A tickle rises in his throat. He coughs. Piers leaps out of the chair, startling them both, and glances around the room. He senses someone there but sees nothing, and reassured, draws a glass of water from the tap, stands staring at the wall. He is thinking of the womblike room on the other side, and the girl, how her presence tortured and delighted, woke him from a dreary sleep and led him to new place. He is sorry they never made love but, at the same time, deeply relieved.
Heartened to know Piers’ thoughts have drifted toward the past, the messenger steps forward. An aura of reverie provides a perfect opening; it will make what he has to say easier. If only Piers would sit down. A hand on the shoulder is always a strong beginning. Words whispered in the ear are credible. Not like the old times, when a burning bush, a thunderbolt would do. These days revelation must travel by stealth.
But Piers does not sit down. He reaches for a small cloth-bound volume on his writing table, and opens it at random. The Courtesan’s Prayer Book, a Christmas gift from Nelly. As soon as she left the house, he had ripped off the wrapping paper and read from beginning to end. He is still mesmerized by her story, by knowing she wrote it under this same roof while he typed for money and let himself be tortured by old demons. He looks at the pages, but he isn’t reading, he is studying the handwriting, a neat feminine script, the style all French girls were taught before the war.
Suddenly, as if he’d heard his name called, he stands up, and sliding the book into his pocket, heads for the door.
Gabriel follows him down the dimly lit hall, their footsteps keeping time. What a picture they make: a tall man wearing a bathrobe and slippers and a tiny hooded creature in a monk’s robe and sandals. At the end of the hall, a room smelling of perfume and the occasional cigarette. Piers turns on the lamp. He has never seen this room before and yet it is painfully familiar, a minute shrine to an intimate life. He sits down on the cot.
Gabriel is standing on the threshold. Their eyes meet. He steps back, ready for the shock of recognition but Piers looks straight through him, as though the intensity of the moment has rendered him blind. The messenger cringes, offers a cracked smile exposing misshapen teeth, a sight he himself could not face in a mirror. But Piers keeps on staring at nothingness until Gabriel is forced to recognize a new truth, yet another sign of how the times have changed, shrunk. I am invisible.
Before he has a chance to digest the news, Piers slips off the cot and onto his knees, a melting motion as if some force other than will has moved him. Reaching under the pillow, he pulls the duvet back on sheets as white as skin that never sees the sun and bends over, sinks into the sheets and inhales, filling his lungs with the scent of her dreams. A second breath, shameless, as if the scent were his to take.
Gabriel leans against the door frame, watching. The shock of invisibility has unhinged him. Reality has never been something he could count on, but this is new. Sadness, envy, confusion and so many other disguised forces well up until his eyes leak acrid juices, and he gives into a human weakness. Later the Lord’s Messenger will tell himself and anyone who wants to know that he wept for a godless time, a time full of gods. It hardly matters. Inflation is as bad as extinction. The truth is, he cried for himself, for his whole redundant tribe left hanging at the end of a millennium. Irony, a curse: the revelation is all his. Angels are futile, so sayeth the man who goes down on his knees in homage to a human conceit. Something to do with procreation, giving rise to taboo and often tears.
Desire.
The spasms Gabriel witnessed in the avocado room, an old woman and this sorry man wrestling with their lust, strange to behold and vaguely violent. Afterwards, the two of them could hardly look each other in the eye, yet everything had changed. Their sense of time, knocked askew. Years, gone. Hope, like a familiar tune hummed unconsciously, no longer a delusion. Since that night they have acted from confidence, acted on their true desires.
Nelly will never admit she was wrong to have turned her attention away from waiting for Roland, that the tragedy of their separation was not all his fault. But she will not run away either.
Piers will never abandon his monkish ways. In a world bereft of mystery, his hunger for the sacred can never be sated. But he will reach out to the childgirl, the product of his desire, love her and let her love him back. His mission, like a river diverted, will find a way: if not a Holy Father, at least an inadvertent saint, a man who leaves a trail of redemption behind him.
What’s left for the messenger to say? The feeling in the lavender room is the feeling he was sent to deliver. The purpose of his message. A state of grace.
Unmindful of the need for silence, he thunders along the freezing hallway, making mental notes for the inevitable report. A task accomplished will surely be commended. So why is he forlorn?
He stops by the avocado room just long enough to help himself to a finger of Scotch and continues on downstairs, out into rue des Griffons. Snow is falling on the streets of Avignon. The old stones are covered with an uncommon air of purity. His footsteps are mute.
— The End —
Acknowledgements
Many many friends were pressed into service during the years I worked on this book. Sincere thanks to all of you, including Mark Czarnecki, Sheila Fischman, Isabel Huggan, Linda Leith, Elise Moser, Mélanie Grondin, Mark Abley, Ian McGillis, Kim McArthur, Pamela Erlichman and no doubt others who are not mentioned. Thank you to my excellent agents Carolyn Forde and Bruce Westwood, the team at McArthur & Co, Devon, Kendra, Kim and the book’s designer Tania Craan. This story would not exist without our friends in Provence, especially Monsieur Bault, Jacques Lagarde, Eliane Grimaud and Nini Albertini, Mohammed, Rana and Rachid. And as always, profound appreciation to my patient husband, Gwyn.
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