Madenn stepped between them, put an end to the assault, just as Isaac seemed to come back to himself. His cheekbones flushed pink, and his lips parted as if he were about to say something. Then his eyes met his father’s and, suddenly, tears began to trickle down his cheeks, wetting a face that Alan had never seen cry – not at the hospital after the accident, nor during the funeral, nor at any other time during the teenage years that Alan knew had been miserable. He watched them flow, not knowing what to say, how to reassure this first intimation of grief. Then he heard a whisper:

‘I see, Papa.’

His son was smiling now – not mischievously, not disingenuously – he was smiling, and his eyes, wet and gleaming, were filled with an emotion he no longer expected to feel, as he watched the fleecy clouds scud across the sky, stared into the twilight that had a softness particular to this island, gazed upon all the things that he had been missing until now and which were only just appearing to him once more.

‘What do you see? Isaac!’

‘I see.’

Feeling utterly drained, Alan let go of the boy, not knowing what to do. Isaac threw himself against Madenn and took refuge in her strong maternal arms.

‘I see, Madenn.’

‘I know.’

She hugged him to her and buried her face in his salt-flecked hair. Beside them, Alan took a step back, a stranger to these two bodies embracing each other.

Gulls wheeled above them, watching the scene without a single cry. After a moment, a peal of bells echoed along the coast: across the sea in Roscoff, the church was striking the hour.

II

THE SEER

The low skies of early morning, more grey than blue, hung over Roscoff, leaving not a chink through which the sun could peer. From all along the old harbour came the clank of mainbrace against mast: trawlers moored, still asleep, their decks piled with crab pots; their steel hulls garlanded with ropes of blue, yellow, green, purple, still sodden from the day before, symbols of the traditional fishing methods still practised here – methods that protected both the fishermen and the seabed they worked. A single crab boat – a caseyeur – was leaving port. It cleaved the water, creating gentle eddies that made the mooring buoys bob up and down on the steel-grey surface of the water. To the east, towering above the harbour, Saint Barbara chapel stood witness to the boat’s departure. It was a small, white, modest building set high above the tree line; there was no indication that this chapel had stood here for four centuries, mute witness to every boat that went out and every caravel that did not come back, representing the patron saint of ‘Johnnies’, the nineteenth-century moniker for the onion traders who set off every summer, their boats piled high with crates, to sell their goods in England, and who prayed to Saint Barbara for her protection as they left. No one prayed to her now. Boats left quays without the deckhands bowing or running up the sails as they glimpsed the church. Now they merely used the white facade to get their bearings as they approached the coast.

The caseyeur sailed away and the watching chapel of Saint Barbara stood silently by, forgotten by sailors, a patron saint who had become nothing more than a landmark, a relic shorn of all respect by the modern world.

A group of townspeople had gathered in the church grounds and were chatting easily, commenting on the warm weather and the lack of wind. Bags of clothes and cardboard boxes marked Children’s Clothes, Jumpers, Shoes were spread out on the lawns. Two tables had been set up to take the collection; Sister Delphine and Sister Anne were busy sorting clothes and talking to those who had brought donations. A layer of grey cloud still hung over the town, and the church – whose appearance changed in accordance with the light – loomed over them like a block of charcoal granite. No one paid any attention to the bas-reliefs carved into the arches of the holy building: the figure of the shipowner standing on the jib of a caravel flanked by two protecting angels as he faced the raging swell. They had forgotten the countless other ships all around the church, the sea ever-present both within and without – on these walls and in the town itself – the sea which was the first denizen of the earth, one that had witnessed every birth and counted all its dead.

‘Could you set any of the clothes with holes or stains to one side, Sister Anne? We don’t want to give out clothes that are in poor condition.’

Sister Anne duly complied. Dropping a threadbare jumper into a cardboard box, she glanced up at the chapel ossuary a few metres away, one of two that opened on to the parish close and which she had at first mistaken for an ordinary house. She turned away. The only ossuaries with which she was familiar were those hidden beneath the streets of Paris, visible only to those who were prepared to go down into the catacombs to see them. It was a morbid fascination she had never understood: in going to look at these bones, mere mortal remains, mankind strayed from all that was sacred about the body.

She went back to sorting clothes; on the other side of the tables, a man approached then stood, staring at her: a thick-set man with a pronounced limp and hair slicked over to one side, he seemed to be gazing in astonishment at the graceful face he had just spotted. Goulven rarely came to Roscoff now; he no longer knew who was still alive there and who had died. He had met Sister Delphine three or four times, on the rare occasions when he had found himself obliged to take the motor launch, to cross the sea he had avoided since it maimed him. There was no doubt that he missed it – the rolling swell beneath his feet, the wind whipping his face – but he only experienced those things now when he was forced to, and this morning, Madenn had forced him.

He lifted up the heavy plastic bag that she had given him.

‘I’ve got this bag.’

‘You can put it over there. Thank you for your donation.’

Goulven did not leave immediately; he wanted to share the secret that Madenn had confided to him, like a child who had discovered the lure of the forbidden. He set down the bag and stepped closer to the nun.

‘There’s a lad on the island says he sees the Virgin.’

Surprised at his own words, he gave a chuckle, revealing his toothless mouth. At first, Sister Anne did not understand, saw only the glittering, mischievous eyes gazing at her as though they were casting a spell; she tried to back away, but the man grabbed her wrist.

‘Seen her three times already, he has.’

‘I’m sorry, Goulven, we’ve got work to do. Go and tell someone else your silly stories.’

Hands on her hips, Sister Delphine looked the ex-fisherman up and down; normally, the islander rarely uttered a word.

‘She told the lad to come back today.’

‘Well, tell her we said hello. Now, go on! Shoo!’

Goulven turned back to the nun whose wrist he was still holding. He looked at her, felt the goosebumps on her skin quivering under his fingers; he had the instinct of those who had sailed the seas for many years, those who had learned to read the shifting light, interpret a shadow passing beneath the surface. Careful not to hurt or frighten her, he leaned forward and whispered to her:

‘It always happens at the far end of the Route de Sainte-Anne.’

He hobbled away from the churchyard and disappeared into an alley. Sister Delphine shook her head sadly as she folded a jacket.

‘Now the poor man’s rambling about visions of the Virgin Mary. It can’t be healthy, living out on that island the way he does.’

Next to her, Sister Anne stood bolt upright, her face impassive, staring at the space that Goulven had just left. She could still feel his hand on her arm, gripping her wrist as though he recognized her, as though she were the one he had come to seek out. Her hands tensed, crumpling the fabric she was holding. A voice came back to her, intoning the same words, like a salutation: You’ll witness an apparition of the Blessed Virgin in Brittany …

The breeze blew across the headland, grazed the statuette that was held in place by pebbles around the base, rosary beads draped over the small resin figure. The Blessed Virgin stood, her bare feet tickled by the grass, palms raised to receive entreaties, happy with this altar being built before her eyes. Next to her, Madenn was filling a clay vase with water. Her eyes were intent, her movements solemn; she was still shaken by the memory of the day before. She could still feel Isaac falling into her arms, his body chilled to the bone yet somehow weightless, as though relieved of all mortal cares. She had slowly led him back to the house, his room; once in bed, the boy had looked at her, still overwhelmed by doubt, uncertain of which world he should trust: ‘She asked me to come again tomorrow.’

Madenn had stroked his forehead until he dozed off. Then she had sat down on the edge of the bed, feeling as if her legs might give way, overcome by an emotion she had never known until this point. Her mother had told the truth – her mother always told the truth, and Madenn had never doubted her, had always believed that her stories were true, but to see what only the heart has known was something else entirely: the Blessed Virgin walking among mankind.

‘Madenn!’

Goulven came trudging along the path, his face still flushed from his trip to ‘the Continent’. Madenn had knocked on his door that morning, holding a large bag of second-hand clothes, and told him to take them to the church collection in Roscoff. She had also asked him to bring her back a spray of white lilies. ‘Isaac sees the Blessed Virgin.’ She had said these words naturally, as though stating something obvious, as though no further explanation were needed. Goulven had taken the bag and asked no questions; during his days at sea, he had witnessed things much more improbable than an apparition of the Virgin.

When he reached the headland, panting and breathless, he proudly held out the bouquet.

‘Lilies for the Blessed Virgin, just like you asked!’

Madenn turned round, her blue eyes wide.

‘You didn’t go telling the florist they were for the Virgin, did you?’

‘Nope!’

The man shook his head a little too vehemently for Madenn’s liking; she took the flowers from him and placed them in the terracotta vase, focusing on each bloom, studying its height and slant, ensuring there was not a single withered petal, since the sacred called for perfection. And as she arranged the flowers, she thought that perhaps She who had promised to return might already be here, watching her prepare these perfect lilies for her arrival, and the thought made her heart beat faster. Below the headland, the tide had receded, revealing the shallows of the beach, the damp sand criss-crossed with rivulets of water flowing back to the sea. Scattered brown rocks speckled the strand like seaweed, as though tossed at random; further out, in the waters of the ebbing tide, the rocks were covered with a greenish moss, like stateless ruins caught between land and water that told the story of these lands and the spirit of their people.

‘Here comes his father, Alan …’

Alan had just appeared on the path: when he had opened the windows of his living room, he had recognized the two figures standing out on the headland. The previous night he had waited hesitantly until dawn, longing to go upstairs, to shake his son awake and demand an explanation. He recalled the sight of Isaac’s face, frozen like a statue, like someone paralysed by shock. He had paced the living room, chain-smoking cigarettes, listening to the ticking of the clock, but still he could not bring himself to go upstairs, dreading what his son might say, dreading the thing he might not understand. No man experiences feelings of inadequacy the way a father does.

Now, here Alan was, looking at the bouquet of white lilies, the little statue of the Virgin in the grass garlanded with rosary beads, the cantankerous old fisherman he usually saw only at lunchtimes, with Madenn quietly tending to her arrangement – both suddenly transformed into disciples, venerating this spot simply because this was where Isaac had stared into the empty air.

‘Oh, come on, Madenn, you can’t be serious!’

‘You saw what happened as well as I did, Alan.’

Madenn reached into her bag and took out two novena candles. Alan simply could not comprehend this devotion. This faith that had no need to see. This conviction that had no demand for proof – or perhaps Madenn thought she had experienced that proof the day before, in Isaac’s silence, in what she herself had felt; for some people, feeling was enough. But Alan sided with his senses, believed only in what he could see. Moreover, putting aside the faith that had ceased to matter to him since the death of his wife, what was happening here involved Isaac, and he was determined not to allow this circus to take place in his son’s name.