Advent (35 page)

 
Still, the questions could not be held back for ever.

 
‘How can it be that you are here? The world itself has grown ancient since we met.’

 
‘It is a long road.’

 
‘And you have trodden it all that time? Yourself?’

 
She looked down at her hands. ‘I could not do otherwise.’

 
‘It is beyond believing.’

 
‘I know,’ she whispered.

 
The land was in its drunken riot of life. Young green clothed the meadows and woods like an exhalation. The magus would have suspected himself of being bewitched with happiness had it not been for the enduring distance between him and her, a remoteness nothing could bridge. The shadow of centuries was palpable on her. The thought of everything she must have seen and endured defeated his imagination utterly, and yet every time he looked into those profound eyes it seemed all too plain.

 
‘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 laugh 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.’