The Story of My Face (19 page)

They followed his mother up the hill. He brought up the rear.

‘Natalie, Natalie!' she was calling, using different intonations and stresses and expressions. She was by turns imperious, pleading, seductive, matter-of-fact – as if it were just a matter of saying the name in the right way: ‘Natalie . . . Natalie! Natalie! –'

They cast their torch beams around them, picking out in sudden detail hedges and standing cattle, a clump of trees, a drinking-trough and salt-lick. Beyond these things, the darkness grew darker, expanded.

It could still be a dream, he thought. But the chill of a predawn breeze pushed its way between his hastily fastened clothes and his skin, and the insides of his boots were gritty and damp. He wished he had put socks on.

‘Is she homesick?' asked Elsbeth Anderton. Her voice was small, especially compared to her husband's chesty rumble, but she strained it to its limits, coming hoarsely and urgently out of silence without preamble, snatching her place in the conversation.

‘She's happy to be with us. And anyway, wouldn't she wait until morning? She must know that we wouldn't stop her, that we'd – She wouldn't
just leave
–' Barbara resumed her calling: ‘Natalie! Natalie!'

In the thin starlight they could see only the broad low shapes of the land, the distinction between it and the sky. Solitary strands of early birdsong gathered briefly together in clusters, then fell shyly silent. Small winds shifted through the crops and trees, expired, renewed themselves elsewhere.

Mark switched off his torch. The rubber-covered button resisted the pressure of his thumb, then did the job silently, without seeming to. He looked down at the land below, feeling the landscape with his eyes. The longer he looked, the more detail he could see. The well-spaced caravans and tents, the huge marquee glimmered in the darkness like some strange geological formation. He made out the large tree towards the bottom of the meeting-field. Beyond, at the far side of the valley, he could make out the scattered houses of a village. There were lights on in some of them.

‘Perhaps she went into someone else's van,' said one of the twins.

‘What do you mean?' Elsbeth snapped.

‘I don't know –' Pete or his brother said. ‘Well, it is something that happens, you know.' One of the huddle of cows pressed against the far fence lowed; the twins burst into laughter, then stifled it.

Mark's father caught up with Barbara and brought her gently back to the rest.

‘There's no point in just wandering about,' he said. Mark sat down on a large stone a few feet away from the rest of them. He remembered how only hours ago Natalie had followed him from task to task, grabbing his arm. ‘Talk to me, Mark, now go on. . . .' It had been sweet to be able, at last, to deny her. In the past months he had so often wished, hopelessly, that she would disappear. But now it had happened he wanted her to be found. It was not right that she should escape from him, from all of them, like this, leaving them standing roughly dressed in a field at night, not finishing whatever it is that she'd begun with them. And he didn't really believe that she had gone, or would go. From the strength of that disbelief came the notion that if he allowed it, the knowledge of where she was would come running to him, like an eager dog. But what then? What would or should he do?

‘Suppose we divide it up,' his father was saying. ‘Suppose the twins go along the river and you two go on up the path, and Mark –'

‘John,' Elsbeth interrupted, ‘there's no point. We've got to phone the police. That's what you do when someone is missing. They will know better what to do than we do.' There was a brief, shocked silence.

‘But Elsbeth,' Mark heard his mother say, her throat constricted, all the earlier authority vanishing from her voice, ‘I don't know her mother very well. I'd hate her to be unnecessarily alarmed. To have a policeman turn up on the door – if it's going to turn out to be all right in the end – well, surely you see?'

‘But
is
it going to turn out all right in the end?' Elsbeth asked. Her torch was still on; she shone it straight in Barbara's face, blinding her briefly, then gestured with it, spilling the light over chests and hands, suddenly singling out a shoe. ‘If something
has
happened to her, we'd only reproach ourselves –'

‘Stop that, please,' she said to the twins, who were kicking in turns at the same stone.

‘The police,' Anderton pointed out, ‘may have found her already –' The party stood for a moment in horrified silence, considering the full range of meanings contained in that one possibility: Natalie, wearing John's maroon hand-knitted jumper three times her size, picked up in the course of some prank or other and sitting now in the police station at Filey, drinking strong, sweet tea while they worked out where she had come from. Natalie, still at the police station, calmly explaining that she has taken up with a group of religious fanatics, regrets it and wants to be sent home. Natalie, still in the police station, shivering, mud-stained, minus the sweater, huddled speechless in a blanket. . . .Natalie, lying under a bush or by the roadside or in a stretcher or on a hospital bed, with a policeman standing by. . . .

Mark looked out across the darkness to the other side of the valley, and knew in his bones that none of these things was true. They were phantoms, mere possibilities which Natalie cast around herself like a shield. . . . But he couldn't tell the others this, stop them panicking, because of his silence. The silence, ostensibly for spiritual preparation, was at least as much a protection against Natalie. So far it had worked, but now –

What should I do? He asked God.

‘If we're agreed,' his father began, addressing the Andertons, ‘Barbara and I will go now and check the site one last time. If she's not there, then we'll telephone from the farm –' Barbara, too tall to lean on her husband, stood next to him like some abandoned building, he, arm around her waist, the buttress.

‘I'm so sorry –' she said, abjectly, and a pulse pushed through Mark, locked his shoulders and chest tight. Yes: it
is
all your fault, he thought, but it's even worse that you apologise for yourself like this, to Elsbeth Anderton, for the
wrong thing
.

‘We'll have to postpone Service, won't we?' Elsbeth said. ‘Such a shame for you, Mark, I know, and for all of us, of course. We must let everyone know what's going on. Simon and I can do that –'

‘Actually,' Mark said, ‘I know where she is –' and the huddle of faces turned to look at him. ‘Well, not exactly, but there's nothing to worry about. She'll have gone where she can see the moonwalk on television, won't she?'

‘Of course!' his mother re-materialised, neither commanding nor terrified now, but simply herself. She looked round at the others, as if expecting to see the pleasure that she felt on their faces too. But Elsbeth's forehead was in furrows, her pale eyebrows tense and prominent.

‘Would she do a thing like that?'

‘She just doesn't quite understand, yet.'

‘It's only a guess. You should still call –'

‘I'm sure Mark is right.' Barbara's tone was almost insolent.

‘If she's found, she should be sent home,' said Anderton. ‘This is no place for someone committed to sin.'

‘Exactly,' Elsbeth said.

‘But –'

‘It can all be discussed later on, in the proper place,' Mark's father said, as they set off back towards the site. Around them, fields and trees emerged minute by minute from degrees of darkness into a textured monotone, faintly washed with colour. They could see mud on their clothes. The skin around their eyes felt tight.

‘I'm sure Mark is right,'
Pete Anderton said at the last gate, in an exaggeratedly feminine gush.

‘You spoke,' his brother Tim told Mark.

‘Yes,' said Peter, ‘you most certainly did.' Mark shrugged his shoulders, opened his hands, forgave them.

Back at the caravan Barbara began to fill the kettle from the outside water bottle, then abandoned the task and pulled Mark tightly to her, water gurgling wastefully onto the grass:

‘I've only just realised. Your silence. Thank you so much, darling.'

‘Didn't I warn you, right from the start?' he muttered into her shoulder. The usual traces of soapiness had gone from her scent; she smelled salty, rather like his own skin. He pushed her away and set off for the meeting field.

Now, Mark has carried all the chairs to the meeting-field. The dew has burned away and he's sweating hard. He takes his shirt off and hangs it on an elder twig next to the wind-cheater he put there earlier. A breeze carries the smell of toast or frying bacon from the site. He can hear some children's voices and the clatter of cutlery from beyond the hedge.

He decides on a position close to the west of the field for the table, so that the congregation will not have the sun in their eyes, and then returns to arrange the assorted picnic and deck chairs in concentric curves to face it, with some milk-crates at the front for the children. Then he goes back again to the site to get a spade, for it's obvious now that on the day of the Moon Walk the object of contemplation must be earth, a shovel full of a rich, slightly pinkish soil taken from the very field they would all be sitting in. The ground is dry and hard to dig, but by going deep he gets a neat slab, stones, roots, grubs and all. The table is ready and he stands with his back to it, looking out.

It's a good place. The colours of the fabrics of the chairs – plain, broadly striped, canvas or plastic weave, even the whites and faded colours – sing out against the rich green of the grass, as vividly as the yellow cowslips and purple clover that dot the untrampled area higher up. Mark's limbs ache pleasantly from hard work; his sweat stings satisfyingly somehow, in the tiny bramble scratches on his arms. He screws his eyes closed, lets the red light behind them fill his head so that the last traces of school, the remainder of the holidays, the entire rest of his life, cricket, the new bicycle he's intending to build, drop clear away from him. . . . He is following a path that leads to the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth in the Here and Now, given by God out of Love as explained in the Bible, then reinterpreted and properly explained by Tuomas Envall. . . . He breathes in slowly and carefully, making himself ready.

When the call comes for Service, Barbara is talking to Mrs Thorn by the food tent, so she has to sit at the end of the eight brown-haired Gardners, on the edge of the third row, whilst John is right at the front.

Facing them all, Mark stands with the sun on his face and the book ready on the lectern. He stands straight and firm, a huge child now, almost a man, but Barbara cannot keep looking at him nor at the pile of earth on the wooden table, nor at the candles burning invisibly in their glasses, because Natalie still has not returned. Her eyes search the distance, then fix themselves on parts of it, on some rooks pecking at the ground further up the hill, or the way the heat shimmers at the horizon, or on the yellow tractor slowly coming down the side of a distant field. The tractor sometimes disappears or stops at a gate. It is just a blob of colour but very bright, shining out; she looks at the way the sun strikes the yellow paint, and the way the shadow behind makes it brighter still, and part of her wishes to be on it, or in the aeroplane that has passed unnoticed but has left a white trail in the sky, in some other life but this one –

Her thoughts circle uselessly around the same few matters, in the hope of avoiding those things that are worse to think about, round and round like the small reddish flies that seem to be attracted to her, to her alone, that collect above her head as if there was something about her that they know: that she has not consulted enough and has brought a complete unbeliever with her, a strange girl, to whom she has told a secret that no one else knows, which she has never confessed and even now, will not, cannot stand up and speak of, even though the silence yearns for her to do so. That sometimes it seems as if she loves the strange girl more than she loves her own son; that she has dragged the Andertons out of their beds in the middle of the night to look for this girl who has still not returned –

It's better by far to think of the hundred cutlets, sixty meat and forty nut, not to be cooked in the same pan, but all at once on different stoves, how they must be ready at near enough the same time; the salad already washed and wrapped in cloths, the bread just needing to be cut and buttered, and of course everyone will help with carrying the plates and so on –

Her pulse runs away with her and the sun's on the back of her head and neck. The silence expands, it's as if she has been cast into it, some terrible boundless space with nothing in it at all, except the feeling of fear that fills her up –

Then her son stands, begins to read the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew chapter 6 – the whole chapter, as has been agreed. He's reading well, slow and loud. He has practised; the words, in any case familiar, come without his needing to look down: ‘But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal –'

These words are not for her. . . . Or else they are there for her in particular: ‘For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also –'

Her ears reject the words just as her eyes did the trestle table and the pile of dirt on it, just as her whole body did the Silence. ‘The light of the body is the eye. . . .' One of the ginger-brown flies, red-eyed, repulsive, settles on her arm and she forces herself to watch it rub its legs. She watches and wills it to go away, because if it does go, she tells herself, everything will be all right. It goes. Everything is not all right. The fly settles again, she brushes it off, another comes –

‘If thine eye be evil,' Mark reads out, ‘thy whole body shall –'
My whole body
, she thinks,
is full of darkness
. She sees the back of her husband's head and his shoulders, often tight with the unarticulated efforts of living, but now relaxed. His hands will be in his lap, his eyes closed over, the jaw she shaved for him still bright white against the tan of the rest of his face, loose. He is not with her, but with the text: ‘No man can serve two masters. . . .' Can a woman? The Lord is there in times of trouble, John always says to her, He will draw you out of the waters; everything passes, listen and He will tell you – ‘Heaven and earth shall pass away but my words shall not pass away.' That was what he said to her when she wept and wept and wished she could cry herself to nothing, to die of it. He held her tight, but that was what he
said
. No miracle, no resurrection, no ‘she is not dead but sleepeth', no ‘for with God, nothing shall be impossible.' And now the other girl gone – and it is her fault. She should have known. If she'd thought of it she could have said something –