The Restoration Artist (3 page)

“It works, Papa. You came,” Piero had said to me.

Now, the whistle sounded a third time. The scene came to life. Claudine beckoned to me, waving her sun hat. Piero raised both arms in a salute. I walked up to join them.

Claudine had spread a blanket on the dry grass and unpacked the lunch we’d purchased in Famagusta before setting out: goat cheese wrapped in sage leaves; a sort of pancake filled with herb-seasoned meat; a baklava of honey and nuts; and a flask of Commandaria, a local sweet wine. I fetched a bottle of water from the back seat and sat down in the shade of the car.

“This is a wonderful spot, Leo,” Claudine said, leaning against me and placing a cup of wine in my hand. “I’m glad we came.”

I kissed her and ran my fingers through her hair. “And I’m glad you’re here to see this with me. You should go and have a look at the fresco afterwards. It’s really fantastic.”

When lunch was over, I helped Claudine tidy up, then collected my paintbox from the car and sauntered along the ridge, a little sleepy from the wine but eager to set to work.

“We’re not going to stay long, are we?” Claudine called. She was stretched out on the blanket in the sun. “I want to get back in time for that swim.”

“Just a quick sketch. Piero, are you going to come and paint?” I was disappointed when the boy shook his head. I’d hoped that we could paint the scene together.

I found a vantage point where the church and the olive grove formed a pleasing composition. I sat down and opened the paintbox. At my feet, blue cornflowers grew among the blades of yellowed grass. In the distant sky swallows chirped their high-pitched cries. I reached for my palette and paints and set out dabs of titanium white, lamp black, yellow ochre and cobalt blue. The purity of the landscape required no other colours.

With the tip of my brush on the board I focused on the scene below. I waited. I waited for the place to reveal itself, to speak to me. All sounds gradually fell away, the faint rustle of the breeze over the grass, the birdcalls, Piero’s footsteps as he chased up and down the slope in pursuit of grasshoppers. A radiance gradually emanated from the scene below me; the church filled my vision, growing larger, its colours more intense.

My hand hovered in a moment of indecision, then stroked the canvas lightly, making a mark, then another. Working quickly, I drew outlines for the building, laying on washes of pale blue for the sky and blocking in the darker greens of the olive trees. I forgot myself as I worked and the vision that I had
held inside myself began to flow from my brush. I was only dimly aware of Claudine and Piero moving about in the olive grove. I barely registered the door of the chapel scraping open, their faint voices as they entered, the door thudding shut.

It may have been only a second later, or minutes, when I heard a boom, like thunder. The doves in the olive grove took flight in all directions. Startled in mid-brushstroke, I looked up at the cloudless sky, and then across towards the nearby hillside where a puff of white smoke blossomed. Then the air above me rippled and tore as something unseen hurtled past, and with a deafening bang, the tower of the church collapsed inward. A second explosion sent a blast of hot, grit-filled smoke towards me. Everything went black.

And then I was running into the darkness, screaming their names.

A
N EYE, DARK AND ROUND AS A SHINY BLACK MARBLE
, studied me with a steady, curious gaze. I lifted my head and tried to focus on it. A gull, which had been hovering on a current of air just near my face, wheeled away with a screech.

Raising myself on my elbows, I grimaced as a pain shot through my right side. All around me there was only a featureless pale blue haze. As I struggled to sit up, my legs swung free in the air. Between my knees and my dangling shoes I glimpsed, far below, a silent ragged line of white foam breaking against black rocks.

A glance to the left and right revealed that I was perched on a narrow shelf fifteen feet below the cliff edge. Sheer stone extended on both sides, and the rock-studded ocean lay a hundred feet below. Above was the cliff. A swarm of tiny spots swam across my vision and the vertigo almost made me vomit.

By shifting myself sideways, I was able to stretch out full length on the ledge, and then position my body so that my back was to the sea and the sky. With my arm folded under my
cheek, I lay with my face a few inches from the wall of rock and closed my eyes. My whole body shivered.

Slowly, I began to remember—leaving the hotel and walking through a landscape of mist, then finding the cliff, and my resolution as I stood there. After that, all was confused in my mind. A ram charging out of the mist, driving me to the edge. I had no memory of falling. Had I jumped after all? Was I dreaming? But the hard surface of the stone beneath my cheek was real, the pain in my side was real. I kept my eyes shut. I didn’t want to see again what was around me. My throat was dry. I was thirsty. And tired. Very tired.

When I opened my eyes again the fog was gone, the blue above me was the sky, and gulls were sailing over the sea below. How much time had passed? Had I slept?

Then it came back to me—something in the mist. Someone. A boy. I had seen a boy, I knew it.

I listened. Nothing.

Of course, nothing. Piero was dead.

It had been more than a year since I watched the coffins containing Piero and Claudine sink into the black Normandy earth, had watched as the wet soil covered the burnished wood and brass fittings, had watched until the hole was filled and the strip of sod was placed over the grave where son and mother were buried. I turned my face to the rock wall again.

I could still end it. All I had to do was roll over a few inches and let myself fall and all of this would disappear, real or not. Isn’t that what I had wanted?

Time passed, if such a thing as time existed in this place. I remained with my face to the rock and my back to the emptiness that used to be the world, not moving. As I lay there, I became
aware of a small caterpillar inching its way across the rough surface of the ledge, just in front of my eyes. It measured no more than the length of my little finger and was yellow-orange, with a brighter stripe of yellow down the centre. The entire body was covered with bristly hair, and if it weren’t for the forward movement of the creature’s expansions and contractions, I wouldn’t have been able to tell the front from the rear.

As I watched its awkward progress across the ledge into a crevice in the cliff face, I wondered how the creature had got to this inaccessible spot in the first place, or where it would go from here.

Slowly I sat up. Bracing my legs with care and keeping my face against the cliff, hands grasping where they could, I gently levered myself upright and took stock of my surroundings.

To my right, just where the ledge ended, a vinelike plant with white flowers wound its way up a narrow fissure in the rock. By stretching out my arm, I was able to grasp and tug at the thick stem of the vine. It appeared to be firmly attached to the cliff. I edged closer and found a secure handhold in the rock. I searched for a foothold, but realized that the toes of my shoes were too wide to fit into the narrow niches and cracks. With one hand I eased off my shoes and socks and then, grasping the vine tightly, began to make my way up.

The vine trembled under my weight, but seemed strong enough, and I reached higher. A sudden pain bit into my palm and I inhaled sharply, but hung on. Sharp green thorns hid among the leaves and clusters of white flowers.

Gradually, I moved closer to the top. My legs were rubbery, the muscles in my arms taut with the strain. In another minute gravity would do its work on my weak body and I
would have to let go. It would be so easy to let go, to just let go and fall free. But I didn’t want to die. Even if I didn’t really want to live either. But whatever I’d thought previously, whatever I’d intended as I stood on the precipice earlier, something now felt different.

The vine ended. The cliff edge was just above me. Not quite within reach. Stretching my arm up, I searched for a handhold, anything, the smallest fissure. My toes settled into a crack, my fingers closed on an outcrop. I took a deep breath, and with a great groan I launched myself upwards in a tremendous push. The side of my face scraped against the rock, my fingernails scrabbled and tore, my legs kicked free in the air. For a moment I was suspended in space, untethered from the earth.

Then, in a desperate scramble, I was on solid ground, rolling onto all fours and crawling as far as possible from the edge before I collapsed face-down on the sweet grass of the meadow, my whole body convulsing with sobs of relief. Every muscle ached, the ribs on my right side throbbed, my hands were scraped raw, my fingernails were broken, and I had lost my shoes. But I was alive.

The ground around me was scuffed and trodden with the hoofprints of goats and a scattering of dung pellets. There had been goats here, I hadn’t imagined that part at least. Then I saw it—the clear imprint of a small bare foot. Human. Just one. A child’s footprint. A boy had stood here. I placed my hand next to the print, measuring it, tracing my fingertip around the outline of the sole and the five toes.

In front of me were the woods, thick oaks and the outlines of dark yew trees. But everything was so still, so strange. The light was brilliant, hurting my eyes. Glancing back at the cliff
edge only a few feet away, I began to tremble with the realization of what had happened, of what I had almost done. I rolled over onto my back and looked up at the empty sky, and when I shut my eyes I could still see it, all white and brilliant. I heard a voice calling, faintly, or thought I did.

I opened my eyes. A woman stood looking down at me. Her black hair fell around her shoulders and the golden sunlight behind her head radiated outwards in a halo of light. In her arms she held a bouquet of wildflowers and grasses.

I felt at peace, calmed by this beautiful apparition that was like an angelic figure from a painting—like Aurora in that picture by Naudé in the Louvre,
The Gates of Dawn
. She shifted the bouquet and leaned closer, stretching out a hand to me. The faintest scent of perfume hung in the air—lily of the valley.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

Then I remembered. I sat up. A pain arced down my right side and I grimaced. The woman stepped back quickly.

I struggled to my feet, brushing the dirt from my hands, wincing from the burning cuts and abrasions on my palms.

“You’ve had an accident?” she said.

“I was lost.” I looked around, making a vague gesture towards the woods. “I fell.”

Now I noticed the espadrilles on her feet, the pale green capri pants and white shirt, the watch with a metal band on her wrist. Neither a dream nor an apparition from a painting, but a flesh-and-blood woman. She looked to be about ten years older than me, maybe forty. Her clothes were stylish and seemed expensive. She didn’t look like an islander.

Then I saw the bruise on her cheek, a purple blotch, as if from a blow. I stared at it.

She took a step away from me and brought a pair of sunglasses out of her pocket, slipping them over her eyes. “Where are you going?” she asked. “Can I help you?”

“Did you … did you see a boy?” I said.

“A boy? Where? No.”

“I just wanted to talk to him.”

She looked back along the path.

“Are you from around here?” I asked. She shrugged. She seemed uneasy. I realized that I wasn’t making much sense, and might even be scaring her. “My name is Leo Millar. I’m staying at the hotel.”

“I think you might need a doctor.”

I glanced down at myself, at my scuffed clothes, a smear of dried blood on one bare foot, conscious of how much my whole body ached. “I’ll be fine. Are you sure you didn’t see a boy? He was here earlier.”

She gave a noncommittal shake of her head. “You’re injured. Do you need help getting back to the hotel?”

“I have to find him.” I scanned the unfamiliar landscape and limped back along the path, peering down at the ground for footprints.

A minute later I halted and looked back. The woman was gone.

W
HAT HAD HAPPENED?
W
HO HAD
I
SEEN IN THE
mist? Piero was dead, I knew that. But I had known that figure standing in the trees, and I had felt the recognition as something physical, with my body. Was I going mad? I shook my head and tried to clear my thoughts. The first thing to do was get back to the hotel and clean myself up. And a drink. God, I needed a drink. And shoes.

I felt unsteady, confused, still reeling with disbelief over what I had almost done. Which way was the hotel? I should have asked that woman. I stopped and looked back. I couldn’t really recall what she looked like. Dark-haired. A bouquet of wildflowers. A bruise on one cheek. The faint scent of lily of the valley.

I walked on, flinching every now and then when my bare feet trod on a sharp stone. Farther down the path I could see a row of poplars and the roof of a house where a thin wisp of smoke drifted up from a chimney. I’d only been walking a few minutes when I saw someone coming towards me, a
short man wearing a dark jacket and white shirt and a large floppy beret. He was in his late fifties, with a broad chest and a very thick moustache peppered with grey. In his hand he carried a stout walking stick, which he raised in greeting at the sight of me.

“
Bonjour
. You must be Leo Millar.” He stopped abruptly, frowning. “But what has happened to you?”

“Do you know me?” I asked, further confused.

“I ate breakfast this morning at the hotel and Linda mentioned that a painter had come to stay. I assumed that would be you. I am the priest here on La Mouche. Père Caron. Or just plain André Caron, if you prefer.” He extended his hand and I shook it, flinching at the pressure. He looked down at the cuts and the dried blood on my fingers. “You’ve had an accident! Can I help you?”

“There was fog. I couldn’t see. I … I fell. Off the cliff and onto a ledge.” I hid my hands in my pockets. “I managed to climb up.”

“You were walking on the cliff in that fog? It’s very dangerous. Didn’t you see the warning sign?”

I shook my head.

“If you don’t mind me stating the obvious,” the priest said, “you don’t look at all well.”

“I’m okay.”

He pointed at my feet. “Where are your shoes?”

“I guess I lost them, back there.”

“Look, I think you’d better come with me to my house. It’s nearby. I can give you a pair of boots.”

I looked back up the path, searching.

“Is someone with you?” the priest asked.

“No. There’s nobody. I just need to get back to the hotel. If you could point out the direction.”

“This way then. Come.” He took me by the arm.

In a few minutes we reached a house built on a rise overlooking the ocean, stone walls painted white, a slate roof. Mauve hollyhocks grew along the sunward walls and the blue wooden shutters were fastened open. A small enclosed orchard of apple trees stood behind the house.

“Come in a minute,” the priest urged. “You can’t walk all the way to the hotel in bare feet. I’ll lend you a pair of boots.”

We went round to the side and I followed him in through a low doorway. He tossed his beret onto a table in the hall under a crucifix and led the way into a snug kitchen, where he opened a cupboard and took down a bottle of liquor, pouring out two glasses.

“Sit down. Drink this.”

I swallowed and the silky liquid slid over my tongue and down my throat, spreading warmth through my chest. The apple flavour that filled my mouth transported me instantly back to those first lonely months in Paris, just after I’d arrived from Canada, when I’d had a room at the Hôtel Mistral on rue Cels, and my one acquaintance in the whole city had been a writer from Vancouver, David McCullough, three doors down the corridor from me. One evening after he’d sold a short story to
Esquire
magazine he took me to dinner at La Coupole, where, he said, he intended to make up for all the months of bean soup and mutton stew. We dined on oysters, and then
magret de canard
with a bottle of Saint-Julien that cost as much as the food combined, and after dessert we each smoked a cigar on the terrace with snifters of eighteen-year-old Calvados.

Everything had seemed possible. Paris awaited us. David was going to be the next Hemingway and I was going to give Picasso a run for his money.

Now I shook my head ruefully and took another sip.

Perhaps mistaking my expression, the priest said, “It’s locally made. From some of my own apples.”

He drank his own measure down in a quick swallow and fetched a porcelain basin, which he filled with water and set on the table. “Soak your hands in this. I’ll get the disinfectant.” He returned with a brown glass bottle and a towel, which I used to wipe the dirt and dried blood from my hands.

“This will sting a bit,” the priest said, uncorking the disinfectant, “but it will do you good. You’d better wash your feet as well.” Watching me dab at my hands with the disinfectant, he said, “Let me see if I can find you some shoes. Our size might be roughly the same.”

A minute later, he reappeared with a pair of worn boots and some socks. “These will do, I think. They’re a bit old but still in good condition.”

While I tried on the boots, the priest poured two more glasses of Calvados. Then he reached into his pocket for a package of Caporal tobacco and sprinkled the flakes into a sheaf of paper, which he rolled into a cigarette. He lit it with a match from a box on the table.

“So, you were out walking and had a fall?”

“Yes. Stupid of me. In all that fog I didn’t really pay attention to where I was going. Luckily I landed on a kind of ledge and managed to climb up.”

“I know the place. You’re extremely lucky that you didn’t tumble straight into the sea.” He tapped the ash from his cigarette
into a large scallop shell that served as an ashtray. “So you’re a painter? I can’t recall any artists visiting our island before. They tend to prefer the more dramatic vistas in Brittany.”

“I’m always on the lookout for new landscapes, and when I saw La Mouche on the map I thought it might be worth a visit.” I was amazed that I could lie so easily, and to a priest.

Père Caron regarded the tip of his cigarette and blew on it while giving me a long, searching look. “Are you … in any sort of trouble?”

“No,” I answered quickly. “I’m just a tourist.”

The priest held up his hands in a placating gesture. “I didn’t mean to offend you. But you must admit that your appearance is, how should I say, a little unusual.”

“I told you, I fell.”

“You’re not French, are you.”

“I’m Canadian. But I’ve lived in Paris for the last ten years. I came to study art and I stayed. It’s my home now.”

“Canada. It’s a long way to come. Do you still have family there?”

“There isn’t anyone. Not any more.”

But there never had been. I’d grown up in the Guild Home for Boys in Vancouver. A home for those without homes. The closest to family I’d ever had was a dormitory of other boys: the lost, the forgotten, the unwanted and the abandoned. At the Guild, we didn’t ask questions about parents. We’d all learned that there were no answers.

I stood up and put my hands in my pockets, then took them out and rubbed the ache in my left arm. I wanted to leave, but I also wanted to know more about the island. “Are there many people living here?”

“Alas no,” he said. “Most were sent away during the war years when the Germans occupied the island. Not many returned. And now, with the decline in the fishing industry, few of us are left. Some fishermen and their families in LeBec, the village on the other side of the island. The hotel and the shop on this side. Ester Chauvin’s farm. One or two others. That’s about it.”

I wanted to frame my next question carefully. “What about the children?”

“Since the war there has been no school here. Twenty years now. At first those families with children used to board them in Saint-Alban because we didn’t have enough pupils to warrant a school. But that wasn’t really suitable in the long run. People ended up moving to the mainland. A few tourists come in the summer.” He shook his head sadly. “Perhaps soon only the birds and the goats will live here.”

“I thought I saw a child in the fog earlier.”

“What did the child look like? I know everybody on the island.”

“It was a boy. About ten years old, with dark curly hair.”

“Really?” He paused. “And why are you interested in this boy?”

Was it my imagination or did he seem evasive? “Perhaps I was seeing things.” I looked away and stared out the window for a minute, then turned back to the priest. “Let me ask you a question, Père. In your capacity as a priest.”

“Of course.”

“Do you think the dead ever communicate with us?”

He glanced sharply at me, then took a moment to roll another cigarette, studying me with curiosity as he lit it.

“Is there another life after this one?” I pressed.

“Well, I can tell you, as a priest, what the Church says. I can tell you what Science says. Or I can speculate as a man, ignorant as the rest.”

There had been a time at the Guild when I’d made a sincere effort at praying, wanting to believe during those long dreary Sunday mornings, nauseated by the smell of incense and furniture polish, longing for breakfast, staring up at the carved wooden figure on the crucifix behind the altar in the chapel, wanting it to move, to blink, to do something. But whatever God listened to prayers had not stirred on my behalf. By the time I’d entered my teens I’d realized that you got through this life with your guile, your fists and whatever measure of talent you could scrape together.

The priest was regarding me thoughtfully. “Why do you ask?”

“I saw … I thought I saw … Nothing.”

He leaned forward. “What have you seen?”

Shaking my head I turned away and got to my feet. “I’ve taken enough of your time. Thank you for your help, Père. And for the boots. I’ll return them as soon as I can.”

“No matter. Anytime.” He was still frowning as he accompanied me out to the garden. “Will you be staying long?”

I looked past him, up to the woods. “No, not long.”

He placed a hand on my shoulder. “I might not have the right answers to your questions, but it helps to confide in someone when we are troubled. Come and talk to me again. Will you do that, Leo Millar?”

“Yes, I will. Thank you.”

He remained standing at the gate as I turned and made my way in the direction of the hotel.