The Miracle Inspector (3 page)

He couldn’t have said why he went to the house to see Joanna Jones. It was on a whim. There was no specific train of thought in which he’d said to himself, ‘I won’t go out inspecting miracles today, I won’t pop home and surprise Angela, my wife and the woman I love; instead, I’ll go and see Joanna Jones and risk ruining the rest of my life.’ If Jones found out, he would have him arrested. He would visit him in an underground prison and stare down at him through the bars in the cage and piss on him. For what? Whatever he was going to do now – and actually he still had no idea what it was – it had better be good. He told himself he just wanted to understand Angela by getting to know Joanna, by comparing the two women.

He sat in his car, parked a little way down the street from where Jones lived. He watched a man sweeping the street. He watched men delivering food and other provisions to the houses along the streets, the housewives coming to the door, chatting a little longer than necessary to the delivery men, glad of the company.

He watched a woman come out of Jones’s house – not Joanna, a heavier-set woman, probably older. She crossed the road, head down, face covered by her veil, arms at her sides, a coal scuttle with legs, her comedy walk necessitated by the long, restrictive outer garment covering her clothes. As she passed by his car, he wound the window down.

‘Ma’am?’

She looked terrified.

‘I want to talk to you, ma’am. Stay where you are.’

She peered at him but said nothing. He took his Ministry badge from the inside pocket of his suit jacket, flipped it open and dangled it out of the window so she could see it. There was really no need, she’d have deduced that he was somewhere near the top of the hierarchy because of the car. ‘How do you know Mrs Jones?’

‘She’s a relative of mine.’ No kidding. But he wasn’t interested in calling her on that. If he pricked the finger of every dissembling woman with the blood test kit he and every other high-ranking Ministry employee had been issued with and sent the sample off to the records office for analysis, he wouldn’t have a moment to spare for any other work. He didn’t care about the database, he didn’t care about their DNA. They all had an X chromosome, that was enough for him. Let them have their visits. Poor cows.

‘What’s in the basket?’

‘Nothing. Just…I brought her a jar of my home-made jam.’

‘Looks kind of uneven-shaped. What else you got?’

‘I keep my knitting in there, too. Making a little cloche hat for my granddaughter. Would you like a jar of jam, sir? I’ve some to spare.’

‘I need to speak to her. It’s important. Go back in and tell her to come out here.’

The woman stared at him.

‘It’s important. We haven’t got much time. Go on. Oh, and listen to me, old woman, breathe a word of this to anyone and you’re in just as much trouble as she is.’

The woman wasn’t even that old, maybe forty-five. What could she do? She went to fetch Joanna and presently she appeared, covered up. Joanna crossed the street to his car. Her friend stayed on the other side of the road, watching. Lucas waved her off and she had no choice but to comply. He watched her in the rear-view mirror until she disappeared from view. Joanna came up to the driver’s side of the car and peered in at him.

‘Get in,’ he said, and she did. He wound up the window and locked the car doors. They were safe from any intrusion; a little oasis of officialdom in her suburban street. Even a soldier would no more come up and knock on the window than take out his automatic rifle and shoot himself in the foot. Lucas was protected because of who he was. It was only then that he realised why he had come here. She had a little freckle on her left nipple. She had a plump bottom and tiny stretch-marks on her thighs, like shirring elastic. He had seen her lick toast crumbs from a breakfast plate in the privacy of her own home, when she thought no one was watching her.

‘Do you know why I’m here?’

‘No.’ She looked uncomfortable. She looked guilty about something. Maybe she’d been having secret meetings about how to overthrow the government under the guise of talking about jam and knitting. One thing that had always worked in Lucas’s favour was his long silences. He was daydreaming, usually, but it always seemed to other people as if he was holding his nerve. They caved and tried to fill the silence. Joanna was no different. ‘What do you want?’

‘Do you trust your husband?’

‘What?’

He could rummage around under the ugly black material that covered her, push her skirt off, get her knickers off. He could kiss her. Would she close her eyes and lie back, like Angela did? Would she feel inside his trousers? Would she turn around and shuffle her plump bottom back towards him? The car was a luxury model but still a bit cramped for that sort of thing. If she wanted to avoid banging her head on the roof, she’d have to keep her head tilted forward in a ‘yes’, signalling agreement with something or other for a protracted length of time. Would he have to talk dirty to her? Maybe he’d say something about covering her with jam and licking it off.

The black material she was wearing was voluminous and it would be difficult getting his hands inside it. If he ruched it up, as if he was an assistant on the haberdashery counter at a large department store, she might start laughing. Or she might fight him off. He was sure she’d enjoy it, if he had sex with her. He just wasn’t sure how to get to that point from where they were just now, sitting in his car with her staring at him through the peephole in her veil in frank astonishment.

‘Would you do something for me, if you thought it might help your husband?’

Her eyes widened. When that’s all you had to look at, it meant that a woman couldn’t hide what she was feeling. If she was wearing ordinary clothes, you’d be looking at her tits. But here it was, an honest, if enforced, communication.

‘It’s not a test,’ he said.

As soon as he said it, she thought it was a test. ‘Did he send you?’

‘What do you think?’

She didn’t know. She didn’t know what to think. She couldn’t follow the logic of what he was doing. No surprise as there was no logic.

He unbuttoned the veil across her face. He looked at her. He wanted to kiss her. He wanted to put his tongue in her mouth – that funny tumbling of something warm and soft and alive, like interrupting a clothes dryer mid-cycle and reaching into it to rescue a kitten. The next step might have been to touch her.

He didn’t kiss her. He didn’t touch her. He said, ‘I didn’t come here to spy on you for him.’

‘I can’t do anything dangerous. I’m not brave. You know? I’m sorry, if you’re trying to help me. Don’t ask me to do anything.’

‘When you leave the house, where do you go?’

‘I go to the women’s groups.’

‘If I leave a message for you, will you meet me one day?’

‘I don’t know. I’m not sure if it’s a good idea.’

He unlocked the car doors. She buttoned up her veil. He didn’t want to meet her ‘one day’. He wanted to take her to a hotel room now. If he asked her to do it, would she?

‘Why does he spy on you?’

‘Jonathan? He’s worried about me.’

But then he saw the change in her eyes. She knew – she suddenly knew why he had come; it was because he’d seen her. She knew. He was frightened of her. But he wanted to go to Jones’s office and look and see if she did anything differently tomorrow, knowing he might be watching.

She got out of the car. She walked across the road to the door of her house. She went inside. He never saw her again.

Angela didn’t think it was prying to look at the journal. Jesmond had wanted Lucas to see it, after all. She thought of herself as his proxy. There was no way Lucas was going to read anything left for him by that man. Besides, it was rare that something so interesting happened to her. Jesmond had given her a journal, full of scrappy ideas for poems, mundane thoughts, little jokes. And a dozen letters, handwritten on thin sheets of paper, each one sent, opened and then returned to him in the envelope it had been sent in. It wasn’t much of a life but it was a life – and it was hers to peruse.

Much as she tried to pretend to herself that she was doing this for Lucas, she had to acknowledge that she saw it as a form of entertainment. She felt guilty but it was such a lovely thing to have in her possession. Reading it would be like having a friend dropping by to gossip. She had precious few distractions apart from visits from a few women ‘relatives’.

The letters in the journal were written to a woman. Angela ascertained that much when she flicked through the first couple of them, quickly, trying not to read or take in any of the information and risk spoiling the treat.

She opened a letter at random and began to read:

Until I met you, I thought there was something scientific about love, and the key to it was getting the balance just right in the mixture of sex and companionship. I thought loving someone involved knowing what vegetables the other person liked and whether or not they’d enjoy the film I was watching. In other words, I thought it was a bit boring, apart from the sex. But you make all of it disconcerting and exciting. I love you so much.

She decided to save the letters. She would open them one at a time and in order; savour them, like instalments in a soap opera.

She looked at the dates on the envelopes, trying to match the day or the date of the letters to the entries in Jesmond’s journal. But often there was nothing in the journal, or nothing that seemed relevant. Perhaps his private thoughts weren’t suitable for ‘the archive’ and he’d concealed them, coded them or destroyed them.

She opened the first letter. There were no others tucked into the journal that came before it, chronologically. But reading it, it was obvious she was joining the party some time after it had started.

Darling,

I read a new poem at a gig last night: ‘Spoiled’. I wrote it for you. It’s an apology for spoiling everything by remarking that I had spoiled everything after making love to you. That night with you was the happiest of my life. I wish I had said as much to you. But I had worshipped you for so long, I was frightened. I said, ‘I’ve spoiled you.’ Do you remember?

When I read the new poem last night, I think the audience were surprised at the tenderness expressed in it. But after a short silence, they whooped and clapped appreciatively enough. Some called for more. And the funny thing is that when I talked to them about it afterwards, it turned out that they all thought – every single one of them – that the ‘you’ I addressed in the poem, my longed-for love, the one I felt I had insulted with my desire, with my crass murmurings, it was England! Yes, I can write anything, any self-flagellating piece in which I offer to crush up the splinters of my heart and put them on the ground and walk over them to prove my love, and these people will assume I’m talking about the revolution.

You’ve teased me in the past, saying I think it’s all about me. And it is one of my failings, I admit. Everything, even the way I relate to you, is about me. (Although I don’t know who else I should channel my feelings through. If ‘you and me’ can’t be about how I feel about you, then I’m stumped. I don’t want to love you through another man – but that’s too damn close to our current situation to joke about.) Anyway, what’s so refreshing about these fucking audiences is they listen to my stuff, my carefully-wrought, delicately-crafted, heart-splintering stuff, and they think it’s all about them. Ha ha ha. Be careful what you wish for, eh, my darling? Oh, I know. I said something along those lines to you that night. But I didn’t mean it to come out quite how it did. You see, I had been wishing for it for so long. For so long. The world has changed, because of you.

p.s. Some members of the audience seemed to think the word in the poem was ‘soiled’. You didn’t think I said soiled, did you? No wonder you were cross.

J. xx