The Disappeared (32 page)

At first the girl hardly referred to Stephen, except as some remote and untouchable person, whose life she had through her clumsiness destroyed. But gradually he entered her conversation more frequently and more freely. You explained that she could meet him again, in other circumstances, without the weight of guilt. You even promised to arrange it, suggesting that she might write to him, a letter that could be placed in his hand when he emerges from prison into the barrage of adverse publicity that is sure to greet him.

She responded enigmatically, saying that those letters, they belonged to another time. And she gave that peculiar look of hers – half wistful, half astonished – with which she reminds you that she is still a child. You wrote to him yourself, informing him that Sharon will be living with you. And you suggested a day in the New Year, when he might come to meet you on the stone seat in the recess at the bottom of King's Bench Walk, at 4 o'clock in the afternoon.

Stephen enters Middle Temple lane with short embarrassed shuffles. He is wearing a ravelled overcoat of brown wool, pulled close around the collar. It is a raw January day, and he has eaten nothing since breakfast at the St Martin's Trust Hostel. He has been out for three weeks now. He has not yet visited his mother, whose frantic communications to him in prison he has only once or twice been able to answer, nor has he contacted old friends. He carries Farid Kassab's letter always in his inside pocket against his heart. But still he has not answered it. The Trust provides temporary accommodation for ex-convicts, and specializes in helping those who have, for whatever reason, attracted the hostility of the public. Their hostel seemed to be the only place to go while he made – or postponed – his future plans.

He has a little money. He has a scheme to write a critical study of Nabokov's
Lolita
, a study that will be, in some way that he has yet to make precise, a kind of revenge. And he has another scheme to teach in an English-language school in Turkey. His decision to respond to Laura Markham's request for a meeting was made two months before, when he imagined he would have the strength to confront Sharon Williams and beg forgiveness for the wrong he had inflicted on her. Now he doubts everything. He casts a sideways glance as he enters the lane, expecting to be questioned by a porter and turned away. But no one notices him, and the figures in smart city clothes or legal dress stride past on confident missions that could not possibly take note of a person like him.

He wonders why Laura asked to meet him in this place, symbol of the English law, and of the ease and comfort that comes to those who practise it. The collegiate buildings remind him of Oxford and of all that he has lost since his student days, when he was filled with the love of literature, and hoped for his own place in it. Around him he sees the symbols and pageantry of the law by which he was condemned. The round church of the Templars flags the English law's ancient foundations, and the neo-Georgian buildings, erected after German bombs had smashed the precinct, are symbols of its will to endure. Huddled under grey clouds on a bleak January day, walking across spaces that are ostentatiously private and as though expressly designed to exclude him, Stephen feels again the burden of his social ostracism. The trees are leafless skeletons and the gardens have a cheerless withdrawn appearance, as though they too are avoiding human company. Everything reminds him of the great mistake he once made, which ruined not his own life only, but the life of the one he loved.

And does he still love her? Have his feelings for Sharon survived the humiliations to which he has been subjected on their account, and the daily confrontation with their perceived inappropriateness? Can he honestly say that his last words to her – ‘my darling' – convey the enduring stuff of his emotion, and that they were not called from him by the stress of the moment and the desire that entered his heart then and has remained there ever since, to be utterly and eternally unnoticed and alone?

He focuses those questions on the elegant facades of King's Bench Walk; he raises enquiring eyes to the windows behind which the rows of leather-bound law reports keep steady vigil over bowed heads and twined fingers; he lowers his eyes again when a man in barristers' tabs and gown appears in one of the windows and looks down at him curiously. And his questions remain unanswered, slowly settling within him to join the ever-growing pool of self-doubt that is the centre of his being.

There is only one stone seat in the recess at the bottom of the walk and a young woman is already sitting there. She is elegantly dressed in a full-length woollen coat of powder blue, and with a coral coloured scarf around her neck. Her blond hair is pulled back in a ponytail, and her face, turned down to the book that she holds in her lap, is invisible.

He is struck again by the remarkable character of this woman, who appeared out of nowhere to bring him a message of hope, whose poised and self-confident manner led him to trust her as he had trusted no one since Sharon was taken away from him, and whose elegance and beauty ought to have set her far above the dismal world into which he had fallen, but into which she nevertheless stooped to offer rescue. Perhaps it was another weakness in him, that he saw women in this way, as angels of mercy, and so overlooked their true and self-centred motives. But what selfish motive could there be to offer rescue to someone who had fallen as low as he had?

He approaches her slowly, shaking off the convict's slouch and walking with even and upright posture. With every step his self-doubt increases. Laura belongs to the confident world all around. She is at home with the law, as she is at home with every profession and every success. And if she is sitting here now, picturesquely reading a book in the last light of a January afternoon, it is only to show that professional competence and poetic imagination are wrapped together in her life like a double helix, inseparable strands of her unique and original DNA. And then, of a sudden, she closes the book and looks up in his direction.

‘Sharon!' he says softly.

‘Stephen!'

She smiles and gets to her feet.

‘I was expecting to meet Laura Markham.'

‘She sent me instead, dinna she?'

Still the same Yorkshire accent; but what a different person this is, who takes both his hands and kisses both his cheeks. How smart and tidy she looks, and how direct and confident is her gaze.

‘I was going to write you a letter,' she says, ‘like I used to. But then I thought that's silly, when I could see you.'

‘Sharon!'

She sits him down beside her, no longer the schoolgirl waiting his permission.

‘Laura says you're going to start apologizing for all I've been through and that I'm to stop you because what you did for me was wonderful and you suffered for it horribly because the world is cruel and you're not in no way never to blame.'

She looks at him from the corner of her eye, ascertaining the effect of her words. He says nothing.

‘Been a long time since they took me away from you, Stephen, but I havena changed – towards you, I mean. Well, that inna true totally. I dinna have no crush on you no more. I loves you though.'

Is this a step up or a step down from his point of view? And what
is
his point of view? Teacher? Lover? Penitent? She has taken his hand and is cheerfully talking about her new life with Laura. She is studying A-level English, French, History and Maths in a private sixth-form college, and hopes to go to Oxford in the autumn. Stephen listens with mixed emotions: the mind that he had treasured is beginning to flower, but the light that shines on it and that causes its sweet petals to unfurl is no longer his. His months in prison have cut him off from the most beautiful thing he has known. He nods, says little or nothing, and allows her to control the conversation. It is not long before she raises the difficult topic.

‘It wasna you behaved wrong, Stephen. I wouldna talk about the thing. I was that scared after what they done to me. I had shut off part of myself, and I couldna face you with it. Laura helped me. She has issues too: you wouldna believe, but it happened to her.'

She repeats what she knows of Laura's ordeal at the hands of the Shahin brothers. He listens in astonishment as she tells him of the way in which Laura faced down those who tried to violate her, and how she has since faced down the effects of their attempt.

‘She showed me how to be honest about it. Said I should be honest with you which I couldna be before, because I was so scared and ashamed and because I was only half real. I come back, see, to the home we had, when one of them was going to kill me but let me go. I come back, and the place was broke into and all smashed up. I tidied up as best I could and shut myself in. There was a bit of food around though nothing like we had in the time we were together. And I thought I would wait there till you came or till I died. It was like I was nothing. Like they'd just wiped out everything except the bit I'd kept for you and which was now lost, because I was supposed not to be in touch with you never again. Then Laura found me and everything changed see. She said that what'd happened had happened to
me
, and I was to be truthful about it, and face up to it.'

She turns to him, and her eyes shine with an unprecedented candour. He knows he must accept what she says as the sign of renewal. She owes him nothing, neither loyalty nor love. And if she can remake herself only by ceasing to desire him, that too he must accept. She mentions her Facebook page, which Laura set up for her, and laughs at the silliness of it. But she has been friended by people who have learned of her ordeal, and who offer their support. She is trying to live honestly with her past and hopes that Stephen can accept it for they will be together again one day in one way or another, she is certain of it. She reminds him that she is to be eighteen years old at her next birthday, and if she goes to Oxford she hopes he will visit her there and show her his old college and his favourite haunts.

And then she moves the conversation on again. She relates Yunus's escape, the death of Muhibbah, the disappearance of the Shahin family and of the Polish gang who were in partnership with them. And she comes at last to the trial of Hassan, put down for the first week of February. This time she will say the whole truth in the witness box, and so will Laura, who is so proud of her that Sharon can now do what she must do, what she should have done when it happened over a year ago, and seek justice, not revenge. But she will need Stephen's support, begs him to come to stay up North for the length of the trial. He can stay in the cottage that Laura and Justin now rent, and which they are hoping to buy in the spring when they are getting married.

‘Will you come, Stephen? Say you will!'

Roger Scruton
is a writer and philosopher, author of over forty books including several works of fiction. He has taught in London and Boston universities, and been visiting professor elsewhere in Britain and America, but now lives as a free-lance writer in Malmesbury, Wiltshire. His recent books include
Notes from Underground
(a novel) and
The Soul of the World
. Roger Scruton is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Discover books by Roger Scruton published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/RogerScruton

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This electronic edition published in 2015 by Bloomsbury Reader

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First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Bloomsbury Reader

Copyright © 2015 Roger Scruton

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eISBN: 9781448214990

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