August (7 page)

‘I am sorry,' Tristan gasped, the memory now jagged with pain. ‘It was better than that. It was more beautiful. I, it's just…'

He waited for the word but his mind remained perfectly blank. It was closing in on him, he could feel it. ‘This story, there is no point, it is just…'

He felt her shift against him. She was about to speak. He wished she wouldn't, but left her room nonetheless. Manners.

‘They were farewelling,' she said, the words falling soft and sure.

‘Yes,' he agreed. ‘They were farewelling.'

Three young mothers stood to the side of the choir, each holding her heartbreak, a small bundle wrapped in the grey swaddling of an unbaptised child. Standing opposite were three women of the night, the stoop of their shoulders suggesting great age. One at a time a mother stepped forward to hand over her dead baby. They received nothing in return, no words, no touch. The crones turned away leaving the mothers stranded before the altar, mothers no longer. Tristan could barely watch as the hell-bound babies were laid together in a single dark box, their deaths sealed by the voices of angels.

Remembering it, Tristan began to weep, as he had on that first night.

‘How did it make you feel?' she asked.

‘Disgusted, of course.'

‘So what did you do?' It was less a question than an accusation. Tristan paused, aware of the absurdity of the answer. But he would give it. The time for not telling had passed.

‘I fell in love,' he admitted. ‘I had no choice.'

He closed his eyes, embarrassed at how it sounded, how foolish and indulgent. But it was the truth. It was his story. If there was a way of changing it he would have, but they were entangled now, her cheek heavy on his chest, her breath wheezing through him.

‘Tell me,' she prompted. Tristan was surprised to hear no judgment in her voice. ‘Tell me how it happened.'

Tristan remembered it with perfect fidelity, that moment of distilled need in which he first beheld the church's failure: three mothers beyond consolation, deprived of religion's anaesthetic. What manner of cruelty was it that kept the Holy Council from finding in its shape-changing scriptures a place for these children?

The voices of the choir licked at the air, their beauty turned ghoulish.

‘Appalling, isn't it?' Brother Kevin whispered. The women of the night moved silently towards a side door with their abandoned freight. The hymn swelled to an unnatural chorus and the mothers were reduced to the roles of extras in their own tragedy. Tristan nodded, not trusting his voice.

‘We can't stay much longer,' Brother Kevin said.

But Tristan couldn't move. As if he already knew. As if in that moment his future had reached out to him and pinned him there.

‘All right. You know the way. You must return before the light comes. We will talk soon.' The brother squeezed Tristan's shoulder and was gone.

The choir softened, now no more than wisps of voices twisting through the broken air. Tristan knew he had no place there, a spectator at the frayed edges of grief. The woman in the middle collapsed, racked with sobbing. The death of a child, the most sorrowful of all the mysteries.

Tristan wanted to show himself, to walk forward and offer her comfort. The possibility tugged at him, but he was afraid. The other mothers held their pain tightly to themselves. The leader of the choir raised a hand and the last of the voices stopped, turning the church cold with silence. The choirboys filed out, leaving only the mothers. Tristan was too frightened to move.

He realised he wasn't the only onlooker. A young woman rose slowly from the shadows of a side pew. Tristan pulled back further, watching her move to the altar with quiet grace and purpose. She stopped at the weeping mother. She held out her arms and the woman fell into her.

Tristan strained to make out the young woman's face; she had a shawl wrapped around her head and her features were cloaked in darkness. But he knew. He was sure of it. For three days she had barely left his mind. Brother Kevin had brought him here deliberately. Tristan felt his face grow warm and his stomach turn treacherous.

He was sick with yearning, as if in that first moment of wanting there was already the seed of loss. He watched her take the first of the women by the arm and usher her to a small door beside the altar. Tristan would follow her now or he would go mad. This, he realised, was how love was, everything made simple and at the same time impossible. He turned and ran out of the church, looping back to the side to intercept her.

The cold air was smudged with mist from the river. Tristan strained to see through the gloom. There was no sign of her. He banged on the church wall in frustration. He ran his fingers along its wooden surface, seeking out the join of a hidden doorway. There was nothing. His breathing turned shallow and desperate. He pulled at his hair and mumbled his request to the sky.

‘Bring her to me,' he pleaded. ‘Please God, bring her to me.'

As if in answer Tristan heard footsteps further down the alley, quiet and careful, moving his way. Without thinking he moved to the fence and crouched in its shadows. He watched her approach.

She was alone. Her shawl was pushed back off her face and in the moonlight her pallor was ghostly. Tristan saw his mistake immediately and cursed his foolishness. It wasn't her. The woman from the church, yes, but not the girl from the rector's study. Tristan stood slowly, coughing so she would see him before she came too close.

The young woman froze. Her dark eyes widened; her mouth grew small. Tristan raised his hand in apology. They stared at one another, neither speaking, and the moment turned fragile. The face before Tristan and the face in his memory blurred to one. It was ridiculous, he knew. He had the thought, tracked the very words through his head:
this is
weak-minded foolishness
. But still it happened. Still this stranger flowed with liquid inevitability into the gap in his heart. He breathed deeply and tried to smile.

Her raised foot, prepared for flight, lowered cautiously to the ground. He saw her shoulders relax. They were two strides from touching. She looked at him quizzically. He gulped at her improbable beauty and looked to the ground, embarrassed and inadequate.

‘What are you?' she whispered. He struggled for an answer that might compel her to speak again, but found nothing.

The moment stretched between them and her eyes filled with fear, as if she read in his frozen face some immeasurable danger. She was ready to run. Tristan knew he had to speak or she would leave and take his future with her. His lips moved but no sound came. He saw her eyes narrow as she tried to make sense of him. He knew what would happen next. It played out in a slow-motion torture. She turned from him and fled.

‘And I didn't follow,' he said, his head swimming now, whether with injury or the memory of loss he could not say. The night moved closer. He imagined the earth beneath them—beetles scurrying, worms tunnelling through the lines of their lives—waiting.

‘My life is heavy with failures, but this is the greatest of them. I did not follow.'

Silence wrapped itself around the admission as if to cushion its collision with the world. Tristan was out of talking. Then the dryness in his mouth brought on a round of retching he could not control. There was no release and he gasped for air, grasping in vain for that space where the pain and fear could not enter. In the darkness he could sense her waiting, preparing to speak.

He had rehearsed the story so often there was no way of knowing which parts belonged to the moment and which had since grown around it like vines taking hold of a tree. But he had never spoken it out loud. Not a word. Nor had he intended to tell it tonight. He waited, his ailing heart knocking out uncertain time.

‘You should have followed me,' she said.

‘Yes.'

‘I was frightened because you did not speak.'

‘I know. I should have spoken.'

‘My name is Grace.'

‘I know that too.'

And so it was finished with, their game of pretending. He waited for more but she held on tightly to her thoughts.
Did
you recognise me tonight?
Tristan wished to ask her.
And what did
you think of me back then, in the shadows behind St Paul's? Does it
sicken you, to know how I thought of you? Can you guess I think it still?
Would the knowledge have kept you from the car tonight? Does it make
you want to laugh or cry that fate has so entwined us?
These and a hundred other questions he burned to ask this woman who had taken hold of his dreams, who lay too close too late. But he did not ask them, and she did not speak. Silence was her counsel, and shame was his. Regret roared loud in his ears, great waves of it dismantling him.

Time passed and death did not visit. Tristan heard a gust working its way through the valley below, the pitch rising as it squeezed between mighty walls of rock. The wind ripped over them and a squall caught beneath the exposed chassis, making the whole car shudder. Wherever it was they had landed, it was not the bottom.

‘Do you believe in God?' Grace asked him. The question was not strange. They were past strangeness.

‘Of course,' he replied. It was easier than the truth, simpler.

She coughed and its sound was the colour of red—heavy drop-laden hacking, clearing the way for another question.