The Story of My Face (10 page)

At the far side of the crossroads is a patch of grass and a wooden bench with a plaque on it. She sits down, eases the backs of her shoes from her heels, closes her eyes and begins on her prayers, which she missed earlier. ‘Lord,' she asks, ‘let me complete well what I have begun.' Next, she prays for John. In seventeen years of marriage she has certainly come to know the strength of his will. Sometimes she thinks it's too strong. Likewise, his loyalty to her. ‘But,' she tells God, ‘I do know these are things which will not change. As we grow older, they'll get stronger, squeeze out other, smaller traits. I'm prepared for that. I give thanks for my marriage,' she tells Him, turning her face, eyes shut, up to the sun, but doesn't mention to God that she feels especially thankful for the
physical union
between them: for being able, even at this age, even against his will, to lead this difficult man she chose for herself to a point of agreement where other differences don't matter one bit. . . . She smiles, her eyes still tight shut, her hands neatly on top of each other in her lap, one arm threaded through the strap of the bag next to her.

‘Let him not take things too hard,' she prays. ‘And as for my son – please forgive him. He never normally complains,' she reminds God. ‘He's pleased to do your will in all ways. He works hard –' She thinks of all those sports days and football and cricket matches she has attended, the sight of Mark diving for a catch or folding himself over the high-jump, the smell of cut grass, of sitting on the slatted wooden chairs or on a rug in the sun, the fragile paper cups of tepid lemon squash, the little twists of ribbon on their tiny brass pins, the almost smoked smell of his skin at the end of summer days. . . . She sighs, shifts the position of her feet, and remembers the look he gave her this morning before he set off for school on his bike. ‘Help him through whatever it is that he is suffering now,' she asks.

The good bit of her prayers is done now.

What remains is to give thanks for the time there was with the girl-child that He chose to take away from her.

‘I don't want to say her name today . . .' she tells Him. She gives thanks for the memories she has polished over the years, kept, like a set of pebbles gathered from a brief beachside walk. The navy-blue eyes seeking her own out and holding them a long while, then, and only then, the slow, gummy smile. The constantly flexing fingers. The grip of that whole hand on her one finger. The fresh-baked smell of the top of her head. The thick but soft hair she was born with, brown (though now she's beginning almost to think of it as red). The way her face relaxed after her milk, the soft weight of her, sleeping.

‘But,' she explains to Him, eyes still shut, frowning now, ‘when a child lives, you don't have to carry your few pebbles away. It goes on and on. You just stay there on the beach.' Her hands clench up; she bites her lip – it's the thing in life she has to bear, this weight on her back, this hole in her heart. When she prays, so John tells her, she's supposed to thank Him even for
that
, for the silver lining that hides in even the darkest cloud of suffering, if only she could find it – and, she tells Him ‘You know how I have tried –'

But now the possibility of ever carrying another child has halved and halved itself until it's too small to count, and now the girl has arrived at her gate –

‘Now,' Barbara tells Him, ‘now, after all these years, I think I've borne it long enough. Release me – '

10

‘Children are very adaptable,' says Mrs Peltoniemi, a faded beauty with a habit of nodding slowly at the beginning of everything she says. ‘The fact is that this is a good education. Our children do well in tests. They have a strong analytical drive, wonderful memories –' she smiles, raises her hand in greeting to a well-wrapped group moving out into the playground. Certainly, the school is not so bad as it looked from the outside. It is painted in bold colours and decorated with wall-hangings in abstract designs, numbers, alphabets and so on. The children run and shout like any others. All the same, it's disconcerting: tiny classes of well-behaved, mostly blonde children, who have all been ‘led by example' and, if necessary, ‘turned away' from making images, and encouraged instead towards an enjoyment of geometry. Mrs Peltoniemi watches me watch them.

‘Parents and teachers respond much as they would with any other undesired or dangerous behaviour,' she explains. ‘Ignore it, or make a sour face, shake their heads, perhaps withdraw approval for a moment or two. Of course, it's hard for an outsider to understand. Exceptional musical ability is common. Several studies have shown their powers of concentration to be higher than average. I'd say they are on the whole less troubled than the average child of our times. But, it seems, these qualities are not in demand –'

As I leave, the sound of a choir singing something contemporary with quarter-tones and long pauses pours out of one of the classrooms, hair-raisingly beautiful.

Afterwards, I emerge from the supermarket with my carrier bag of salad, smoked fish called pike-perch and some bread, and the first thing I see is Christina. She's coming the other way – we hold each other carefully in view, and all the time I'm thinking that I should say something to her but I don't know what. We draw level, then acknowledge each other with a bit of a nod: it's almost as if she'd never knocked on my door, never sent those letters. Then she stops and calls out my name.

‘Natalie – we must talk.' I stop too, and turn back a little to keep her in view, but say nothing.

‘Do you get my letters?' she asks, brightly, as if they were something ordinary.

‘Yes, I do.'

‘Good. I send my youngest, Pekka, to deliver them. You can never be sure! Though he's a good boy in the main. He went to that school you've just visited –' The look she's giving me is half hard, half considering.

I just stand there, keeping her in view.

‘What do you think, then, of what I'm telling you?' she asks. ‘Have I got through to you? I'm only trying to help, you know.'

Help?

‘Actually, I'm considering whether to call the police,' I tell her. ‘The people I've discussed it with think it unnecessary, but I still might. I don't want any of your letters, you see. I'd like you to stop, please.'

She raises her hands, palms out, at waist level, as if literally stopping me from coming closer. As if
I
was out of order. And then she backs down completely, becomes, suddenly, all smiles. ‘You must come for a coffee sometime. Have a chat,' she says, her voice eager, verging on warm; she makes a little wave and turns into the chemist's, leaving me standing there.

Perhaps from time to time she just runs out of whatever keeps her steady in the winter-time? Seasonal Affective Disorder is what Heikki Seppä was suggesting, but it feels more serious than that. Does she want to hurt me back? Does she think she can bring me into the fold, and that somehow that will make whatever it is all right?

At home, I eat my pike-perch sandwich, phone my mother. Somehow, the afternoon stretches ahead of me. I find myself imagining Elojoki as it was in Tuomas's time. Such a very small place: the forest pressing at them from the west, the sea from the east, the huge sky arching and yearning above them – just one road passing through and no general shop until 1872. So it must have been relatively easy to control what came in, reject this, blot out a picture on a label with thick red ochre paint. Even though photography had existed for over twenty years and had already caused debates and controversies, though not, according to Tuomas Envall, sufficiently radical ones; even though exposures were growing shorter by the month; even though most towns had a photographic studio and soon most clergymen would feel it necessary to have their photograph taken – despite all this, at that time making and looking at increasingly realistic images was still a process which required consent and effort. And although the first motion picture presentation was not far ahead in time, it took place half a world away, in California.

At the same time as the means of making images grew more sophisticated, the means by which an image could be reproduced mechanically was also developed. The lithographic press gave way to photogravure, so that colour photographs could be printed. And even as early as 1926, television existed: the image of a man sitting on a chair in a shadowy room was transmitted through the air and picked up by a receiver in another room several metres away. . . .

Tuomas didn't live to hear of this. ‘A man never changes, but if he follows God, he becomes more properly himself,' he wrote, just before he died suddenly, at sixty-five, in wintertime, out of doors while chopping wood. His daughter Mustikka became for a year or so an unofficial leader of a movement which had now spread, albeit thinly, to the very south of the country and also as far away as Canada, Australia, South Africa and England.

Of course, I am drawn to my subject for personal reasons, but at the same time, I've come to enjoy it for its own sake. One of the things that pleases me most is the fact that a belief system such as Envall's has managed to survive against all odds, right up to the present day. This isn't sentiment – I admire it for its obstinacy. I appreciate it the way one can appreciate a good joke, or a particularly powerful irony, as evidence of the essential waywardness of our hearts.

At the same time, when I decide to turn in early, I find myself glancing towards the door to check that I've locked it, and that no letter has arrived.

I remember how once before I also kept watch for letters. I had pretended our telephone wasn't working, so Barbara told me she would write. When I found the envelope I took it straight upstairs to my room, opened it and realised straight away that I needed someone to help me.

11

Penelope Cole was not my teacher any more but she was the one I thought would do best. She had her head down, marking, and I was so close to her that I could see individual hairs, the way the grey was made up of white and black. I stood by her desk, shifting my weight from foot to foot, and willed her to look up and smile.

‘Excuse me, Miss –'

She remembered me, of course. Teachers generally did: the extraordinary hair, the dull, almost inaudible voice I used when forced to read anything aloud, the way my writing was inconsistently peppered with childish mistakes and perfectly spelled longer words, my habit of staring serenely into space during tests, as if the whole thing was nothing to do with me, refusing to even try
– Natalie Baron? Oh, yes –
At the same time, because I would sit right in the front row, my eyes roving over the teacher's face, almost meeting her eyes twenty times in the course of a lesson, slipping away just before the moment of reciprocation, dragging away bits of her attention, returning again to her face as soon as she'd looked away . . . because of this, and because of my sudden enthusiasms (for a topic in History, say, or a particular experiment in Science) during which I would gather and hoard facts, shoot my hand up, begging to contribute, and because even when the subject bored me I was always trying to
make
it interesting, wanting to know something, anything, ready to ask a question, and because I listened to the answers given as if life depended on them: because of all this, I managed somehow to suggest that despite the missing homeworks, the blank test papers, the ‘word-blindness' and the playing dumb – despite my making them want to tear out their hair – I might still be worth bothering with.

I stood there, with dirty fingernails, fiddling with the strings on my duffle-bag.

‘Yes, Natalie?'

‘You look tired, Miss,' I said, softly, wiping the palms of my hands on my dress. It had recently been let down, but not pressed; the old crease still showed.

‘I certainly am, Natalie,' Penelope Cole said, adding – not a secret, but nonetheless something she would not have said to any other child – that this was because her sister Josephine, whom she looked after, was particularly bad at the moment and needed a lot of attention during the night, so she had to do all her marking like this in the lunchtimes, instead of sitting in the staff-room with the rest.