The Virgin Blue (28 page)

I slept badly that night, my mind burdened with thoughts about Rick and Jean-Paul, and harsh thoughts about myself. I got nowhere with them, just worked myself up into a state. When I finally managed to fall asleep, I still woke early.

I brought the Bible downstairs with me. Jacob and Susanne were already at the table reading the paper, along with a pale man with orange-red hair like a carrot rather than chestnut like mine. His eyelashes and brows were red too, giving his face a fuzzy, undefined look. He stood up as I came in and held out his hand.

‘Ella, this is Jan, my boyfriend,’ Susanne said. She looked tired; her coffee was untouched, its surface beginning to form a wrinkled scum.

Ah, the father-to-be, I thought. His handshake was limp. ‘I am sorry I was not here to greet you last evening,’ he said in perfect English. ‘I was playing at an engagement at Lausanne and arrived back only very late in the evening.’

‘What do you play?’

‘I play the flute.’

I smiled, partly at his formal English, partly because his body was a bit like a flute: thin, rounded limbs and a certain stiffness in his legs and chest, like the tin man in
The Wizard of Oz
.

‘You are not Swiss, no?’

‘No, I am Dutch.’

‘Oh.’ I couldn't think of anything else to say, his formality freezing me. Jan remained standing. I turned awkwardly to Jacob. ‘I'll put the Bible in another room for you to look at after breakfast, OK?’ I said.

Jacob nodded. I went back to the hall and tried another door. It led into a long sunny room painted cream, with unfinished wood trim and gleaming black tiles on the floor. It was sparsely furnished with a sofa and two battered armchairs; like the bedroom, there was nothing on the walls. At the far end of the room stood a black grand piano, lid closed, and a delicate rosewood harpsichord facing it. I set the Bible down on the grand piano and went to the window to get my first real look at Moutier.

Houses were scattered willy-nilly around us and up the hill behind the house. Each house was grey or cream, with a steep slate roof ending in a lip that jutted out like a flared skirt. The houses were taller and newer than those in Lisle, with freshly painted shutters in sober reds, greens and browns, though just across from Jacob's house there was a surprising electric-blue pair. I opened the window and leaned out to look at Jacob's shutters: they weren't painted at all, but left a natural caramel-coloured wood.

I heard a step behind me and pulled myself back inside. Cup of coffee in each hand, Jacob stood laughing at me. ‘Ah, you are spying on our neighbours already!’ he cried, handing me a cup.

I grinned. ‘Actually I was looking at your shutters. I wanted to see what colour you painted them.’

‘Do you like them?’

I nodded.

‘Now, where is this Bible? Ah, there. Good, now you can go home,’ he teased.

I sat next to him on the sofa as he opened the book to the front page. He gazed at the names for a long time, a pleased look on his face. Then he reached behind him and from a bookcase pulled a sheaf of papers taped together. He began unfolding and spreading them on the floor. The papers were yellow, the tape brittle.

‘This is the family tree my grandfather made,’ he explained.

The handwriting was clear, the tree carefully plotted. Even so it was a messy affair: there were tangents, branches shooting off, gaps where lines petered out. When Jacob finished setting up the sheets, they formed not a neat rectangle or pyramid, but an irregular patchwork, with sheets tacked on here and there to hold information.

We crouched next to it. Everywhere I saw the names Susanne, Etienne, Hannah, Jacob, Jean. At the top of the tree it was sketchier, but it began with Etienne and Jean Tournier.

‘Where did your grandfather find all this?’

‘Various places. Some at the
bourgeoisie
in the
hôtel de ville
here – there are records that go back to the eighteenth century, I think. Before that I don't know. He spent years studying records. And now you've added to his work; you've made the great leap to France! Tell me now how you found this Tournier Bible.’

I recounted an abbreviated version of my search with Mathilde and Monsieur Jourdain, leaving out Jean-Paul.

‘What a coincidence! You've been lucky, Ella. And you've come all this way to show it to me.’ Jacob ran his hand over the leather cover. A question lurked behind his words, but I didn't answer it. It must have seemed extreme to him, my coming here so suddenly just to show him the Bible, but I didn't feel I could confide in him: he was too much like my father. I wouldn't dream of telling my parents about what I'd just done, the scene I'd left behind.

* * *

Later Jacob and I went for a walk around town. The
hôtel de ville
, a deliberate building with grey shutters and a clock tower, stood in the centre. Shops were clustered around it, making up what was called the old town, though it seemed very new compared to Lisle: many of the buildings were modern, and all had been modernized, with fresh plaster and paint and new square roof tiles. There was a peculiar building with an onion-shaped dome to one side and a stone monk placed in a niche under it, holding a lantern over the street corner, but otherwise the buildings were uniform and unadorned.

In the last century the town had expanded to 8,000 people, and houses had spread up the hillsides around the old town to accommodate the population. It all had an unplanned feel about it, strange after living in Lisle with its grid of streets and sense of being an organic whole. With a few exceptions the buildings were functional rather than aesthetically pleasing, built for a purpose, with no decorous brickwork or cross-beams or tiling like in Lisle.

A little out of the centre we strolled along a path next to the River Birse. It was small, more like a stream than a river, and lined with silver birches. There was something cheering about water running through a town, connecting it with the rest of the world, a reminder that the place was not so static or isolated.

Everywhere we went Jacob introduced me as a Tournier from America. I was greeted with a look of recognition and acceptance I hadn't expected. It was certainly different from my reception in Lisle. I mentioned this to Jacob, who smiled. ‘Maybe it is you who are different,’ he said.

‘Maybe.’ I didn't add that though the people's attitude toward me here was gratifying, I was also slightly suspicious of such wholesale embracing of a family name. If you knew how awful I've been, I thought grimly, you wouldn't think Tourniers were so wonderful.

Jacob had classes to teach. On his way to the school he took me to a chapel in the cemetrey on the edge of town and left me to inspect the interior. He told me there'd been monasteries at Moutier from the seventh century; the existing chapel of Chalières dated from the tenth. Inside it was small and simple, with faded Byzantine-style frescos in rust and cream on the choir walls and whitewash everywhere else. I studied the figures obediently – Christ standing with his arms outstretched, a row of Apostles below him, pale circles of halos framing their heads, some of the faces washed out beyond expression – but except for the faint trace of a sad-looking woman off to one side, the frescos left me cold.

When I came out I saw Jacob partway up the hill, standing in front of a headstone, head bowed, eyes closed. I watched him for a moment, ashamed of my own worries when here was real tragedy, a man grieving over his wife's grave. To give him privacy I went back inside the chapel. A cloud had crossed the sun and it was darker inside; the fresco figures hung suspended above me like ghosts. I stood in front of the faint lines of the woman and studied her more closely. There was little left of her: heavy-lidded eyes, large nose, pursed mouth, framed by a robe and a halo. Yet these rudimentary elements captured her misery precisely.

‘Of course. The Virgin,’ I said softly.

There was something about her expression that made her different from Nicolas Tournier's Virgin. I closed my eyes and tried to remember it: the pain, the resignation, the strange peace in her face. I opened my eyes and looked at the figure in front of me again. Then I saw it: it was in the mouth, the tight little turns at the corners. This Virgin was angry.

When I left the chapel again the sun had come back out and Jacob was gone. I walked toward town through the newer houses, ending finally at the Protestant church, the one I'd seen when I first woke up in Jacob's house. It was a big building, made of limestone and surrounded by old trees. In some ways it reminded me of the church in Le Pont de Montvert: both were situated in the same place in relation to the town – not in the centre, but still dominant, halfway up the north slope of a hill, with a grassy porch and wall where you could sit and look out over the town. I circled the church and found the front entrance open. Inside there was more decoration than there had been in the church at Le Pont de Montvert, with marble floors and a bit of stained glass in the choir. Still, it felt bare, austere and, after the Chalières chapel, large and impersonal. I didn't stay long.

I sat on the wall in the sun, just as I had before in Le Pont de Montvert. It was warm now and I took off my jacket. Underneath, my arms had broken out with psoriasis again. ‘Dammit,’ I muttered. I folded my arms to my chest, then straightened them and held them up to the sun. The stretching movement made a patch on my arm fill with blood.

At that moment a black Labrador bounded up to me, scrambled half onto the wall and pushed his head into my side. I laughed and petted him. ‘Perfect timing, dog,’ I said. ‘Don't let me wallow.’

Lucien appeared across the green. As he approached I got a better look at him than I had the night before, at his baby face, dark wiry hair and wide hazel eyes. He must have been about thirty, but he looked like he'd never been touched by worry or tragedy. A Swiss innocent. I glanced down, deliberately keeping my psoriasis exposed. I noticed another patch on my ankle and cursed myself for forgetting to pack my cortisone cream.

‘
Salut, Ella
,’ he said, standing awkwardly until I invited him to sit down. He was wearing old shorts and a T-shirt, both covered in spots of paint. The Lab looked at us, panting, tail moving; when he was sure we weren't going anywhere, he began nosing around the nearby trees.

‘Are you a painter?’ I asked to break the silence, wondering if he'd heard of Nicolas Tournier.

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘I'm working up there.’ He gestured behind us up the hill. ‘You see the ladder?’

‘Ah, yes.’ A house painter. This shouldn't make a difference, I said to myself. But my questions dried up; I didn't know what to say.

‘I build houses too. I fix things.’ Lucien was looking out over the town, but I could see he was also surreptitiously glancing at my arms.

‘Where do you live?’ I asked.

He pointed out another house up the hill, and glanced at my arms again.

‘It's psoriasis,’ I said abruptly.

He nodded once; he was not a talkative man. I noticed his hair had streaks of white paint in it and his forearms were covered with a mist of white speckles that comes from using a roller. I was reminded of moving with Rick: the first thing we did when we got a new place was to paint every room white. Rick said it was so he could see the dimensions of the rooms better; for me it was like cleansing them of ghosts. Only after we'd lived in a place for a while, when its character became apparent and we felt comfortable living in it, did we start painting rooms different colours. Our house in Lisle was still white.

The phone call came a day later. I don't know why it caught me off-guard: I'd known my other life would intrude eventually, but had done nothing to prepare myself.

We were eating fondue at the time. Susanne had been amused to learn that after Swiss Army knives, clocks and chocolate, fondue was the fourth thing Americans associate with Switzerland and insisted on making it for me. ‘From an old family recipe,
bien ŝur
,’ she teased. She and Jacob had invited a few people: Jan was there, of course, as well as a German-Swiss couple who turned out to be the neighbours with the blue shutters, and Lucien, who sat next to me and stared at my profile from time to time as we ate. At least I had covered my arms so he couldn't stare at the psoriasis.