Missing Joseph

December: The Snow

BRENDAN POWER spon round as the door creaked open and his younger brother Hogarth entered the glacial cold of the vestry of St. John the Baptist Church in the village of Winslough. Beyond him the organist, accompanied by a single, tremulous, and no doubt utterly uninvited voice, was playing “All Ye Who Seek for Sure Relief,” as a follow-up to “God Moves in a Mysterious Way.” Brendan had little doubt that both pieces constituted the organist’s sympathetic but unsolicited comment upon the morning’s proceedings.

“Nothing,” Hogarth said. “Not a ginger. Not a git. And no vicar to be found. Everyone on her side’s in a real twist, Bren. Her mum was moaning about the wedding breakfast being ruined, she was hissing about getting revenge on some ‘rotten sow,’ and her dad’s just left to ‘hunt that little rat down.’ Quite the folks they are, these Townley-Youngs.”

“Maybe you’re off the hook, Bren.” Tyrone — his older brother and best man and, by rights, the only other person who should have been in the vestry aside from the vicar— spoke with guarded hope as Hogarth closed the door behind him.

“No way,” Hogarth said. He reached in the jacket pocket of his hired morning coat that, despite all efforts by the tailor, failed to make his shoulders look like anything other than the sides of Pendle Hill incarnate. He took out a packet of Silk Cuts and lit up, flicking the match onto the cold stone fl oor. “She has him by the curlies, she does, Ty. Make no mistake about it. And let it be a lesson to you. Keep it in your trousers till it’s got a proper home.”

Brendan turned away. They both loved him, they both had their own way of offering consolation. But neither Hogarth’s joking nor Tyrone’s optimism was going to change the reality of the day. Come hell or high water— and between the two it was more likely to be hell — he would be married to Rebecca Townley-Young. He tried not to think about it, which is what he’d been doing since she’d fi rst dropped by his office in Clitheroe with the results of her pregnancy test.

“I don’t know how it happened,” she said. “I’ve never had a regular period in my life. My doctor even told me that I’d have to go on some sort of medication just to get myself regular if I ever wanted a family. And now…Look where we are, Brendan.”

Look what you did to me was the underlying message, as was And you, Brendan Power, a junior partner in Daddy’s own solicitor’s fi rm! Tsk, tsk. What a shame it might be to be given the sack.

But she didn’t need to say any of that. All she needed to say, head lowered penitently, was, “Brendan, I simply don’t know what I’m going to tell Daddy. What shall I do?”

A man in any other position would have said, “Just get rid of it, Rebecca,” and gone on with his work. A different sort of man in Brendan’s own position might have said the same thing. But Brendan was eighteen months away from St. John Andrew Townley-Young’s decision as to which of the solicitors would handle his affairs and his fortune when the current senior partner retired from the fi rm, and the perquisites that went with that decision were of the sort that Brendan could not turn from lightly: an introduction to society, the promise of other clients from Townley-Young’s class, and stellar advancement in his career.

The opportunities promised by TownleyYoung’s patronage had prompted Brendan to involve himself with the man’s twenty-eightyear-old daughter in the first place. He’d been with the firm just short of a year. He was eager to make his place in the world. Thus, when through the senior partner, St. John Andrew Townley-Young had extended an invitation to Brendan to escort Miss Townley-Young to the horse and pony sales of the Cowper Day Fair, it had seemed too much a stroke of good fortune for Brendan to demur.

At the time, the idea hadn’t been repellent. While it was true that even under the best of conditions — after a good night’s sleep and an hour and a half with her make-up and her hair curlers and her very best clothes — Rebecca still tended to resemble Queen Victoria in her declining years, Brendan had felt he could tolerate one or two mutual encounters with good grace and the guise of camaraderie. He counted heavily on his ability to dissemble, knowing that every decent lawyer had at least several drops of dissimulation in his blood. What he did not count on was Rebecca’s ability to decide, dominate, and direct the course of their relationship from its very inception. The second time he was with her, she took him to bed and rode him like the master of the hunt with a fox in sight. The third time he was with her, she rubbed him, fondled him, skewered herself on him and came up pregnant.

He wanted to blame her. But he couldn’t avoid the fact that as she panted and bobbed and bounced against him with her odd skinny breasts hanging down in his face, he had closed his eyes and smiled and called her Godwhat-a-woman-you-are-Becky and all the time thought of his future career.

So they would indeed be married today. Not even the failure of the Reverend Mr. Sage to appear at the church was going to stop the tide of Brendan Power’s future from fl ooding

right in.

“How late is he?” he asked Hogarth.

His brother glanced at his watch. “It’s gone half an hour now.”

“No one’s left the church?”

Hogarth shook his head. “But there’s a whisper and a titter that you’re the one who’s failed to show. I’ve been doing my part to save your reputation, lad, but you might want to pop your head into the chancel and give a bit of a wave to reassure the masses. I can’t say what that’ll do to reassure your bride, though. Who’s this sow she’s after? Are you already having a bit of stuff on the side? Not that I’d blame you. Getting it up for Becky must be a real treat. But you were always one for a challenge, weren’t you?”

“Stow it, Hogie,” Tyrone said. “And put out the fag. This is a church, for God’s sake.”

Brendan walked to the vestry’s single window, a lancet set deeply into the wall. Its panes were as dusty as was the room itself, and he cleared a small patch to look out at the day. What he saw was the graveyard, its cluster of stones like malformed slate thumbprints against the snow, and in the distance, the looming slopes of Cotes Fell that rose cone-shaped against a grey sky.

“It’s snowing again.” Absently, he counted how many graves were topped by seasonal sprays of holly, their red berries glistening against the spiked, green leaves. Seven of them that he could see. The greenery would have been brought this morning by wedding guests, for even now the wreaths and sprays were only lightly sprinkled with snow. He said, “The vicar must have gone out earlier this morning. That’s what’s happened. And he’s caught somewhere.”

Tyrone joined him at the window. Behind them, Hogarth ground his cigarette into the floor. Brendan shivered. Despite the fact that the church’s heating system was busily grinding away, the vestry was still unbearably cold. He put his hand to the wall. It felt icy and damp.

“How are Mum and Dad doing?” he asked.

“Oh, Mum’s a bit nervous but as far as I can tell, she still thinks it’s a match made in heaven. Her first child to get married and glory-to-God he’s hopping into the arms of the landed gentry, if only the vicar’ll show his face. But Dad’s watching the door like he’s had enough.”

“He hasn’t been this far from Liverpool in years,” Tyrone noted. “He’s just feeling nervous.”

“No. He’s feeling who he is.” Brendan turned from the window and looked at his brothers. They were mirrors of him and he knew it. Sloped shoulders, beaked noses, and everything else about them undecided. Hair that was neither brown nor blond. Eyes that were neither blue nor green. Jaws that were neither strong nor weak. They were all of them perfectly cast for potential serial killers, with faces that faded into a crowd. And that’s how the Townley-Youngs reacted when they’d met the whole family, as if they’d come face to face with their worst expectations and their most dreaded dreams. It was no wonder to Brendan that his father was watching the door and counting the moments till he could escape. His sisters were probably feeling the same. He even felt some envy for them. An hour or two and it would be over. For him, it was a lifetime proposition.

Cecily Townley-Young had accepted the role of her cousin’s chief bridesmaid because her father had instructed her to do so. She hadn’t wanted to be part of the wedding. She hadn’t even wanted to come to the wedding. She and Rebecca had never shared anything other than their relative positions as the daughters of sons on a scrawny family tree, and as far as Cecily was concerned, things could have pretty much stayed that way.

She didn’t like Rebecca. First, she had nothing in common with her. Rebecca’s idea of an afternoon of bliss was to crawl round four or five pony sales, talking about withers and lifting rubbery equine lips to have a sharp look at those ghastly yellow teeth. She carried apples and carrots like loose change in her pockets, and she examined hooves, scrotums, and eyeballs with the sort of interest most women give to clothes. Second, Cecily was tired of Rebecca. Twenty-two years of enduring birthdays, Easter, Christmas, and New Year’s on her uncle’s estate — all in the name of a spurious family unity that absolutely no one felt — had ground to gravel whatever affection she might have harboured for an older cousin. A few exposures to Rebecca’s incomprehensible extremes of behaviour had kept Cecily at a safe distance from her whenever they occupied the same house for more than a quarter of an hour. And third, she found her intolerably stupid. Rebecca had never boiled an egg, written a cheque, or made a bed. Her answer for every little problem in life was, “Daddy’ll see to it,” just the sort of lazy, parental dependence that Cecily loathed.

Even today Daddy was seeing to it in fi nest form. They’d done their part, obediently waiting for the vicar in the ice-floored, snow-speckled north porch of the church, stomping their feet, with their lips turning blue, while the guests rustled and murmured inside among the holly and the ivy, wondering why the candles weren’t being lit and why the wedding march hadn’t begun. They’d waited for an entire quarter of an hour, the snow making its own lazy bridal veils in the air, before Daddy had stormed across the street and pounded furiously on the vicarage door. He’d returned, his usual ruddy skin gone white with rage, in less than two minutes.

“He’s not even home,” St. John Andrew Townley-Young had snapped. “That mindless cow”—this was his manner of identifying the vicar’s housekeeper, Cecily decided—“said he’d already gone out when she arrived this morning, if you can believe it. That incompetent, foul little…” His hands formed fi sts in their dove-coloured gloves. His top hat trembled. “Get inside the church. All of you. Get out of this weather. I’ll handle the situation.”

“But Brendan’s here, isn’t he?” Rebecca had asked anxiously. “Daddy, Brendan’s not missing as well!”

“We should be so lucky,” her father replied. “The whole family’s here. Like rats who won’t leave a sinking ship.”

“St. John,” his wife murmured.

“Get inside!”

“But people will see me,” Rebecca wailed. “They’ll see the bride.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Rebecca.” Townley-Young disappeared into the church for another, utterly freezing two minutes, and came back with the announcement, “You can wait in the bell tower,” before he set off again to locate the vicar.

So at the base of the bell tower they were waiting still, hidden from the wedding guests by a gate of walnut balusters that was covered by a dusty, foul-smelling red velvet curtain whose nap was so worn that they could see the lights from the church chandeliers shining through. They could hear the rising ripple of concern as it fl owed through the crowd. They could hear the restless shuffling of feet. Hymnals opened and shut. The organist played. Beneath their feet in the crypt of the church, the heating system groaned like a mother giving birth.

At the thought, Cecily gazed speculatively at her cousin. She’d never believed Rebecca would find any man fool enough to marry her. While it was true that she stood to inherit a fortune and she’d already been given that ghoulish monstrosity Cotes Hall in which to retire in connubial ecstasy once the ring was on her finger and the register was signed, Cecily couldn’t imagine how the fortune itself — no matter how great — or the crumbling old Victorian mansion — no matter how distinct its potential for revival — would have induced any man to take on a lifetime of dealing with Rebecca. But now…She recalled her cousin just this morning in the loo, the noise of her retching, the sound of her shrill “Is it going to be like this every goddamned morning?” followed by her mother’s soothing “Rebecca.

Please. We’ve guests in the house.” And then Rebecca’s “I don’t care about them. I don’t care about anything. Don’t touch me. Let me out of here.” A door slammed. Running footsteps pounded along the upstairs passage.

Preggers? Cecily wondered idly at the time as she carefully applied mascara and smoothed on some blusher. She marvelled at the idea that a man might actually have taken Rebecca to bed. Lord, if that was the case, anything was possible. She examined her cousin for telltale signs of the truth.

Rebecca didn’t exactly look like a woman fulfi lled. If she was supposed to blossom with pregnancy, she was adrift somewhere in the prebudding stage, somewhat given to jowls, with eyes the size and shape of marbles and hair permed into a helmet on her head. To her credit, her skin was perfect, and her mouth was rather nice. But somehow, nothing really worked together, and Rebecca always ended up looking as if her individual features were at war with each other.

It wasn’t really her fault, Cecily thought. One ought to have at least a titbit of sympathy for someone so ill-favoured by looks. But every time Cecily tried to dig up one or two empathetic stirrings from her heart, Rebecca did

something to quash them like bugs.

As she was doing now.

Rebecca paced the tiny enclosure below the church bells, furiously twisting her bouquet. The fl oor was filthy, but she did nothing to hold her dress or her train away from it. Her mother did this duty, following her from point A to point B and back again like a faithful dog, with satin and velvet clutched in her hands. Cecily stood to one side, surrounded by two tin pails, a coil of rope, a shovel, a broom, and a pile of rags. An old Hoover leaned against a stack of cartons near her, and she carefully hung her own bouquet from the metal hook that would otherwise have been used to accommodate its cord. She lifted her velvet dress from the floor. The air was fusty in the space beneath the bells, and one couldn’t move in any direction without touching something absolutely black with grime. But at least it was warm.

“I knew something like this would happen.” Rebecca’s hands strangled her bridal fl owers. “It’s not going to come off. And they’re laughing at me, aren’t they? I can hear them laughing.”

Mrs. Townley-Young made a quarter turn as Rebecca did the same, bunching more of the satin train and the bottom of the gown into her arms. “No one’s laughing,” she said. “Don’t worry yourself, darling. There’s simply been some sort of unfortunate mistake. A misunderstanding. Your father will put things right straightaway.”

“How could there be a mistake? We saw Mr. Sage yesterday afternoon. The last thing he said was, ‘See you in the morning.’ And then he forgot? He went off somewhere?”

“Perhaps there’s been an emergency. Someone could be dying. Someone wishing to see—”

“But Brendan held back.” Rebecca stopped pacing. Eyes narrowing, she looked thoughtfully at the west wall of the bell tower, as if she could see through it to the vicarage across the street. “I’d gone to the car and he said he’d forgotten one last thing he’d wanted to ask Mr. Sage. He went back. He went inside. I waited for a minute. Two or three. And—” She whirled, began her pacing again. “He wasn’t talking to Mr. Sage at all. It’s that bitch. That witch! And she’s behind this, Mother. You know she is. By God, I’ll get her.”

Cecily found this an interesting twist in the morning’s events. It held out the tantalising promise of diversion. If she had to endure this day somehow in the name of the family and with one eye fixed on her uncle’s will, she decided she might as well do something to enjoy her act of sufferance. So she said, “Who?”

Mrs. Townley-Young said, “Cecily,” in a pleasant but determined-to-discipline voice.

But Cecily’s question had been enough. “Polly Yarkin.” Rebecca said the name through her teeth. “That miserable little sow at the vicarage.”

“Vicar’s housekeeper?” Cecily asked. This was a twist to be explored at length. Another woman already? All things considered, she couldn’t blame poor old Brendan, but she did think he might have set his sights a bit low. She continued the game. “Gosh, what’s she got to do with anything, Becky?”

“Cecily, dear.” Mrs. Townley-Young’s voice had a less pleasant ring.

“She pushes those dugs into every man’s face and just waits for him to react to the sight,” Rebecca said. “And he wants her. He does. He can’t hide it from me.”

“Brendan loves you, darling,” Mrs. Townley-Young said. “He’s marrying you.”

“He had a drink with her at Crofters Inn last week. Just a quick stop before he headed back to Clitheroe, he said. He didn’t even know she’d be there, he said. He couldn’t exactly pretend he didn’t recognise her, he said. It’s a village, after all. He couldn’t act like she was a stranger.”

“Darling, you’re working yourself up over nothing at all.”

“You think he’s in love with the vicar’s housekeeper?” Cecily asked, widening her eyes to wear the guise of naiveté. “But, Becky, then why is he marrying you?”

“Cecily!” her aunt hissed.

“He isn’t marrying me!” Rebecca cried out. “He isn’t marrying anyone! We haven’t got a vicar!”

Beyond them, a hush fell over the church. The organ had stopped playing for a moment, and Rebecca’s words seemed to echo from wall to wall. The organist quickly resumed, choosing “Crown with Love, Lord, This Glad Day.”

“Mercy,” Mrs. Townley-Young breathed.

Sharp footsteps sounded against the stone floor beyond them and a gloved hand shoved the red curtain aside. Rebecca’s father ducked through the gate.

“Nowhere.” He slapped the snow from his coat and shook it from his hat. “Not in the village. Not at the river. Not on the common. Nowhere. I’ll have his job for this.”

His wife reached out to him but didn’t make contact. “St. John, good Lord, what’ll we do? All these people. All that food at the house. And Rebecca’s condi—”

“I know the bloody details. I don’t need reminding.” Townley-Young flipped the curtain to one side and gazed into the church. “We’re going to be the butt of every joke for the next decade.” He looked back at the women, at his daughter particularly. “You got yourself into this, Rebecca, and I damn well ought to let you get yourself out.”

“Daddy!” She said his name as a wail.

“Really, St. John…”

Cecily decided this was the moment to be helpful. Her father would no doubt be rumbling down the aisle to join them at any time — emotional disturbances were a special source of delectation to him — and if that was the case, her own purposes would best be served by demonstrating her ability to be at the forefront of solving a family crisis. He was, after all, still temporising on her request to spend the spring in Crete.

She said, “Perhaps we ought to phone someone, Uncle St. John. There must be another vicar not far.”

“I’ve spoken to the constable,” Townley-Young said.

“But he can’t marry them, St. John,” his wife protested. “We need to get a vicar. We need to have the wedding. The food’s waiting to be eaten. The guests are getting hungry. The—”

“I want Sage,” he said. “I want him here. I want him now. And if I have to drag that low church twit up to the altar myself, I’ll do it.”

“But if he’s been called out somewhere…” Mrs. Townley-Young was clearly trying to sound like the voice of perfect reason.

“He hasn’t. That Yarkin creature caught me up in the village. His bed hadn’t been slept in last night, she said. But his car’s in the garage. So he’s somewhere nearby. And I’ve no doubt at all as to what he’s been up to.”

“The vicar?” Cecily asked, achieving horror while feeling all the delight of an unfolding drama. A shotgun wedding performed by a fornicating vicar, featuring a reluctant bridegroom in love with the vicar’s housekeeper and a frothing bride hellbent on revenge. It was almost worth having to be chief bridesmaid just to be in the know. “No, Uncle St. John. Surely not the vicar. Heavens, what a scandal.”

Her uncle glanced her way sharply. He pointed a finger at her and was beginning to speak when the curtain was drawn to one side once more. They turned as one to see the local constable, his heavy jacket flaked with snow, his tortoiseshell spectacles spotted with moisture. He wasn’t wearing a hat, and his ginger hair wore a cap of white crystals. He shook them off, running a hand back over his head.

“Well?” Townley-Young demanded. “Have you found him, Shepherd?”

“I have,” the other man replied. “But he’s not going to be marrying anyone this morning.”