Harriet Spork stares at her son, and he can see her wondering whether she should call the porters and have him thrown out. Well, no; there’s no question that she should: she’s a cloistered woman and his presence is absolutely against the rules. She’s trying to untangle whether she will, because in the end—in the absolute, final analysis—he’s her son. He hasn’t actually considered what he might do under those circumstances, and wonders abruptly whether his indecision will be tested.
Apparently not.
“Joshua,” she says.
“Hello, Mum.”
“You’re in trouble.” Not a question. She knows, or she has correctly deduced. Or perhaps she has always expected. “I can’t hide you, you know. The Church can’t give sanctuary any more.”
“I don’t need sanctuary.”
“Oh. Oh, dear.” Because if he is not here to be concealed, he is here for some other kind of help. He considers telling her he has come to see her before he gives himself up. He wonders whether the lie would bring her joy or guilt, and what it would do to him. He wishes he could stop trying to play her, and just be her son, but he never knows any more whether he’s talking to God’s wife or the woman with the plasters and the warm neck who could make everything be all right. He is briefly, irrationally furious that God should require of her the abandonment of her son, and almost tells her, but remembers that this approach triggers a lecture on the testing of Abraham.
Instead he says “I’m going to hug you,” and does, and she, after a moment’s appalled hesitation—because it is very much not what they do these days—hugs him back, fiercely, throws her arms around him and shudders massively and asks him what on Earth is going on, and is he all right, and then for the second time what it’s all about and what it means, and he replies that he has no idea, does not understand, but Billy is dead and the world is upside down and it’s not his fault, but please, please, please, she must be careful, she must, she must. This seems to unzip Harriet’s emotions entirely, because she cries silently into her son’s shoulder and he does the same, feeling all the while that he’s being unfair offloading all this on her, because she’s so small.
At last, she manages to peel him off, or perhaps the point is reached where the hug is finished, and the comfort it grants is offset by awkwardness and self-awareness. They part, and he looks at her.
Harriet Spork—Sister Harriet—is still attractive. The voice which sang “Ma, He’s Making Eyes At Me” is now more commonly deployed for the Eucharist, and make-up has given way to a stern expression which mingles faith and devotion with compassion and—on the rare occasions when she is wrong-footed, as now—a confident anticipation of clarity. She is everyone’s mother now, and Joe feels an absolutely dreadful hunger, and a jealousy, even alone with her in this room. These blessings are mine, his heart shouts, mine and no one else’s! It seems so unfair to him that she should bestow her empathy on others and yet bar her door against him, who most rightfully deserves it.
She has grey hair now; the last black streaks are gone. Perhaps they were a final vanity, now dismissed. Her eyelashes are still spectacular, her hands still elegant.
“I don’t want you to forgive me, Mum. I don’t need that.” Normally he calls her Harriet, because she has asked him to. Today is not normally.
“We all need that.” And Harriet perhaps more than others, which is why she’s so quick on the draw. He pushes the thought away.
“How long do we have?”
“How long do we have before what?”
“When do you next pray or eat or whatever?”
“Long enough.” To achieve whatever God has in mind for this conversation. The fatalism terrifies and angers Joe in equal measure. The answer could mean five minutes or a week.
He takes the folded sheet of accounting paper from his pocket and lays it on the bed, as if it were the final piece in one of Agatha Christie’s murder mysteries and he the detective explaining why he has called everyone here this evening. Except there are only two of them, and it seems far from the last piece, alas.
“Mathew paid for Daniel.”
She looks at him, and then down at the paper, and nods. “Yes.”
“He fiddled the books.”
“Yes.”
“And then later, when Daniel had them done in town—”
“Mathew got Mr. Presburn to fiddle them for him.”
Presburn the honest dealer, accountant pro bono to craftsmen and persons of good character. Except that Presburn, apparently, had been Mathew’s creature, the conduit for his completely illicit largesse to his angry father. All true, then. But what does it mean, here, now, to J. Joseph Spork, who tried as a child to be Mathew and then as an adult to be Daniel, and never, really, has focused on being Joe? And who is, in his various persons, now pursued by demons through this world of sin?
“Did you know?”
“Yes.”
“But Daniel never did.”
“No. I considered telling him.” Because God loves truth. “But it would have been cruel.”
Yes. It would. But you might have told me. It would have made my life easier, because if I’d known Daniel’s trade didn’t pay the way he ran it, I might not have spent ten years of my life doing exactly the bloody same and being so confused when it didn’t add up.
Harriet sighs, and clasps her hands for a moment. May God grant both of them peace.
Again, Joe feels that peace could be granted more generally if people inside his family told each other fewer whopping lies, and left their children somewhat less complex and occult heritances.
At least she hasn’t mentioned the ineffable nature of the Lord at all. When Harriet first came here, Joe assumed that this kind of answer was a sort of polite, convent version of “Fuck off.” Later, he came to believe it was an assertion of faith.
“Daniel built something with Frankie, didn’t he?”
Harriet’s face undergoes a stark transformation, from beatific to furious.
“Oh, he would have done anything for her! He did do anything. She asked a lot, and he always did it. And what she didn’t ask, what she just left him to do… that was worse. She was wicked, Joshua! So wicked. So blighted and dark. They all thought she shone, all those clever men, but she was rotted inside like a windfall apple. Maggots and death. She was a witch, from a witchy breed, and God save her, because I think she’s in Hell. I won’t talk about her. She was a bad one.”
“I thought we were all bad, unless we tried.”
“Oh, we’re all sinful. But we’re not evil, Josh. Not unless we really put our shoulders to the wheel. She was evil. She had such eyes. They saw everything, right down to the bottom of creation. She saw like Einstein, they say. And look what came of him: burning cities and charred shadows on the wall. A half-century of fear and loathing and now we’re all waiting for the first suitcase which turns a city into glass. But Einstein was a godly man, wasn’t he? Frankie was none of that. Oh, no.”
“Why? What did she do?”
“Oh, Joe, these are old sins. Old shadows. It’s better they stay buried.”
“Well, they haven’t. What did she build down there? What did Daniel help her build?”
“She lied to him. She said it was a great mechanism to heal the world. She thought the truth would make everything all right, that she’d usher in a new utopia. Salvation through science, that was the doctrine back then. Salvation comes from the soul, and is the gift of God. But Daniel… he said God helps those who help themselves, of course. He said that everything under Heaven is an opportunity to learn. He said God wanted us to strive to be more than we are, and this was part of that striving. It was all so noble. The Devil turning love into sin.”