The Healing Place

by Clare Nonhebel

CHAPTER 20

  ‘It’s a beautiful place,’ said Ella.

  The last thing she had expected Franz to do on holiday was to bring her to see a church, albeit a very quaint ancient Celtic building. However, he didn’t show any sign of interest in it, merely standing outside and waiting while she looked round.

  A walk through the pine forest was more predictable. She was happy to walk with him because walking to enjoy the scenery was a good antidote to his restless pacing. He pointed out clumps of snowdrops and ferns and the occasional scampering tiny red squirrel, and she admired everything but was unable to find an answer to the question that kept presenting itself: what are we doing here, exactly?

  She had never known Franz do anything without a purpose. There was no reason, of course, for thinking he was simply relaxing and being a tourist; they were, after all, meant to be on holiday. But it didn’t feel like a holiday, and she didn’t believe it was one. She would wait and see and walk and watch the pine trees sway in the chill wind and enjoy the squirrels and it would become clear, she felt.

  The silence was reassuring, although it signalled an absence of communication between them. It seemed appropriate to leave each other free to communicate with the natural environment and think their own thoughts for a while.

  ‘What’s that tower, ahead?’ Ella asked. It was a question but surely not personal, Ella thought, and Franz seemed all right with it. He smiled.

  ‘It’s a prayer tower – part of the old monastic community. You’ll see the rest of it in a few minutes.’

  ‘Are there monks living there now?

  ‘No, not since the beginning of the thirteenth century, and the interesting bit, further on by the lake, dates back to the sixth century.’

  They wandered round the monastic settlement, Ella making appreciative comments about the buildings and Celtic crosses. Franz showed no sign of impatience but she felt in him an urgency to move on.

  ‘There’s something mystical about this place,’ Ella said.

  ‘If you think this is mystical, wait and see what you think of the next place,’ Franz said.

  ‘What is the next place?’

  One question too many.

  ‘Wait and see,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not waiting,’ she said. ‘The suspense is killing me. Let’s go.’

  ‘Sure you’ve seen enough here?’ But he didn’t wait for her answer and began walking on immediately.

  ‘Am I walking too fast?’ he asked, after a while.

  ‘No.’

  He wasn’t walking too fast for her to keep up with him but it was too fast for someone on holiday whose only agenda was to admire the scenery. Ella noticed him look at his watch a few times. She thought at first it was habit: he was used to scheduling his day from one appointment or task to the next. But after a while she wondered if he had some kind of timetable.

  She had the feeling they were marking time, beautiful though this place was and well worth a trip to Ireland just to visit it. She longed to ask whether they were waiting for something, and if so, what? But she didn’t. Having never been on holiday before with Franz, she had no way of knowing if this restlessness was usual with him when he was off-duty.

  He had switched his phone off, at least. A true workaholic wouldn’t do that. He had taken the decision to switch it on twice a day to pick up messages and in between times it didn’t seem to trouble him. If he was worried about something, Ella didn’t think it was his absence from The Healing Place.

  ‘Round the next corner, you’ll see it,’ Franz told her.

  At first Ella couldn’t see what she was meant to be looking at. There were random huddles of stones like crumbling giant beehives made clumsily from whatever the locality afforded.

  As she stood and looked, though, the place seemed to take shape. It was another community, of a kind: a long-ago ghost village of deserted hovels, each separate and unique, designed to accommodate one person alone – as long as that person was not very big and didn’t want to stretch their legs.

  ‘What is this place? Did people live here as well?’

  ‘It’s a hermitage. One of the monks, Saint Kevin, didn’t find the monastery solitary enough and came out here to live. Then others came.’

  ‘Came and joined him when he wanted to be on his own?’

  ‘No, not in the sense of living as a community, like in the monastery. They came to be on their own too. Alone with God.’

  God. The word sounded strange, coming from Franz’s mouth, Ella thought. She had never, in all the time of his running a foundation for spiritual development, heard him mention the name. Many of the guides did – either God or gods or god-concepts. No one else appeared to have any difficulty with the idea or any aversion to the notion of God, happily adapting it to their own personal image and form and making whatever use of it they wished.

  Ella thought now that, strangely, she had never seen Franz as an atheist. If she had to describe his state of faith or cynicism, the nearest she could come to it would probably be God-allergic.

  ‘Each in their separate way, communing with God, then?’ Ella said. ‘Not coming together to commune with each other. How did they live? What did they eat?’

  ‘A lot of the time they would have fasted, or lived very frugally,’ Franz said. They were walking towards the beehive-homes. None of them was big enough to stand up in. Unless the hermits were leprechaun-sized, thought Ella irreverently.

  ‘And people would have also brought them food,’ Franz added.

  ‘What people?’

  ‘Locals who knew they were here and maybe people from farther afield. People would travel a long way sometimes to go and see a holy man.’

  ‘Like sightseeing or like going to consult an oracle or a guru?’

  ‘Most would come with a personal request, for one of the hermits to pray for them or heal a sickness or ask God’s guidance for some difficult decision in their life.’

  ‘Didn’t people believe in doing their own praying?’

  ‘Sure. But they’d think that a person who gave their whole life up to pray would be closer to God and more in tune with his will for them.’

  Ella was fascinated, not so much by the explanation as by the fact that it was Franz who was giving it. She couldn’t resist the further question.

  ‘Do you think there’s anything in that?’

  No go.

  All expression faded from his face, which had been animated while he was explaining. Ella had the impression that Franz had been seeing the hermits, in his mind’s eye, and that her question had banished them. His eyes were empty now, like the stone caverns. She wished she hadn’t asked.

  ‘Listen,’ she said quickly, ‘I need to go for a pee. I’m going to go behind some rocks and then maybe wander off and explore for a bit. You don’t mind if I leave you alone for a while?’

  His expression relaxed. ‘No, you go on. Take your time; look around by yourself: it’s the best way to get the feel of the place.’

  ‘That’s what I thought.’

  It was unlikely she’d be disturbed, crouching behind a rock, screened anyway by her discreetly long skirt. The place was amazingly devoid of tourists for such an incredible beauty spot. Even in February, when grey evening started to roll in from early afternoon, she would have expected more people to be around.

  It gave her a feeling of being close to nature, peeing outdoors. It was something she hadn’t done since she was a child. She guessed at the feeling of freedom the hermits would have had, the sense of timelessness here, with ordinary clock-time and calendar-time merging seamlessly into eternity.

  I wonder what it would be like to live like this. Bloody freezing, her practical nature and cold ankles told her. She stood up, shaking out her skirt, and began walking up a path leading away from the hermitage and away from Franz. She wondered how long he would need to be left alone.

  She climbed to the top of a hill. The path was too densely bordered with trees to allow much of a view but t
he sense of being in a high place made her feel exhilarated. There was a lot to be said for getting high up above the daily world, she thought. Mystics and religious people had always climbed high tors and mountains, partly to be alone and escape the crowds in the populated valleys, she supposed, and partly to get a sense of perspective.

  Our first hill walk, Ella told the baby. Hope you’re enjoying it.

  The air was crisp, so clear she could almost taste it. The light was starting to dim already, as if the day was exhausted by so much beauty and needed to tone it down and hide itself, gathering its glory for tomorrow’s unveiling.

  Ella felt on the edge of exhaustion too, though curiously refreshed at the same time, as though the scenery and new experience had taken something out of her but only something she needed to lose.

  I won’t be able to go at this pace in a few more months, she realized, launching into a swinging stride down the hill, jumping from rock to rock in the muddy parts, hearing her boots crunch on the fine shale near the bottom of the slope. She slowed down as she came out of the trees into the clearing, looking for Franz, wanting to gauge his readiness for company or continuing need for solitude.

  She didn’t see him at first. He was almost perfectly camouflaged, in his dark grey fleece, against the hunched outlines of hermit homes.

  He could have been a hermit. Ella almost laughed out loud at the thought. Franz, with his constant calls on his mobile phone, his never being still for five minutes, his ceaseless thinking and planning, his focus on work – a hermit, living in silence, alone?

  But he does, she thought. In a sense, his total focus on whatever he’s doing or whoever he’s with does come from that aloneness within himself, that silence. Living with him as she did, she should know better than anyone that Franz was always alone.

  She sat down on a rock, unnoticed, and watched him. He sat motionless, his gaze fixed on the far horizon, for an hour. She didn’t mean to time him but it was the maximum period she had set in her mind for being tactful and leaving him to his reverie. Beyond that, she knew, she couldn’t stand the cold.

  Reluctantly, because he looked so at home in his surroundings, she approached him, scuffing up pebbles to give him advance warning. Still, he only shifted his focus at the last moment.

  ‘Hi,’ she said, perching on the rock beside him.

  ‘Oh, hi. Did you have a nice walk?’

  ‘Fine. You?’

  ‘Oh. I just sat for a while.’

  Two hours at least since I left him, and he thinks he’s only been here a little while?

  ‘Are you cold?’ she asked him.

  He looked surprised. ‘I don’t think so. Are you?’

  ‘Frozen. I need the walk back to the car, to thaw out!’