The Story of My Face (17 page)

Of course, she begins, stealing
is
a sin and it
does
matter, it matters even if there is a good reason. But at the same time, it is all right too. Her voice goes slow and slightly sing-song, like a teacher's; she continues, explaining how sins are things people do to hurt each other, to hurt themselves, or to hurt God, which happens anyway in either of the two preceding cases. I guess that these are words she's often used to others and my attention wanders. Now that my shoes are off I'm considering whether to dip my feet in the stream, but I somehow can't move. I rest my arms on my legs and my head on my arms. Gradually, my eyes begin to close. Several times I force them back open. ‘We are all sinners,' she concludes, ‘it's part of being human. So in that sense – yes, you are one too. But the thing is – when we admit what we have done and are sorry, then God just wipes sins away –'

Then she stops, quite suddenly, and I realise that she's looking at me in a particular way. Her dark eyes have settled on mine, where the pale lashes, like careless over-stitching, only just show against the skin. She has given up explaining and is just noticing and waiting for whatever might come next. Her gaze moves fractionally all the time, as if she is reading something very interesting written in tiny print on my face.

‘So why?' I ask. ‘Why does he just forgive everyone?' It makes everything sound like a waste of effort, somehow.

She ignores this and leans closer. I can hear her draw in breath.

‘You know, I'm just like you, Natalie,' she says. Anyone she asked would tell her not to do what she's about to do, to think it through at least. But Barbara doesn't have or give herself (or want, even?) time to think. She lets her secret slip out whole, like one of those women you read about in magazines who go to the bathroom and give birth without knowing what they are doing; ignorant, even, of the pregnancy itself.

‘I've got a sin too.' She pauses, as if half-expecting, half-hoping for a question that will require her to continue. But although I say nothing, just wait, she continues anyway, explaining in a lowered voice that hers was a sin against God, the community, her husband and herself too – She swallows hard, leans forward, as if naming it were physically hard:

‘I keep an image,' she says. Her voice is having to stretch itself around a lump in her throat. ‘A photograph. I've never told anyone before,' she adds. Slowly, my face cracks open into a huge smile.

‘So you see –' Then she just stops, startled-looking as if she has no idea what could follow ‘So you see'. Perhaps she wants to say: ‘Please don't tell anyone what I've said,' but to ask such a thing would, to her, seem almost worse than burdening me in the first place.

‘What's in it?' I ask her. My voice bright, curious, as ever; I really don't know how important what she's said is and will be. ‘What's in the photograph? What's it a picture
of
?'

‘The baby girl,' she answers straight away, smiling now. ‘I told you about her. The one who died.' She puts her face next to mine and whispers in my ear, all breath and tickle:

‘Emma' is what I think she says. Then she pushes her lips together and shakes her head slowly from side to side: I know I'm not to ask any more. She takes off her glasses; I try them on and laugh as the world swells, rushes inwards, pushing me to the ground. I lie there listening to the summer sounds of insects in grass; the faint trickle of the water; very distantly, the erratic hammering and shouts from the camp where the food tent is being erected.

Barbara sits next to me in a pale, blurred world. What must it be like to have said those words, even in the smallest of voices to a child who doesn't really understand them? To have told a secret and be unable to get it back – like waking up in hospital, knowing some part of her has gone for ever: being radically altered by it but unable to complain since she made it happen; tearful, but at the same time relieved. Aware of her surroundings in a way she has not been for years; completely uncertain as to what difference the change will make.

From the direction of the camp comes a ragged cheer, signalling the successful erection of the tent. ‘So –' she says, frowning, bringing the conversation back to its starting-point, as if this might somehow obscure what happened in the middle: ‘I'll talk to Christina's mother, as soon as we get back.'

‘Don't worry,' I tell her. ‘I don't care what they think. Not when I'm with you, I don't.'

‘I know it's all so very different from what you're used to,' she says, ‘but I do want you to be happy here.'

‘I am,' I say, and Barbara lies down next to me, puts her arm over her eyes. Drained by the stress and release of her admission, softened by the sun, she quickly falls asleep.

Bored, I make my way back to the camp. The newly erected food tent, sun-bleached green canvas with twin poles, a fringe at the bottom of the roof and an entrance-way at each end, stands close to the gate towards the top of the field, where the ground is flatter. Most of the women and one or two men are inside it. Lower down, on a rather disabling slope, a children's cricket game, to be umpired by John Hern in a white shirt and straw hat, is about to start. I glimpse Mark by the far hedge and wave to him; he, of course, ignores me. Then, as I try to decide whether or not to join in, I see Christina, emerging, chewing and sticky-fingered, between two panels of the tent. Partly out of bravado and partly in order to test what will happen, I bite her on the arm as hard as I can.

Barbara would have woken, sweating, with the sun on her face. To begin with, she wouldn't have been able to think why she was there, lying in that field. Then she'd have remembered what had happened, what she had said. It would have taken her a few minutes to find her glasses, which I'd put carefully out of harm's way, on top of a large stone some feet away. And then, once she got her sight back, she could see that it was almost three o'clock.

She hurried, via the camp, to the meeting-field where she was supposed to be helping with tea. The tent was thick with the hum of women's voices. Three trestle tables had been set up along the middle, and a separate one for making tea and mixing squash. She stood next to Alice Cox, who, while buttering, explained in detail about the building of an extension to her house. Barbara spread egg mayonnaise on slices of bread, four at a time, pressed four more slices on top, cut them diagonally in half, piled them on the plate, took more slices. It was comforting. She jumped when Josie Gardner tapped on her arm: they must talk, Josie said, while the children were busy with the cricket match.

They sat on some spare benches by the inside wall of the tent, their faces ghostly in the greenish light that seeped through it. Josie kept her feet tucked under her skirt, her back straight. A fine gold chain, Barbara noticed, was, for part of its length, stuck inside a fold in the skin at the base of the other woman's neck.

Natalie, she said, coming straight to the point, had just bitten Christina on the arm. She pointed out the place on the inside of her own well-fleshed upper arm. Her brown eyes glittered. The bite, she said, leaning forwards and lowering her voice,
drew blood
. She sat straight again, her hands in the lap of her skirt, waiting.

‘Why did she do it?' Barbara asked.

That was not really the point, Josie said.

Some of the children, Barbara said (aware dimly that she was enjoying saying it), including Christina, had been using their faith as a means to attack others.

‘I want you to see,' Josie told her.

They went outside, shocked momentarily by the brilliant light, the sharp shadows. As the food tent had taken the flatter patch at the top of the field, the cricket was forced to take place on the more sloping part below, where the prayers had been held in the morning.

Barbara and Josie found us at opposite ends of a row waiting to bat. Christina pulled the plaster from over the mark on her arm, pointed out bloodstains on the gauze pad. I had come up behind her suddenly, she told them, when she was on her own, behind the tent. Her eyes, narrow under straight, fleshy brows, moved steadily from one adult to the other. In that respect, we were more alike than we would have liked to admit.

‘You did it to yourself,' I said, carelessly, half-watching the game. ‘That's why no one heard you scream: your mouth was full of arm. So you're a liar, and that's another sin on top of what there was before –'

Christina burst into tears. It was because I had said she was
fat
, she sobbed, by way of admitting that she had taunted me, burying her face in her mother's chest.

‘Only after what you said,' I pointed out.

We must both, Josie said, apologise to each other and ask to be shown how to overcome our pride.

‘I'm not sorry,' I said to Christina as soon as they were gone.

‘I'm not either,' she said. Somehow this defiance bound us together and we stood awkwardly next to each other in the line.

‘I hate games,' she told me a while later, as if she had completely forgotten that we were enemies.

‘Oh dear,' Barbara said as they walked up the slope, ‘oh dear. But it is funny, too.' Josie stopped a moment to get her breath back and tuck her bra strap in. To her mind, she said, it just went to show what a struggle it was to bring a child up, a thing most men had no idea of. But all the same, some were harder than others. Mark, for example, was a lovely boy, thoughtful and hard-working, respectful, sure in his faith. She could see him serving the congregation when he was older, perhaps even taking the long route through ordination and back. There was definitely something special, something of a Paul Leverson about him, even at this age. What mother could want more?

Oh, Emma
, Barbara thought, as she pushed back into the food tent just in order to get away from the other woman,
my
darling
. . . . For while the small steel plaque said ‘Ruth Hern, three months old', and she had been happy enough with Ruth before, once the child had been laid to rest, the other name, the one she would have preferred, was the one that came to her. It was soft and simple in the mouth – Emma, Em – and because it belonged to no one else she knew, it could be just between the two of them. The simple syllables carried a feeling far in excess of the nameable facts: that her grip on a finger was even stronger than Barbara remembered Mark's being; that like him, she was a long baby, and that her round eyes, when she was in the mood to look, seemed particularly alert, the tiny beginnings of eyebrows arched high just like Barbara's own, and again, Mark's; that she cried determinedly for her milk, tended to snore at night – which was why as soon as she slept four hours at a time they put the cot across the landing in the back bedroom. But truly, she gave no sign that in the small hours of a Tuesday morning she would simply stop breathing, leaving behind her a terrible silence that woke Barbara, so that she sat bolt upright, listening, then hurried across the landing, twelve steps. There was no sign. There was no sign that her lungs were not properly formed, no sign that she would not just keep growing into herself, even less sign that she would be, as it had turned out, Barbara's last child.
Em
, what she was, what she might have been. Born May, died September, gone.

She stood for a while until her eyes adjusted. Plates of food had been covered with tea cloths. There was an overwhelming smell of bread and hard-boiled eggs. Most of the helpers had disappeared. She was about to leave herself, when Anna Herrick called out: ‘Could you be a dear and cut some cakes up, sixteen pieces from each?'

In the late afternoon she shows me in slow motion how to slip the knitting needle in, carry round, slip off. The important thing is to keep the wool moving steadily over your fingers, not to let it drop, not to pull on it, not really look at it too much, just feel it there and keep track of it with the back of your mind. That way the tension stays the same, and your edges come straight, which is just as important for a six-inch blanket square as it is for a pullover. The people getting the blanket might not notice wavy edges, but then again they might, and there was no reason why they should have second best –

‘Barbara,' I interrupt, ‘can I ask something?'

‘What sort of thing? Well actually, no,' she says. ‘I'd rather you didn't, sweetheart, not now –'

‘All right,' I tell her. I wanted to know who it was who took the photograph of the dead little girl, but it can wait.

‘I don't mind,' I say. The white cardigan she's just started, she says is for me, if I want it.

‘I really do!' I say, two rows done, bent double over my needles, the pink thread extra bright in the shadow of my lap.

Later, John washes down using a face flannel and the pale-blue plastic bowl on the table outside the van.
Whatever have I done?
she thinks, watching him dip the flannel in, squeeze it out, rubbing it over his neck, behind his ears, while he relays the afternoon's news.

Mark got a half century right at the end. Now he's gone somewhere quiet to consider tomorrow's text, he tells her.

Natalie's helping with supper, she says.

He tips out the water, wrings the flannel, pulls the yellow towel from its drying place over the stable door. A shame about this morning, he says, smiling over to where Barbara sits. She's tanning quickly. Her hair is looser than normal, her blouse the worse for a day's wear, her bare feet have grubby soles. She smiles back at him, just as usual. Perhaps it's a rather small smile, but certainly John doesn't sense that his wife has, since this morning, changed: that as she looks back at him she is asking herself which thing, of those she has done wrong, would matter to him most, if he knew –

He comes over to her, squats on the ground by the chair, kisses her lap, offers his hair and the back of his neck to rub. Why not go inside now? he suggests.