Death of a God (35 page)

A murderess!
he had kept on reminding himself, to no avail. Miriam or no Miriam, the memory of what had happened between himself and Mara Felsenstein would, he knew, enrich his life for the rest of his days. Still and all, love was giving, not taking; and seeing that there was now that much less on offer by way of gift, Miriam had to be told. There had to be truth between them or there was nothing; he told himself so many times that he almost believed it.

Not quite, though – his sense of the feasible taking over at the last moment. You couldn't be an Angleby copper without acquiring some saving apprehension of the inherent imperfectibility of any human relationship. So that when, against all likelihoood, Miriam ran to him and kissed him on the mouth, stifling his confession at birth, he surrendered gratefully, lost in a surprise of happiness.

‘Miriam –'

Her face wet with unregarded tears, she burst out, ‘I've been speaking to Leo. Oh Ben, you can't imagine what he told me! He's told me everything –'

Everything?

Jurnet said awkwardly, ‘We did question Mr Felsenstein ourselves –'

Miriam calmed down and said, ‘Of course. I wasn't thinking. You know it all already.' Voice breaking: ‘Poor Mara!'

‘Poor Loy. Poor Punchy King,' added Jurnet, taking a risk that had to be taken.

‘Yes,' she responded soberly, passing the test first time. ‘When Mara told Leo what she'd done it almost killed him.'

‘At Hob's Hole she nearly added him to the score anyway.'

The other nodded. ‘What made it even more terrible – did he tell you? – was that, right up to the time they got into my car, he still thought they were just going for a drive in the country. It was only on the way that she told him everything –'

Everything?

‘– and then, when she took the brake off, and they began to move towards the edge of the Hole –' Miriam's eyes widened with horror, as if she too had been among those who, aghast on the drove road, had watched the little car begin its last journey – ‘if he hadn't already undone his seat-belt, had his hand on the door handle, Professor Whinglass could never have got him out in time.' Miriam shuddered, shrugged her white coat closer. ‘What he said to me was, ‘‘I loved her and I left her to die alone.'' Oh, Ben, you should have seen his face! I'd always thought of him before as an invalid, a shadow who hardly existed without Mara, but he isn't like that at all. He's stronger than any of us, with a sense of life that's like a great river pulsing through that poor twisted body. When he spoke, it was as if he spoke for all the people he saw die in the Holocaust, speaking out against the waste of them, and the pain. I'm explaining it very badly –'

‘No. You're doing fine.'

‘He said, ‘‘If you can kill one, you can kill six million.'' He said, ‘‘How do you think the Nazis began? First they killed one, and then another one, and then another one.'' Oh, Ben!' Miriam broke off and looked at her lover, her large, lustrous eyes brimming. ‘I feel so ashamed, the way I've behaved. Can you forgive me for everything?'

Everything?
Jurnet pulled her towards him, tilted her face upward.
‘So long as we make it mutual!'

Arm in arm they moved slowly across the small garden where the crosses had stood as reminders of death and rebirth.

Miriam asked, ‘Were you lonely?'

‘A cat came to keep me company.'

‘A cat?' Jurnet suppressed a chuckle at the feminine suspicion in her voice. ‘A real cat?'

‘I'm not sure.'

Somebody had cleared away the flowery mound erected to the memory of Loy Tanner. Not made much of a job of it either. Bits of shrivelled greenery lay about untidily. The boys and girls – even, it might be, Mrs Lark of Parks and Recreation – had taken their tears elsewhere; or else, youth being what it was, too short for sentimentality, had wiped their eyes, given their noses a good blow, and were already offering up their adoration at another shrine.

Good on them.

Suddenly, Jurnet squatted down on his haunches, moved aside a scatter of petals that had once been red. A thorn stuck in his hand, making it bleed.

Out of the battered earth, the buried daffodils had pushed their way into the air. A solitary golden flower stood up, indomitable.

‘They made it! They actually made it!'

Miriam smiled at Jurnet's excitement. She reached for his hand, felt the warm stickiness of blood.

Turning the palm upward, she lifted it to her mouth, and, the tip of her tongue showing cat-like between her lips, licked the wound clean.

First published in 1987 by Constable

This edition published 2012 by Bello an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR Basingstoke and Oxford Associated companies throughout the world

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ISBN 978-1-4472-2512-6 EPUB
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Copyright © S T Haymon, 1987

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