The Janus Stone

It’s very hot. Too hot. Last night I slept with only a sheet over me and I was covered in sweat by the morning. She came to me again and I was weak. Perhaps my weakness is why this house is cursed, why nothing grows here but dust and ashes. In the morning I sacrificed again and the entrails were rotten, stinking and putrid. I buried them behind the greenhouse where the grass grows long. The time is near. We cannot escape.

CHAPTER 20

Edward Spens lives in Newmarket Road, a busy thoroughfare on the outskirts of Norwich. This is the land of the seriously rich. The houses are huge, set back from the road and surrounded by trees. So many trees, in fact, that the houses themselves are almost hidden until you come to the end of the driveway and they suddenly appear in all their smug, landscaped glory. Nelson drives slowly up to Edward Spens’ house, past a covered swimming pool and a child’s play house that looks as if it must have needed planning permission. Sprinklers play on the perfectly manicured lawn, and as he comes to a halt a gardener hurries past carrying emergency plant supplies. Nelson is pleased to see that his dirty Mercedes distinctly lowers the tone.

He is still feeling shell shocked after yesterday’s revelation. Well, not exactly revelation, more confirmation. How unlucky can a man be? He has a one-night stand and, hey presto, he’s going to be a father again. Other men (he knows this from Cloughie) sleep around all the time with never a whisper of consequences. Why the hell hadn’t he used contraception? Why hadn’t Ruth? His feelings towards Ruth veer crazily between anger, admiration and a sort of heart-clenching compassion. He admires her for her determination to have the baby and is grateful that she doesn’t seem to want anything from him. But he is slightly irritated too. Ruth seems to think that she can just have this baby and bring it up on her own, with the occasional birthday present from him. But he knows, as she doesn’t, that parenthood can be a lonely business. He knows that Michelle struggled sometimes, especially when they moved down south, when he was working long hours and she was alone all day with the kids. Ruth will have no one to turn to, except her Jesus-freak parents and that flaky girlfriend of hers. Maybe Cathbad will offer to babysit. That’s no life for a son of his.

His son. Contrary to popular belief, Nelson has never been desperate for a son. He has always been delighted with his daughters. He likes their otherness, their ability to disappear behind secret feminine rites, he even likes being outnumbered at home; it’s restful somehow (‘It’s a girl thing, Dad. You wouldn’t understand’). A son – now a son brings all sorts of buried emotions to the surface. Nelson was never that close to his father. He was the only boy in the family (he has two older sisters, a pattern that he now sees is going to be repeated) and he realised, early on, that there were expectations attached to the role. Unlike his sisters he wasn’t expected to be good; he was expected to be tough, athletic, embarrassed about emotions, passionate about football. And, by and large, Nelson achieved this. He suppressed an early interest in ponies (which had deeply worried his father) and became a football fanatic, playing for the school, and later the county teams. His father had always been there to watch him, yelling incomprehensible advice from the touch-line despite the fact that he, Nelson’s father, had never actually played the game. He had a withered foot, the result of childhood polio, and walked with a stick. How had this affliction affected his vision of manliness? Was this the reason why he wanted his son to be a sportsman above everything? Nelson never asked him and now it is impossible. His father died when he was fifteen. Archie Nelson never saw his son become a policeman, a career choice which would have delighted him.