LITMIR.BIZ

       IV

      i

      Will consumed his soup like a dutiful patient, and then, once Adele had taken his temperature, collected his tray and gone back downstairs, quickly got up and dressed. It was by now early in the evening, and the sleety day was already losing its light, but he had no intention of putting his journey off until tomorrow.

      The television had been turned on in the living-room – he could hear the calm, even tones of a newscaster, and then, as his mother changed channels, applause and laughter. He was glad of the sound. It covered the occasional squeak of a stair as he descended to the hallway. There, as he donned scarf, anorak, gloves and boots, he came within a breath of discovery, as his father called out from his study demanding to know from Adele where his tea had got to. Was she picking the leaves herself, for Christ’s sake? Adele did not reply, and his father stormed into the kitchen to get an answer. He did not notice his son in the unlit hallway, however, and while he whittered on to Adele about how slow she was, Will opened the front door and, slipping through the narrowest crack he could make so as not to have a draught alert them to his going, was out on his night-journey.

      ii

      Rosa didn’t conceal the satisfaction she felt at the absence of the book. It had burned up in the fire, and that was all there was to say in the matter. ‘So you’ve lost one of your precious journals,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you’ll be a little more sympathetic in the future when I get weepy about the children.’

      ‘There’s no comparison,’ Steep said, still searching the ashes in the antechamber. His desk was little more than seared timbers, his pens and brushes gone, his box of watercolours barely recognizable, his inks boiled away. His bag containing the earlier journals had been beyond the scope of the fire, so all was not lost. But the work-in-progress, his account of the last eighteen years of his vast labour, had gone. And Rosa’s attempt to equate his loss with what she felt when one of her brats had to be put out of its misery made him sick to his stomach. ‘This is the labour of my life,’ he pointed out.

      Then it’s pitiful,’ she said. ‘Making books! It’s pitiful.’ She leaned towards him. ‘Who’d you think you’re making them for? Not me. I’m not interested. I’m not remotely interested.’

      ‘You know why I’m making them,’ Jacob said sullenly. To be a witness. When God comes, and demands we tell Him what we’ve wrought, chapter and verse, we must have an account. Every detail. Only then will we be…Jesus! Why do I bother explaining it to you?’

      ‘You can say the word. Go on, say it! Say forgiven. That’s what you used to say all the time. We’d be forgiven.’ She approached him now. ‘But you don’t really believe that any more do you?’ She gently reached up and put her hands to his face. ‘Be honest, my love,’ she said, suddenly soft.

      ‘I still…I still believe there’s purpose in our lives,’ Jacob replied. ‘I have to believe that.’

      ‘Well I don’t,’ Rosa said plainly. ‘I realized after our fumblings of yesterday, I have no healthy desires left in me. None. At all. There won’t be any more children. There won’t be any hearth and home. And there won’t be a day of forgiveness, Jacob. That’s certain. We’re alone, with the power to do whatever we want.’ She smiled. That boy—’

      ‘Will?’

      ‘No. The younger one, Sherwood. I had him at my titties, sucking away, and I thought: it’s a sickness to take pleasure in this, but Lord, you know that made it all the more pleasurable? And I began to think, when the child had gone, what else would give me pleasure? What’s the worst I could do?’

      ‘And?’

      ‘My mind fairly began to spin at the possibilities,’ she said with a smile. ‘It really did. If we’re not going to be forgiven, why try to be something I’m not?’ She was staring hard into his face. ‘Why should I waste my breath hoping for something we’ll never have?’

      Jacob pulled his face from her hands. ‘You won’t tempt me,’ he said. ‘So stop wasting your time. I have my plans laid—’

      The book’s burned,’ Rosa snapped.

      ‘I’ll make another.’

      ‘And if that burns?’

      ‘Another! And another! I’ll be the stronger for this loss.’

      ‘Oh, so will I,’ Rosa said, her features draining of warmth, so that her beauty seemed, for all its perfection, almost cadaverous. ‘I will be a different woman from now on. I will have pleasure whenever I can take it, by whatever means amuse me. And if someone or something gets a child upon me I’ll fetch it out of m’self with a sharpened stick.’ This notion pleased her. Laughing raucously, she turned her back on Jacob, and spat into the ashes. There’s for your book,’ she said. She spat again. ‘And there’s for forgiveness.’ Again she spat. ‘And there’s for God. He’ll have nothing more from me.’

      She said no more. Without looking to see what effect she’d had upon her companion (she would have been disappointed; he was stony-faced), she strode out. Only when she’d gone did Jacob let himself weep. Manly tears; the tears of a commander before a broken army or a father at his son’s grave. He didn’t simply grieve for the book – though that added to the sum – but for himself. After this, he would be alone. Rosa – his once beloved Rosa, with whom he’d shared his most cherished ambitions – would go her hedonistic way, and he would take his own road, with his knife and his pen and a new journal full of empty pages. Oh, that would be hard after so many years together, and the work before him still so monumental and the sky so wide.

      Then an unbidden thought: why not kill her? There would be satisfaction in that right now, no question about it. A quick slice across her pulsing throat and down she’d go, like a felled cow. He’d comfort her in her final moments; tell her how much he had loved her, in his way; how he would dedicate his labours to her until they were finished. Every nest he rifled, every burrow he purified, he would say: this is for you, my Rosa; and this; and this, until his hands, bloodied and yolked, had finished with their weary work.

      He pulled his knife from his belt, already imagining the sound of its swoop across her neck; the hiss of her breath from her throat, the fizz of her blood. Then he went after her, back towards the Courtroom.

      She was waiting for him; turned to face him with her pet ropes – what she liked to call her rosaries – cavorting around her arms like vipers. One leapt as he approached her, finding his wrist with the speed of her will, and catching it so tight he gasped at the sensation.

      ‘How dare you?’ she said. A second rope leapt from her hand, and wrapping itself around his neck caught hold of his knife-hand from behind him. She flicked her eye and it pulled tight, wrenching the blade back towards his face. ‘You would have murdered me.’

      ‘I would have tried.’

      ‘I’m no use to you as a womb, so I may as well be crow-bait, is that it?’

      ‘No. I just…I wanted to simplify things.’

      ‘That’s a fresh excuse,’ she said, almost admiringly. ‘Which eye is it to be?’

      ‘What?’

      ‘I’m going to puncture one of your eyes, Jacob. With this little knife of yours—’ She willed the ropes to tighten. They creaked a little. ‘Which is it to be?’

      ‘If you harm me, it’ll be war between us.’

      ‘And

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