The Story of My Face (24 page)

‘See?' I told him; I never mentioned love. ‘My shoes and trousers are over there on the beach,' I told him, adding that I was hungry. He went to find the clothes. He had been wrong about the tide, which was going out, and now suddenly there were more people, spreading out towards us from the clusters on the bays to either side.

At first he couldn't see the trousers and shoes. Then when he had found them, he began searching the sand for the image I'd made with my finger, but it had vanished. Children's voices shrieked above the splash of the waves as he ran back to the cliff, and worked his way methodically along it. I was sitting up on the grass, with my blouse on, waiting.

‘We can get up to the top just over there,' I told him. ‘We've got to hurry up. Your Mum'll be killing herself.'

His face fell. For the first time since we had left the camp, he must have been remembering who he was, and what he was a part of. The implications, the consequences of what he had done would have ranked themselves ahead of him like the impossible mountains of a new country, far too vast to take in, let alone approach. But one thing was clear enough:

‘She mustn't know. No one must know,' he told me as we set off, scrambling up the gap in the red dirt of the banking, half running, hand in hand, over the cliff-top scrub towards the field and the road.

By the time we reached the village, I was limping. I took my shoes off but my foot still hurt.

‘What on earth will we do?' he asked. I had no idea.

Mark banged on the door of the shop and explained to a balding man woken from his afternoon sleep how we had walked too far and everyone would be expecting us by now. Did he sell sticking plasters? We would have to come back and pay for them tomorrow – ‘That your sister?' the man asked.

‘Yes,' he said. The man called his wife, the one I'd bought the Tizer from.

‘They're from Harris's camp,' she said. ‘The religious lot, the –' She looked to Mark: ‘What are you?'

‘Envallists.'

She fetched some sticking plaster, from her own box, she said, adding that Mark was not doing a very good job of looking after his sister. I slipped the flip-flops back on and stood up. It didn't make any difference and I'd never been so tired in my life.

Wasn't there, I asked, anyone in the village who might just happen to be driving towards Harris's farm?

Why would they be doing that? the woman said. She certainly wasn't getting the van out. It was early closing. She and her husband worked every hour of the week, and nowadays they had to get up for the newspapers on Sunday too. But she wouldn't be called uncharitable; there was an old pair of plimsolls in the shed, too big but better than nothing. We could take those and a pair of socks as well if it helped, and that way we would learn from the experience to prepare ourselves better next time – what was our mother thinking of, letting us out with nothing to eat and wearing such shoes? Didn't our God have something to say about that kind of thing?

We set off again. Mark said that perhaps he could carry me on his back some of the way. I could see that it was as shocking for him to hear himself say this as it had been earlier on to agree that I was his sister. But then, after all, we had seen each other without our clothes, he had touched me all over and felt my hands on him, we had done the thing we didn't have a proper word for, so we were connected by our shared secret and by our desire to get back quickly. On top of that there was the difficulty of the journey itself and somehow it was so awful it was almost funny.

‘It is a real pity,' he told me, absurdly, reaching for my hand, ‘that you didn't come to Elojoki. It's so much better there!'

25

It was mid-afternoon. There was no shade. The congregation shifted in their chairs, fanned themselves with scraps of paper, books, hats; they poured water on their handkerchiefs and wiped their faces, hands, the backs of their necks.

‘Anthony Thwaite – you want to remake us all to suit your own circumstances. You are prepared to take everyone else down the path of your own temptation –' Anderton, speaking, gripped the chair in front of him, leaned into it. Damp patches spread from his armpits across his shirtfront, almost meeting in the middle. His face, raw-red, ran with sweat. He wiped it with his wife's tiny handkerchief, returned the handkerchief to her, looked up and around:

‘And you –' his voice, rough at the edges, exhausted with its own passion, accused Jean McAllister of obeying the Lord's commandments until now only because it was ‘not inconvenient'. He pushed the words out, like something painfully but necessarily regurgitated, burning his throat as they emerged. ‘Now,' he said, ‘you discover that it might entail some sacrifice, and you want it
reconsidered
. . . .' The heat seemed to make Jean whiter, more intense.

‘No,' she told him. ‘I want it reconsidered because I love my son –' and so Christina's mother Josie joined in: she'd brought up six, so if anyone knew what it was to love a child, then she – ‘Not this one –' Jean told her, and then Elsbeth Anderton reminded everyone that it was God's love that mattered – Jean jabbed her finger towards Anderton. ‘Let's say I go into town and have a photograph made, because the law requires it and then I –' ‘
Look at it!
' Anderton interrupted. Yes, she agreed. She was bound to
see
it, but that didn't mean she would – Here, Barbara leaned in close to John. Her hand was still held tightly in his, damp, almost numb; she put the other hand on top, whispered to him with her lips almost touching his ear: ‘I see what Jean means – do you, darling?'
Suppose
, she was hoping against hope,
he changes his mind? And then –

‘Not see,
look
–' Anderton corrected Jean. ‘Slip it in a drawer where you can look at it again. And then think it's harmless and start to want to see other such things:
An image is
a door for the devil to climb through!
How many do we want to give him?' Some cheered at this.

And did any of this matter to Ian himself? Christina's mother was asking when the noise died down. Surely he'd be loved and appreciated by the congregation, whether or not he went to study in Helsinki?

Jean shouted: ‘Ask him! Go on!' and pointed up the field to where Ian was lying, half-way between the meeting and the food tent, on his back, kicking one leg rhythmically into the air. Then she sat down, rested her head on the back of the empty chair in front while her husband rubbed the heel of his hand slowly up and down her back.

Barbara turned back from watching this to John, who was sitting with his head bowed and eyes closed, the thinking position: she pulled her hand free, had to stop herself from shaking him, from shouting out, ‘How can you not see –?' And there was Elsbeth again, talking about the differences between human and divine love, how there were times when earthly love must be put aside, for example –

‘Everyone here,' she told them, the faintest flush coming to her damp cheeks, ‘everyone knows how we had to lose our daughter –

' Barbara, after years of forbearance and trying to think the best, could stand it no more; she was on her feet before she knew it, shouting:

‘You didn't have to lose her! You didn't deserve to have her in the first place! And why did you have to send Natalie away? Why?'

It was obvious that Elsbeth was going to burst into tears, but in the moment of absolute silence that came before she did so, everyone realised, more or less at the same time, that Paul Leverson had arrived. There he was, sitting on the gate to the field, watching and listening. How long had he been there? His blond hair, short at the sides, longer and curled on top, glinted in the sun as he slipped down from the gate and made his way towards the meeting. His loose white shirt was unbuttoned at the neck and his beige trousers, gathered around his waist in a narrow belt, were creased down the front of the legs.

‘Leverson!' Anthony Thwaite embraced him, so did John and others. Soon, he was lost in the crowd. An empty chair was brought forward from the back and put, with no discussion, next to Thwaite's. Julia Jowett carried over a jug of cool orange squash, poured him a glass.

Leverson didn't sit down, but set the cup of juice on the seat of the chair, and stood with one hand on its back. ‘Who is this Natalie, then?' he asked.

‘A child –' Jean said.

‘A non-believer –' said Elsbeth, ‘brought here by Barbara Hern –'

‘She did apologise –' Barbara insisted to no one in particular, sitting down.

‘More importantly, it's a matter,' Anthony Thwaite tried to explain, ‘of Letter and Spirit –

' Leverson raised a hand for silence. ‘Brothers and sisters,' he said, once everyone had stopped talking, ‘this is Babel. We must forget the enemy outside and search ourselves inside, each one of us, for what is within –' It was as if he had been brought to them (no one had heard the car), untouched by the journey, from some other, cooler country. The congregation settled again in their places. Their skins had been dissolved, their brains boiled, but already they felt cooler, and waited, calmer, hopeful, while Leverson organised his thoughts.

‘Who is without sin?' Leverson began. ‘A sin confessed is forgiven and transcended, but an unshriven sin lodges itself inside. Our unshriven sins are stones – to be carried by the sinner alone until the moment of confession. . . . Stones, carried inside our bodies or strapped onto them, day and night. They bend us over, they twist us this way or that way, hurting, they force us to distort ourselves in order to support and accommodate them. They bow our heads, they press against our tissues and organs; carrying them takes up more and more attention as time passes. And the longer the sin remains within, the more effort we must make in order to bear the self-imposed burden and to keep it secret. And even if we act in every other way rightly, day after day, we will still not be able, in our hearts, to find God and to know what He requires of us – we are already, you could say, in Hell. . . . Yet, if only we can remember or be reminded, all that we have to do is to drop our burdens, to admit them, and, from that moment, we can begin to stand straight and see clearly again, and feel ourselves no longer alone. Surely, brothers and sisters, it is a congregation of such people that now, more than ever, we need to be?'

And at this point, Paul Leverson paused, and let his eyes – famous for their ability to glitter and burn, to melt, soothe, challenge – pass slowly over each and every person there. ‘Each one of you,' he said, using his softest, most sympathetic voice, ‘knows what he or she is carrying. Each one of you is probably thinking of it at this very moment. . . . Speak –'

Barbara's heart thudded steadily in her chest. Her skin pricked, as she forced herself to meet his gaze. Part of her rushed, like the blood to her cheeks, desperate to do what he asked. But all the same, she found it quite possible to resist, and when Leverson prompted, ‘Sister?' she kept her face blank, and looked right back at him. ‘Brother?' she heard him ask someone else. Then, blinking back tears, she took John's hand and gently stroked the bone-ridged back of it with her thumb.

26

Harris and Belinda's bedroom window gives a good view of both fields. It's the best room in the house. Belinda has taken up the carpet and varnished the floorboards, then bought rugs and hung them on the walls.

‘They've been there
all day
. Is that
earth
on the table? What a life! Do you think they screw much?' she asks. It always turns Harris on to hear her use coarse words in her careful southern voice – girls' boarding-school, half a degree in Sociology, then, on the last bit of parental goodwill, the Slade – all of it left behind, for him. A mutual risk, of course, but right from the start he'd seen how it could work. She has her press in the old scullery, dries the work on chicken-wire trays; he gets the prints framed up and sent away to London. Money comes back.