A Great Deliverance - By Elizabeth George Page 0,132
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
"wicked-ness' - 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-Gillylike as possible. That way, her father wouldn't want her sexually."
"But it didn't work."
"Unfortunately, no. He merely turned to perversions to arouse himself, making her part of it. That would feed his need for power."
"I feel as if I'd like to tear Teys apart," Lynley said.
"I feel that way all the time," the doctor responded.
"How could anyone...I don't understand it."
"It's a deviant behaviour, a sickness. Teys was aroused by children. His marriage to a sixteen-year-old girl - not a voluptuous, womanly sixteen-year-old, but a late-maturing sixteen-year-old - would have been a glaring sign to anyone looking for aberrant behaviour. But he was able to mask it well with his devotion to religion and his persona of the strong, loving father. That's so typical, Inspector Lynley. I can't tell you how typical it is."
"And no one ever knew? I can't believe it."
"If you consider the situation, it's easy to believe. Teys projected a very successful image in his community. At the same time, his daughters were tricked into self-blame and secrecy.
Gillian believed she had been responsible for her mother's desertion of her father and was making reparation for that by, in Teys's words, "being a mummy' to him. Roberta believed that Gillian had pleased her father and that she was supposed to do the same.
And both of them, of course, were taught from the Bible - Teys's careful selection of passages and his twisted interpretations of them - that what they were doing was not only right but written by the hand of God as their duty as his daughters."
"It makes me sick."
"It is sick. He was sick. Consider his sickness: He chose a child to be his bride. That was safe. He was threatened by the adult world and in the person of this sixteen-year-old girl, he saw someone who could arouse him with her childlike body and, at the same time, gratify his need for the self-respect that a marriage would give him."
"Then why did he turn to his children?"
"When Tessa - this childlike bride of his - produced a baby, Teys had frightening and irrefutable evidence that the creature who had been arousing him and upon whose body he had taken such gratification was not a child at all, but a woman. And he was threatened by women, I should guess, the feminine representation of the entire adult world that he feared."
"She said he stopped sleeping with her."
"I've no doubt of that. If he had slept with her and failed to perform, imagine his humiliation. Why risk that kind of failure when there in his house was a helpless infant from whom he could get immense pleasure and satisfaction?"
Lynley felt his throat close. "Infant? " he asked. "Do you mean..."
Dr. Samuels took the measure of Lynley's reaction and nodded in sad recognition of an outrage he himself had felt for many years. "I should think that the abuse of Gillian began in infancy. She remembers the first incident when she was four or five, but Teys was unlikely to have waited that long unless his religion was providing him with self-control for those years. It's possible."
His religion. Each piece was falling into place more tidily than the last, but as each did, Lynley felt an anger that needed free rein. He controlled it with an effort. "She'll stand trial."
"Eventually. Roberta's going to recover. She'll be found competent to stand trial." The doctor turned in his chair to watch the group in the garden. "But you know as well as I, Inspector, that no jury in the world is going to convict her of anything when the truth is told. So perhaps we can believe that there will be a form of justice after all."
The trees that towered above St. Catherine's Church cast long shadows on the exterior of the building so