The Miracle Inspector (4 page)

The first thing Lucas realised when he saw Angela that evening was that he couldn’t have sex with her if he was likely to think about Joanna Jones because that would be disrespectful and almost as bad as cheating on her. The second thing he realised was that he didn’t want to have sex with Angela anyway because he now suspected she only did it to pass the time, and he was angry about that, and this anger had perhaps motivated his almost suicidally imprudent visit to the Jones household.

The third thing he realised was that he had changed since this morning and Angela hadn’t. She was just the same lovely woman she had always been. But he was behaving as if she was the one who had changed.

He went to the cupboard and looked at the jars arranged on the shelves. He was looking for jam. He wanted to know if Angela was in any way similar to Joanna Jones. He wanted to know if she was the sort of woman who would sit with a stranger in a car, and if she might then go to a hotel room with him for sex, if she thought her life or her husband’s life somehow depended on it. And if so, he wanted to blame her for it, rather than himself. Ultimately, of course, society was to blame: confining women to their homes, taking away their right to work, to protest. In recent months, he had sometimes congratulated himself for not beating Angela or abusing her, as other men did with their wives. He realised – what number was he up to? Was that number four or five? He also realised that it was not enough. It was not right. They had to get out of London. They had not a moment to lose. It didn’t help that Jones would be home by now, would have spoken to his wife, might already be on to him. Why add that danger in to the mix, as if the stakes were not already high enough? Perhaps he had behaved incautiously so they would have no choice but to leave London?

He wanted Angela to have children. He wanted to live in Cornwall with her and the children. If not Cornwall, then Wales. If he thought there was any chance of getting there, he’d build a boat and sail them to Australia. It was so remote and such a dreamed-of paradise, Australia. You might as well talk about the Lost City of Atlantis. It seemed unimaginable that there was once air travel, freely available to all. You turned up at an airport, climbed aboard a plane, strapped yourself in and in a few hours you were there, all the way at the other side of the world, where you could explore and wander at will. Now, the paperwork alone would take longer than the flight. But anyway, there were no flights to be had because of terrorism.

There were still ships, trains, cars. But few countries allowed visitors by those routes because of what they might bring: terrorism, disease, unpleasant ideas. He imagined going to Australia and inadvertently infecting that beautiful, happy, liberal country with his ideas. He imagined somehow managing to get on to a ship and arriving in Australia and then spoiling it all by doing to a woman what he had wanted to do to Joanna Jones. He had behaved despicably. He had frightened her.

‘Lucas? What are you looking for in there? You want something to eat?’

Maybe Angela was frightened of him. She was worried because he was looking in the cupboard and she thought he couldn’t find the Marmite or something. Maybe she didn’t have sex with him to pass the time. She had sex with him because he was her husband and she was frightened of him. She did it to please him. She did it because when the women sat around in the women’s groups and talked about what life was like, she realised that other women’s husbands beat them. She did it not because he had blue eyes and she fancied him rotten, nor even because she was bored and she wanted to pass the time. She did it because she was frightened of him.

‘Lucas? Should I cook you something?’

‘Don’t you want to be something more than a housewife, cooking for me?’

She was hurt by that, though she tried not to let him see it. He’d assumed that men were more intelligent than women but then he’d never been forced by law to sit around the house all day waiting for something to happen. If the incarceration didn’t make you stupid, it would certainly make you cautious. You wouldn’t want to reveal that you knew anything. You wouldn’t want to invite criticism or do anything that would invite a beating. Maybe women just seemed stupid. He had hurt two women in one day and it made him feel guilty and depressed.

She said, ‘You want to go upstairs? Let’s go up and have a cuddle.’

‘I’ll have a shower. I’ll be up later, OK?’

Was that the first time he’d ever turned her down? He couldn’t remember another time. He went into the bathroom. He took off his clothes, he ran the water. He soaped all over his body. He washed his hair with the shampoo. He conditioned his hair. He thought about Joanna Jones bending over, water running down over her plump little bottom and dripping down her thighs. He thought about all the various possibilities that would be available to him if she were here now, blushing and bending over. He washed himself off with the soap and then he turned the shower water to cold for the last half a minute.

He went into the bedroom in his towel. Angela was lying on the bed reading something. She closed it and tucked it under the bed as he came in. He hadn’t known she kept a journal. Not that he minded.

She was in her dressing gown with nothing underneath. She turned to look at him. She smiled at him.

‘You look better,’ she said.

‘You don’t look so bad yourself.’

He threw the towel on the floor and jumped on her. She was warm and his skin was cold. She shivered and giggled and grabbed hold of him. He made love to her. He realised how much he loved her. He told her, over and over, ‘I love you, Angela.’ He really meant it. She meant everything to him.

Afterwards he heated up a pizza and made them a salad and they shared a bottle of wine and they lay in bed and watched TV – one of those nature programmes Angela liked because she said it made her glad she wasn’t a puma or a lion, having to struggle just to survive.

Reading Jesmond’s letters was strangely intimate. It was flattering to have this famous man addressing her directly, talking of love, parties, infidelity, the genesis of his poetry, even though, of course, he wasn’t addressing her; he had written the letters to someone else. She was growing very fond of him. She was falling for him, she might have said, if she wasn’t already married. She had never had an insight into the mind of a grown-up in this way. She’d never talked to her own father as an adult because by the time she had grown up he had been taken away. She was struck, over and over again, by how like her generation Jesmond’s generation was, and also how different; less guarded but more damaged. Needier, somehow, but less defensive. She knew she couldn’t assess a whole generation based on a few scribbles and rejected love letters from a man like Jesmond. And yet still, she did.

She wished she could share this with Lucas, talk over Jesmond’s motivations, speculate about who this woman was, who he was writing to. When he came to the house, hadn’t Jesmond said something about collecting shells on a beach with a woman he was in love with? Surely that was the same woman. Unfortunately Angela didn’t remember him saying her name.

She couldn’t talk to Lucas about it. He’d only say, ‘I don’t know how he could live that god-awful, bohemian lifestyle that he and my father lived, caught up in the importance of their music and their poetry and their feelings, and shagging around while the country went down the shitter.’ Something like that, anyway. It was a pretty fair summary of his opinion of Jesmond.

It was illogical but as Angela read Jesmond’s letters, it felt as if he had known that she would one day read them and that (even though she had only just been born at the time of writing) he was in some sense writing to her future self. If so, she was sure he would have been disappointed if he’d discovered what she was really like. The letters assumed a wisdom and complexity in the reader, a level of sophistication that she didn’t have. She had barely travelled further than the edge of the kitchen table, and the reader of the letters – the legitimate reader – seemed to have seen and done so much. She wished she could have some experiences that would change her. She longed to see something of the rest of the world and learn from what she saw. If Jesmond had been there to talk it through with her, would he have cautioned her to be careful what she wished for? Or would he have joked with her about it, as he used to joke with the woman he loved?

Angela had looked in the journal and found a scrap of the poem Jesmond had mentioned in the first letter she had read. It had been written hastily, without revisions, as if it was a first draft, and then there was a single line going through it, diagonally, from bottom left to top right, as if he wasn’t happy with it. But he hadn’t ripped the page out or scribbled through the words completely, as he had elsewhere in the book.

Spoiled

My touch left a muddy

fingerprint, a speck on the film stock,

a smear on the family china,

a fly in the marmalade you

were making.

Don’t reproach me.

Don’t think I’m trying to

trivialise by mentioning

household items. I wish we had

a household.

I wish we were together,

you and me.

I would take care of you.

I would not breathe on you or

touch you or handle you – there I

go again, saying the wrong thing.

I mean I would find a way to

worship you, to be with you

without changing you while still

knowing that to be with you would

change me.

She couldn’t have read it to Lucas. He hated poetry. ‘What’s the point?’ he’d ask. ‘What’s it good for? What can it do?’

She’d leave it to educated people (the archivists?) to judge whether or not it was any good. Lucas would sneer at that business about the fly in the marmalade. Surely it didn’t matter – all poetry, pretty much by definition, was actually rather trying to read, especially when it had been written to be performed, as Jesmond’s was. Reading it was a test of faith, somehow. But it could change people – she believed that. At any rate, reading this had changed her. It made her want to be the sort of woman who could inspire a man to write poetry. It made her want to be interesting. As things stood, no one would ever want to write about her, no matter how kind she tried to be, or how eager to please. In fact, from her rudimentary reading of the relevant literary works (or rather, the summaries of classic novels that she had found in encyclopaedias), the kinder and the more eager the woman, the less likely she was to inspire poetry.

She wished she had talked to Jesmond when he’d visited. She’d come to think of him as a pompous, vain drunk who troubled her husband – because that’s what Lucas thought. And although she’d felt sorry for him because of the life he led, she’d never tried to make a connection with him.

Never mind. She would make an effort next time he dropped round.

The next day, Lucas had to go and inspect a miracle. He decided to get it over with and go straight there rather than stopping in to the office first. He didn’t like doing the home visits. It could be so embarrassing. There’d be the walk up to the front door, where he’d find himself making a judgement about the people inside before he even set eyes on them. Then there’d be the particular smell of the house; something acrid and left over. Then there’d be the people themselves; the desperation, the smallness of them compared with their big dreams.

When he started out in this job, he’d assumed it would be mostly religious establishments that would contact him. But it wasn’t. Perhaps such places had their own rigorous tests to which they subjected potential miracles before reporting them. Or perhaps they had miracles and they kept them to themselves, storing them up to store up power which they would unleash one day, when the time came – whenever that might be. Then again, perhaps miracles didn’t happen in churches, mosques and temples because God does not exist and miracles do not exist. It seemed entirely feasible to him that these places were there simply to guard that secret. But try telling ordinary people that God does not exist. They weren’t interested. They wanted to believe in something.

It was funny but he did think, as he set off for work that morning, how brilliant it would be if he found a miracle. He would tell Angela. It would be their passport to Cornwall. He would have sex with her from every angle and never think about Joanna Jones. And then he thought how strange it was that if you tried not to think about someone, their name popped into your mind, like that.

Trying not to think of Joanna didn’t work so he’d have to keep himself busy with other things, putting time and distance between them and simply not thinking of her for months on end, until he never thought of her. But for now, he was wondering if she was at home wondering if he was watching her. He’d like to go into Jones’s office and have a quick peek, just to make sure, but he was in the car en route to a reported miracle, so he couldn’t. The thought of her began take him over. He’d have to give himself over to it for now and then just try to remember not to try not to think about her in future.

But for now, well, she would be standing in the kitchen in a T-shirt and a little pair of frilly knickers. She would have jam on her fingers. She would look up at one of the cameras Jones had positioned around the place. She would bring her fingers up to her mouth and put the middle three fingers in her mouth up to the first set of knuckles, then she would lick each of her fingers all the way up and down, one by one. She would look at the camera and her expression, close up, would be exactly the same as the expression he had seen in her eyes in the slot made by her veil.

She would go upstairs… He decided to pull in for a moment, to a layby, under the pretext of consulting a map. No one could see in through the tinted windows but it wasn’t a good idea to drive while he was feeling like this. It wasn’t safe. He didn’t want to have a crash and hurt someone or himself. He didn’t want it reported in the news that came in on the computer in Jones’s office, ‘man with erection kills widow and children,’ or, ‘man dies in car crash, with erection.’ They didn’t report details like that, of course. Or he had never seen them reported. Perhaps it had never happened before? No, men had dirty thoughts about other men’s wives all the time.

He imagined Joanna Jones going upstairs, knowing the camera was watching her. Knowing her husband was watching her and had perhaps noticed a difference in the way she was behaving. Would she find it stimulating to think that her husband was jealous and had only himself to blame? Would Jones find it stimulating? No, that wasn’t an image he wanted to pursue; Jones wanking in the men’s lavatory at the thought of other men looking at his wife.

Joanna Jones would go upstairs to the bathroom and remove her knickers. Perhaps she would take a razor and shave the backs of her legs at the top. She might not know that he would find that erotic, so perhaps she would not. What had he told her? What would she do so that he would know that it was for him?

Had he mentioned jam? Possibly not. He had certainly mentioned her husband. He had hinted at danger. He had thought of having sex with her but not said it aloud. That was all their relationship consisted of. And, to be fair, to many minds it wouldn’t quite constitute a relationship.

It was a warm, sunny day and he had the air conditioning turned up in the car. Still, he was perspiring. He felt guilty. He wondered whether Angela had fantasies about other men. Thank God women weren’t allowed out of the house. He didn’t mean that, of course. But still. Who did she come into contact with? The delivery drivers, the postman, the milkman. Neighbours going off to work in the morning. Did she have salacious thoughts about any of them? If he asked her tonight, would it put an idea into her mind that had never been there? If he asked her, would she think it was a fantasy of his and try to please him by naming someone? Would she turn to him with her dressing gown half open and nothing underneath and say yes, when I touch myself, I think of Jones. Fortunately not – she didn’t know Jones.

If Jones asked Joanna, would she tell him that she thought of the man from the Ministry and describe Lucas? Not if she had any sense. He thought of Jones slapping Joanna, saying something like, ‘I’ll beat you black and blue, mate.’ Did Jones call his wife ‘mate’? He didn’t want to think about Jones. He felt aggrieved, as if Jones was deliberately intruding on his fantasy.

He drove to the address he had been given and parked his car outside. He walked up to the front door. He saw a few weeds in the path. He saw evidence of peeling paint. He saw a sweet wrapper on the ground, left behind by the bin men. He didn’t stoop to pick it up; it would blow away soon enough.

The miracle that had been reported was something to do with a child. So many women seemed to have a fantasy of themselves as a Mary figure, with their child a saint. It would make their lives easier to bear, no doubt, to have a child who would be looked after and revered. Perhaps the women thought they would be taken away with the child to live in a palace somewhere and be protected. His own belief was that even if he made a report to say that he had found a miracle, someone would intervene, take the people concerned into custody for questioning, harass them, accuse them of being involved in terrorism, then lock them up somewhere for good. Or terminate them. Maybe it was just as well he’d never had to report anything as a miracle – yet.

The woman who answered the door seemed nice enough, if a little careworn. Her name was Maureen and she was old enough to be his mum. She invited him in. He didn’t have any erotic thoughts, other than to note that he wasn’t having erotic thoughts, which immediately conjured up an image of Joanna Jones in a pair of frilly pants with a pot of jam in her hand, an image he was fortunately able to put aside almost immediately.

Maureen took him in to the front room and offered him a cup of tea. He said yes, so that she’d have to go away to the kitchen to make it and he could sit quietly and look around. There were no religious artefacts around the place, no pictures of Jesus. It wasn’t against the law to practice religion, although there weren’t many men who wanted to become priests any more. It was often taken as a confession of paedophilia and priests could expect a lot of interest from the authorities. Most took lovers, or pretended to do so, installing attractive female housekeepers to ensure they were not mistaken for paedophiles by the local community.

‘Have they told you anything?’ Maureen asked.

‘No.’ He always said that, of course. He let them put it into their own words.

She droned on. He was feeling unerotic now and back on track. Perhaps he had been under some sort of stress that had now gone away. If he had been a woman, he’d have said it was hormonal. There must have been something, some extraneous thing, that had caused him to behave so oddly. Perhaps he had been the subject of a test? Perhaps Jones had come into his office yesterday and sprayed an undetectable hormone around to gauge its effect on him. Jones was a brute, unpredictable and coarse. Lucas could hardly bear being in the same office building some days. He didn’t know how he endured it. He became sentimental. He told himself that he didn’t care what he had to endure, just so long as he could protect Angela. Just so long as she loved him and she didn’t ever betray him or subject him to any kind of test. He loved her and he was going to prove it by taking her away to Cornwall.

Maureen was looking at him. He looked back at her, calmly.

‘So what do you think?’ said Maureen.

‘I can’t really say.’

‘Well, what should I do?’

‘Who else have you told?’

‘Well, as I was saying…’

He had drifted off and she wasn’t impressed. But the thing was, he wasn’t here to impress her. It was she who had to try to impress him.

‘Did you want to take notes?’

‘No.’

He had a piece of the lemon drizzle cake she offered him. It was home-made. He sat and thought about his options while he ate it. He wondered, if this was that rare and impossible thing, a real miracle, ought he to take the woman hostage? He wouldn’t hurt her of course. He’d put a gun to her head for the benefit of any security forces who might turn up to rescue her and he’d call for Angela to join him. He’d state his demands: safe passage to Cornwall.

It would never happen. They’d never let him go. They’d blow him and Maureen and Angela to high heaven, miracle or not. In fact, if it was a real miracle, it would save the authorities the job of deciding what to do about it, if the evidence was destroyed in the process of protecting lives and the safety of the citizens of London.

What about Australia? If he could get a message to someone in Australia that he had found a miracle, would someone from there come and save him? Probably not. Even if people in Australia believed in miracles, they wouldn’t sanction hostage-taking, wouldn’t care if a person such as he should live or die. They wouldn’t want to give sanctuary to a gun-wielding, adulterous-leaning miracle inspector. Besides, he didn’t have a gun.

‘So do you want to see her?’

‘Who?’

‘Christina. Do you want to see her? She’s next door.’

‘Might as well.’

He stood and smiled brightly. Poor old Maureen. What a life.

Christina was lying on top of the covers on a single bed in the next room. She was an unremarkable-looking child, as they so often were. She looked about five years old although she might have been older. Maureen had probably mentioned her age but there was no need to get mired in details.

He went up to Christina and smiled at her. ‘Hello.’ No response from Christina. He tried again. ‘Hello, Christine.’

‘Christina.’

‘What?’

‘Christina, not Christine.’

‘Oh, I see.’

‘She understands you.’

‘Yes. Does she speak?’

‘The doctor says there’s nothing actually wrong with her vocal chords.’

He hadn’t been paying attention. What was the miracle, exactly? That this poor little child was alive? That she could understand? Or was she supposed to heal the sick? Some of them were very good at the piano but he couldn’t see one in the room, so he might escape hearing any Rachmaninoff today. Dare he ask Maureen to go through it again? What if she reported him? But she wouldn’t. Who would she report him to?

Lucas said, ‘You want to leave me alone with Christina, here? Might help me get a feel for her… special qualities.’

She didn’t. He suddenly saw in her face all the awful fears every mother had these days. Maureen thought that he might do something nasty to little Christina. She didn’t believe that he would do it but she thought it. She’d been trained to think it. They all had. Even he thought it. He thought that if a man was left alone with little Christina, he might start touching her inappropriately. He himself wouldn’t do it. The next man wouldn’t do it, nor the next man, nor the next. You’d have to search long and hard to find one who would. But the suggestion was enough to condemn them all to this hell of a life. There was no proper education for the kids, no life outside the home for the women, all of it to keep them safe from inappropriate touching. What if the thought of it was more harmful? What if the fear that covered them all was worse than one child sometimes being touched? You couldn’t say it, of course. Say something like that and they’d lock you up forever. Besides, he wasn’t sure if he even really meant it. He wasn’t sure what he thought about anything. They’d all been conditioned to believe what the authorities wanted them to believe.