The Story of My Face (16 page)

I was watching them. Half-hidden behind the Bryants' caravan, peering around its corner, I could see John Hern, seated on a three-legged stool in a patch of shade at the floor of the steps, while Barbara snipped at his beard with scissors. It was no surprise to see that he was hairy everywhere too. The coarse beard-stuff, mottled grey and ginger, drifted down and away in rough clumps, marooned itself on the towel tied around his neck. Stray hairs drifted beyond the edges of the towel, attached themselves to his bare shoulders and to the neat, sideways-flowing ranks of smaller hairs on the shelf of his belly. When most of it was off, leaving him mottled and grubby-looking, she rubbed a wet brush into a lather. I could see her lips part as she worked at it; she began to smile. She looked quickly up at him, brush in hand, and both of them laughed. He flexed his toes in the grass, tipped his head back and looked up at the treetops and the sky beyond, back down again.

‘Come on!' he said. His lips twitched as the brush approached. She covered his face in foam.

‘Keep still, now. No talking.' She took his jaw in her hands, turned it firmly to one side, adjusted her position. From a starting-point on the soft pad of flesh just in from his left ear, she stroked the razor downwards, following the line of his jaw.

‘Don't move,' she said, ‘ssh –' I was very close. If I stilled my own breathing I could hear the wet rough whisper of the blade, imagine its first bite and the slow slide afterwards.

‘Okay?' she asked. He widened his eyes to indicate yes, and sat there completely still, silent, obedient. Her face was so close to his that he must have felt her breath play on the newly exposed skin. She worked steadily over the big planes, cheeks, neck, and then, with small, carefully angled strokes, the awkward areas around the mouth and chin. She splashed his face with clean water, dabbed it dry, pulled off the towel and shook it. Mr Hern caught Barbara's hand, turned it over, kissed the thin pale skin of her wrist and the inside of her arm.

‘You look like nothing on earth –' she told him, laughing, while all the time he went on kissing her arm–

So I stepped out from my hiding place, and they stopped it. I got a good look at John's new face: it came in two halves, the eyes and forehead as before, the secret curves of its jaw, the plump, blue-white chin freshly exposed. The crescent of flesh around his neck and the bottom third of his arms were already tea-coloured from the sun, and matched the top part of his face. I looked back to Barbara and said:

‘Mark won't talk to me.'

‘But you know he's not talking to anyone,' she said. ‘Why not leave him alone and try someone else? I thought you were with the girls, helping with the food?'

‘Yes, but they don't like me,' I told her.

‘Of course they do –'

‘What are you doing?'

‘We were just holding hands –' she said.

‘I want to talk to you.'

‘Well, that'd be nice. Go back to the food tent, I'll be along in a while to help.'

‘I'd rather do it now, please.'

‘In a little while,' Barbara insisted. ‘Half an hour.' The door to the caravan was open behind them; I could see that their bed hadn't been folded back.

I stood there silently, without moving. I was quite prepared to stand there for ever, so what was the point in fighting me?

‘Are you all right?' she asked. ‘What is it?' I didn't reply.

‘Darling –' she said, ‘I think I had better see what the matter is –' and John watched us walk off between the caravans and tents, my hand in hers where his had been. I led her at a half-run, pulling at her arm, out between our caravan and the Bryants', down through the rest of the field, over a stile and diagonally across the slope beyond, past the flat bit where we had eaten supper the night before, along the stream, over another stile – soon, the campsite was out of view. I had no idea where we were going and only the dimmest feeling of what I might say to justify dragging her along like this. I'm sure she had no sense, either, of what she would find herself telling me, and this – the pair of us out of breath as we run in rough grass and buttercups beside the slow stream – is the last moment before everything changes again.

17

The wooden steps to the
pappila
are slippery with the dew and thaw but the big key turns easily in a lock that must have been oiled not long ago. Light streams through the windows into the hall, over the paired cabinets, across the striped rug. I turn left, into a long room, also very bright, with lined blue-and-white plaid curtains on the three large windows, blue-grey shutters folded back, plain upholstery and plenty of turned wood. It would be a good place for plants and that must be why there are so many small tables and shelves. There's a huge stove close to the hall wall. On the far side of the room, a metre or so of floorboards has been removed, exposing the partly rotten joists and earth sub-floor below. On the right, towards the back of the room, is a locked door.

Using one of the smaller keys, I let myself through it into a dark room which smells ever so faintly of damp. I feel my way to the window, fold back the shutters. The room is painted the inverse of the bigger one, blue-grey walls, the woodwork white. As I hoped, it is the Pastor's office. A huge, dark-wood desk takes up the right-hand wall, a vast, overfull bookcase above some low cupboards is on the left. The books are mainly old and leather-bound, here and there a gathering of newer cloth-bound texts, even the occasional paperback. The chair at the desk, I notice immediately, is a rough copy of the one I saw in Tuomas's Uncle Runar's office at the regional museum – a kind of strutted tub to waist level, padded leather seat, rotating mechanism below, a wheel-like circular support sitting on the floor. Surely, then, it is the one Pastor Tuomas Envall used? I sit in it, test the spin. Even the smallest movement or gesture produces an ominous creak, but no doubt that will be fixed during the restoration. And then a cord will be tied across, to stop people trying it out. . . . I really have arrived in the nick of time.

I turn my attention to the desk, which is so large that I cannot reach the back of it without standing. It is wider than my outstretched arms. At the same time, it is rather low. There is a dark-blue leather rectangle set in the top, behind that, just within reach, a blotter and silver inkwells, empty. There are eight small drawers on one side, three large ones on the other, all of them empty and all, except for the filing drawer, lined with some kind of fine baize-like cloth, dark red, rubbed through here and there, and then covered over at the bottom with sheets of thick, cream blotting paper. Some of the drawers are subdivided into little compartments, some of which have little hinged lids, raised by means of a sunken semicircle of silvery metal. In one of these lidded compartments I find a shiny new paperclip, two perished elastic bands and a drawing pin. Then I realise that there are two extension pieces, tucked under the desktop, which (as if more space were needed!) pull out to make more desk to either side. These extensions are decorated with a panel of the same blue leather that is set into the top of the desk, though it's far brighter and newer, almost untouched. . . .

It's not as if I have set out to find anything in particular here, yet something makes me look again, harder, and I realise that these leather panels or inserts are in fact hinged on one side and fastened along the other with tiny rotating metal clips. I pick them open with a paperclip. Beneath each inset is a shallow, hollow space, just bare wood, unlined. The right one contains a handkerchief and an expanding metal bracelet such as men once used to adjust the length of their shirt-sleeves; the left, a thin, leather-bound notebook, dated, on the fly-leaf, 1899: two years before Tuomas died. My first impulse is to push away from the desk and look almost angrily around the room, where book after book stares back at me, and the air is utterly still. The fact that I've been here ten minutes and have already found something seems somehow too much, almost uncanny. Then, as I begin to examine the little book in detail, everything else recedes.

The writing, small and contained in the main but interrupted with sudden, disproportionate upward and downward strokes, is undoubtedly his. Only a few pages at the beginning are filled. I turn over.

‘The mind-images that rise up,' I read, forcing the clustered consonants into meaning and translating crudely as I go, ‘often at the limits of sleep and waking, are the hardest to judge of, and the hardest to fight with. Oh my Lord, have I not struggled in this respect –'

Again, it's too much. I put the book down for a moment, sit back in the chair. The shadows of twigs outside the window to my left play across the wall in front of me, upon which hang framed biblical texts embroidered in crosses and chain-stitch. After a while, I open the window to let in some fresh air. Then I get out my own notebook, pens, dictionary and begin painstakingly to translate what remains.

‘And yet sometimes when I wake from my shameful dreams,' he continues, ‘it seems to me that the bedroom is less real than what has been taking place in them, and likewise, now, the pen I hold in my hand, the paper I write on, the desk upon which it rests –'

He stops, mid-sentence. Two pages later is another entry. ‘My God, but one yearns,' he writes in the same blue-grey ink that he used for the official registers, ‘how much even at the end of life one yearns to be fully known by another human soul as I believe I am, whether I will it or not, by You, whose knowing sustains and contains me. Yet (and I do sometimes think this), suppose You are not there? Then no one –'

Clearly, this is not an empty desk.

My hands, I notice, have begun to shake. At the same time, I want to cry, but can't because I'm too tense. Telling or discovering a secret, even being in the vicinity of someone else doing one of these things, is never without ramifications. It must always be some kind of beginning, it can shift you with terrifying abruptness from one possibility to another and, in a few swift seconds, change the entire shape of a life for better or for worse. That's why secrets are kept in the first place, and why letting them go is properly a terrifying thing to do, thought about endlessly before it's done.

18

‘Natalie – let's stop here,' she says. Her face is damp with sweat and I suddenly feel burning hot as well. There's a scrubby tree by the edge of the stream, a scrap of shade. We sit down there and I pick at the tightly knotted laces of my plimsolls – once white, now grey, coming apart at the front where they join the soles. Some of the metal eyelets are missing too, leaving the lace to pass through frayed holes.

‘Maybe I can get you a new pair of those?' she says. ‘If they have them in the village, then I will. What is it?'

‘They don't like me here. They call me names.' Tears come to my eyes as I tell her this, though it isn't the name-calling that makes them come – I know how to deal with that – but the idea of the shoes. One thing slides so easily into the next; years later I'll regret that the conversation began like this in bad faith, but right now, it's the most natural thing in the world.

‘Christina Gardner started it.'

‘What did she start?'

‘She called me a sinner.'

‘It's just because you don't go to our services,' she says. ‘I'll talk to her mother.'

‘Am I one?' I ask, not quite giving in to the embrace. ‘I've stolen things,' I tell her, as I prise the shoes off, still laced. I'm warming to my line of enquiry, genuinely curious by now. ‘But I did it because I really needed to.' One of the things I've stolen is that twenty-pound note, sitting in Barbara's purse right now – nothing, you could say, to what I would like to take. But very likely Barbara thinks I just mean sweets. The small four-a-penny sweets in boxes at the side of the shop, flying saucers, liquorice, chews. An occasional wrapped chocolate bar from closer to the till – it's just about possible for her to imagine me doing that, walking home sticky-fingered, sugar-lipped. . . .