The Story of My Face (14 page)

But Mark too is different. He has had a vision. That is how God will use him, not in scientific research as he used to hope. He will be conducting Monday's service. The words, stored and refined during the silence he is keeping, will spring, inspired, from his mouth, and after that he will be in the middle of things, speaking and being listened to. During one of the meditations, it's possible that he might be given further visions: there is a still, open place in him, always ready for that, should it come. . . . He can feel that place even now; he can feel that place even with me sleeping beside him in the back of the car, my head almost touching his leg.

And like this I do seem almost harmless. So he allows his eyes to rest on me a little longer than before. He sees how the tips of the fingers of the hand that's under my head poke through the intricate endless tangles of my hair, as if to find their way up to breathe – pale, smooth, full of sleeping nerves, and he finds his own hands suddenly restless. He closes
Physics
IV
, returns his attention to the window.

Distant cooling towers stand to both sides, stretch into lines or settle to squat groups according to the angle of view. Pylons plant their feet in the fields, stride alongside the road. The traffic thickens, lorries mainly, some other caravans, cars.

We turn north-east, towards the coast on a narrower road. Now and then there's a pub with a painted sign. Some of the lorries, too, have crude images on them as well as words. Mark looks away when he sees them, looks instead at the real things God has made: the sky, the fields, the road ahead, or inward, at his own hands or his mother and father.

‘I'll stop at the next lay-by,' John calls over his shoulder. ‘Keep an eye on behind, would you?' Mark leans out of his window as far as he dares, the wind stinging his eyes. His father makes slow circles with his arm and in this way the Herns and I move almost imperceptibly from steady movement to a standstill, and I wake up.

The car shakes slightly each time a vehicle passes. A heat haze shimmers above the surface of the road. To the other side of it spread generous, undulating fields in different blends and textures of gold and green, dotted occasionally with livestock and broken up with stands of poplar, oak and copper beech. Above us, the sky is endlessly blue: it's the broadest possible daylight and yet on the radio a newscaster announces that Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins are approaching the point when they will go into orbit around the moon.

‘It puts our journey in the shade,' Barbara says. ‘Do you think they'll make it?'

‘Yes,' I say.

‘It's so very hard to imagine,' John Hern replies. ‘So it
should
be,' he adds, opening the door, easing stiffly out of the car. He stretches, circles his neck, then climbs up the bank behind the lay-by and disappears.

‘We'll put the rug on the grass up there,' Barbara tells Mark, ‘if you wouldn't mind, and watch the world go by.'

My hair is a huge irregular mass, as if it had grown while I slept, the right side of my face is hot from pressing against my arm. The afternoon light is too bright and I squint until I'm used to it. Mark, smoothing out the plaid rug, watches me emerge from the back of the car. I can see that he's trying not to react.

Barbara pats the rug next to her, holds out a plastic cup. When I sit down she puts her arm around my shoulders, squeezes and leaves it there. We eat our sandwiches and watch the cars go by. All the time in Space, which is as black as the inside of my own brain, Apollo 11 hurtles silently around the moon.

14

The days lengthen, but there are still no leaves on the birch trees, just tiny buds. Patches of grubby snow and air-riddled ice persist in the noonday shadows of buildings and trees, in the hollows of the newly visible chocolate-brown fields. The very bareness of things forces me to see more in what little there is. I'm thinking that perhaps it was the same for Tuomas Envall at the beginning of those long, hopeless months before his triumphant sermon. Perhaps the season helped, pushed him to clean the paint-box he had found and to dampen and stretch a piece of paper onto a board. In any case, making use of the time between his reading in the morning and his silent lunch at the pastor's table, he had begun to paint, ‘to accept the Devil's invitation'.

Time and time he'd painted the view from this window: the path, the trees, the pastor's house. Different days, different lights. Sometimes he filled a bottle with water, walked out through the village into the surrounding countryside, sketching barns, the boulders protruding from the slush-pools in the fields, the first buds on the birch trees. Soon it was impossible for him to pass a day without painting; the more he painted, the more it seemed he saw and the more of the day he spent doing it:

And then there came a day when I forgot to recite my psalm, and then another, and when I realised this, I told myself that I was simply celebrating the Lord's power and glory in a different way, and so fell ever deeper into temptation. My situation was difficult, and I was ill prepared for it, but instead of accepting what was, I sought to distance myself from it, to make it again in a way that pleased me better. . . .

Easter came: the pastor continued to conduct the services, holding the congregation close to him still, just as he gripped the pulpit to keep himself upright. Increasingly, he would be absent for one or other of the day's meals, and Tuomas, eating alone at the long table, would hear him coughing and moaning in his bedroom.

There was no point in knocking on the door or calling out to him, Ulla said: just as he did not wish for an assistant, so also was the pastor adamant that he would not be seen by the doctor.

The river water melted, setting reflections free, but the landscape darkened overnight and the ground itself was still frozen. Tuomas, forced now to paint thinner and thinner to save the colours, tried to convey the way these reflections appeared as captive fragments of some other, brighter reality. Then finally the paints ran out and, deprived of his distraction, Tuomas wrote to his bishop, describing the situation he found himself in, apologising for his lack of success and begging for advice.

No answer came. When the roads were better, Tuomas thought, he would ride there himself, though he was not sure what he would say. Indeed, it sometimes seemed that his tongue was fusing with the roof of his mouth, and moving it to pronounce words, even prayer or song, was a huge effort of will. By mid May, the roads were dry, but he didn't ride to the bishop. ‘I stayed where I was,' he wrote later, ‘and sent money to Oulu for more paints; I received pigment, linseed, turpentine. . . .'

At home, my mother infroms me, they are having a heat-wave. People are going to work in shorts and bright-coloured dresses, lying in parks at lunchtime, buying fans. Here, the ground is still frozen. But villagers have begun to display on their windowsills little trays and pots of grass grown indoors from seed. Sometimes, on my walks to the supermarket or the community centre, I glimpse on a kitchen or dining-room table a vase containing a dozen daffodils or one or two bright and expensive Gerbera daisies.

When the sun is strong, a faint steam rises from the ground, and there's a rotten smell, somewhere between excrement and ethyl alcohol, which, I've been told, is last year's organic detritus concluding, in double time, the process of putrefaction interrupted by last year's frost: a true sign of the beginning of spring.

Tuomas's little house has its own smells: the resinous tang of the dry wood it was built from all those years ago, still in some way alive; fresh coffee and, later in the day, the heavy sludge of old grounds in the filter papers; imported apples and oranges in their bright plastic bowl; periodically, sheets, needing to be taken to a Mrs Lausti for washing, there being no launderette. Despite the cold, I make a point of keeping the windows open in the morning for a good half-hour before I go out. I raise my hand to passing cars as they shower me with mud, call out brisk greetings to fellow pedestrians. Most people nod or raise their hands and reply. Of course, there's Christina. And there are certainly a few people who feel guilty about, or embarrassed by, or suspicious of me, or else connect me with their bitter disputes with the Board of Antiquities and the official Lutheran Church. But the majority here listen to a question with interest, and do their best to answer it.

I go out first thing and do my local errands on foot, so as to move my blood around and get as much light as possible. Today, Heikki Seppä's jeep passed me just as I emerged from the shop. He stopped a few yards ahead, the engine running and the door open, waiting for me.

I explained that I was walking on purpose.

‘Five more minutes will make no difference,' he told me, in English.

‘No, really,' I said, taking a good look inside the car all the same. He keeps it tidy, with the inevitable maps tucked neatly into side pockets, a roller-ball pen fixed with Blu-Tak to the dashboard shelf.

He shrugged.

‘I hear you are making good progress,' he told me. ‘Is that so? Are you well?'

I told him that his help had been invaluable.

‘As for me,' he said, ‘I'm having a bad day –' Last night, a long argument on the telephone with his ex-wife. This morning, a flat battery and then late for a meeting with his superiors where he was told that there will be further delays in a number of projects, including the restoration of the church here, making him even less popular with both the religious faction and the new middle-class incomers than he already is –

He shrugged again.

‘This is life. But now I am on holiday for two weeks. I am taking Kirsi skiing in Lapland, and then visiting my mother. And meanwhile, I thought you might need to spend some more time in the
pappila
–' He unfastened his seatbelt, dug into the inside pocket of his parka and handed me an iron key-ring. On it, the two large and half-dozen smaller keys that will let me into the main house and anything that's locked up there, alone, as and when I please.

Of course, he shouldn't have given them to me. The
pappila
has been deteriorating for over twenty years, and I shouldn't be allowed in without a hard hat, some kind of supervision – and, of course, the letter of permission and signed disclaimer, which for some reason are taking ages to arrive. So I thanked Heikki warmly, and wished him a good holiday with his daughter.

It was only after he had driven away that it occurred to me that he might have wanted a coffee or a drink and that I could have risen to the occasion. The wind was behind me as I walked home, angry at my awkwardness, and then angry at him for making me feel it.

15

A fat, sunburned man wearing wellington boots and trousers belted with a piece of green twine waved us to a standstill. The trousers had slipped down, showing a broad slice of white skin. Wisps of dry, sandy hair grew from the reddish brown of his scalp, like chaff on a field. Behind him, another lane like the one we were on led uphill to a low stone house and other farm buildings, a windbreak of poplar trees growing behind.

‘Harris,' the man said, offering a huge hand through the driver's window. ‘Pleased to meet you. It's ten pounds in advance.' He folded the cheque carefully in half and put it away in his back pocket, doing the button up by feel. His movements had an odd, practised delicacy about them, the fat man's grace.

‘The ground's dry, it's set fair. I'm up here. My wife'll do eggs and milk any time, plain bottles, brown bags. You can order bread. . . . No fires.' He hitched up the trousers. ‘Well –' He raised his hand. ‘There's more of you coming –' A blue Imp had stopped behind us.

‘Harris,' we heard him say. ‘Pleased to meet you. . . .'

We coasted slowly down the rest of the lane, stray twigs scraping at the sides of the caravan. A breeze blew through the hedges, bringing a thick, sweet smell that I had no name for. Then, the ground levelled and there it was – a vast and vivid field spreading out across the bottom of the valley, trees marking where the river must be, distant fields, dotted with cattle, rising to the other, steeper side.