Alentejo Blue (26 page)

The vicar didn’t seem cross. ‘I don’t know,’ he said gently. ‘I believe. That’s what we call faith.’

She carried on believing, into her early teens. She didn’t even notice when she stopped. One day, during prayers, she opened her eyes and realized she hadn’t believed for a long time. It was surprising, as though somebody else had done it, walked into her bedroom and taken something away.

I meant to ask him where animals go, thought Sophie. I never asked him that.

They were driving through a storm and there was thunder but it was bright outside, a whitish light. At the outskirts of the town now, the houses beginning to build up. A construction site at a standstill, an office block and a fan of parked cars.

What did I believe, though? What did I believe?

She was getting married in that church.

Alicia went to a register office.

The bus. There were children on board. It could go one way or the other.

She died and her last thought was the dress.

You didn’t die. You didn’t.

What did I believe?

‘Sophie,’ said Huw, ‘I think you should put the head-lights on.’

‘Oh, Jesus,’ she said. ‘Stop fussing.’

In the morning they stood in the little marble-clad bathroom and looked at themselves in the mirror. Huw stuck out his hand. ‘Hi, I’m Huw Ridley. And this is my wife, Sophie. Sophie, say hello to these nice folks here.’

She crossed her eyes and put out her tongue.

He put his arm around her shoulders. ‘How do we look together?’

She leaned into him. ‘I think we look just fine.’

He turned on the tap and picked up his toothbrush.

‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘about yesterday.’

‘Forget it.’ He applied the toothpaste. ‘Feeling better today?’

‘Much better, thanks. I’m going to get dressed.’

‘You realize,’ he called out to the bedroom, ‘that you’ll have to mend your lippy ways. Because when I’m your husband I’ll want a lot more respect out of you.’

‘Come here and say that, pussycat.’

Huw appeared in the doorway. He struck a bodybuilder’s pose.

‘Idiot,’ she said. ‘Come here.’

‘I said that when I’m your husband, I’ll want a lot more respect out of you.’

He was close enough now for her to pull off his towel, so she did. ‘What’s this?’ she said. ‘What’s this?’

In the Capela dos Ossos Sophie left Huw by the altar and went back to the entrance, wanting to read the guidebook as she walked round. She began, instead, to read the graffiti on the skulls to the right of the gate. Nuno, Gary, Lena, Justin B, Pinto, Paulo, Marie Rosta, Susana Alforas. Kiss me, it said on one skull. I’m hungry, on another in pink felt-tip.

She opened the book.

An anthology could be compiled on the subject of the Insight of Death, the perception of which has preoccupied Mankind from time Immemorial.

There indeed should be no great need for the Church to remind us every year on the first day of Lent that thou art dust and to dust shall thou revert, this being as it is probably the foremost of eternal verities . . .

She paused and looked around and tried to imagine the monks who had built this place, fitting the bones together, choosing from a pile, sizing and stacking and balancing. Did they shiver? Did they sing? Did they work in silence?

Taking a deep breath and rolling back her shoulders she tried to assess how she was feeling today. It was hard to tell. Am I feeling normal? A little heavy perhaps. Everyone feels low sometimes. Especially in a place like this.

She pressed her teeth together. If you think about how you feel then you inevitably start to feel bad. Forget it, please, stop fretting. Do you want to make yourself ill?

Flicking forward a couple of pages she began to read from the tombstone inscriptions.

At St Dominic’s Monastery in Lisbon:

She looked up at Huw, who was studying the ceiling. She wanted to laugh. She wanted him to come and read over her shoulder and say something to make her laugh. He had his hands on his hips and his head tipped back and she thought he looked very fine.

She didn’t know what to think about this place. Huw would know what he thought, he always did, and later she would argue with him until she realized what it was that she felt. She liked the way that worked.

Only with the wedding it was different. All the church stuff, he hated it. To him it was just telling lies. She couldn’t argue with that but she wanted to; she realized now that she wanted to.
How do you know?
she wanted to say.

She looked at him; his brown suede shoes rimmed with tidemarks from yesterday’s rain, his dark jeans and tan belt and the blue check shirt he hadn’t bothered to iron. Huw moved and she looked away, guilty, as though she had been spying on him.

Father Antonio Vieira S.J. wrote a masterly definition of the boundary between the living and the dead:

‘The living are dust that stands and the dead are fallen dust. The living are no more than dust that walks as the dead are dust that lies.

‘In summertime the squares in town are full of dust as dry as powder; there blows a puff of wind, the dust is raised in the air and what does it then do? What the living, and very alive for that matter, do, for the dust will not settle down nor can it stay still. It walks, runs, flies . . . The living are dust that is blown and therefore inflated with conceit; the dead are windless dust, there is no vanity left in them.’

Sophie closed the book. She was thirsty, really thirsty. Her lips, her mouth, were dry. The old couple in their vegetable patch came into her head and made her want to cry. Oh, God, she thought, it’s coming again. Her mind began to race, it wanted to get away. A hand with fingertips missing, her mother peeling potatoes, Jonnie Singh saying, ‘Miss, please, miss, can I go?’, Huw pushing back his fringe. If she had a glass of water. If there were somewhere to sit down. Something old, something new. Her mother had given her a brooch. She would wear it in her hair. Huw in his suit and tie, coming through the door. An eagle, they’d seen an eagle. If she slept with another man she’d know. Up the aisle and through the door and over the rainbow. Christ, it was and it wasn’t. That’s just how people are.

‘Excuse me,’ someone was saying. ‘Are you OK?’ It was the young woman in the red jacket, her boyfriend standing behind.

‘Yes,’ said Sophie. ‘Thanks. I was just . . . a little dizzy. Now I’m OK.’

The woman paused then turned away. ‘It’s kind of spooky, yes?’ she said over her shoulder.

‘It’s not,’ said Sophie quickly. It sounded rude and she wanted to say something else, to be nice, but the couple had carried on walking and now she had missed her chance.

She went slowly along the line of the tiles as if treading a tightrope and stood by the Founder’s tomb. There was nothing, nothing wrong. There was a cast of sunlight on the floor, shrugged off by the window. Sophie stared at it and sank.

‘God always welcomes us back,’ Reverend Chambers had said. He never took a biscuit but he touched every one on the plate. ‘I mean, if we’ve been away. He understands.’

Huw said something sarcastic. He barely covered it up.

Please, she thought, and raised one foot to rest against her knee, please, I would like to know. I don’t want everything to be nothing. What’s the point? If I open myself will you let me in? If I open my eyes will you let me see? I am trying. I’m helping myself now but I need . . . I need . . . What I’m asking for, I don’t think it’s too much, I’m asking you to see me.

She stood for a while and was calm. Her lips no longer felt dry. She looked at the walls of yellowing bones and thought, it’s a long time since I prayed.

Huw walked across, scratching his head. ‘It makes you think,’ she said to him.

He took her arm. It was time to leave. ‘Certainly it does,’ he said.

They walked through a tangle of Moorish alleys to the Praça do Giraldo and went into a
pastelaria
for a late lunch.

‘Do you want to do more churches after?’ said Huw. Sophie shook her head.

‘We’ve done quite a few, I suppose.’ He bit into his toasted sandwich and burned the roof of his mouth.

He took a napkin from the plastic dispenser on the table and wiped away a string of cheese. The napkin was thin and slippery, like cheap toilet paper. The coffee machine clattered and hissed. A man in white overalls delivered boxes of cakes stacked on a fork-lift trolley. A waitress bent over to inspect them and Huw stared at her varicose veins. They should have found somewhere proper to eat.

‘Not the most glamorous, is it?’ he said to Sophie.

She picked out a toothpick and snapped it in two and looked away.

Her sister had got married in a register office. That didn’t kill her parents. Sophie built things up into problems. He would just have to be firm.

‘Do you want coffee?’ he said.

‘OK,’ she said, ‘if you want to.’

‘God,’ he said, ‘don’t let me force you.’

‘I’ll have one, I said.’

He pulled out his wallet. ‘No. Let’s not. I want to go.’

On the way back to pick up the car they looked in some tourist shops. They were all the same: hand-painted earthenware, ceramic cockerel fridge magnets, tiles saying ‘Portugal’, crocheted place mats, leather belts and novelty items made out of cork.

‘Do we need a cork cruet set?’ said Huw. ‘How about a cork hat?’

Sophie picked up a cork wine cooler and put it down. ‘I’m not in the mood for shopping,’ she said.

Back on the street he tripped over a basket of white plaster churches. ‘Why don’t they keep the goods inside the damn shop?’

She strode on ahead. Huw tried to catch up but his foot was hurting and he was forced to stop again and take the weight off it for a while. The street, which had been quiet, suddenly filled with young people carrying books and files. If Sophie looked back now she wouldn’t see him. All these students hogging the road. It was her fault, anyway, for walking off like that. He was going to take his time.

He sat down on the kerb and eased off his shoe.

I’m not going to spend the rest of my life at the bank, he thought. I’m not going to be a lifer.

Some of them – most of them – they can’t see beyond. Not me, he thought, not me.

The students flowed around him. They talked loud and fast, as though they were about to be kidnapped and this was their last chance to speak. A bag knocked into his head. ‘
Desculpe
,’ said a girl bending down to him. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘I needed a new one in any case.’ She shrugged and walked quickly away.

Huw rubbed his foot. If it swells up, he thought, how am I going to get it back in my shoe? He shivered and realized it was far too cold to be going about in a shirt. All the students had jumpers or jackets. They hadn’t been fooled by the sun.

It occurred to him that Sophie would have to drive again. He sighed and tested some weight on his foot.

The street had cleared again now and Huw looked up to the far end where it began to rise steeply and then curved away under an arch. Sophie had not waited. He picked up his shoe and began to ease the lacing wide apart.

Huw was dawdling and that was all right with Sophie. He didn’t need to hurry up and she didn’t need to wait. She wasn’t quite sure which turn to take but then she saw the Misericordia and got her bearings again. They had looked round the church in the morning. ‘What do you call this style?’ Huw had asked. ‘Don’t know,’ said Sophie, ‘baroque?’ Huw looked in the booklet they’d got from the
tourismo.
‘Mannerist,’ he said, ‘apparently, but it seems more like High Kitsch to me.’

She thought about the way he had said that, with a smile on his face, as if gold leaf and carvings proved everything, as if that settled it all.

At the cathedral she paused and looked up at the odd mix of Gothic arches and Romanesque battlements and watched a middle-aged man come out and cross himself beneath a photograph of the Pope; he lit a cigarette as he stepped out of the porch.

She had decided to wait until they got home before she told Huw. He might think she was breaking off the engagement.

Perhaps she was breaking off the engagement.

She edged along the square, past the side of the monastery-turned-hotel where they had stayed, the pillars of the Roman temple coming into view.

A bellboy ran out to an arriving car, chased by a phalanx of fallen leaves. Sophie stood on the corner outside the hotel, one arm in the shade and the other in the sun.