The Punishment She Deserves

  “There are other girls, of course,” Rabiah pointed out. “Happy to have a roll in the hay or whatever it’s called these days. In the meantime, I mean. Sex with no strings? A hookup and handshake . . . ?”

  Justin looked appalled. “You mean doing it for . . . for relief or the like? Oh, I’d never do that, Missus Lomax. I’m no cheater. Besides, now Missa’s back home, it won’t be much longer. I’ve got my savings and something I’m doing on the side that’s bringing in money.”

  “Have you a second job, then?” Rabiah asked.

  “Starting my own business,” Justin told her. “I don’t like to say because it’s early yet, but it’s doing the kind of work I always did best.” He held up his hands. They were nicked, calloused, and bore scars from burns that probably had occurred at the smithy. “These’re my best tools. Long’s I have these in working order, I c’n do just about anything.”

  “Granny, it’s such a treat to see you!”

  Rabiah looked up to see that Missa had come into the pavilion and had purchased a flapjack. She kissed Rabiah on the top of her head and joined them at their table, where she divided the flapjack in half and handed a share to Justin. She said, “What a mad day! I’ve had to spend most of my time keeping ten-year-old boys away from the tallow vat. What about you, Justie? Any of the kids trying to stick their hands in the forge?”

  “Only every one of them.” He had finished his cake and tea, and he glanced at a wristwatch that he took from his pocket. He rose, then, took up the flapjack portion, wrapped it in a paper napkin, and said, “Half past, then?” to Missa in a message that she apparently understood.

  She said, “Gran, you’re going to see Mum and Dad, aren’t you? Sati as well? I could go home with you if you’re still here at closing.”

  Rabiah wanted to speak with Missa’s mother alone, so she said, “I’ll be long gone by then, love. There’s only so much Victoriana that a woman my age can take. You’re better with Justin.”

  He looked pleased. He bent to Missa as if to kiss her, and she tilted her head to give him her cheek. He hesitated, then kissed her in the manner she wished. He nodded at Rabiah in a farewell and he left the pavilion. Not, Rabiah noticed, without receiving the admiring glances of one girl at the till and two others in Victorian garb having their afternoon cups of tea. Missa appeared oblivious to this.

  “What’re you doing here?” She offered Rabiah a fond smile.

  “I’ve come to see you.”

  “Really?” Missa used both hands to slide her sleek bobbed hair behind her ears. It was, as always, shiny with health, which relieved Rabiah although she could not have said exactly why. “Why’ve you come to see me? Not that it isn’t a treat that you’re here.” Missa added this last hastily, but Rabiah could tell that she was suspicious. If her grandmother had driven up from Ludlow to see her particularly, there would be a reason and chances were she wasn’t going to like it.

  “Justin seems as devoted as ever,” Rabiah noted. Outside in the Victorian fairgrounds, a period roundabout began its slow spin, with calliope music accompanying it.

  Missa fingered her portion of the flapjack she’d bought, but she didn’t take a bite. “Hmm,” was her reply.

  “He was talking about his savings and what he intends to do with them,” Rabiah told her. “And about a business he’s developing that involves his hands. It’s hush-hush, apparently, but its purpose seems to involve buying a home.”

  “Well it was always stupid for everyone to think he’d just stay with his mum and dad forever and be content as the one to take care of them. That’s what they thought, you know. His dad was always saying, ‘Justie’s our dumb one. He’ll keep at home so when we get doddery, there he’ll be.’ Like Justin wouldn’t be bothered by the label dumb one. Like he didn’t want a life of his own.”

  “Oh, decidedly he means to have a life. Do you know about this business he’s got on the side? Has he told you about it?”

  “Just that he’s saving,” Missa said. “I don’t know anything about a business.”

  “You might want to ask. Or have a talk with him. Or . . . something.”

  Missa looked up, wide-eyed. “Why?”

  “Don’t be obtuse, Missa. You know very well he intends the two of you to marry, have children, walk hand in hand into your dotage. If that’s what you want, fine. If that’s not what you want . . . Which is it? You were meant to be taking a break from each other when you first came to Ludlow. You told me as much last September. Where are you with each other now? I mean, according to you. I’ve already heard according to Justin.”

  “We’re not anywhere different, Gran,” Missa replied. “We’re just like we’ve always been.”

  Rabiah eyed her. “Really, Missa. You’re not simple-minded.”

  Missa cocked her head to one side. She had a way of looking at one that made it easy to assume an offence had been given. But Rabiah wasn’t going to back away. This wasn’t exactly the confrontation she’d intended to have with her granddaughter, but it would do for now.

  “I wonder how he’s going to react if you tell him that it isn’t your intention to settle down in Ironbridge, have his babies, change their nappies, launder his clothing, and perhaps grow organic veggies in an allotment somewhere.”

  “You’re not being very nice when you talk like that,” Missa pointed out.

  “Are you being nice?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Rubbish. You know very well what I mean. Here you are—according to him—stressing virginity, no sex before, and all the rest, which I assume means no hand—”

  “Granny!”

  “—no mouth, no back door—and . . . Oh God. What is it?”

  Missa’s eyes had filled. Rabiah saw she had gone too far.

  “Oh dear, I’m sorry,” Rabiah said.

  Missa made no reply, but she looked away.

  “Missa, is there something that’s happened between you and Justin that—”

  “I just want to be, Gran. Why can no one let me just be?”

  “All right,” Rabiah said. “Forgive me, dear. I’ve not come all this way to do anything at all with regard to you and Justin.”

  “Why have you come, then?”

  “Because Ding and I had a talk today. After two visits from the Metropolitan Police, you must have known I’d have a word with the girl before I set them upon her like a pack of dogs.”

  Missa moved her gaze to Rabiah, and her expression remained as open and frank as it always was. “What did she say?”

  “I caught her by surprise. It would have been wise had you rung her directly you and I spoke, since she hadn’t a clue what she was supposed to be doing or saying to me once I confronted her about using our name when she spoke with Mr. Druitt. Had you given her the word, she would have had time to cook up something. She might have had any number of stories about her seven appointments with a clergyman. For my part, I would have believed her at once had she told me she was using our name to meet with Mr. Druitt for a reason that needed to be untraceable to her. As it was, though, she denied seeing him at all. When I pressed her . . . Perhaps the best way to describe her reaction is to say she simply fell apart.”

  “She’d been caught in a lie,” Missa pointed out.

  “I think it’s rather she’d been caught without time to create a lie. At the end, all she was able to do was to instruct me to talk to you. So here I am. What you need to know is that while Ding and I were in the midst of our initial words to each other, we were in the street. And so, unfortunately, were the detectives from New Scotland Yard. Why they were there, I couldn’t tell you. That they were there suggests Ding is in their sights now. When I last spoke to them, they wanted to know why my phone number wasn’t registered on Mr. Druitt’s mobile. I like to think I’m in line for a BAFTA with my explanation to them, but now they’ve seen me with Ding, I r
ather doubt it. What would you like to tell me, Missa? I ask because you will tell me something and I suggest you choose the truth.”

  Having said that, Rabiah waited. Doing so, she was forced to consider the idea of Missa’s speaking to a member of the clergy seven times prior to leaving Ludlow. Rabiah had to admit that the girl had certainly been under pressure from her mother not to leave the college when she’d first wanted to do so in December, and Rabiah herself had called the idea completely mad. Doubtless her friends and instructors at West Mercia College had joined in the chorus of disapproval. But once she’d cooperatively returned to the college after the Christmas holiday and still wanted out of the place, it did rather make sense that Missa would have sought someone with whom she could talk rationally about the matter. She would want someone with no chips in the game, and didn’t a clergyman fit into that role like a foot into a shoe? Of course he did. Beyond that, didn’t Missa have a right to privacy as she made her decision? Of course she did. And really, who the hell could blame her?

  “Mr. Druitt rang me,” Missa told her.

  Well, this was certainly not the direction Rabiah had thought the conversation would take. “The clergyman rang you?”

  “He said he’d been told I needed someone to talk to about leaving college. I expect my tutor put him onto me. He disapproved, you see. Just like everyone else.”

  “Druitt disapproved?” What a tangle this was, Rabiah thought.

  “My tutor disapproved. I’d explained to him that I was intending to leave, and he thought I was rushing things.”

  “So he put a clergyman onto you?”

  “That’s what happened. I expect he thought I might be able to sort everything out better with a . . . I don’t know. With a man of God?”

  “As you’re here now, Mr. Druitt must have supported the idea of leaving college. Did he?” Rabiah made the question casual because the fact remained that the man had killed himself. And Missa had left Ludlow soon afterwards. “The police are going to trace you, Missa.”

  “But you said you told them that you were the one who met with Mr. Druitt.”

  “True. But Ding isn’t about to do you that favour. And they’re going to want to speak to her, after catching me with her today.”

  “All right. I see that. But what I don’t see is how any of that has to do with his suicide.”

  “I expect among other things they’ll want to know what your relationship was with the man prior to his death. Are you prepared to talk about it?”

  Missa’s hand drew into a fist that crumpled her paper napkin as she took this in. She said, “My relationship with him?”

  “If anything happened between you.”

  “I don’t understand. What could have happened?”

  “Missa, I don’t know. But our surname appears in the man’s diary often enough to cause suspicion in the eyes of the police. Since they’re in Ludlow because of his suicide, it stands to reason that they might also be in Ludlow to look into what led up to it.”

  “That can’t have anything to do with me. We only ever talked about college and uni.”

  “Then if you’re asked, that’s what you’ll tell them. Of course, that begs the question: why didn’t you simply tell me that when I phoned and asked you about it?” Rabiah waited. There was more here. She could see that much in Missa’s tense body. She went on with some care although her exasperation with the girl was mounting. “And if there is some other reason, Missa, you should tell the police what it is . . . if, as I said, they come to call upon you.”

  “There isn’t some other reason,” Missa told her. “There’s just the fact that I’ve finally become myself, Gran. I’ve become who I am, and I don’t want to keep defending my decisions. I can’t explain it any more than that.”

  She rose then. She said that her break was finished, and she was meant to get back to her candle making. Everything was fine, she was fine, life was fine, she said. Her grandmother needn’t have lied to the police to keep them away from her. If they wanted to ask her questions about Mr. Druitt, she would tell them whatever she could.

  “He didn’t do a thing except try to help me make my decision,” she said. “I needed someone to be there for me, and he was that person, Gran.”

  COALBROOKDALE

  SHROPSHIRE

  At their clinic, Yasmina Lomax had been trying daily to keep her gaze away from where her husband worked in the pharmacy. Most of the time, she was so busy with her young patients and their parents that she was successful in this endeavour. In this way she could tell herself that Timothy wasn’t stealing opiates. She could conclude that since he’d beaten back his need for drink directly Missa was born, she had nothing further to worry about. She could also assure herself that, with time, he would find his way back to her just as she would, with time, find her way back to him. If they didn’t manage to do that, she couldn’t imagine what life was going to be like. Prior to Janna’s death it had been difficult enough.

  They’d been too young when they’d met. She’d been utterly inexperienced, the child of parents whose arranged marriage had worked out well and who were thus convinced that applying this same traditional approach to their daughter’s future was wise. Yasmina had at first acquiesced to their plan, accompanying them on one trip to India, where a cousin had revealed to her the nature of her own arranged marriage to an older man who’d already raped and beaten his way through one wife and was raping and beating his way through her. Her parents’ reassurance that this was an anomaly in the world of arranged marriages did very little to soothe Yasmina’s fears. But since they promised that no marriage would take place prior to their daughter’s completing her university studies, her anxiety about her future lifted.

  She hadn’t intended to become involved with any young man at university. Her focus had been on her studies. And studying was exactly what she’d been doing when she first met Timothy Lomax, with his goofy, slightly sticking-out ears, his curly hair, and his blazing smile that made one not notice anything else but how attractive he was, even with those ears.

  He’d come from a uni drinks party. She’d been studying in a café, nursing a cup of tea long gone cold. He’d been slightly drunk and he admitted this to her, adding that if he hadn’t had several too many drinks he wouldn’t have had the courage to approach her at all. “You’re gorgeous,” he told her. “Gorgeous is a bit off-putting to an ordinary bloke like me.”

  She didn’t have the experience to ask if this was a line he used to acquaint himself with young women he fancied, although she did wonder it much later. But by that time, she was in love with him, or she was in whatever state it is when the brain stops functioning and the body takes over, riding roughshod over one’s future plans in the urgency of satisfying lust. Indeed, she didn’t know what lust was as she’d never felt it. So she’d called her obsession with his body and with what his body could do to her body by the only word she could come up with: love. That was what was used in films, wasn’t it? Whatever else could it be?

  They’d had four lucky months before she’d fallen pregnant. He’d used protection, but it wasn’t fail-safe. Beyond that, there was just one time when exigency overcame common sense—no condoms at hand and really, how on earth could she become pregnant if they didn’t actually complete the act in the traditional fashion—and the rest was permanent estrangement from her family. The arrival of Missa and later Janna and Sati made losing her natal family less painful, and Rabiah’s kindness and support had got them through the thornier times created by having three small children and two careers.

  Things began to get difficult, however, no matter Rabiah’s helpful presence. Yasmina found herself far too busy with her practice and with her growing girls to consider the degree to which she and her husband began merely to go through the motions with each other. She assured herself that she was doing her best, since even when she was exhausted by her life she persevered in be
ing her husband’s lover because it was another wifely duty that had fallen upon her with her hasty marriage. After all, she’d grown up learning that a woman’s lot in life was defined by the two chromosomes that made her just that: a woman. So she accepted that she was to cook the meals, keep the house neat, bathe and feed and see to the various needs of the children, do the weekly shop, use the iron to press the wrinkles from her husband’s shirts. And when he reached out for her thigh in the darkness or caressed her breast to awaken her in the early morning, she cooperated and hoped that it would soon be over so that she could simply just sleep. This was enough, she told herself. Timothy had to be satisfied with what she could give.

  And then Janna. And how one’s imperfect world crashes around one when a child becomes critically ill. And how one begins to think—no matter one’s religious or spiritual upbringing—about being punished by God for not being enough. Not enough of a mother. Not enough of a wife. Not enough of anything, really.

  All the ways relating to how she and Timothy managed their marriage came to a halt as they faced what was growing like a tentacled monster within their daughter’s skull. The fact that Timothy did not believe in disease as punishment did nothing to ameliorate Yasmina’s anguish. He wouldn’t hear any talk of the many ways in which she—a paediatrician, for God’s sake—had failed their daughter. Ultimately, he would not hear any talk of anything at all.

  He’d begun with the opiates during Janna’s illness. The excuse was his need to sleep, although the truth was his need to escape from what they both knew lay directly in their path, which was the soul-destroying grief of losing their child. The diagnosis had carried within it the seed of truth, although Janna’s team of specialists had tried, as they would do, to put the best possible face upon it. Five years if we fight this aggressively, they said. Eighteen months if we do not. But in any case, terminal. Always terminal no matter the youth and prior health of the person stricken. So terribly, terribly, terribly sorry.

  People believe, she thought, that they will emerge from the nightmare of losing a child and somehow find their way back to at least a semblance of who they had been before. And perhaps that was the case for some, but it had not been the case for her. She did her best. She wanted only what was good for her two remaining children, and she managed to direct her waking moments to fulfilling her obligations as a physician and as a mother. But she had nothing left when it came to her husband.