The Story of My Face (20 page)

The yellow tractor, which had disappeared, emerges from behind the hedge of a nearby field; amidst the other sounds around her Barbara finds the soft beat of its engine and holds onto it, a thing not words, not even sound, something like touch.

Mark steps forward. His mouth moistens, just as it did when he first spoke in the meeting all those weeks ago. He closes his eyes.

‘This is about the nature of faith,' he tells them, ‘and the ways to it.' His left leg begins to vibrate, an invisible movement that nonetheless shakes the whole of him, even his voice, but he goes on: ‘The disciples are told that they must go far beyond what they ever thought was required of them, and that most importantly of all, they cannot serve two masters at once. No more, of course, can we –'

He's slippery with sweat but his voice is steadying and the words follow each other out of his mouth, eager but orderly enough. More wait inside him. He can feel them jostle each other, trying themselves out. He squints against the light and waits for them to be ready. He looks into the faces that are looking at him. Even though he feels the chapter is relevant to it, he does not want to talk about the Island, but rather about what lies beneath the desire for it.

‘Envall says Faith is a paradox. An inner knowledge of something that cannot be proven except by our knowing of it. Not a knowing about, but a knowing
with
. That's how he puts it in the
Explanations
. The means to faith are also its ends. We are being told here about how to open our hearts –' The words begin to ignore whatever has been in charge of them, to make their own way through Mark, gathering silence about themselves, shaping his throat and lips and the pace of his breathing to suit their own rhythm.

‘Just a whisper, a hair's breadth, separates Faith from its opposite. Remember Saul. From inside it's clear, from outside it's not. Faith is absolute. Utter. Extreme. Demanding. It sets us apart from the ordinary laws and customs of our times. But it is also generous –'

The steady rhythm outside of him which Mark has been half-hearing misses a beat, then stops. He glances to his left and sees the yellow tractor rolling, oddly silent now, down the lane. The words lose direction, scatter. Everyone else is looking too, as the tractor rolls on down past the farmhouse track, spits out something half explosion, half mechanical cough, picks up its rhythm again. It keeps on coming and drives right into the top end of the meeting-field. It comes on down towards them as if it means to run them down, then stops ten feet away from the front row. Harris gets out of one side and I, in my jeans and yellow blouse with John's maroon jumper bundled under my arm, slide down the other.

‘Got lost coming back from Saxby,' Harris shouts over the engine, pushing me forwards. Barbara rushes over, hugs me.

‘Well, there y'are,' says Harris. No one thinks to thank him. He reverses the tractor, sets off up the slope. The smell of diesel lingers, heady, unsettling.

‘Sit down, please, Natalie, Barbara. Go on, Mark.' John gestures as he speaks, pointing where we should go as if he were a lollipop man inviting us to cross a difficult road. Barbara and I ignore him, but his voice is brisk and business-like and, for a few moments, it almost seems as if it might be possible to push on past the interruption, as if it had never happened: the seated congregation wait, to see if Mark can perform this feat for them, pick them up where he left off and take them where they were going, as a pilot or a sea captain might steer his passengers around the blustery edges of a disaster and out into the clear blue beyond. But he is only fourteen. It defeats him; he shakes his head and sits slowly down on the wooden chair behind him, checking first that it is still there.

The entire congregation are looking at me now. I look straight back at all of them and my voice bristles with the pleasure of each extraordinary word.

‘I saw the astronauts walking on the moon!' I tell them. I do know they won't like it, but I say it all the same – ‘I saw it on TV!'

There's a short, intense silence, then voices erupt. Barbara, appearing from nowhere, takes me in her arms.

‘I was planning to be back before you woke up,' I tell her; she bursts into tears. Her own suffering has vanished in the relief she feels, but she'll never forget the sight of Mark, as he sat down on the chair in the field, suddenly becoming a boy again, then a child –

‘I'm sorry –' I mumble as Anderton gets to his feet, grasps the chair in front of him and bellows out above the rest:

‘Why is this child here?‘

‘Because –' Barbara begins but flounders in the sudden silence.

‘Why?' Anderton repeats, his colour deepening.

‘Please – stop this,' says Mrs Thorn, sitting there in her usual smart skirt, her carefully ironed and packed blouse with the two top buttons undone, the exposed skin blotched and damp. ‘Are we or are we not holding Service? Are we going to render unto the Lord what is due to Him, or is this suddenly beyond us?'

Thwaite steps forward then. ‘Service is
postponed
,' he says. ‘If everyone goes away and cools down, if we come back at eleven, say, then, perhaps, we can talk this all through –'

It's agreed. The congregation parts around us as it makes its way back to the other field.

‘I don't want to come back,' I tell Barbara.

‘It'll be all right,' she reassures me, ‘you'll see.'

How does she know? I'm the one who started all this, though I wish I hadn't, and I've no idea how it goes from here.

20

Back at the caravan, I sit almost in the hedge, head in hands, and wait for someone to start shouting. But no one does: Barbara seems almost cheerful. She washes her face and puts on a short-sleeved blouse, big-collared, pink with white buttons, then bustles pointlessly about. Mark just lies on his back on the scuffed patch of ground in front of the caravan, looking up at the sky. At one point he laughs, then he goes back to looking. Mr Hern sits in a deckchair, his eyes closed, frowning.

‘We'll be needing milk,' Barbara announces. Mark sits up.

‘I'll go –'

‘It's my job on the rota,' she tells him. ‘Actually, I want the walk –'

‘What about me?' I say quietly. ‘Can I –'

In the end all four of us set out to get twenty pints for teatime, some sort of expiation, perhaps, for the trouble we've caused. We make our way through the site in a tight group, winding our way around guy ropes and ducking under washing lines, aware all the time of being observed. All of a sudden it feels oddly as if we are something like a family.

‘Getting the milk –' Barbara explains to a small gathering of women filling water-bottles at the gate tap. One of them smiles and nods, but the others look past us. Barbara seems to respond to this by standing straighter, and looking back harder.

In the lane, the dusty scent of the cow parsley is undercut with calm, sweet honeysuckle, and the tall hedges make a deep groove of shade, protecting us from observation and the heat alike. By common consent, we slow our pace.

‘I'm sorry,' I say, experimentally. ‘I am sorry for causing so much trouble.' Am I forgiven? At any rate, it feels quite good to say it like this.

‘Thank you, Natalie,' Barbara replies. ‘I do know you didn't mean it to happen. But I wish you had told us what you wanted to do.'

Supposing I had, though, what would she have done? I don't ask her that, nor of course do I mention the photograph she told me about – everything here is hanging together by the finest, most frayed of threads, breakable with the slightest extra strain. At the same time, no one is acting that way.

‘And I'm sorry, Mark,' I add for good measure, ‘that I spoiled your speech.'

‘Mark –' Barbara prompts gently.

He inclines his head without looking up.

‘It's out of my hands,' he says.

A painted notice tells us to close the gate, a new aluminium one, behind us. There's a distant bickering of chickens, though none are visible and neither can we see the dog barking itself into a frenzy somewhere not far away. The track ground deep by the passage of huge wheels, intermittently cindered, takes us to an open barn with a corrugated roof where the yellow tractor from this morning is parked at a slant. There are several other outhouses, and some long, low sheds. The farmhouse itself is a mixture of old and new, with recently painted blue woodwork. Avoiding the gleaming front door, we follow the concrete flagged path around the side, where a single-storey extension, invisible from the front, projects back onto some levelled ground. It gives onto a large paved area, fenced around with blue-painted picket. There's an empty rotary clothes drier; a row of potted herbs and some tomato plants in grow-bags stand alongside the building. The second of two half-glazed doors is hooked open and music drifts out from somewhere deep inside the house. We knock and peer in at a vast number of egg trays piled up on a large table.

‘While we're here, perhaps we could phone your mother,' Barbara suggests; I tell her I tried yesterday and the phone at home still wasn't working.

Eventually a woman comes to the door, wearing tight jeans and a huge man's shirt, nothing on her feet. She has very blue eyes, pale skin and hair that had been dyed pure black, and cut into a fringed bob. There's a bright gold ring on her wedding finger. She examines us, her expression somewhere between curious and amused, nodding sharply all the while to the relentless four-four beat of the music behind her. Harris is coming shortly, she says. Thirsty weather then? she asks. When Harris lumbers into the kitchen, shadowy and huge, she goes away again. The music gets louder, becomes a frenzy of drumming, and then stops abruptly on a low note.

‘You again!' Harris says, grinning and jabbing at me with his huge finger.

He leads us across a mud-and-straw yard into a stone-built shed. He has bottled milk; most people prefer it nowadays. He opens a fridge door and gestures at the rows of bottles gleaming dully in the light inside.

‘Take it from the top left. Everything all right down there? Got what you need?' Harris sits heavily on an upturned crate, yawns. He has been up since five, cutting hay and finding lost children.

‘It's a lovely site,' Barbara says. Somehow, I can't get her to look at me.

‘So,' Harris says, rubbing his hand swiftly over his palely stubbled jaw, ‘I hear you don't hold with the TV?' John Hern just smiles. He reaches up for the bottles, slipping them two at a time into their compartments.

‘I don't have one either,' Harris continues cheerfully. ‘I'm holding out. Look at the cost of it, and the time it wastes: you lose twice over. I say to Belinda, if you've got spare time, I can think of something a sight better to do! I suppose it's hard on the kids –' He gestures sideways with his head towards where I am sitting on a crate. ‘What do you get out of it, though?'

John puts the two bottles he has been holding down on the dirt floor. He screws his eyes shut for a moment. Harris watches all this, interested.

‘God's Grace,' John finally says, looking directly at Harris, his face open, mobile. ‘Peace. Confidence. Passion.' A sweet, almost childish smile lights up his face, as if the thing he has spoken of is passing through him right now.

The smell of damp stone in the shed is oddly soothing. There's not much to see in the shadowy light: a pile of empty sacks, a hay fork, some stainless-steel dog bowls crusted with left-over food. We look instead at each other. Mark is leaning against the wall, sucking on a piece of straw. Barbara is standing still, her hands relaxed at her side.

‘I don't believe in anything except hard work,' Harris says after a moment or two. He gets up, stretches. ‘I have the hippies down here in August, they come from all over, and that's what they want too, heaven on earth, as they see it, music all day and free love all night, and the drugs, of course. Terrible mess at the end of it – mind you, they pay and they come back every year.'

‘I have some books with me –' John says.

‘I'm not a reader,' Harris tells him. He gets to his feet, offering his huge slab of a hand all round.

Mark and Barbara take one crate, John and I follow with the other, an arrangement dictated by our heights.

‘Can
I
see the books?' I ask John as we leave the farm.

‘Of course,' he says. ‘Of course you can, Natalie.' The crate bangs into the side of my leg; when I try to hold it away, my shoulders hurt.

We walk past the women left in charge of the younger children, who can't be expected to sit the meeting out: Alison, a thin girl from Berwick, who wears a woollen jumper even in the heat, Gail Vickers, Julia Jowett, who is feeding her new baby. Gail's much younger sister Caroline, pregnant, is in the awning of the food tent, her swollen feet in a bowl of tepid water flecked with grass seed. We put some bottles in the cooling bucket at the back of the tent; they nod their thanks, then glance back at each other – clearly we are the subject of their conversation.