Read On Loving Josiah Online

Authors: Olivia Fane

On Loving Josiah (10 page)

BOOK: On Loving Josiah
7.16Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

His placement after the Leatherpots was, in fact, with one of his teachers, who was a curious woman in both senses: she was both strange and nosy. The teacher had been asked to help out in such
emergencies before (she had earned herself the reputation of being a ‘safe house’). Josiah would come home from school only to be mercilessly cross-examined over half-moon spectacles about his first memories of his mother et al. Josiah naturally stayed mute.

In his next placement he shared a bedroom with a three-year-old boy who bit him. As the child had never bitten anyone before, his parents naturally blamed the interloper and ten days later he was gone. Two further placements later there was a flurry of activity to find him a relation who might look after him. The first port of call was obviously his grandmother. Mrs de Selincourt said she would think about it, and the foster lady told June Briggs that she was optimistic she could persuade her to take on her grandson. The adoption lady piped in that Mrs de Selincourt might even in the end consider adoption, but June Briggs said, ‘I’ve met the lady. She’s like the worst sort of Victorian imperialist, and I don’t hesitate to blame her at least in part for Eve’s appalling character.’ So when Mrs de Selincourt asked to meet the child about a month later (and she was now, to do her credit, working in a soup kitchen for the homeless in London in the vain hope of finding her daughter), they told her he was now happily installed with a family of very good standing and it was better not to visit as it might unsettle him, and, as she put it, ‘rock the boat.’ For a couple of days Mrs de Selincourt was very set on rocking that boat, but her husband persuaded her against it. He was intent on taking up a post in the US for a couple of years, and if the Social Services deemed Josiah ‘quite difficult,’ then was she really prepared to repeat those miserable years she’d had with Eve?

Nor were the Social Services lying when they informed the de Selincourts that Josiah had, at last, been placed successfully. Lady Brack had been persuading her husband for years that fostering
children
was ‘a good thing’ because ‘It was right that they should put back into the community just a little of what they had taken out.’
And there was another reason, too: her favourite Labrador bitch Clover had come to the end of her breeding life, and after that last dear puppy had been sold, and while she was slowly, pensively
clearing
away the newspaper from the little pen in the hall which she had made for Clover and her nine children, she came across a peed-on advertisement from the Cambridge Evening News. ‘Have you ever thought of fostering?’ it said, ‘Do you have a spare room?’ (Lady Brack smiled and thought, ‘We have six!’) ‘Do you have patience and understanding?’ (Yes, yes! thought Lady Brack). ‘Could you give a child a loving home?’ (Yes, yes! thought Lady Brack). ‘Then phone Pat on 632148.’ And she did.

The Social Services had been delighted with the sound of her. For because by now Josiah had lost his soft Lancashire lilt and
enunciated
his vowels even more perfectly than Lady Brack herself, they had found a perfect voice match, and it was social services policy to mix like with like as far as was practicable. One of Josiah’s previous foster families had complained of his ‘holding his chin too high,’ but at Fratton Hall, they decided, he could hold it as high as he liked.

But Josiah did not sit, nor stay, nor do as he was told. He didn’t eat his meals and he didn’t sit on Lady Brack’s knee when she asked him to. Lady Brack had been told about Josiah’s love of gardening, and she would hover by him when he was weeding, her silk scarf doing little to keep a bitter wind from her ears. On one occasion Josiah asked Lady Brack to tell him the name of a certain flower, but she didn’t know it and had to find the gardener. When they came back the boy had gone and all hell was let loose; within five minutes Lady Brack had even called the police. He was found a couple of hours later: he had buried himself in the compost heap.  

Lady Brack was so pleased to find him that she wasn’t even angry, but ran Josiah a bubble bath with drops of her very own eau de cologne, ‘Oh Josiah! You don’t know how worried you made us! And now you’re back and safe with just a few blades of old hay in your
hair, oh how happy I am! Now, I want you to tell us, why did you do such a thing? Is there something making you terribly unhappy?’

Josiah didn’t know what to say, but because Lady Brack was so insistent he eventually told her that he hated the wallpaper in his bedroom.

‘Josiah, is that all? Is there nothing more serious than that? That can be so easily remedied, you know! Funnily enough, I’ve always hated that pampas grass design. It’ll be such fun to repaper your room!’

Lady Brack told her husband Sir Peter (knighted two years
previously
for services to the export industry) in bed that night about the latest Josiah saga.

‘And
where
do you think we found him, Peter?’

‘Mmm,’ mumbled Sir Peter, as he struggled with the last three clues of a crossword.

‘In the compost heap! Can you believe that?’

‘Well, just about,’ he said.

‘Anyway, I thought it was time we redecorated his room.’

‘Darling, he doesn’t seem very happy. He might not be with us very long. Is it worth it?’

‘Men understand nothing!’ said Lady Brack, happily, as she turned off the light.

So Lady Brack became ever more devoted to her charge. She would pore over Osborne and Little’s nursery collection, and then make Josiah sit next to her after his tea and insist that he
confide
in her (that was the word she used) how, in an ideal world, he would have his bedroom look.

‘For you’ve grown out of little cars, haven’t you? But what about these aeroplanes? Have you ever been in an aeroplane, Josiah? Have you ever been to Paris? Shall I tell you about the trip I made to Paris when I must have been your age?’

And yes, Josiah proved quite good company, an excellent listener,
and stared up at Lady Brack with his large melancholy brown eyes and quite stirred the cockles of her heart. He also adored her dog Clover quite as much as she did, and he would get down on his knees to stroke her, and lay his head on her back. And to do Lady Brack credit, it was at her house that he stopped wetting the bed for the first time since leaving home.

A full three months later, with Josiah’s bedroom happily
wallpapered
with a design imported from France, (onion-sellers with striped shirts and moustaches riding bicycles) the Bracks, the Social Services, and Josiah himself were still getting along famously. But then something happened, a bridge too far, an unfordable chasm. Josiah spent his last day with the Bracks on his eighth birthday.

Lady Brack wanted to give him a birthday party; though in fact she wanted to give him something else even more: the clothes to wear at that party. She had inherited in almost pristine condition a child’s green velvet suit complete with lace collar and cuffs, circa 1880. Her son Angus had worn them at a wedding when he was about the same age, and in fact, as she explained to her husband much later, when she first set eyes on Josiah she thought, how very, very pretty he would look in just that colour green. All she needed was an excuse to retrieve the entissued garment from the attic, and a birthday was as good as any. ‘And he’s been with us six months,’ she pleaded with her husband, ‘It will be a mark of our trust in him!’

On the morning of his birthday she gave him his present, suitably wrapped and bowed, and Josiah’s pleasure on opening the parcel was so palpably great that even Sir Peter was rather moved. For as we know, Josiah didn’t like ordinary toys, he wasn’t an ordinary boy, but he knew instinctively when something was lovely, and this velvet suit assuredly was.

Lady Brack let him wear it straightaway and took him to her bedroom so that he could admire himself in the full-length mirror.

‘Josiah,’ she said to him, ‘You look wonderful! I knew the moment
we first met that one day I’d give you these clothes, and now they’re yours!’

Josiah even kissed her in gratitude, and kissed Clover too, because he was so pleased. Yes, Josiah was that close to a comfortable life, for that one kiss made Lady Brack quite determined to take Josiah away from his primary school and send him instead to King’s College prep school, where both her sons had been so happy. And after that, doubtless, he would follow them to Eton! O lucky boy to have landed on her doorstep!

Lady Brack’s mistake was not so much to give Josiah the pretty velvet suit but to give him a party. How she had loved giving parties when her sons were small! She rang up her friends and told them about the wonderful Josiah and that all grandchildren were invited; and she blew the old flour off her Constance Spry cookbook and found that very same recipe for Victoria sponge she had used all those years ago.

Lady Brack baked all morning, and watched Josiah running up and down the garden lawns from the kitchen window. She didn’t have the heart to tell him that the clothes were old and delicate, and must be kept clean, as she might have done to her own children.

When the guests arrived at three that afternoon (six middle-aged women, a girl of four and two boys of eleven), Josiah was about as cute as a cuttlefish.

‘Patricia,’ the women exclaimed, one after another, ‘doesn’t he look exactly like Angus? When I first saw him I thought I was seeing a ghost.’

‘You’re not a ghost, are you, Josiah?’ said Lady Brack, protectively. She watched him whiten.

‘Now just when was it,’ asked one, ‘when we last saw that darling outfit? Such beautiful lace!’

‘I remember the occasion only too well,’ said a woman in a navy blue cashmere cardigan. ‘Alicia’s wedding. Pitlochry Castle. Bitterly cold.’

‘Come here, young man! Can I just take a look at that
beautiful
lace?’

But Josiah stayed as still and stalwart as a soldier. This third woman, who was Lady Brack’s first cousin, leant over him to take a closer look, picking up the collar as she did so. ‘Quite exquisite!’ she enthused.

Lady Brack was watching on, anxiously. The two eleven-year-old boys were both wearing football kit, and were shoving each other off the arm of the sofa. The four-year-old girl was sitting on her Mummy’s knee sucking her thumb. There was an unhappy pause in the conversation.

‘So, Josiah, what do you think of your new home?’ asked one of the guests, innocently.

‘I’ve got a present for you!’ said another.

‘And so have I!’ said the third, rummaging around in her handbag.

Then Josiah suddenly said, ‘And I’ve got a present for you all!’ With that, I’m afraid to say, he pulled the lace from the collar and the wrists of that pretty jacket, and tore the lace from the bottom of the britches, and threw it at them. And away he went, running up the stairs to his bedroom, and from the landing shouting down at Lady Brack, ‘I am not somebody else!’

All Lady Brack wanted to do was follow him, but her friends held her back and said it was best to let him cool down. The boys gloated happily, and to a certain unforgivable extent, so did the women, who for half an hour capped each other in reLating terrible fostering sagas they had heard about. And down fell the questions on poor Lady Brack, does he steal, well you might not know quite yet, and is he ever violent and has he been cruel to the dog? Then because the children were getting bored and Lady Brack was so faultlessly polite, she invited them all into the dining-room for a birthday tea, when all she actually wanted to do was throw the lot of them out of the house.

If ever there was a moment to pity the boy, pity him now. Josiah had ripped off his green velvet clothes and did his best to tear them, which was hard work except for a sleeve where a moth had given him a head start; then he’d scrumpled them up and thrown them under his bed. But the agony he felt was not anger at those stupid people, for the anger was vented the moment he lay shivering on the bed. Rather, his feelings were of remorse and loss: loss at first of the pretty clothes he’d had on, but then the loss of his old life where he had a proper place, and the way his mother had made him laugh and his father who made him feel king of the world. All he wanted was to find them again, and he couldn’t understand why there were so many people looking for them and where they had gone, because he knew they would never, never leave him. And then it occurred to him that perhaps he was the missing one, perhaps that very first day they hadn’t realised he was going to school and they were out looking for him even now. And because Josiah was thinking very, very hard he was quite sure he’d heard his father calling him from the garden. ‘Jo, Jo,’ he heard. So softly, as in a dream, and he ran to the window to open it.

‘Daddy, are you there?’ he said to the cool breeze. The trunk of his body was shaking and he held on to the sill to steady himself.

‘Daddy? Daddy?’

With a sense of urgency he threw on some clothes and slunk out of the back door, even while the others were still enjoying his birthday tea. Again he heard his name, Jo, Jo, and he wandered into the small wood at the bottom of the garden. Every shadow of every tree promised him his father; again and again he ran towards them in a state so heightened that when he heard a twig break he jumped to attention. One minute he was ready to fall into his father’s lap; and the next to throw himself into an abyss of despair. And as the minutes wore on, the abyss grew ever deeper and more inevitable, and he began to make preparations to throw himself into it.

He found a spade and began digging under a rose bush, his small hands sliding impatiently over the wooden handle. Then he threw down the spade and began to dig the earth out with his fingers.

Sir Peter Brack was watching him from an upstairs window. He had already seen the torn lace on a table in the drawing room, had put his head round the dining-room door and had an earful about Josiah’s antics that afternoon, but the velvet suit wasn’t from his branch of the family, while the
Madame Isaac Perere
he’d planted himself.

But the saddest moment was not the slap, nor the threats (all carried out the following morning) that Josiah would be removed from their home, nor the shouting which brought Lady Brack out into the garden in tears, but the very first moment, when Josiah had first seen the shadow running towards him, and was waiting to be scooped up in its arms.

BOOK: On Loving Josiah
7.16Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

The Perfect House by Daia, Andreea
North of Hope by Shannon Polson
90 Miles to Havana by Enrique Flores-Galbis
Fighting for You by Sydney Landon
New York's Finest by Kiki Swinson
The Letting by Cathrine Goldstein
A Singing Star by Chloe Ryder