The Story of My Face (9 page)

Broad-shouldered Mr Gardner and the Gardner boys have thin, straw-coloured hair, crew-cut by the barber now and then, home-trimmed in between. The three Gardner girls, Christina, Mary and Eva, wear theirs in single thick plaits, as does their mother, Josie, though hers is considerably less neat than theirs. Mostly, the girls and women have plaits. Susannah East and her mother are unusual in their chestnut-brown curls; Mr East and Mr Thorn almost identical in their cropped salt-and-pepper bristle, thinning on top.

In the middle row, Tim Anderton and his twin brother Peter, about Mark's age. They'd be indistinguishable, but for the fact that Tim wears his hair cut very close, whereas Peter's grows down further, turns up where it touches his collar. They have an older sister, Fay, who abandoned observance as soon as she got to university and refused to attend church (her parents and the grandparents who live with them were to blame, some people say, for being over-strict about things like skirt lengths and shoes). Fay's hair, Mark remembers, was long, bright blonde; it fell over her face when she leaned forwards, individual strands attaching themselves not just to the shoulders of her own jumpers in winter-time, but also to those of whoever sat next to her. Later on, you'd find those shed hairs clinging to you, shining out against the dark cloth. Her mother, Elsbeth Anderton, wears her hair loose, as her daughter used to – perhaps still does – kept from her face with slides, but it's not blonde now, if it ever was. She is tiny, unhealthy-looking, with a sallow skin and over-bright eyes.

Next to her, in a pencil-thin pony-tail is poor Susan Cameron, who began to lose her hair in patches when her husband left a year or so back. He simply did not return one night from work. Months later, adding insult to injury, he sent a postcard from New York –

The silence is thicker than ever, like a liquid about to freeze. The delphiniums burn in their vases. Pollen falls on the table. And suddenly, Mark sees in his mind's eye an island. A mountain, fields, sheep, cows, houses – all clustered around the harbour. Glittering sea, wheeling gulls. The words arrive in his head, like writing, voice and music all at the same time:

‘We will buy an island, and live on it,'
the voice, half his, half not, says.
‘We will build an Envallist church from blocks of stone. It
will be in the windiest, most exposed part of the Island, on a headland
or a spit or a cliff looking out over the sea. It will be a thick-walled
room like this one, with a stone-tiled roof and plain-glass windows
giving views of the sea and sky. My father and I will make the seats
and the altar. Next to the church will be a bell-tower, the way it is in
Elojoki. . . .'

He hears the ringing sound of a bell, rushed to his ear then snatched away by the wind. The congregation will walk to the church over the fields and through the gardens. . . . The people in this room, the Gardners, the Johnsons, the Lattens, the Teals, the Thorns themselves, he sees them walking towards him, as clearly as he has just seen the backs of their heads, as if they were all of them already there.

Then a small movement catches his eye: one of the delphinium florets has fallen onto the white cloth. He looks down into his lap, feels his skin tighten with fear.

He knows that what he has just experienced could be a
vision
, like those of Ezekiel, or Isaiah, even that of John. Sometimes, he reminds himself, as with Mary's husband Joseph, a vision can take the form of a simple statement of fact or an injunction, or at other times, as with Jacob's ladder, it can be an Unspeakable Aspect of God symbolically revealed, or then again it can be a prediction of the future expressed obliquely. . . . In scripture, even the dreams of non-believers are sometimes vehicles for God's word and will, even when the dreamer himself doesn't understand or can't remember them –

It could be a vision. On the other hand, what he has just experienced could be a self-induced piece of
mental imagery
, the very worst kind of temptation, which means that the devil is within him.

He closes his eyes and tries his hardest, but even though he grows tense with the effort of wanting it, he can't make the Island come back. Maybe this is a good sign, because if it
is
the kind of man-made image that can be dwelled upon, falsely venerated and so on, then it would come from inside him, and so surely he would be in control of when it appeared?

He looks up again. There are the backs of heads in front of him, there is the blue of the delphiniums – a concentrated royal-blue inkiness, an iridescence that verges on purple towards the centres of the individual flowers.

Mr Thorn glances at the clock.

Someone should speak!
Mark thinks. Then saliva floods his mouth and he swallows it down. His heart bangs in his chest.
No
– he thinks,
please
– and Mr Thorn's eyes, moving from face to face, meet his. His mouth fills up again and, as if pushed, he stands.

‘I believe we should find an island and buy it, then live there, all of us,' he says aloud. ‘I have seen a vision of this in my head. We need our own place, away from the world of Imitations. So we can live right, yet still remain open –' The congregation turns to look at him. Suddenly they are all there – the faces implied by the backs of heads, their many pairs of eyes all angled so as to touch his face. They want him to continue. But as suddenly as the words have come to him, they pass, leaving him with a dry mouth and shaking legs. He grasps the back of the chair in front of him, then, keeping his eyes fixed on Mr Thorn's as a drowning swimmer might hold a rope, he sits slowly down. His father embraces him, grasps the back of his head and pulls it down close to his own.

After the reading, they all go outside to sit on the recently mowed grass, eat squares of communion bread and then the Sunday meal. The older people have chairs brought for them, the rest sit on the ground. A warm breeze lifts the edges of the cloths and rugs, the women's skirts. More of the blue delphiniums are growing in a packed border against the barn wall. Edith Thorn, neat in her ironed Sunday blouse, reaches her hand over and rests it on top of Mark's.

‘You've spoken what is in many hearts,' she says, smiling. ‘We shall talk of these things a great deal in the Summer Congregation. What you have to say will be very important indeed.'

It has been more or less decided, she explains, that because so many are unable to renew their passports they will hold the Summer Congregation near Hunmanby on the East Coast. Arrangements are being made with a landowner to use several of his fields for a week. Privacy is guaranteed, a water supply, chemical toilets, rubbish clearance. The price is reasonable. . . . ‘Are you feeling all right?' she asks, touching his forehead gently. ‘Why not lie down?'

He follows her back into the house and upstairs into a shady room, allows her to bring him a glass of water. Certainly, he thinks, sipping it and watching the curtain being gently sucked in and out of the window,
something
has happened to him. He recalls the story of Tuomas Envall, holding the hands of the dying man. Of course, it was not so great a thing as that, but perhaps it was an experience of the same kind – ‘a kind of white heat that does not burn.'

‘At least,' Barbara says on the way home that afternoon, ‘there won't be that ferry journey to deal with. I've never liked it much. And another thing – everyone will speak the same language, which is surely a good thing.'

‘You seem almost pleased,' Mark tells her, his judgement of her clear in his voice. Although his earlier intensity of emotion has gone, it has left behind a kind of strengthening residue.

‘I'm just making the best of things, darling.' She has clipped sunshades onto her glasses; her arm trails outside the car window, catching at the tips of comfrey and vetch in the narrow lanes.

That evening, while he's in the kitchen and his parents sit over the remains of supper, he distinctly hears her tell his father that she would like to invite Natalie to the Summer Congregation.

‘The red-haired girl?'

‘She's an only child.'

The gaps between these remarks seem long, and the connections between them weak, as if the real communication was taking place some other way.

‘Has she shown any interest?'

‘She does so like to be with us –'

After another long pause, his father asks, lightly, ‘What about her parents?' The wrong question, Mark feels. He goes back into the room; they've moved their chairs closer and are holding hands on the table, both hands, fingers interleaved. His father gives Mark an odd, almost sheepish smile.

‘Don't,' Mark tells them. ‘Don't ask her.' They stare at him.

‘She'll spoil things,' he announces with all the authority of having earlier spoken in Service ‘what was in many people's hearts'. He addresses his father, banishing Barbara to a dim presence at the edge of his frame of vision: ‘She'll drive us apart –' he announces, and feels as he says it as if the girl is on the verge of materialising in the gathering darkness and any minute will be in the room with them again, looking around, greedily taking it all in for some incomprehensible purpose of her own –

‘I've no idea why he's like this,' Barbara says. ‘Maybe he's jealous.' With her thumb, she makes tiny stroking movements on the back of her husband's hand.

‘I'm not – I just know,' he tells them. ‘She's beginning to do it already –'

Barbara interrupts: ‘Is this another vision?' she asks.

‘Shouldn't we welcome a stranger who seeks us out? Christ Himself turned no one away. Didn't He say –'

‘Please –' Mark's voice gets lost in his throat, emerges thin and high as if whatever made the proper sound had slipped out of place. Both parents smile, then stop themselves. ‘She wants something. She'll just take it.'

‘What might that something be?' his father asks. ‘Could it be the
Lord's Grace
?'

‘Whatever it is,' Barbara says, ‘even if it's just some company, can't we just give it to her?'

John disentangles his hands, clasps them together. He closes his eyes, pulling the pale lids down like blinds, so as to hear more clearly the inner voice. Mark has no choice but to look hard at his mother, pushing hopelessly at her for some kind of acknowledgement of her duplicity, for a last-minute withdrawal. It's hopeless. He's appalled, but not surprised to hear his father eventually say:

‘It must depend, of course, on what her parents think. So long as she enters into the spirit. . . . Well, we do have four berths, after all –' He reaches for his wife's hands again, looks up to her face, watching and unconsciously copying with his own smaller, redder lips, the smile that's growing there.

The next morning a letter adressed to ‘Mrs S. Baron' nestles in Barbara's best, cream-coloured handbag. Her face is smooth and plump, as if she's slept particularly well. Her green skirt and matching short-sleeved blouse are home-made as ever, but smart. She hums to herself as she lets the blue gate swing closed behind her and sets off briskly down the Avenue. The May blossom and ceanothus are finished and the last of the flowers lie in faded pink and blue drifts on the pavements and grass verges. Laburnums are out now, and peonies.

Few flowers grow in the estate. No. 88 is a flat-fronted, pebble-dashed semi with the Council's maroon paint peeling from the front door. From the other side of the road she watches a stringy, bullet-headed man hack at the tangle of brambles and columbine which spills over the front fence and reaches higher than the ground floor windowsills. His efforts are vigorous but have little effect on the sheer bulk and tangle of vegetation. As she watches, he throws his shears down and begins pulling at the bushes with his gloved hands. The down of thistles and dandelion clocks clots the air. Barbara crosses the road, stands by the fence.

‘Excuse me – are you Mr Baron?' She repeats herself several times before he notices.

‘No –' He faces her, sweating hard, hands fisted, the creases of his face black with dust. ‘Not to my knowing!' He adds, ‘I'm just the gardener, me.' At this, he makes an explosive noise in his throat, halfway between laughter and a cough. His forearms are scratched and bleeding, his eyes still bright with effort, angry, she guesses, with the bushes for taking more out of him than they should.

‘You've got your work cut out!' she tells him. ‘This
is
where Mrs Baron lives, isn't it?' The tattoo of a snake, she realises, is winding its way around and around the man's upper arm. She glimpses the head – socketed eyes, jaws agape, red mouth, split-whip tongue, and blinks, returns her eyes to his face; a flush comes to her own, takes hold, spreads. Anything can bring it on –

The man stares at her, grins. She can't look away, in case she sees the image of the snake again.

‘I'm looking for Mrs Baron,' she persists. ‘Is she in?'

‘Not so far as I know,' he says.

‘If you don't mind, I'll just make sure.'

Stepping over stray lengths of bramble, she makes her way up onto the shallow porch. The windows of the house are opaque with dust. On a wire shelf beneath the panel of grimy frosted glass next to the door is a row of milk bottles, rimmed with algae. There's neither bell nor knocker, so she bangs on the door with her hand. Then she pushes her letter through the slot in the door.

‘Thank you,' she says. The man watches her all the way back to the gate.

‘Thank
you
,' he repeats softly as she closes it.

She feels him looking at her still as she retraces her steps, back across the road, up the slight incline, out of his sight, past more pairs of the same kind of house, finally, out of the estate. . . .

The Barons, she tells herself, must have quite recently moved to the house from elsewhere. They're obviously struggling. Mrs Baron works peculiar hours, and her mother, or one of their mothers at any rate, is ill. But they are doing their best, trying to tackle the place. . . . It'll help them out to have the child off their hands for a week or so.