The Mistletoe Bride and Other Haunting Tales (12 page)

Hermione got out of the car and turned to the church itself. It was the only place that looked open. She’d have a quick look inside. She was not a manipulative woman, but the idea came to her – if Leon complained at how long she’d kept him waiting for lunch – that she’d say she assumed he’d be pleased she was taking an interest in the local architecture.

The thought made her smile.

It was an ugly building. Fourteenth century? Fifteenth, maybe? Gargoyles with lewd mouths squatted around the edges of the roof. Unpleasant. Years of having her appearance criticised had made her self-conscious, so Hermione found herself pressing her T-shirt to her chest as if the stone watchers were leering down her cleavage. She pulled at her shorts too, to reveal less orange-peeled thigh. Leon said the backs of her legs were ugly.

Hermione didn’t want to go in, not really. She didn’t much like churches. But the thought of Leon watching her dither compelled her to hitch up her bag on to her shoulder and walk with purpose to the wooden door. It had a clumsy iron latch, the sort you’d expect to find in a National Trust cottage. She pushed down with her thumb. It didn’t move. She tried again, this time giving the door a vicious little kick with her foot. A creak and she was in.

The ecclesiastical chill slipped over Hermione’s bare arms and legs, the lingering smell of a Sunday service and damp.

As her eyes got used to the gloom, she realised that the church was much bigger than it appeared from the outside. Metal chandeliers hung from the rafters like fake wagon wheels in a country pub. Scenes of the crucifixion covered the walls, the reds and blues obscene against the grey of the stone. Beneath each tableau, thin candles burned in rows, their yellow flames giving no light or warmth. Faded scraps of paper were pinned on the walls, curt instructions on what to do and how to behave. Light a candle, drop a
centime
in the box. Pray for me.

Remember me.

Hermione supposed that her discomfort would fade once she was inside, playing the bona fide tourist, but in fact she felt nervous. One of ‘her headaches’, as Leon would put it. She put it down to the heat and too little to drink.

Clasping her hands in front of her, Hermione began to walk around with that shuffle particular to churches and art galleries, slow and steady and serious. The slap of her leather sandals was embarrassingly loud on the flagstones and the only sound except for the tick, tick of the electricity meter above the door.

Nerves sloshed at the pit of her stomach, intensifying with every step she took. Everything seemed unpleasant, threatening, rather than interesting. All these scenes of suffering and torture, nothing of faith or forgiveness. The pulpit seemed to lurch out from one of the pillars in the nave like a twisted dragon and when she screwed up her eyes, to test the truth of what she was seeing, she saw only images of hell and retribution.

The side chapel was no more pleasant, like a room in a giant doll’s house, three-sided with the front open to the nave. Wallpaper, broken furniture and everyday relics peppering the altars – an empty vase, flat-topped glass cases protecting scraps of material and feathers.

Protecting them from whom? From what? Those who came to worship unseen? It all repulsed her, made her want to smash it to pieces. She realised that she was twisting her wedding ring on her finger, round and round, making the skin underneath the gold sore and red.

By now, it was only the thought of Leon and the scene to come that was keeping Hermione in the church. She couldn’t shake the idea she was being watched, the sense of activity just suspended, as if she’d interrupted something. She imagined that, as soon as she left, the air would whoosh back into place behind her. More than once she spun round, sure that someone else was there – a tourist who’d slipped in without her hearing or a local woman come to polish or pray – but there was no one.

Hermione found herself standing at the communion rail. She lifted her head and saw a bleeding Christ, nailed to his cross, and a starched white altar cloth embroidered with greens and golds. More oppressive was the army of plaster statues, like a fossilised congregation, stationed between her and the altar.

Their paint was ragged round the edges, chipped pastel pinks and yellows and sea-green. Saint André, Sainte Germana, Saint Jean, Saint Antoine, adult faces on three-quarter size bodies, as if they’d stopped growing before time. One in a monk’s robe, a naked baby in one hand and a Bible in the other. One leaning on a staff, a lamb warming his dead feet. One clutching a skeleton’s hand, sharp like a claw. But most of all it was their dead eyes, their claustrophobic eyes, which pressed into her, accusing her, judging her.

Suddenly, Hermione couldn’t bear it a moment longer. Overwhelmed by a need to get out of the church, she turned and ran back down the nave, her leather sandals slipping on the smooth stones. Where was the door, why couldn’t she find the door? And still the eyes were burning into her back, challenging her to stand her ground, to stand up for herself. But she’d forgotten how.

She didn’t see Sainte Thérèse until it was too late. Hermione collided with the statue. Dazed, she touched her forehead with shocked fingers and found she was bleeding. She couldn’t make sense of it. How could she possibly have missed seeing the statue when she came in? It was so much bigger than the others and set right in front of the door.

She raised her head.

The plaster face of the saint wore an expression of such serenity, such grace, that Hermione’s fear evaporated. She felt her shoulders drop and heard a sigh, of relief or contentment, slip from between her lips. A cobweb was caught between the fingers on Sainte Thérèse’s right hand which cradled the outline of a quill. No longer frightened, Hermione found herself reaching up to brush it away. It was an act of such intimacy, she found herself blushing.

And in that moment, no more than a pinprick of time, she was touched by a presence that was white and clear, as if something pure had crept inside her head and was pushing out all other sensations. Such lightness, such stillness. An absence of physical being, a calm and peaceful silence that seemed to go on for ever.

For a moment, she was looking into living eyes. Thérèse looking at her. Hermione smiled.

Then, it was over. Just the grey of the church and the tick, tick of the electricity meter and herself, alone again, but at peace. Hermione had no idea what had happened, only that something had. And even though she didn’t believe in living saints or spirits, she knew that her world had shifted.

Hermione pushed the hair out of her eyes, picked up her handbag, then opened the door and walked out into the Midi sun. Lost in the shadows or an act of deliberation, she did not notice her wedding ring lying on the cold floor at the feet of the saint.

Years later, friends would still talk about how Hermione came back from that French holiday a different woman. About how strange it was that, after years of putting up with Leon’s bullying and belittling, she’d had the courage to send him packing. Walked out of a church in a place called Montolieu, called a taxi to the airport in Toulouse, bought a new ticket and flown home on her own. It was as if she’d got a new lease of life, they said. As if she’d got a bit of her old spirit back, they said.

You could see it in her eyes.

Author’s Note

Along with ‘Red Letter Day’, this is another of the earliest stories I wrote set in the Languedoc.

In the 1990s, when we were discovering Carcassonne, we spent many summer weekends driving from village to village, exploring the region. We fell in love with Montolieu – known as the ‘village of books’ – a pretty place north-west of Carcassonne. Like most French towns in the Aude, large and small, the church is at the heart of the community and unlike their Protestant counterparts, Catholic churches are usually colourful affairs – plaster saints, vivid paintings, richly decorated.

There are several Saint Teresas. Saint Teresa d’Ávila, a sixteenth-century Spanish saint, has a quill and book as her symbol and, among her various responsibilities, she is the patron saint of those in need of grace.

Reading this again after ten years – and after the publication of
Labyrinth
,
Sepulchre
and
Citadel
– I found it interesting to see how I was already trying out themes that were to become so important to me: the connection of history and emotion; the idea that architecture and landscape influences storytelling; the sense that reality can be momentarily suspended.

A version of this story was first published in
Woman & Home
magazine in 2005.

THE SHIP OF THE DEAD

Finistère, Brittany Coast
November 1930

The Ship of the Dead

Sur le Raz de Sein, au crépuscule, apparaît parfois un bateau qui navigue sans sillage toutes voiles dehors contre vents et marées.

Sometimes at dusk, between the mainland and the island of Sein, a boat appears that leaves no wake, its sails all unfurled, indifferent to wind or tide.

BRETON LEGEND

Although the night was dark – no moon and the sky obscured by cloud – I was able to follow the pale pathway worn by generations of feet in the cliff top. The crash of the waves on rocks and the suck of the tide on shingle far below kept me on course.

The land rose and I followed the track, the flint and chalk faint but unmistakable in the turf. I had walked further than I had intended and I was weary, but at last I reached the summit of the headland and looked out over what I knew to be the ocean. Nothing between me and the Americas.

I sat on a well situated boulder and contemplated my solitude, regretting I was walking alone. I was not – have never been – a clubbable sort. All the same, I enjoyed the pleasure of the right sort of companion. On this occasion, not one of my acquaintances had been available to undertake a walking tour of the Finistère coastline – for me, a return to the happy landscape of my childhood – so I had been obliged to travel alone.

I took out my tobacco pouch alone and smoked a pipe. It is said that tobacco deters insects and that may be true in some climates and latitudes. But here, on the Atlantic coast of Brittany, it had the opposite effect. I was soon beset by a cloud of hovering midges, many of them bloodthirsty, all of them irritating and oppressive. It quite spoiled my mood of contemplation.

I knocked out my pipe on the stone, stood up, adjusted my rucksack onto my shoulders, set my grip firm around my stick of hazel, and moved on.

The descent was no easier than the climb. The path was slippery beneath my boots – not from moisture, but from the small stones and gravel that I sent skittering down the steep slope ahead of me with every tread.

Just then, a pale moon was revealed by a rent in the clouds and I saw I was now walking along the edge of a field, lined with a drystone wall separating me from a substantial drop to a distant beach frilled with foam from the breaking waves. Wondering how deep might be the drop, I picked a stone and threw it as far as I could out into the night. I was able to count full to twelve before I heard a faint click. I have never suffered from a fear of heights nor am I usually prone to flights of fancy, but it seemed to me that a breeze sprang up all at once, a plaintive sound, deliberate and demanding, like a vexed child, provoking in my imagination the idea that I had transgressed by hurling the pebble. That its proper place was among its fellows in the wall, no doubt erected to prevent grazing animals from falling to their deaths. The idea caused me to shiver. All at once, I was keen to be off the cliff-top path and installed in some boarding house or shelter for the night.