A Great Deliverance

St. James pulled the window closed, drew across the heavy curtains, and led Deborah back to the fire. She curled up on the fl oor next to his chair, warming herself, allowing the fire to tingle against her skin.

“A ghost baby, I take it?” she said to Da

“An absolute one that I heard myself. You’ll hear it as well. Wait and see.”

“Ghosts always have legends attached,” St. James noted.

Glad you asked, Da

St. James chuckled. “We should have, but I’m afraid we came in from a…different direction.”

“The scenic route,” Deborah added.

Da

“So we discovered,” St. James put in.

The girl nodded earnestly. “But days in advance the village got word that the murd’rous Roundheads was coming. ’Twasn’t the village that old Cromwell wanted, but the villagers themselves, all o’ them that was loyal t’ King Charlie.”

“To kill them, of course,” Deborah prompted as the girl paused in her story to catch her breath.

“T’ kill every last one!” she declared. “When word came that Cromwell was looking for the Kel, the village got a plan together. They’d move every stick, every stitch, every soul t’ the grounds o’ the abbey. So when the Round-heads arrived there’d be Keldale, all right, but not a soul in her.”

“Rather an ambitious plan,” St. James remarked.

“An’ it worked!” Da

“Good heavens!” Deborah murmured. She edged closer to her husband’s chair. “Just the sort of story one longs to hear on a wedding night, isn’t it?”

“Ah, but you must know.” Da

“Wear garlic?” St. James asked. “Sleep with a crucifix clutched in one’s hand?”

Deborah punched him lightly on the knee. “I want to know. I insist upon knowing. Shall I have my life blighted because I’ve married a cynic? Tell me what to do, Da

Gravely, Da

“That’s interesting,” St. James acknowledged. “Sort of an animated amulet. May we hope that this baby cries often?”

“Not terrible often. But I…” She swallowed, and suddenly they saw that this was no amusing legend for lovestruck honeymooners, for to her the fear and the story were real. “But I heard i’ myself some three years back! ’Tis not something I’ll soon forget!” She got to her feet. “You’ll remember what t’ do? You’ll not forget?”

“We’ll not forget,” Deborah reassured the girl as she vanished from the room.

They were quiet at her departure. Deborah rested her head against St. James’s knee. His long, thin fingers moved gently through her hair, smoothing the curly mass back from her face. She looked up at him.

“I’m afraid, Simon. I didn’t think I would be, not once this last year, but I am.” She saw in his eyes that he understood. Of course he did. Had she ever truly doubted that he would?

“So am I,” he replied. “Every moment today I felt just a little bit mad with terror. I never wanted to lose myself, not to you, not to anyone in fact. But there it is. It happened.” He smiled. “You invaded my heart with a little Cromwellian force of your own that I couldn’t resist, Deborah, and I find now that rather than lose myself, the true terror is that I might somehow lose you.” He touched the pendant he’d given her that morning, nestling in the hollow of her throat. It was a small gold swan, so long between them a symbol of commitment: choosing once, choosing for life. His eyes moved from it back to her own. “Don’t be afraid,” he whispered gently.

“Make love to me then.”

“With great pleasure.”

Jimmy Havers had little pig’s eyes that darted round the room when he was nervous. He might feel as if he were putting on the bravura performance of a lifetime, lying his way grandly out of everything from an accusation of petty larceny to being caught in flagrante delicto, but the reality was that his eyes betrayed him every time, as they were doing now.

“Didn’t know if you’d be home in time to get your mum the Greece stuff, so Jim went out himself, girl.” It was his habit to speak of himself in the third person. It allowed him to evade responsibility for virtually any unpleasantness that cropped up in his life. Like this one now. No, I didn’t go to the turf accountant.

Didn’t pick up snuff, either. If it was done at all, was Jimmy that done it, not me.

Barbara watched her father’s eyes dance their way round the sitting room. God, what a grim little death pit it was: a ten-by-fi fteenfoot room whose windows were permanently sealed shut by years of filth and grime, crammed with that wonderful three-piece suite so essential to delicate living, but this one a creation that had billed itself as “artifi cial horsehair” thirty-five years ago when even real horsehair was a hideous concept of comfort. The walls were papered with a maddening design of interlocking rosebuds that simpered their way to the ceiling. Racing magazines overflowed from tables onto the floor and argued there with the fi fteen simulated leather albums that assiduously documented every inch, every mile of her mother’s breakdown. And through it all Tony smiled and smiled and smiled.

A corner of the room held his shrine. The last picture of him before his illness-a distorted, unfocused little boy kicking a football into a temporary goal net set up in a garden that had once leapt with fl owers-was enlarged to beyond life-size proportions. On either side, suitably framed in mock oak, hung every school report he had ever done, every note of praise from every teacher he’d had, and-God have mercy on us all-given pride of place, the certificate of his death. Beneath this, an arrangement of plastic flowers did obeisance, a rather dusty obeisance considering the state of the room itself.

The television blared, as it always did, from the opposite corner, placed there “so Tony can watch it as well.” His favourite shows still played regularly to him, frozen in time, as if nothing had happened, as if nothing had changed. While the windows and doors were closed and locked, chained and barred to hold out the truth of that August afternoon and the Uxbridge Road.