Advent

  ‘And you did not forget me?’

  ‘No. I do not forget.’

  ‘You are not a woman, then.’ He pushed back her hood. A woman’s face looked back at him, ordinary enough except for its peculiar solemn beauty and its subdued strength. ‘You are a goddess fallen to Earth, sent to bless me.’

  ‘I am not blessed, Johannes.’

  ‘Then tell me. Tell me how you crossed such a span of time.’

  ‘The burden I bear,’ she said, ‘is endless.’

  ‘What burden, carissima?’

  She shook her head and folded her fingers around his. ‘It brought you to me once. Now it has brought me to you.’ And that was as much of an answer as she would give.

  In her presence, it was enough for him. He asked nothing more from the world. For months he had longed for that, and only that, and when he thought back on his longing the tide of joy flooded so high it erased every other thought as a wave wipes footprints from the sand.

  But when he was alone again he meditated on what she said. His love and longing went still and a small, strange curiosity peeped up beside them like the tiny flower of a garden weed.

  It brought you to me once. What was it that had brought him to her? His art, surely – his unworthy whim, so eagerly acceded to by the companion spirit. So what was it, then, that had brought her to him?

  That was the mystery, beyond conception, beyond credence. Did she mean to say it was his art that had again performed the miracle? Had he summoned her across time without knowing it, by his great mastery and by the sheer force of his love?

  The magus was all too ready to believe it of himself.

  After all, he began to think, the more he contemplated this marvel, was not his art the image of her fate?

  Legend called her the prophetess whom no one would believe. Was that not indeed his fate also? When one considered it? Was he not also the master of holy wisdom scorned by the world?

  ‘You spoke once of your burden,’ he reminded her, some weeks later. His giddy bliss had tempered itself and he had begun spending more and more of his solitary hours thinking, wondering.

  ‘Once was enough.’

  He reached his arm across her shoulders. ‘Is it not lifted now we are together?’

  ‘Lightened, yes.’ She leaned against him.

  ‘But not lifted?’

  She looked at him without a word.

  ‘I share it with you,’ he went on, feeling peculiarly nervous, as if he were asking her for something he could not be sure of having earned. ‘I have not suffered all that you have suffered, but some part of it belongs to me also.’

  His mouth and his heart teemed with wonder and gratitude, but underneath all that, unspoken even in his private thoughts, was a deep conviction that Providence had blessed her at last with him, that he had come to save her.

  This was his old habit of mastery, under the new guise of love. She was a cursed being – somewhere he had heard that; he could no longer recall exactly where – but it had no weight with him. His wisdom and love together would break the curse. And then she would belong to him always and – the dream stole quietly into the furthest recesses of his heart as spring came on – he would become as she was. A human creature still, shaped in the very image of God. A human creature, but one who was as endless as life itself.

  Immortal.

  So his temptation began, though he never knew it. For all his wisdom, he was not wise enough to know his own desires. Not then, nor that autumn, his love fading with the year as first love does; least of all long, long afterwards, when he decided – as if unwillingly; as if the seed of the decision had not been present all along, planted beside his love – that in order for him to inherit her immortal gift, she would have to die.

  Fifteen

  Hester pointed at a signpost as they turned off the main road. ‘My village.’

  A few minutes later lights appeared. First, the garish luminescence of a garage, looking as if it had been sliced out of a suburban high street and dropped in the middle of nowhere, then a post office, a row of unlikely shops, a thatched pub at a crossroads. The pub was the only building that looked alive. They turned into a narrow street of bungalows and boxy concrete cottages, squatting behind front gardens, nudging close together as if seeking comfort against the dark spaces behind. Under the last streetlamp, Hester inched the car through an open gate onto a patch of gravel.

  ‘Let’s make some tea first,’ was all she said.

  From the outside the house was sad and shabby. When she reached under a bush to pull out the door key, Gavin found himself expecting a bare light bulb and the smell of stale carpet.

  Nothing could possibly have prepared him for what he saw when she clicked on the light.

  His immediate impression was that he’d stepped onstage. A fantastic crowd of motionless faces greeted him, all appearing at once like an expectant audience. The walls of the room Hester shepherded him into were hung with masks.

  There must have been thirty of them. They leered and scowled and smiled and stared, impassive or threatening or serene, terrifying in their sinister silence. They were fantastically various. Some jumped out of the wall at Gav with a jolt of disturbing familiarity. The bright red sharp-cheeked one with the demonic grin and gaudy brows came from those Japanese plays whose name he couldn’t remember. There were elongated wooden faces with protruding lips that were like things he’d seen in a lesson about West Africa. An eerily smooth, creamy-white, glistening and blank-eyed one made him think of Venice and torchlight and disturbing carnival. But he couldn’t look at any of them for long. If his eyes stopped moving, he was instantly overwhelmed by the hallucinatory conviction that other faces were inspecting him behind his back. If it hadn’t been for the reassuring mess below them, Gav thought he’d need to run from the room, but beneath chest height the place was cosily shambolic, all overstuffed bookshelves and harmless clutter. There were two mismatched fraying sofas with a low table between them. The table had obviously come from somewhere very far away, its incisions and curlicues and smoky grey wood unmistakably tropical. He felt like he’d walked into a mad explorer’s trophy room. No wonder the slatted blinds over the window were folded tight shut.

  ‘They are a bit much, aren’t they,’ Hester said, from behind him. ‘Come into the kitchen. It’s more bearable there.’

  He followed to the back of the house with relief. The most the kitchen had in common with the front room was a pleasantly unkempt feeling: slightly too many things, not quite enough places to put them away. A wide unshuttered picture window, its corners fuzzy with condensation, looked onto mere darkness. The other walls were mercifully bare apart from a clock and a framed poster. Hester bobbed down and switched on a little electric fireplace, then set about the kettle and the cupboards, ferrying packets of food to a dining table of the kind of varnished wood that looks and feels like plastic. She kept up a reassuring commentary. ‘Right. Bread. Ham. Oh look, here’s that flowery biscuit tin; we could use it as a centrepiece. There. Hold on, that’s the kettle, I’ll do that first. Extra warmth . . .’

  It was as if they’d silently agreed to suspend whatever they’d begun to share in the car. Household rituals had temporarily banished it.

  ‘Help yourself, please,’ she said, once the table was full, and he did, though not as eagerly as he’d thought he would. He just let her talk.

  She spoke about living with the voice at her ear, but she almost made a joke of it, and before he knew it he was drawn into sharing stories. He told her how he’d plucked up courage to see Mr Bushy the Friday before last, and the Sunday morning someone had rung from school to tell his parents they thought he was in a state of ‘nervous exhaustion’ and needed some time off and perhaps we could schedule a discussion about whether this is the ideal environment to meet his needs? The whole tangle of shame and bitterness he felt as he repeated the tale was dissolved by the way she laughed at it and then told him her own version of much the same experience. She even made him lau
gh himself with her impression of the person who’d lectured her about the importance of preserving the confidence of hmm hmm hmm, and surely she’d be better off without hmm hmm, and please be assured of the continuing ahem ahem, and then asked her to resign.

  ‘So I moved my stuff down here over the autumn.’ She dunked a biscuit in her mug. ‘Well, not all of it. This house isn’t nearly big enough to accommodate just the books, let alone the rest. My parents bought it as a holiday home. I’ve been coming here for years. It seems like the right place to retreat to. I can’t do without the books, so they’ll have to live in boxes for a while. They’re all upstairs, along with the things I couldn’t be bothered to unpack. Everything I left behind can just be sold. It’s funny the things you decide are indispensable.’ He thought she was staring absently at the wall, but then she nodded towards the framed picture. ‘Like that. It was the very first thing I put up.’

  It was a poster from a museum, advertising an exhibition. Most of it was taken up by a reproduction of a painting. Now that Gavin looked at it properly, he recognised something about it, though he couldn’t say what: maybe he’d seen the style before. Something Old Mastery. It showed two heads: a bearded man, deeply wrinkled, and, leaning over his right shoulder from behind, whispering in his ear, a young and almost painfully beautiful face, heavy-lidded, either a long-haired boy or a girl with strong bones and thick eyebrows. The old man looked as if some profound and astonishing train of thought had just been set in motion by whatever the beautiful boy or girl murmured in his ear. The youth’s expression was so radiant with gentle solemnity that Gav felt slightly embarrassed to be staring at it, like squirming at the slushy bits of a film.

  ‘Ah,’ he said.

  The young boy/girl laid a hand on the old man’s shoulder, or maybe it wasn’t quite touching: delicate, sweetly intimate. Hester gazed at the two of them, her expression suddenly pained.

  ‘I think perhaps the only time I might have truly lost my reason was once when I went to see that painting. It’s in Paris, in the Louvre. I went on Eurostar. A sort of pilgrimage.’ She picked up her mug and held it in mid-air, as if she’d forgotten about taking a sip of tea halfway through the motion. ‘They had to escort me out of the gallery. When it closed, I should say. I wasn’t hysterical or raving or anything dramatic like that. At least I assume I wasn’t; I don’t really remember. Anyway, it was embarrassing enough as it was. Apparently I couldn’t stop looking at it, all day long. I couldn’t move.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Yeah, I see what you mean.’

  ‘It was the very first thing I brought down. I put it in the back of the car and hung it up before anything else came in the house.’ She took her sip. ‘Sort of like my patron saint. He’s St Matthew. The gospeller. His symbol’s an angel; that’s the angel whispering in his ear.’

  Gavin got the point at last and suddenly thought he understood where Hester had displaced all the rage and horror that were missing so conspicuously from her manner. ‘What about that lot in there?’

  ‘Hmm? Oh, my masks, you mean. Yes, you’re quite right, it’s the same idea. The concealed face, I suppose you could say. Though of course I tell myself I collect them just because I like them. And to be fair, some of them are objects of professional interest to me. Ex-professional interest, I should say, now that I find myself forcibly retired.’

  Gav remembered the newspaper article. ‘They’re shaman masks?’

  She raised an eyebrow at him.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘It was all in the paper.’

  She sighed. ‘That’s all right. It’s an odd feeling, being other people’s business. I even had someone from the local rag phone this morning, wanting an interview. You can just imagine that, can’t you. The Nutty Professor in her own words. The phone kept going after that, in the end I had to unplug it.’ She nodded towards an ugly wall-mounted object of cream-brown plastic, the cord beneath it trailing loose. ‘Thank God this place is antique enough still to have the kind you can unplug. Anyway. Yes, more or less. There’s no such thing as a shaman mask per se, but four or five of my menagerie are totemic objects of one sort or another, or modern interpretations of such objects. Used for communicating with the spirit world, essentially. Like opening a channel. Not that you want a tutorial on the subject. A couple are rather rare and valuable. Not exactly museum quality, but still the real thing.’

  She dabbed at crumbs on her plate with a fingertip.

  ‘I thought,’ Hester said after a while, eyes on her plate, ‘I’d want to ask you what her face is like. Speaking of faces. I thought I’d want to know. But it turns out I don’t. I really don’t.’

  And there it was, out in the open again.

  He heard the effort in her voice. He glimpsed again how she must have struggled to stay sane.

  ‘It’s almost as if I’m afraid that talking about her might bring her back. Like a bad omen.’

  ‘I think you’ll be OK,’ Gav said, not meeting her eyes.

  ‘Oh, do you?’

  He wished he hadn’t spoken, but now she was watching him intently. ‘Yeah. Something’s . . .’

  ‘Don’t talk about it if you’d rather not. We don’t have to. Believe me, I know how difficult it is.’

  I don’t want to hear about this, Gav. Don’t be ridiculous, Gav. Mention that name again, Gavin, and I swear I’ll make you wish you hadn’t. No. Not any more. He wasn’t going to try and pretend Miss Grey didn’t exist, not ever again.

  How could she be gone?

  He gripped his hands together under the table and tried to keep his voice casual. ‘No, it’s OK. I just mean . . . something’s changed. With her. I’m pretty sure you don’t have to worry.’

  After a pause she said, ‘May I ask what?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What changed.’

  Gav rubbed his eyes. ‘Well, OK. On the train. She’s never been like that before.’

  Hester leaned towards him, disconcertingly curious. ‘And you said this has been all your life?’

  ‘Yeah. Long as I can remember. She’s always been there.’ Don’t start crying, he told himself. ‘Know what’s stupid?’

  ‘Nothing, I suspect, but go on.’

  ‘It was only, like, three years ago that I figured out that . . . that she . . . That I was . . .’

  She waited patiently while he battled the humiliation of tears.

  ‘That she’s not real,’ he finished, and gulped at his tea.

  ‘That isn’t stupid,’ she said.

  ‘It felt pretty bloody stupid.’

  ‘I was thirty-three.’

  He looked at her, wiping his nose.

  ‘Thirty-three years old. Nearly thirty-four. It was an autumn day in 1996. October the sixteenth. I could hardly forget the date, could I?’

  A shiver went through him, but only on the inside. Absorbed in her memories, she saw nothing of it. ‘I’d lived a good part of an adult life. A normal, rather privileged, on the whole unusually happy life. I was down here for a weekend. I was walking along a path by the river, over on the other side. As I began one step’ – she mimed walking with two fingers, lifting one forward – ‘my life was much the same as anyone else’s. Anyone who’s more or less secure, at least. And when I put my foot down . . .’ The finger tapped on the table. Hester stared at it, an unfathomable look on her face. ‘It wasn’t.’

  But all Gavin was thinking about was the date: 16 October 1996.

  His birthday. The day he was born.

  ‘I wasn’t a child. I thought I knew the difference between reality and delusion. I did. I do know the difference. But in all these fifteen years I’ve never been able to persuade myself which of the two she is.’

  It’s my fault, he was thinking. It’s all to do with me. The thing in the chapel had said so. The thing that couldn’t really have happened, the thing he’d run away from, the thing he didn’t want to remember.

  What have I got to do with it?

  Everything. Stupid boy.

 
He’d brought Miss Grey into the world with him, like some insane living shadow.

  ‘Did she frighten you?’ Gav took a moment to realise she’d directed the question at him. ‘When you were younger?’

  ‘No.’ The memories opened up suddenly beneath him, misty landscapes of vanished happiness. ‘Never. Not until a couple of days ago, when she started screaming like that.’

  ‘Is she . . . ?’

  ‘What?’

  Hester got up and began clearing the table. ‘I’m sorry, Gavin. I know I shouldn’t keep trying to talk about this. I’m going to shunt you off to bed soon, anyway. You look absolutely shattered.’

  ‘Bad day, yeah.’

  Get worse.

  ‘I’m sure. But it’s so hard not to keep on asking. For me it’s like you’ve arrived in my house to cure me of fifteen years of accumulated suffering. Every word I can exchange with you undoes a little bit of it. Do you see?’

  Embarrassed again, he nodded.

  ‘What I was going to ask was, is she . . . is she like a . . .’ She opened her arms helplessly. ‘Oh, I don’t know. Is she anything like . . . a normal person? A woman?’

  Miss Grey, who’d always been there. ‘Yeah. Well, no, not normal. Not at all. But not . . .’

  Hester laughed mirthlessly as he trailed off. ‘Language isn’t a very good tool for describing the indescribable, is it? A lot of what we used to call “primitive” cultures are much better at this sort of thing than us.’

  But now it was Gavin’s turn to be deep in memories.

  ‘She was my friend,’ he said quietly, staring at the tablecloth.

  Hester came and sat down opposite, without a word.

  ‘Mum and Dad never understood.’ He’d never imagined himself telling anyone this. It was like a dream, like someone else speaking. But then he’d never imagined himself missing her either, and yet there was no other explanation for the swelling misery inside him. Miss Grey, gone? ‘Dad used to get so angry every time I said anything about her. He tried everything. He made this rule that every time I said her name he’d go up to my room and take a pound out of my piggybank. If there wasn’t any money in it I had to go straight out and wash the car or mow the lawn or whatever. To earn the pound. So he could take it away. That’s how he used to do it. He’d take the pound coin out of his pocket and give it to me and make me put it in the piggybank and then he’d take it right out again while I watched. Didn’t matter what time of day. Even if it was bedtime. He sent me out to do the car in the middle of winter once. In my pyjamas with a bucket and sponge. Mum . . . Anyway. Miss Grey was there, at the end of the street. Just seeing her made it OK.’