‘That’s Isaac. He’s one of my second-year students. Not what I would call a well-adjusted lad.’
The teenager waited until the car had disappeared over the brow of the hill before carrying on his way. He strode quickly up the dune, crossing the coastal path and making his way towards the headland; he walked on, oblivious to the fact that he was being observed by Madenn, who was standing near the hedge at the top of the path. She had been watching for an hour, perhaps two, her heart pounding fretfully, waiting for the boy to come back to the promontory where she had left him the day before.
When the wind had become too cold, she had walked away without calling out to Isaac one last time. Afterwards, she had been unable to sleep so she had dug out some old family albums; as she leafed through the pages, she had found photographs her mother had kept: the black-and-white shots of four smiling girls – Jacqueline and Jeanne, Nicole and little Laura – had been taken back when her mother was living in L’Île-Bouchard. Her mother had known the four schoolgirls, had witnessed their delight when the Blessed Virgin together with the Angel Gabriel had appeared to them in the village church several times over the course of a week. Sitting up in bed, in the glow of the bedside lamp, Madenn had studied the frank smiles of these country girls, the four innocent faces who had been given the gift of grace; she leaned back against her pillow, the album open in her trembling hands: the next day she would know for certain.
Now, out on the headland, Isaac seemed to be waiting for something. He kept looking around him as though unsure what he had come there to find. Madenn decided to go to him: she approached slowly, step by step, holding her breath, never taking her eyes off the boy. Suddenly her heart began hammering so fiercely she thought she might faint: Isaac had just turned round and gone utterly still, staring at whatever had called him to this place again. Madenn raced back down the path and across the dunes to Alan’s house, and as she had the day before, she pounded on the door as if determined to break it down. Finally, it opened.
‘You need to come with me.’
She grabbed Alan’s wrist and dragged him out so forcefully that he almost fell flat on his face; then she set off at a run. She was already panting for breath and dizzy from the scene she had just witnessed, but she did not slow down; in fact she ran faster, determined that this man should see what she believed to be true.
‘My mother was living in L’Île-Bouchard when those visions happened … She saw the girls in church …’
Her mother had described the scene in detail: four little girls kneeling at the foot of the altar, motionless, spellbound, gazing up at a blank wall as though it had revealed all the mysteries of the universe, and behind them a group of villagers, seeing nothing yet feeling everything, realizing they were not alone, that in that very moment, the Blessed Virgin walked among them in their little church.
‘There was something about their eyes, the way they stared … And your son … he’s doing the same …’
Alan stopped in his tracks, annoyed that this woman had dragged him out here for no reason, irritated that she had woken him: having come home from work, he had stretched out on the sofa and had instantly dozed off; he hadn’t heard his son’s footsteps in the hallway, hadn’t heard the front door close. Sleep had simply overwhelmed him. For years now, Alan no longer decided when to sleep: he simply waited, lay awake at night counting the hours, never knowing when sleep would come.
During the day he might drift off for a while. Once, while teaching a pupil to navigate, he had fallen so soundly asleep that he did not hear the screams of the panic-stricken student, who had to steer the vessel back to harbour unaided, and had never set foot on a boat again. His wife’s death had robbed Alan of his equilibrium, and he had let it go, surrendering himself to whatever each day might bring; he even took a certain comfort in no longer making decisions.
‘What’s the matter with you, Madenn? What the hell are you talking about?’
The lack of instinct in men never ceased to amaze Madenn; it was her turn to be annoyed now. She turned, took a step back towards him, fixing him with a steely blue glare; she would say this only once:
‘I’m talking about people who see the Blessed Virgin.’
Without giving him time to think, or even to consider what she had just said, Madenn dragged him on again. Down below them, the tide was rising, returning to the shore it had abandoned all day long; the kelp had been washed away and now floated among the waves, a viscous ball that the tide would spit out tomorrow when it ebbed.
‘Over there. Your son.’
Standing on the promontory three metres above the sandy shore, Isaac was oblivious to the incoming tide, deaf to his father’s voice calling his name; he was staring at the sky, watching the scudding purple clouds. Or was he looking at something else – the gulls circling overhead, the waxing moon already on the rise, some special quality of the light that only he could see? Once more his name echoed into the void, into a world of which he was no longer a part, like the dead vainly trying to speak to the living. The sharp salty tang of the sea filled the air; the tide continued its approach, devouring the last shreds of kelp; the waves murmured as they embraced the shore, ringing the coast with a darkening blue as the light waned.
‘Isaac!’
The voice was close now, right behind him. Alan raced up, panicked, unable to bear the sight of this motionless figure that triggered some nameless fear in him. He grabbed Isaac and spun him around; he did not recognize this face. This was his son – these were his features: the almond eyes, the slightly upturned nose, the thin, mute lips – yet Alan did not recognize him. The boy seemed like a stranger. Not knowing what to do, he clutched the boy’s arm and shook him roughly, as though shocking the body might bring back the mind; as though he had not shaken his son enough, as though this transfixed face were the result of his neglect. Behind him, Madenn screamed, begging him to stop, not to hurt the boy, but Alan did not hear. It was as if nothing could be heard here on this headland, as if it were cut off from the rest of the world. Alan continued to shake the boy, trying to rid him of the stupor that had frozen his face, gripping his frail arms so tightly he could feel the bones beneath the skin.
‘What the hell is wrong with you? What are you doing out here?’
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.’
