself. His only course of action was to tell JB he'd changed his mind, phrasing it in some tactful way which wouldn't sound ungrateful. ‘Actually, we … er … can't stay long in any case. I'm already rather worried about problems in the office. So it's probably best if I get back and …'

‘Still running away?'

‘I'm not running anywhere, dammit! I'm a busy man, with certain responsibilities I can't just leave behind.'

‘But that's the problem, Daniel, isn't it? You can't leave anything behind – not the past, not your pain and suffering as a child. I've been trying to understand why you're so desperate to escape, and it came to me this evening that you associate this part of Wales with death. It's not completely clear to me as yet, but I had this image of a child of seven or eight or so, who died not far from here – a child with your own name.'

Daniel simply stared, too shaken to respond. It
had
been a sort of death – the death of childhood, death of hope; the darkness and incarceration. But how on earth could JB have known? No amount of heart-to-heart with Penny could explain his insights this time, because Penny didn't know herself. He had told her very little; despised those men who kept banging on about the horrors of their schooldays, in search of easy pity. Such memories should be buried, or discarded with the uniform, the rugby kit, the tin trunk. There was something mawkishly self-indulgent about displaying childhood wounds and expecting people to rally round with the emotional equivalent of cold compresses and Band-Aid.

He stole another glance at JB, whose face expressed the same fierce and almost frightening concentration as when he'd been healing Margot. The word ‘work' came to mind again, although muddied with less flattering words – fanatic, preachifier.

‘You see, if it
was
a death, you've probably never mourned it, Daniel, never even faced up to it before. We all prefer to run away from death, but life is actually a whole series of deaths. Though it's also a series of births. You can be reborn into the present, which is a sort of resurrection. Living in the present moment is the only form of deathlessness worth having.'

‘Look, I'm sorry, but I don't know what you're talking about.'

‘Yes, you do. You understand extremely well – far better than I'd hoped.'

‘What d'you mean, better than you'd hoped? You keep making out that you know me, when we're complete and utter strangers.'

JB laughed. ‘Human beings are never that.'

Oh no? thought Daniel bitterly, remembering Greystone Court again. The only reason he'd been sent to that particular school rather than one less isolated was that his father knew the chaplain there, and perhaps assumed that he'd befriend his son, or even be something of a substitute father. But the Reverend Mr Hanbury-Webber had proved as icily remote as the school itself; a punctiliously strict man who was determined not to expose himself to accusations of favouritism. ‘Complete and utter strangers' seemed precisely the right phrase to describe both him and most of the staff – tyrants ten foot tall who inhabited a different world and flew into terrifying rages over nothing.

But he didn't want to dwell on all these memories, nor on pain or death or childhood, or any of the other things he had managed so successfully to confine in locked compartments, but which this dangerous man was now dragging out for inspection. He grabbed a fistful of sand, let it trickle slowly through his fingers, then rooted for a pebble, sat tapping it against the rock. He was unable to stop fidgeting, whereas JB preserved a total stillness, as if hewn from rock himself.

The muffled chink of the pebble seemed magnified in the silence of the night. Daniel strained his ears, listening for some other noise – a restive sheep or rustling bird, the faintest plop or stirring from the lake. But there was nothing save his own stealthy tap-tap-tap, which only emphasized the fact that he hadn't really responded to JB's last remarks. He cleared his throat, trying out various openings in his mind, but dismissed them all as threatening – too likely to lead on to further inquisition. All subjects seemed taboo, in fact. If he returned to Pippa there would only be more blame, and if he started probing Margot's cure he would be trapped in awkward questions about acceptance and belief.

It was a relief when JB spoke himself, even accompanying his words with a slight gesticulation, as if to prove that he was flesh, not stone.

‘You see, I too was living in the past, and actually became quite ill because I couldn't seem to let go of it. I was very closed like you, Daniel, and it took something really violent to shake me out of my misery – a shock to the whole system.'

‘What
was
the shock?' asked Daniel, jibbing at the label ‘very closed'.

‘My life changed – totally.'

‘But what happened?' Daniel persisted, considerably relieved that the focus appeared to have shifted from
his
problems to the healer's.

‘It's difficult to find the words.' JB leaned forward and brushed his hand across the sand, as if smoothing out some obstacle in his mind. ‘And anyway most words are misleading when it comes to spiritual change. I suppose you might say it was a question of grace breaking and entering my soul.'

Daniel only grunted. Religious terminology always made him defensive. He'd had enough of it at school – the Reverend Hanbury-Webber expatiating on the soul when he clearly lacked a heart. And as for grace, he had never really grasped it as a concept: not surprising, perhaps, when his initial introduction to it was as ‘the grace of God which passeth all understanding'. He was aware of JB's eyes on him – that penetrating gaze again, which seemed to bore through to his marrow, or to the soul he wasn't sure he had.

‘I have an intuition that the same will happen for you, Daniel. That may be why you're here. Often, there's a higher consciousness which plans things out for us, so perhaps you needed to come to Wales to confront that early death. In fact, it would probably be enormously helpful if you returned to the place where it happened …'

Daniel sprang up to his feet.
No
! he shouted silently. Never in a million years. Keep your crack-brained notions to yourself. He realized he was shivering. It must have turned cold suddenly; the night storage-heater running out of power. ‘I … I'd better get to bed,' he said aloud, already striding from the shore towards the path. ‘It's bloody chilly up here in the wilds.'

‘It's actually quite warm,' the impassive voice corrected. ‘Surprisingly muggy, considering it's the middle of the night.'

‘Okay, it's warm,' Daniel muttered, anger surging up in him, exploding through his body, as if he were breaking out in shingles or a rash. ‘Have it your own way! Black's white, isn't it, and blind people can see.'

‘Yes,' JB said softly. ‘Just occasionally they can.'

Daniel put his foot down, watching the speedometer climb to seventy-five, then eighty. It was exhilarating to roar along a decent stretch of road, after his tortoise-like manoeuvrings on the narrow country lanes. He was out for the whole day, footloose and fancy-free. The radio was playing a jaunty piece for strings by a seventeenth-century French composer whose name he hadn't caught – perfect for the occasion since it matched his sense of spree. He'd been released from boarding-school and allowed to visit the real world again – a peculiar and wicked world, containing all the things discouraged by JB, and where people wore conventional clothes, instead of bikinis teamed with Wellingtons or (in Happy's case this morning) a caftan and a coolie hat.