On Loving Josiah (29 page)

‘Justice is intuited at three years old, but we need another thirty years to understand it. First we must know temperance, fortitude and magnanimity. And look here at the figure of Peace –’

‘I love her!’ enthused the tour guide,

‘She’s fat!’ denounced Thomas’ enemy.

‘But she understands a thing or two,’ said Thomas. ‘And she’s stronger than you think. Peace and Concord! We must read Cicero, Josiah!’

Thomas’ voice displayed a new crescendo of excitement as he stood back to admire the fruits of Good Government: tall painted houses with balconies and large windows, pot plants and bird-cages, cobblers’ shops. ‘And a schoolmaster with his pupils! And that man’s selling kitchenware and wine-jugs…’

The tour guide stepped forward. ‘If you don’t mind,’ she began, gesturing towards the group of tourists behind her,
‘I’ll
take over now, thank you very much.’

Thomas, visibly wounded, took a step backwards and said, ‘But I still have to show my son the countryside!’

‘By all means,’ said the guide, as though it were nothing to do with her, and she took her coterie back to the burning city behind her, back to the ruin and destruction ruled over by tyranny, where the only trade was in arms. Her voice was high-pitched and full of historical detail about the wars which would have been
confronting
Siena at the time; but Thomas took Josiah away from all that, and put his arm about his shoulders and said,
sotto voce,
as though he were telling the boy an intimate secret, ‘Take a look at this, Joe, you asked about farming, didn’t you? This is why it’s a subject for poetry!’

This time they were quiet. They stood together, side by side, an island far away from the crowd about them. In the foreground of the fresco are reapers, and a peasant taking his pig to market; there are noblemen setting out for their castles; donkeys laden with bales of wool, heading for the weaver’s shop in the city; a packhorse bridge over a river and a river flowing to a lake; in the background wheat is being gathered in and the hillsides are furrowed; there are
prosperous
farmsteads, and far in the distance a myriad of palaces with towers and crenellated walls. Then suddenly Josiah spotted a tiny white chapel on the brow of a hill.

‘That’s our chapel,’ he whispered to Thomas.

And Thomas replied, ‘Let’s go home.’

This time, they didn’t bother to take the bus. Somehow, it was too hot. Walking out of the city gates to hit the main Siena bypass wasn’t quite the experience those hunters on their noble steeds had
promised
it would be, but it was good enough for them. And Josiah did say, in appreciation of it, that if you spent your whole life looking at
pictures and then walked out into the real world, what a weird and amazing place that world would seem.

‘For the thing we have which paintings don’t have is air,’ he said. ‘Air is hot or cool or damp or dry, air can blow over you or stultify you. Not only that, we breathe it in the whole time. And breathe it out. Like we’re breathing in the whole world, without realising it.’

‘In Latin you breathe out your spirit when you die,
animam
exhalare
, or there’s a rather good phrase,
exhalare mortiferum
spiritum
, to exhale your death-bearing spirit.’

‘Then can you do the opposite?
Animam inhalare volo, inhalare vitaferum spiritum
. I hope you got that. I want to inhale life-
bringing
spirit.’

‘You do that already, Josiah. Any more and you’d be dangerous.’

‘Have you ever lived dangerously?’

Thomas took the question seriously. They were negotiating a short cut over barbed wire to get out into the open countryside. ‘The truth is, not dangerously enough. I’ve been living in a flat-paged book. This air business is good for me.’

Thomas hadn’t bought a map with him; things hadn’t turned out quite how he’d thought they would, not that he was in the mood for caring. It was really too hot to care about anything.

‘Northern climes make people live too much in their heads,’ he said.

‘What?’ asked Josiah.

‘It’s not important,’ Thomas said to himself, and then to Josiah, ‘Wait.’

Josiah stood patiently, looking up at his mentor, Siena and her traffic murmuring beneath them. Thomas brushed the boy’s fringe aside with his hand and said, ‘You’ve caught the sun. You look well.’

Even Josiah was abashed and turned away.

‘No, look at me, Josiah. You are exquisitely beautiful. You are the
pulse of life, not just mine, but all life. One day you’re going to make someone supremely happy.’

‘What about you?’

Thomas laughed. ‘I don’t count,’ he said. They walked on. Thomas was leading, though he didn’t know it. For a while they followed a path, but when the path petered out they followed a line of cypresses over a hill and walked down into the valley. A stream took them to a small lake, and they both swam naked, shamelessly, and lay on the bank to dry like washing.

‘I don’t think we’ll go back to Siena,’ said Thomas.

‘I thought we were going to the Palio.’

‘There’s no need. It’s just a horse race. We won’t be missed.’

‘I don’t get it,’ said Josiah.

Thomas rolled over to kiss Josiah and sighed. ‘One day you will.’

They didn’t get back to the chapel for three days. It was as though they were both under a spell which neither of them wished to break; there were no ‘oughts’ or ‘have tos’, no maps, of course, so they never took the wrong path. When they came to a village they sat outside under vines, eating large bowls of pasta and drinking red wine, yet Bacchus never took advantage of them, only let them sleep like babes under large acanthus leaves, hand in hand. At night they would find a decent haystack to sleep in, climbing up to the top and covering themselves with a duvet of hay. They would kiss, like a father and a son, a husband and a wife, a lover and his beloved, and every night they would somehow contrive a position which brought their sleeping bodies, if it were possible, even closer together.

There were the stars, of course. Josiah told Thomas that he’d never actually seen stars before, not a thousand billion of them, not like this. He’d never even known what darkness was like, and how black
it was. Thomas told Josiah how the Romans believed there were sixteen celestial regions, each inhabited by some deity that took an interest in human affairs. They were an immensely superstitious lot, he said, far more interested in the art of astrology than the science of astronomy. Occasionally there was even a celestial marriage. And everything that happened amongst the stars somehow left its mark among men.

‘Do you believe in destiny, Josiah? Do you believe that our future is already mapped out for us? Should we even bother to defy it?’

Josiah didn’t answer him the first time Thomas asked that
question.
But as August wore on, and the rhythmical meander of days became a march, and even vast constellations of stars followed their fixed course across the night sky, time began to matter again. No swimming, no reading of poetry, no Latin conversation, in which, incidentally, the two were getting superbly fluent, could compensate for the fact that the end was in sight.

It was the night before their return to Cambridge. They’d been swimming till late, and were now suffering for it, both shivering under blankets with their backs up against the still warm wall of their chapel.

‘I think we should stay here,’ said Josiah. ‘We don’t have to go back. No one’s making us go back.’

‘Life goes on. That’s not something we should be afraid of.’

‘But I
am
afraid,’ said Josiah.

‘We’ll still have weekends. And the holidays. Nothing’s going to change. We’re not going to die the moment we set foot in England. And as long as you’re not dead, and I’m not dead, how could things ever be different?’

‘What if they are? What if they’re terribly different?’

‘Come closer to me, Jo.’

And all night long, those two shivered into each other; neither could relinquish the stars. Thomas kissed Josiah’s cheeks, his mouth, his hair; and he told him that he loved him and would always love him, and that that, at least, would never change.

THEY WERE WAITING FOR THEM
at the airport: four police officers, three social workers. Thomas suffered his fate humbly. Josiah could see his wrists, but not his face. He saw his wrists because Thomas held them up meekly to be handcuffed; but though he hungered for some reassuring glance, some conspiratorial understanding between them which might say, ‘These idiots, what do they know about us? What do they know about anything?’ Thomas gave him nothing. For even while they were on the plane, the air they were
breathing
in felt unreal, manufactured and bottled in canisters, a perfect temperature, a perfect pressure, evil stuff. The air separated them from what they had known, and because that knowledge had been transmitted via their skin rather than their intelligence, and because that kind of knowledge can never be written down or even talked about, it is liable to be forgotten, cast aside as a dream, as an illusion, when perhaps in the final counting of things it is as close to truth as we shall ever be.

The police investigation had been a straightforward one. By midday on the morning of Josiah’s abrupt departure on the first of August, they knew both the name of the man who had abducted him (there was even a note of it on Josiah’s file; June Briggs had always had her suspicions) and the time of their flight to Florence. They had interviewed Thomas Marius’ elderly neighbour (whose address Josiah had written in the signing-out book) and she
confirmed
that the boy whose photograph they showed her had indeed been a regular visitor at his house. She also told them that Dr Marius
had had a lodger from the university, though regretted that she had never learnt his name. ‘The modern world!’ she sighed, as she twisted the corner of a cushion in her arthritic fingers, ‘All comes to no good in it! I should have suspected something bad was going on! I’m so sorry, gentlemen!’

By the afternoon, they had traced Greg Wright through the
University
Lodgings Syndicate; he was a more than happy witness. When the trail ran cold in Florence – after calling over fifty hotels and guest houses in the city – June Briggs hit upon the idea of visiting Josiah’s father in hospital. She was adamant that such an interview should be conducted with the utmost sensitivity; Gibson Nelson was not a well man, and had found, according to Daphne Field, the ward sister, his son’s visits acutely stressful. Nonetheless, if anyone could throw light on their whereabouts, surely it was Gibson; indeed, his role as their confidant might well have been the trigger for his recent intense bouts of weeping, which were as mysterious and as deep as groans coming out of a mountain. They all said to each other how
notoriously
difficult such cases were: the rights of a son to see his father, of a father to see his son; and now, should a sick man be protected from such terrible news as his own son’s abduction? Or were a child’s rights always paramount?

In this case, everyone was keen to see justice done. They needed information. June Briggs assigned two of her most experienced social workers to accompany a police officer to the hospital. The interview was sensitively and professionally conducted, but Gibson was not helpful, and told them nothing. He heaved and rocked, and was often short of breath. Within an hour of their departure he had had an aneurysm, and was admitted to Addenbrookes hospital. Early the following morning he was dead.

Gibson’s death was sobering. The police made inquiries at Corpus, but the Fellows there had never even heard of the boy Josiah, and did not know where Dr Marius was spending his summer. So in the
end they decided to be patient. After all, there was no one to speak up for the poor boy, no tearful parents parading their loss on TV, and above all, there were no leads. The chances were, the man was a paedophile, not a murderer. They would simply catch him at the airport on their return journey.

The last time Josiah and June Briggs had come face to face was on that fateful morning eight years previously when she had taken him away from his parents and his home. Josiah didn’t remember, of course. He had been busy looking forward to his first day at school, not looking at the lady at the steering wheel. Likewise, June had barely registered Josiah: all she knew of that pale, earnest boy was that he had been both neglected and probably abused by his parents. Eve’s subsequent disappearance had only served to vindicate her
suspicions
: what mother could do that to her child? June was
unaccustomed
to feelings of a personal nature, so she surprised herself when she took Josiah’s hand into her own at the airport and gave it a wholesome pat.

‘Don’t worry, Josiah,’ she said to him, while he watched Thomas being taken away by the four policemen. ‘Things have a way of coming out all right in the end. The important thing is, you’re safe.’

Josiah would have preferred a snake bite and snatched his hand away.

Angela Day said, ‘You just don’t know how worried we’ve been about you. We all have. The younger children have been really upset.’

Kevin was Josiah’s latest field social worker. They hadn’t even met yet. He was sensitive enough not to introduce himself; he just said: ‘Right. Let’s get out of here.’

These three had previously decided that the most comfortable and appropriate place to debrief Josiah was in Angela Day’s private sitting-room at
The Hollies
. The police interviews, they had
suggested,
could wait until the following day. As he was still a minor,
they were legally entitled to record Josiah without his knowledge, and this they fully intended to do. The police could then hear the tape before carrying on with their own interrogation.

The journey back to Cambridge took a mere forty minutes, during which not a word was spoken by any of them. Angela sat in the back of the car with Josiah, but Josiah turned his whole body away from her, and kept his face up against the window, as though the view between Stansted and Cambridge was one of the most
fascinating
in the world.

No one in
The Hollies
had been told to expect Josiah: so the elder children had gone into the centre of town to ‘doss’ while the younger ones had been taken on a trip to Linton Zoo. The house felt eerily empty; the windows were all open, and a breeze was blowing crisp packets across the stained carpet.

Angela Day said, ‘Come upstairs, let me get you some tea. Josiah, will you have a cup?’ Upstairs Angela unlocked the door which said ‘Private’, and they all went in. On a low table was a bowl of sugar and a box of tissues, ready for Josiah’s tears; round it were placed a sofa and two armchairs, in one of which June Briggs had already made herself at home. She was fiddling with the small tape recorder in her bag. Josiah was staring out of the window, his elbows leaning on the sill. Angela was boiling a kettle in the kitchenette, and shouted out to them, ‘Does everyone take milk?’

‘Thank you,’ said Kevin. The other two ignored her, so Angela put a little jug of milk on the tray along with a comforting brown tea-pot of Tetleys and four mugs.

‘It’s a nice sitting-room they give you,’ said June. ‘I suppose they’ve got to give you some perks in this job.’

Angela sat down on the sofa and began pouring the tea.

‘I like it here,’ she said.

Kevin sat down beside her, and rummaged around in his
briefcase
: what for, no one ever knew, for he never found it.

‘Josiah, come and sit down, love,’ said June. To everyone’s faint surprise, he did. He took a cup of tea from the tray and added sugar.

They all felt encouraged, and smiled benignly. June switched the recorder on.

‘The first thing we want you to know,’ she said, ‘is that we
absolutely
don’t blame you for what happened. You have nothing to fear. Do you understand that?’

‘What do you mean, I have nothing to fear? How do you know what I fear?’ Josiah spoke easily; Kevin was impressed.

‘The small matter of duplicating keys, stealing your passport, absconding… you won’t get into trouble for any of it. In fact, we don’t even blame you for any of it.’

‘Is that what you think I fear?’

‘Then what do you fear?’

Josiah said nothing.

‘We need your account of what happened, Josiah. How long have you known this man?’

Josiah looked away.

‘How did you meet him?’

Silence.

‘Then let me tell you. You met him outside your school at the beginning of February. He offered to teach you Latin, and for a while you used to come on Saturday mornings. The lessons turned into days, into weekends, into holidays. Isn’t that how it was?’

Josiah looked up. ‘Is that so bad?’ he said.

‘Tell me. I want you to stand back from the situation for a while. You’re an intelligent boy. Just look at how this might seem to us. Thomas Marius is a man of thirty-six. He comes from an entirely different background from you. He’s mature, educated, for God’s sake. You’re barely fifteen. What’s in it for him, do you think? What could you possibly have in common with one another?’

‘A father loves a son. What do they have in common?’

‘They have blood in common, Josiah. That is an entirely different thing.’

‘Why couldn’t he have loved me as a father?’

‘Because he isn’t your father, that’s why!’

‘What kind of love do you think he had for me then?’

‘Do you acknowledge that he loved you? Can we at least get that straight?’

‘Yes, he did,’ said Josiah, holding himself high. To have said
anything
else would have been a betrayal.

June Briggs almost clapped with what she saw as a swift victory. Josiah noticed; he asked her, ‘Have you ever been loved?’

‘Most people have known that pleasure.’

‘So love is a good thing?’

‘Of course it is.’

‘Is it ever bad?’

‘When it’s exploitative.’

‘But if love’s exploitative, it stops being love doesn’t it? It becomes something else.’ Josiah was sitting bolt upright, his cheeks red, his pulse racing.

‘You don’t think Dr Marius ever tried to exploit you?’

‘Of course not. He would never do that.’

‘But he encouraged you to go on holiday with him?’

‘Yes, he did,’ said Josiah.

June smiled malevolently. ‘And why, do you think, would he have wanted your company?’

‘He likes teaching. I like learning.’

‘Do you really think teachers want to go on holiday with their pupils?’

‘If there was a teacher who loved teaching enough and a pupil who loved learning enough, no holiday could be happier.’

‘That’s an absurd thing to say,’ snapped June. ‘Do you honestly expect me to believe you read schoolbooks all day? Kevin, do you
want to fetch his case? Will we find some history project in there, is that what you’re telling me?’

‘The word “education” has a Latin root. It means to “lead out”, not to “put in”.’

‘Okay. He’s taught you well,’ said June sourly. ‘Do either of you have any questions?’

Kevin asked, ‘So how did you spend your time on holiday?’

And Angela, ‘Were you lucky with the weather?’

Both Josiah and June ignored them. ‘Tell us what happened,’ said June.

‘What do you want to know? We went to Siena. We looked around a few churches. Saw a few pictures.’

‘Where did you sleep?’ asked June.

‘We had a… room in the country.’

‘Did you share a bed?’

Josiah said nothing.

‘Did he try to kiss you?’

Again, nothing.

‘What happened between you?’

Josiah shook his head.

‘Did he touch you inappropriately?’

‘Never,’ said Josiah.

‘Whatever you tell us now, you understand you will have to submit to a medical examination. The courts need to know if there was anal penetration.’

Josiah stood up as if to go. ‘The courts can fuck off,’ he said.

‘Sit down, Josiah.’

Josiah had no intention of sitting down, but shot June Briggs such a look of rage and loathing that all she could do to retaliate was tell him something that only an hour previously she had been wondering how to break to him.

‘All right, stand up then! Stand up! Your father died when you
were gone.’ The words sprang out of her like a dart. Josiah stood even straighter, eyes staring ahead, unblinking. She relented
immediately
; Kevin and Angela were looking at her in astonishment.

‘I’m sorry to have to break the news like this,’ continued Miss Briggs, her voice in gentle mode. ‘He didn’t know where you were. He was upset. These things happen. Don’t blame yourself.’

‘I don’t,’ said Josiah.

And this was how a nice brown tea pot, a jug of milk, a bowl of sugar, one full mug of tea and three empty ones, ended up on June Brigg’s lap; this was why the table banged against her shin bone on its way down to the floor, and why June shouted out stuff about his bloody mother that Kevin and Angela were fairly shocked to hear, and why June destroyed the tape afterwards. Josiah, victorious, threw the box of tissues onto June’s lap and told her to clean herself up with them. He smiled, took a bow, and left the room.