A Possible Life (25 page)

Although there were murmurings in the village about Madame Lagarde’s strangeness and her melancholy moods, no one actually believed that she had drowned herself on purpose. There were no stones in her pockets, no sign that her death was anything other than a grim accident, such as occasionally might befall a grieving and distracted soul.

Jeanne brooded on the death of her mistress. Although she believed the words of the priest who exonerated Madame Lagarde from all sin as he buried her in the hallowed ground of the village cemetery, Jeanne felt in some small way tainted by association. This unease hung over all the last period of her life, which began when Marcel moved back into his parents’ house, bringing his wife Hélène and their three small children. Jeanne, who had been living in Clémence’s old bedroom upstairs, returned to her cold place on the ground floor. It pleased her well enough to have a new generation of children to look after, particularly the baby, whom she bounced up and down on her knee, chanting rhymes that had emerged from the deep countryside to lodge, somehow, in her brain.

She made no judgement on what she had seen in her life, but each experience affected her idea of what the world was. Clémence and Marcel had shown her that people change and are not the same all their lives. Madame Lagarde taught her that sometimes they
cannot
change. The orphanage, the dairy and Monsieur Lagarde made her think that all that really counted was good fortune.

Marcel was kind to her and gave her money for the work she did, though she was too old and worn out to do much. As her eyesight failed and she could no longer sew, she was left to sweep the floor and tend the children when the parents were not at home. She still prayed morning and night, and this communion with her god was the liveliest part of her slow day. At night she pulled the blanket over her head. She had no thoughts then, and she did not dream.

One day she was too tired to go outside, but stayed by the fire. She liked to watch the shape of the flame in the logs. All her life she had been fascinated by the sound of the fire as it spat and licked at the wood, carving new shapes with the sharp edge of its heat, no two ever the same. Then she fell asleep in the chair and died.

Between the orphanage and the dairy there were ten years in which Jeanne – a growing girl, then a young woman – laboured where she could find work. She gained her unusual strength by helping the men build dry stone walls in the fields and by harvesting the crops in August. In winter she went to religious houses and asked for shelter in return for scrubbing and sweeping. Sometimes the abbot or the Mother Superior would take pity; at other times the double doors were closed in her face, even when it was snowing on the road. She grew accustomed to sleeping in outhouses, in cellars, on sacks or on bales of straw. When the spring came at last she could again find work on the land.

She tried not to make friends because she feared to become reliant on another. One winter when she was about twenty-five years old she found work at a monastery – not in the main cloisters, where no woman was allowed, but in the laundry. The others working there were women like herself, and a few who were soft
in
the head. Their conversation was coarse and Jeanne learned from it that human beings could behave in the same way as the animals in the field. The thought repelled her, but the wash house was warm from the steam of the water in the large wooden vats where they pounded the linen.

Because of her strength, Jeanne was at first made to carry the heavy cauldrons, which she and another woman did by inserting a length of wood beneath the iron handle and hoisting it between them on their shoulders like a yoke. Then she would refill it with buckets they carried in from a well in the yard. A friendly monk, Brother Bernard, would sometimes keep an eye on their progress. One of the girls sang the song ‘Frère Jacques’ whenever he appeared in the yard and one day he obliged them by joining in the last line with his bass voice – ‘Din, dan, don, din, dan, don’ – till Jeanne and her companion were squealing with laughter.

It was a cold winter and the ground froze hard. It became slippery beneath the wooden clogs of the women as they crossed to the wash house in the morning. There was nothing to distinguish one day from another except the visits of Brother Bernard. Jeanne found herself looking up expectantly each time the laundry door opened. She felt she was competing for his attention with Mathilde, who had now changed the words of the song to ‘Frère Bernard’. He was younger than most of the monks; he had black curly hair and a puzzled, wounded look in his eye, Jeanne thought – like a dog that had been chained up too long. He smiled at the women and encouraged them in their work, but then fixed his eyes on some indefinite point in the distance, as though there was something there that only he could see.

When they took their break in the middle of the day he came and sat by the well, bringing apples or walnuts from the shelves of the refectory. He told Jeanne and Mathilde stories from the lives of the saints, but he never asked them about their own past.

One day, on an impulse, fretting at this lack of true exchange between them, Jeanne said, ‘Why did you become a monk, Brother?’

He did not walk away angrily or rebuke her, as she feared he might, but said mildly, ‘It was my destiny from a young age.’

Bernard began to visit every day and to stay for a long time talking to the washerwomen. He told them about the raising of Lazarus, the feeding of the five thousand and the time Jesus felt some vital strength leave his body in a crowded street and demanded to know who had touched him. A weeping woman knelt down and confessed that she had touched the hem of his garment in order to stem her ‘issue of blood’.

A strange look came into his eye at this moment and Jeanne became convinced that Bernard felt that he himself shared something of this power – a power to attract and heal and make whole.

The women slept outside the monastery walls in an old apple barn that had a dozen straw mattresses on the ground or up a ladder on a platform beneath the rafters. That night as she lay in her straw bed Jeanne became sure that Bernard did have something of the Saviour in him. She had heard him speak of the Apostles and how they were sent forth into the world to carry on Christ’s good work. They were chosen men who became filled with the Holy Spirit, and the heir of one, St Peter, was the holy Pope in Rome. So, ordinary men, she reasoned, could also have Jesus’s power in their blood.

The wonderful thing about Brother Bernard was that she, Jeanne, was the only person who had seen this power. The abbot treated him as an under-servant. The other monks laughed at him. Being in charge of the laundry – spending the day with the old crones, the bastards and the halfwits who worked there – was the lowest task in the monastery. But Jeanne had seen the look in his eyes, as though Bernard could see through the surface of
things
– through the trees, through the walls and into some comforting and more truthful world that lay beyond them.

One day when Brother Bernard came into the laundry and went close by Mathilde, Jeanne and another laundress as they worked, Jeanne did what the woman in the crowded street of Jerusalem had done: she touched the edge of his garment as he passed by. It was a less delicate movement than she had intended and she felt his hip bone through the cloth of his vestment. He paused for a moment, then, as he moved on, gave her an understanding smile.

Having lived now for more than a quarter of a century, Jeanne felt for the first time that it might be possible to open a door into her solitude. Death had made her an orphan; life had made her poor; and she had made herself go through each day with no regard or trust for others. It had worked in its own way; it was a life and she knew no other. In the smile of Brother Bernard, however, she glimpsed a sort of heaven. She saw what it might be like to let another creature see inside herself – and she imagined what views she might be granted in return. Perhaps most other people’s lives were like that, she thought. What might it be like not to be alone?

When the spring came, Jeanne did not leave the monastery to look for work on the farms, where she would be paid, but offered to stay and work for food and shelter alone. She was content to wait and see what might happen. The fact that Bernard was a monk was a comfort to her; it meant he would have no feelings of the kind the coarser women talked about. Jeanne had long since disqualified herself from any idea of love or marriage. What was left, what was real, was the holy power that she alone had seen in Bernard.

One day in May, Brother Bernard asked Jeanne if she would like to meet him that Sunday afternoon. The abbot allowed the
brothers
to walk in the countryside before Vespers and since the women did no work on Sundays he thought it might be a chance for the two of them to talk and pray. His eyes beneath his dark brows were full of concern.

Jeanne stammered out an agreement and Bernard pointed to a small copse on a hill beyond the local village. On the day, Jeanne cleaned her clothes and dried them as best she could. She had barely slept and found her hands clumsy even at this habitual work. When she arrived at the place Brother Bernard had pointed out, she found him already there, sitting with his back to a tree. He patted the dry leaves on the ground next to him and Jeanne sat down. She had never in her life before met someone without a purpose and did not know what she was supposed to do.

Brother Bernard turned to her. ‘How old are you, Jeanne?’

‘I don’t know exactly.’

‘Perhaps you are a couple of years younger than I am. Do you know where you came from?’

She shook her head.

He smiled. ‘I suppose none of us does. Or where we’re going. But we are here for a purpose, I believe.’

‘What purpose?’

‘That is your life’s work. To discover.’

‘And what’s yours?’

‘To serve God.’

‘Is that all?’

He laughed. ‘And to help others. I felt you touch me that day in the laundry and I knew that you wanted something from me.’

Jeanne looked down at the dry leaves. ‘I … I don’t know.’

When she looked up at his face again, she saw that it was framed with light, like the face of Christ on the cross in the orphanage church when the sun came through the glass.

He stood up and offered his hand. Jeanne allowed herself to be pulled to her feet. They walked together for a long time in silence, not touching, till they came to a narrow track with a farmhouse at the far end.

There was a feeling of peace that Jeanne had never known as they walked along the cart track between the poplars, towards the house, which had a commanding view of the countryside.

She felt that her life was about to take a decisive turn. Why should it be here of all places, she wondered – this old farm that had seen the generations come and go and would see her in the grave as well? But then again, why not? What are places for – but to keep watch silently?

‘Shall we ask these people if they will give us some water?’ said Bernard.

They crossed the yard, past a foul-smelling midden, and a chained dog began to bark as they approached the door. No one answered when Bernard knocked, so he cautiously opened it and called out a greeting. There was still no answer.

Jeanne hung back, but Bernard took her arm and led her into a gloomy passageway; they heard a horse shifting noisily in a side room. Eventually the passage opened into a parlour where the embers of a fire were smouldering, as though someone had recently been there and needed warming, even though the day was hot.

They stood opposite one another in the empty room with its cold stone floor and dark walls with unlit candles in wrought-iron sconces on the wall. Bernard held his arms wide and Jeanne fell to her knees in front of him.

‘Dear Saviour,’ she said.

There was a door that led into another part of the house. It swung open quietly. Bernard gestured towards it with his arm outstretched.

‘Will you follow me?’ said Bernard.

Jeanne stood up and looked into his eyes, deep brown and trusting under their black brows.

She felt the burden of her life shift inside her. She turned and went back quickly down the passage, the way they had come. Then she ran out into the dark, into the light.

PART V – YOU NEXT TIME

1971

IT WAS A
hot evening in July, and I was sitting on the porch in a chair made from an old car seat. I had a six-string acoustic on my lap and was running my fingers up and down the fret board, gazing into the distance. There was a can of beer open on the deck. We didn’t count alcohol as a drug and American lager almost wasn’t beer. Lowri was inside the farmhouse, and through the closed insect door I could hear her singing. Janis and Grace, the dogs, were rooting around in the yard.

Times like this, I often used to just sit there and stare out towards the woods. And I liked the idea that Lowri would soon be cooking, and that Becky and Suzanne, the stray hitch-hikers, would be there too when it got dark.

There was the sound of a car coming up from the village. You could pick it out by the tower of dust as it snaked along the road, vanishing outside the clapboard post office with its tattered flag on a pole, coming into view again on the low-hedged straight beside the apple barns. It was an old Chevy pickup, painted green with a flower stencilled on the door, so I knew who it was before he even pulled over in front of the house – Rick Kohler with his kilo bag of white powder and the body panels of his automobile stuffed with grass.

‘Hi there, my man.’ Rick was a scrawny guy with glasses. His hair always needed washing and the trousers hung off his non-existent backside. He looked like the chemistry swot from school. He certainly knew a lot about drugs.

I offered him beer, but he waved me away. ‘I got something special for you, man,’ he said.

‘Christ, what next?’

Rick looked towards the Chevy. ‘Come on out, honey!’

The passenger door on the far side opened, and I saw a female head. Round the front of the car came a skinny girl of about twenty-two years old. She had a floral cotton skirt, sandals and a white peasant blouse. Her dark straight hair was half tied back, secured by shades she’d pushed up on top of her head. She had suspicious brown eyes and she carried a guitar by the neck. Her high cheekbones made me think of a Cheyenne. She paused, unsure, and at that moment the sinking sun came through her hair from behind, through the short sleeves of her blouse, lighting her up. This was my first sight of Anya King.