A Great Deliverance (42 page)

“Bobby died. Bobby died.”

“Don’t say that! You’re alive. Don’t let him kill you now!”

Roberta shrank back, freeing herself fiercely. “Papa never kill, Papa never kill, Papa never kill!” Her voice grew high with panic.

The psychiatrist leaned forward in his chair. “Kill what, Roberta?” he asked quickly, and pressed the advantage. “What did Papa never kill?”

“Baby. Papa didn’t kill the baby.”

“What did he do?”

“Found me in the barn. Cried and prayed and cried.”

“Is that where you had the baby? In the barn?”

“No one knew. Fat and ugly. No one knew.”

Gillian’s eyes were transfixed in horror, not on her sister’s face, but on the psychiatrist. She rocked on her heels, a hand at her mouth, biting down on her fingers as if to keep from screaming. “You were pregnant? Bobby! He didn’t know you were pregnant?”

“No one knew. Not like Gilly. Fat and ugly. No one knew.”

“What happened to the baby?”

“Bobby died.”

“What happened to the baby?”

“Bobby died.”

“What happened to the baby!” Gillian’s voice rose to a scream.

“Did you kill the baby, Roberta?” Dr. Samuels asked.

Nothing. She began to rock. It was a rapid movement, as if she were hurtling back into madness.

Gillian watched her, watched the panic that drove her and the unassailable armour of psychosis that protected her. And she knew. “Papa killed the baby,” she asserted numbly. “He found you in the barn, he cried and prayed, read the Bible for guidance, and then he killed the baby.” She touched her sister’s hair. “What did he do with it?”

“Don’t know.”

“Did you ever see it?”

“Never saw the baby. Boy or girl. Don’t know.”

“Is that why you didn’t come to Harrogate? Were you pregnant then?”

The rocking slowed to a stop. It was affirmation.

“Baby died. Bobby died. It didn’t matter.
Papa sorry, pretty baby. Papa never hurt again. Pretty baby march for Papa. Papa never hurt again
.”

“He didn’t have intercourse with you again, Roberta?” Dr. Samuels asked. “But everything else stayed the same?”

“Pretty baby march for Papa
.”

“Did you march for Papa, Roberta?” the doctor continued. “After the baby, did you march for him?”

“Marched for Papa. Had to march.”

“Why? Why did you have to?”

She looked about furtively, an odd smile of twisted satisfaction dancing on her face. And then began to rock. “Papa happy.”

“It was important that Papa be happy,” Dr. Samuels said reflectively.

“Yes, yes.
Very
happy. Happy Papa won’t touch …” She cut the words off. The rocking increased in intensity.

“No, Bobby,” Gillian said. “Don’t you leave. You mustn’t leave now. You marched for Papa to keep him happy so that he wouldn’t touch someone. Who?”

In the darkened observation room, the terrible realisation cut like a sword’s swath down Lynley’s spine. The knowledge had been there before him all along. A nine-year-old girl being schooled in the Bible, being read the Old Testament, learning the lessons of Lot’s daughters.

“
Bridie
!” he said savagely and understood everything at last. He could have told the rest of the story himself, but he listened instead to the purgation of a tortured soul.

“Papa wanted Gilly not a cow like Roberta.”

“Your father wanted a child, didn’t he?” Dr. Samuels asked. “He needed a child’s body to arouse him. Like Gillian’s. Like your mother’s.”

“Found a child.”

“And what happened?”

Roberta pressed her cracked lips together as if to stop herself from speaking. The corners of her mouth were spotted with blood. She gave a ragged cry and a flurry of words escaped as if of their own volition. “The Pharaoh put a chain on his neck and dressed him in fine linen and he ruled over Egypt and Joseph’s brothers came to see him and Joseph said I am supposed to save your lives by a great deliverance.”

Gillian spoke through her tears. “The Bible told you what to do, just as it always told Papa.”

“Dress in linens. Wear a chain.”

“What happened?”

“Got him in the barn.”

“How did you do that?” Dr. Samuelss voice was low.

Roberta’s face quivered. Her eyes filled with tears. They began to spill down her acne-covered cheeks. “Tried twice. Didn’t work. Then … Whiskers,” she replied.

“You killed Whiskers to get your father to the barn?” the doctor asked.

“Whiskers didn’t know. Gave him pills. Papa’s pills. He was asleep. Cut … cut his throat. Called for Papa. Papa ran. Knelt by Whiskers.” She began to rock furiously, cradling her bloated body, accompanying the movement with low, tuneless humming. She was in retreat.

“And then, Roberta?” the psychiatrist asked. “You can take the last step, can’t you? With Gillian here?”

Rocking. Rocking. Savage and furious. Blindly determined. Her eyes on the wall. “Love Papa. Love Papa. Don’t remember.
Don’t remember
.”

“Of course you remember.” The psychiatrist’s voice was gentle but relentless. “The Bible told you what to do. If you hadn’t done it, your father would have done to that little girl all the things he had done to you and Gillian through the years. He would have molested her. He would have sodomised her. He would have raped her. But you stopped him, Roberta. You saved that child. You dressed in fine linens. You put on the gold chain. You killed the dog. You called your father to the barn. He ran in, didn’t he? He knelt down and—”

Roberta jumped off her chair. It flew across the room, striking the cabinet, and she went after it, moving like the wind. She picked it up, hurled it against the wall, dumped over the cabinet, and began to scream.

“I chopped off his head! He knelt down. He bent to pick up Whiskers. And I chopped off his head! I don’t care that I did it! I wanted him to die! I wouldn’t let him touch Bridie! He wanted to. He read to her just like he’d done to me. He talked to her just like he’d done to me. He was going to do it! I knew the signs! I killed him! I killed him and I don’t care! I’m not sorry! He deserved to die!” Slumping to the floor, she wept into her hands, large grey doughlike hands that covered her face, but pinched and brutalised it even as they protected. “I saw his head on the floor. And I didn’t care. And the rat came out of nowhere. And he sniffed at the blood. And he ate at the brains and I didn’t
care
!”

With a strangled cry, Sergeant Havers leapt to her feet and staggered from the room.

Barbara crashed into the lavatory, fell blindly into a stall, and began to vomit. The room swam round her. She was so ragingly hot that she was sure she would faint, but she continued, instead, to vomit. And as she retched—painfully, spasmodically—she knew that what was spewing forth from her body was the turbid mass of her own despair.

She clung to the smooth porcelain bowl, fought for breath to redeem her, and vomited. It was as if she had never seen life clearly until the last two hours and, suddenly faced with its filth, she had to get away from it, had to get it out of her system.

In that dark, stifling room the voices had come to her relentlessly. Not just the voices of the sisters who had lived the nightmare, but the voices of her own past and of the nightmare that remained. It was too much. She could no longer live with it; she could no longer bear it.

I can’t, she sobbed inwardly. Tony, I can’t any longer! God forgive me, but I can’t!

Footsteps entered the room. She struggled to pull herself together but the illness continued and she knew she would have to endure the further humiliation of being mortally ill in front of the fashionable competence of Lady Helen Clyde.

Water was turned on. More footsteps. The stall door opened and a damp cloth was pressed to the back of her neck, folded quickly, and then wiped across her burning cheeks.

“Please. No! Go away!” She was sick again and, what was even more despicable, she began to cry. “I can’t!” she wept. “I can’t! Please.
Please
! Leave me alone!”

A cool hand pushed her hair off her face and supported her forehead. “Life’s rotten, Barb. And the hell of it is that it doesn’t get much better,” Lynley’s voice said.

Horrified, she spun around. But it was Lynley, and in his eyes the compassion she had seen before: in his treatment of Roberta, in his conversation with Bridie, in his questioning of Tessa. And she suddenly saw what it was that Webberly had known she could learn from Lynley—the source of his strength, the centre of what she knew quite well was tremendous personal courage. It was that quiet compassion, nothing else, that finally broke her.

“How could he?” she sobbed. “If it’s your child … you’re supposed to love, not hurt. Not let him die. Never let him die! And that’s what they did!” Her voice spiralled hysterically and all the time Lynley’s dark eyes were on her face. “I hate … I can’t … They were opposed to
be
there for him. He was their son! They were supposed to love him and they didn’t. He was sick for four years, the last year in hospital. They wouldn’t even go to see him! They said they couldn’t bear it, that it hurt too much. But I went. I went every day. And he asked for them. He asked why Mum and Dad wouldn’t come to see him. And I lied. I went every day and I lied. And when he died, he was all alone. I was in school. I didn’t get there in time. He was my little brother! He was only ten years old! And all of us—
all
of us—let him die alone.”

“I’m so sorry,” Lynley said.

“I swore that I would
never
let them forget what they’d done. I asked his teachers for the letters. I framed the death certificate. I made the shrine. I kept them in the house. I closed the doors and the windows. And every
single
day I made sure they had to sit there and stare at Tony. I drove them mad! I
wanted
to do it! I destroyed them. I destroyed myself!”

She put her head down on the porcelain and wept. She wept for the hate that had filled her life, for the guilt and the jealousy that had been her companions, for the loneliness that she had brought upon herself, for the contempt and disgust that she had directed towards others.

At the last, when Lynley wordlessly took her into his arms, she wept against his chest, mourning most of all the death of the friendship that could have lived between them.

Through the transom windows in Dr. Samuelss orderly office, they could see the rose garden. It was designed in plots and descending terraces, the plants segregated by colour of flower and type. A few bushes still had blooms on them, despite the lateness of the year, the cold nights, the rare frost in the mornings. Soon, however, the heavy blossoms would die. Gardeners would cut the bushes back for a dormant winter. But they would renew themselves in the spring, and the circle of life would continue.

They watched the little party wander on the gravel paths among the plants. They were a study in contrasts: Gillian and her sister, Lady Helen and Sergeant Havers, and far behind them the two nurses, their forms hidden beneath the long capes they wore against the wind-blown afternoon.

Lynley turned from the sight and saw Dr. Samuels watching him thoughtfully from behind his desk, his intelligent face carefully devoid of expression.

“You knew she’d had a baby,” Lynley said. “From her admission physical, I should guess.”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t trust you,” Samuels replied and added, “then. Whatever fragile bond I could hope to develop with Roberta by keeping that to myself was far more important than sharing the information with you and running the risk of your blurting it out to her.” He tempered his words. “It was, after all, privileged information.”

“What’s going to happen to them?” Lynley asked.

“They’re going to survive.”

“How can you know that?”

“They’re beginning to understand that they were his victims. That’s the first step.” Samuels took off his spectacles and polished them on the interior of his jacket. His lean face was tired. He had heard it all before.

“I don’t understand how they survived this long;”

“They coped.”

“How?”

The doctor gave a final glance to his spectacles and put them back on. He adjusted their position carefully. He’d worn them for years, and deep, painful indentations had been created on either side of his nose from their pressure. “For Gillian it appears to have been what we call dissociation, a way of subdividing the self so that she could pretend to have or be those things which she couldn’t really have or couldn’t really be.”

“Such as?”

“Normal feelings, for one. Normal relationships for another. She called it being a mirror, just reflecting the behaviour of those round her. It’s a defence. It protected her from feeling anything about what was happening to her.”

“How?”

“She wasn’t a ‘real person,’ so nothing her father did could really touch or hurt her.”

“Everyone in the village describes her in an entirely different way.”

“Yes. That’s the behaviour. Gillian simply mirrored them. Taking it to its furthest extreme, it becomes multiple personalities, but she seems to have prevented that from occurring. In itself, that’s remarkable, considering what she went through.”

“What about Roberta?”

The psychiatrist frowned. “She didn’t cope as well as Gillian,” he admitted.

Lynley gave a last glance out the window and returned to his seat, a worn upholstered chair: resting place, no doubt, for hundreds of tormented psyches. “Is that why she ate?”

“As a way of escaping? No, I don’t think so. I’d say it was more an act of self-destruction.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The abused child feels he or she has done something wrong and is being punished for it. Roberta may well have eaten because the abuse led her to despise herself—her ‘wickedness’—and destroying her body was a scourging. That’s one explanation.” The doctor hesitated.

“And the other?”

“Hard to say. It could be that she tried to stop the abuse the only way she knew how. Short of suicide, what better way than to destroy her body, to make herself as un-Gilly-like as possible. That way, her father wouldn’t want her sexually.”