The Patron Saint of Lost Souls

by Menna Van Praag

  Every year, for the past twenty years, Jude’s hoped that she’ll be drawn to her very own talisman, the very special thing that will bring her happiness, that will give her direction, that will save her life. Of course, it never happens. Every year she’s left standing, looking around forlornly, empty-handed. So, every year, Jude’s hope dwindles and, for the last few years, as she’s started seeing her fiftieth birthday looming on the advancing horizon, Jude has only enacted the little ritual as part of a punitive regime – for unspecified sins – a reminder that, for some utterly unfair reason, she’ll never have the life she longs for. Not that she even really knows what that life would be.

  Now the next Christmas Eve looms, but Jude can still postpone the inevitable disappointment for another six weeks. For now, she can content herself with cleaning dust off her antiques, polishing the wood and shining up the brass, silver, gold and glass before the eager early Christmas shoppers descend upon Gatsby’s. For now, she’ll enjoy the fresh morning hours, the oasis of calm before the gathering storm clouds of consumerism burst open and blow through her little shop.

  Jude is on her hands and knees, rubbing beeswax into the legs of a particularly beautiful ornate Edwardian writing desk, when she hears someone push at the door and step inside. Annoyed – Gatsby’s isn’t usually the first port of call for the Christmas shoppers, they usually descend in their desperate rush after exhausting the traditional shops – Jude glances up. Upon catching sight of the customer, she nearly drops her cloth, but just manages to keep her grip on it and scramble to her feet.

  ‘Hello,’ Jude says. ‘Are you looking for anything specific? Can I help you? I’m here if you need anything. Just ask, I’m at your …’

  Jude isn’t a talker. She rarely speaks with her customers – even her favourites – bar a few carefully chosen words. Now she can’t seem to shut up. Why on earth can’t she control herself? It’s him. She’s never seen him before. But, at the same time, it feels as if she knows him more intimately than anyone else, which, Jude has to admit, wouldn’t actually be very difficult, given the total absence of intimates in her life.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ he says. He’s tall, quite thin, with dark red hair. A week’s worth of russet stubble covers his cheeks, his brown eyes are bloodshot with sleeplessness. ‘I don’t really know, I just found myself …’

  Jude conceals her smile. She’d known immediately that he wasn’t a Christmas shopper, but not only that, he is her very favourite kind of shopper: the uncertain sort.

  She hides the cloth behind her back and smooths down her skirt – not that there is much point. She looks dowdy and drab anyway. Why does she never bother dressing well or wearing make-up? She might as well have a dishcloth tied round her head. And yet, even then, Jude still feels – looking into his dark eyes – that there is possibility, there is hope. She doesn’t know why she feels this way – she’s certainly never felt this way before – but she does. There is something in the air between them, a sense of connection, a spark. Is she simply imagining it? No, surely she can’t be.

  ‘Well, why don’t you have a look around,’ Jude suggests, taking a step back towards the counter. She smiles, patting down her hair. ‘We’ve got so much here, it might take you a while. And I’m always … if you need anything.’

  Her customer nods, still looking a little disorientated and bemused. Jude slips behind the counter, both to give him space and to hide behind a helpful antiques magazine so she can better watch him while he finds his own talisman.

  What is it he’s looking for? Jude wonders. She hopes it’s love and she hopes he hasn’t found it yet. Perhaps it’s something else altogether but, whatever it is, Jude longs to be by his side while he finds it. He’s a lost soul, that much is clear, and she can help him. And, for once, for the very first time, she can be given something in return. Would that be too much to ask? A little love as the small amount of interest paid on a lifetime of selfless acts. Couldn’t she have that as her Christmas wish? Please. Please, pleeease … But to whom is she praying? God? Father Christmas? And what’s the point of that, since she doesn’t believe in either.

  Jude watches the stranger as he gazes around the shop, taking in the chaotic, eclectic collection of charms that surround him. She can see the sense of overwhelm flood his face, waves of fear and desire collide and crash together on his cheeks until, finally, he finds the courage to step forward and begin investigating the objects closest to his fingertips.

  As he carefully picks up a solid-silver hand mirror, slowly turning it over and over, tracing the swirls of roses engraved across the handle, Jude imagines him holding her in the same way: gently unwrapping the drab clothes from her body, caressing the lumps and bumps of her blurry body as if it’s the most beautiful object he’s ever touched. When he presses a palm to the back of a Victorian chauffeuse, Jude feels him putting his hand just beneath her shoulder blades, a gesture of comfort, reassurance. And then he turns and stops. Jude leans forward, trying to get a glimpse of what he’s seen. But, as he bends over and clasps his fingers around the object, Jude can’t see, not until he places it on the glass counter.

  It’s a small china doll with a painted smile and a shock of frizzy blonde hair. Love. He must be looking for love. And Jude has blonde hair. It’s dead straight, not remotely frizzy, but still. She reaches out so he can place the doll carefully in the centre of her open hand. Slowly, showing the same reverence he did when choosing his talisman, Jude begins to wrap the doll in dark-blue tissue paper. He withdraws his wallet from the back pocket of his trousers. Jude takes her time folding the paper.

  And then – because she can’t bear him to walk out, to leave, to possibly never return, without her knowing anything about him at all, without at least trying to put herself in the picture – Jude does what she never does: she asks him the question.

  ‘So, um, what is …’ Jude nods towards the little doll, just as she tucks the tissue paper over the little china face. ‘What is it you want?’

  She glances up and catches his eye. His face breaks open into a smile and Jude feels the hope rise up again in her chest. She smiles back, tentative, shy, suggestive.

  ‘It’s for my … wife,’ he says. ‘We’re … we’re trying for a baby.’

  ‘Oh. Right. I see.’

  Jude tries to nod, tries to feign a smile, but finds that she can’t.

  Chapter Eight

  Viola misses her father every day. But lately she misses him more than usual. She wishes he was here for the competition. Holding herself up to his exacting standards would ensure that she stood a good chance of winning. Viola does her very best to set the bar high for herself, but she knows that, at least sometimes, her stamina fails her. She’d always done terrifically well at school, but then she’d had her father’s expectations to sustain her, to buoy and lift her efforts. If Viola achieved eighty-four per cent in an exam, Jack Styring would ask what happened to the other sixteen per cent. He would praise her effort but remind her that she could always do better. Together, they’d go over the exam paper, analysing the questions, assessing Viola’s answers, to see where she’d slipped.

  As a child and teenager, it was her greatest wish to one day, just once, achieve one hundred per cent in an exam. She would often fantasise about this scenario before she fell asleep, wondering just what it might be like. What would her father say when faced with an achievement that couldn’t be bettered? Would he just praise her? Would they analyse the exam together and gloat over all her perfect answers? How glorious that would be. Viola could only imagine as, sadly, it had never happened. She’d come very close once, achieving ninety-seven per cent in her history A level. Even more frustratingly than that, she very nearly achieved the highest mark in the whole of England (something that surely would have impressed, even if she’d failed to reach the illusive one hundred per cent) but another studious child had beaten Viola to it by a single per cent. So, Viola had come second. This had been enough to get her picture in the local paper and a com
mendation from the headmaster, but it had always rankled Viola. If only, she would think, if only she’d tried a little harder, done a little better, she would have done something near-perfect, something truly worthy of praise; she would have been the best.

  ‘Why don’t you take a break? You’ve worked hard enough today.’

  Viola looks up from her peach and rosemary tarte Tatin at her mother sitting at the kitchen counter.

  ‘I’ve just got to finish this,’ Viola says. ‘And the choux buns, and then I just need to ice the little cakes and—’

  ‘Oh, Vi.’ Daisy Styring sighs. ‘I don’t know why you go to such efforts. I’m sure you’ll get the job – you don’t need to work so ridiculously hard.’

  Viola bends to pull a tray of puff pastry buns from the oven. ‘Never underestimate the competition,’ she says. ‘It’s fatal.’

  Her mother rolls her eyes. ‘I don’t know why you put yourself under so much pressure. You could get a job in one of the colleges, you’d probably get paid more and you’d have so many perks and wouldn’t have to strive so—’

  ‘Oh, Mum’ – Viola slides the buns onto a cooling rack – ‘you don’t understand, you’ve got no idea. I don’t just want to cook, I want to create something superb, something truly unique, something nobody else—’

  ‘I understand perfectly,’ Daisy says. ‘You’re just like your father. Never happy, never satisfied with …’

  Viola frowns at her mother. ‘With what?’

  ‘With just being normal.’

  Viola flinches. ‘That’s not the point. I just want to do the best I can do. That’s how it should be, that’s the way of the world. Everything evolves: animals, humans, cultures. Otherwise, what’s the point of being alive?’

  ‘Now you sound so much like your father it’s unnerving.’

  Viola reaches for the flour. ‘Is that such a bad thing?’

  Her mother sips her tea. ‘It depends. I loved your father, I did. But it wasn’t easy living with a man for whom nothing was ever good enough.’

  ‘I don’t remember him like that.’

  ‘You wouldn’t,’ Daisy says. ‘You were his precious little girl, the one who could mould according to his own impeccable standards. I was his wife, the one who could never meet those standards.’

  Viola puts down her sieve. ‘But he loved you too, didn’t he? I mean …’

  ‘Yes, but love is very different depending on who’s doing the loving. It’s not all unadulterated adoration, chocolates and flowers, more’s the pity.’ Daisy sighs, then eyes her daughter. ‘Speaking of which, how’s your love life?’

  Viola picks up her sieve again and applies herself to the important business of aerating the flour.

  ‘Well?’

  Viola doesn’t look up.

  ‘Yes,’ Daisy says. ‘Just what I thought.’

  ‘So?’ Viola says. ‘How’s your love life? You’ve hardly been living it up since Dad died. You haven’t remarried. You haven’t been burning up the dating scene. So, you can hardly lecture me on the virtues of promiscuity.’

  Her mother huffs in turn, setting down her teacup with a clatter. ‘I’ll have you know, I met a rather nice man at the cinema on Monday.’

  Now Viola eyes Daisy. ‘What were you watching?’

  ‘You’re so suspicious. It was an afternoon showing of Annie Hall. His name was Bernie. We passed a perfectly pleasant ten minutes waiting in the queue to buy tickets.’

  ‘Ooh, racy.’

  ‘He was a perfect gentleman.’

  ‘So, when are you seeing him again?’

  Daisy returns her attention to her teacup. ‘We didn’t set up anything specific. But I’ll probably run into him again at the next Silver Screen,’ she says. ‘And perhaps I’ll invite him to share a sandwich for lunch afterwards. We’ll see.’

  ‘That’s why I don’t get involved with all that,’ Viola says. ‘It’s a total minefield of disappointment and despair. It’s not worth it.’

  Daisy sighs. ‘What a ridiculous thing to say. If everyone had your attitude, what kind of state would the world be in?’

  ‘A much better state than it’s in now,’ Viola says, returning to her flour.

  Chapter Nine

  Even though the university library holds every book Mathieu could possibly want or need for his current research topic – the culinary influences of the court of Versailles on the court of George III – he still likes to visit the bookshop on the market. Mathieu doesn’t favour fiction and, even if he had once, he’d have given it up after his wife died. Virginie had loved novels with such an all-consuming passion that reading anything other than for research would only have reminded him of her. Still, he likes to look, likes to run his fingers along their spines, to brush their covers, to buy something non-fiction once in a while. Books are different outside, radiating a rather carefree air, as if on holiday from their usual habitat. Also, these particular books are second-hand which, of course, especially to the historian, makes them all the more enticing. They hold the invisible imprint of past readers, past lives they’ve touched, and, if Mathieu’s very lucky, these initial readers will have left more than just their impression on their books but also their comments and notes. There is nothing Mathieu loves more than to discover the marks, the thoughts, the records of lives once lived. It’s the reason he became a historian.

  When Mathieu was a little boy, living in his grandmother’s farmhouse in the Dordogne, he discovered a stash of letters in an old armoire. They’d been written by his great-grandfather to his great-grandmother during the First World War. Secret and in code, sent from the front line, it had taken young Mathieu several weeks to decode and translate them all in a process that had proved so thrilling he’d actively sought out other literary mysteries ever since. Thus, he was brought to the study of history which, Mathieu soon discovered, was the complex process of trying to answer unanswerable questions with the use of historical evidence: why did the Third Reich come to power in pre-war Germany? Why did the English Revolution of 1664 not happen a decade earlier? Who killed JFK? In school, Mathieu threw himself headlong and full-heartedly into trying to solve these particular mysteries. He spent innumerable hours scouring microfiche in the library basement, poured over reproductions of letters and documents, frowned at statistics and frequently forgot to eat as the hours flew by in his pursuit of knowledge.

  At university and thereafter, Mathieu might have dedicated himself to the historical study of some more manly topic, such as the political, economic or scientific, if not for the fact of falling in love with his wife. Mathieu first laid eyes on Virginie in his first week at the Sorbonne. She was a year older, in the second year, and, although she was taking a degree in French literature, she was renowned among the other students for baking. Every Friday night she hosted a small study group in her room, an event for which she spent the entire day preparing in the tiny dorm kitchen. The scents of sugar, roasting almonds, and melting chocolate would act like a siren call to every single student within sniffing range. Needless to say, once they learnt that they weren’t eligible to consume the delicacies they’d just discovered, they were keenly disappointed, soon spreading these abject feelings to anyone who’d listen. And so Virginie’s fame only grew.

  Mathieu managed to bribe his way into the study group in exchange for a rather valuable first edition of The Second Sex that his grandmother had given to him for his eighteenth birthday. He’d felt very guilty about this at the time, but needs must and his needs, both for food and love, were great. Mathieu could barely boil an egg and was too poor to pay others to cook for him, so he lived on a diet of toast with various toppings: honey for breakfast, jam for lunch, peanut butter for dinner. At the weekends, he had lemon curd for breakfast, lunch and dinner. In love, Mathieu was equally bereft. Upon arrival at university, he’d still been nursing a broken heart for a girl who’d unceremoniously dumped him after being accepted to Oxford University to study chemistry. Mathieu had nursed a significant grudge again
st the city ever since and had vowed never, should he happen to find himself in England, to visit. He had remained miserable, the pieces of his battered heart rattling around in his ribcage as he shuffled from his room to the library and back, until he’d set eyes on Virginie. His spirits had so uplifted at the sight of her that Mathieu had imagined his grandmother would understand about the book. The exchange had certainly been worth it.

  That first night of the study group, Mathieu had consumed more petites madeleines, chocolate eclairs and palmiers than any other attendee. The chef regarded him with initial suspicion, from over the top of Madame Bovary, then incredulity, then, finally, admiration. At the end of the evening, to Mathieu’s great relief, since he’d run out of excuses to linger, she’d stopped him at the door.

  ‘I don’t know whether to be offended or flattered,’ she’d said.

  Mathieu’s spirits had sunk. ‘Why offended?’

  ‘On behalf of Madame Bovary,’ Virginie said. ‘Since you passed the whole evening without paying the slightest attention to her. Indeed, you passed the entire evening without paying much attention to any of us.’

  Mathieu was silent, desperately wondering how best to defend himself in order that he might be permitted re-entry the following week. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to … be so rude. I’ve just – I had never tasted anything so sublime as your pastries before and I, I …’

  And then he’d trailed off because Virginie was smiling at him.

  ‘It’s alright,’ she said. ‘I’ve decided to be flattered. Would you like to stay for a coffee? If you’re able to squeeze anything more into your stomach, that is.’

  Mathieu, still standing in the doorway, saw that her room was now empty. It’d taken a great deal of restraint not to let out a yelp of delight. The fact that he was decidedly nauseous, that even the thought of coffee, let alone the smell, nearly made him wretch did not deter Mathieu for the slightest of seconds. He nodded firmly, even as his stomach gurgled dangerously.