The Submerged Cathedral (14 page)

I
N
A
RLES, CAFÉS
everywhere claimed Van Gogh, his landscapes and sunflowers. The hotel foyer smelled strongly of cheese, and Jocelyn had to concentrate hard in order to disguise the fact that its stench turned her stomach. She laughed about the cheese with Duncan. ‘
Philistine
,' he hissed into her ear, his accent exaggerated, ridiculous, his arm light around her waist. Sometimes she felt herself loosening, could feel Duncan feeling it.

In the market herbs were heaped in great piles, vats of olives shone. She walked with his large hand covering hers. It was 1970, she was in France, a good man said he loved her. She heard music hissing from radios, songs about love, about
boys and girls
.

Australia was long ago. She was somebody else now.

Duncan told her the story of a virtuous young nun, Roseline, who was setting the table for her sisters' dinner
when she fell into a religious ecstasy. The mother superior came and scolded Roseline for abandoning her work and threw up her hands in anger at her story. Then the mother turned to see a flock of angels hovering over the table, setting out the meal and preparing for the nuns' dinner … Marc Chagall had made a mosaic,
Le Repas des Anges
, the meal of the angels, in a tiny chapel in Haute-Provence. Duncan would take her to see it, the chapel and its garden. Another of his offerings of Europe.

In the centre of the chapel was a glass case in which lay the fully clothed body of a very small nun. Jocelyn took a breath and stared in at St Roseline.

Roseline's habit was white and new-looking. Her flesh, if that was what it could be called, blackened and paper-thin. The body was tiny, more the size of a ten-year-old than a woman, and the feet protruding from the long skirt were misshapen and flipper-like. A typewritten notice next to the case said that the body of St Roseline had been exhumed 200 years after her burial, and to the astonishment of all, was almost perfectly preserved – especially the eyes, which were as lifelike as the day she died.

Louis XIV had heard the crazed legend about a dead woman's eyes and sent his physician to ascertain the truth, to see whether these were indeed the real eyes of a cadaver. In his zeal the physician pierced the left eye with a stilette.
He was convinced, but the eye lost its brilliance from that moment.

The creature's eyelids were closed now. The teeth protruded. Duncan nudged her, ‘Come and see the remaining eye.' At the far end of the chapel in a gold reliquary was a coin-sized faded ball, under glass.

The week before, in that square in Arles, Duncan had asked her to marry him. The square had begun to blur, and she'd closed her eyes, but saw only Martin's face. She had felt suddenly dead tired, wished for nothing but to lie down on the stones and sleep. And then she knew that if she did, Duncan would sit by her on the cobblestones until she woke. She had opened her eyes, and felt her mouth smile, and heard her voice. ‘Yes.'

Now at Chagall's mosaic, with its dusty angels floating above a table set with flowers and fruit, Jocelyn could not concentrate, kept thinking of the stilette and the eyeball; of the taking apart of Roseline's body. Making a saint out of a girl who only fainted into sleep on flagstones.

 

In the cloister garden of an abandoned abbey, drinking tea from a thermos, Duncan had told her about the tradition of the cloister, the enclosed courtyard from Roman times. From where they sat the view was framed and dissected by the stone columns. In the centre was nothing
but the bones of a collapsed box hedge, and the only view beyond was sky. The circular path for walking and prayer and contemplation. Around and around, Duncan had said, just the sky and the stone and your god.

Now, here, nothing in her garden is as it seems. She observes the spaces all through the day, and yet each day she finds she has been tricked. She has her designs, her drawings, wants to move through them like a reader through a book. But once outside, in among the weeds and the soil and the air, she's undone by the very earth; the angle of the rise is different from her measurements, or a marshy spot appears out of nowhere.

Or, as today, the soil is not soil, but three inches down turns to solid stone struck by her frail spade. She'd need a jackhammer at least to dig here. So the bed takes a different turn, following the contour of this plate of stone, now revealed by the spade to take up half the space she had allotted for the bed. Each afternoon the drawing from the day before is redrawn. The bulb of rock now needs something to balance it in the opposite corner. So she cuts a path, in an echo of its curve, plants it with the pennesetum grasses, their ball-gown skirts and long dusky flowers on bowed stalks yet another repeat of the arc.

Each time she sets out with a plan the space rejects it, pushing her elsewhere. And each time she must wait for
the meaning to uncover itself. She begins to feel that working here is a kind of apprenticeship, some mastery only possible to learn by doing, allowing herself to be led by the place and some formless faith.

She looks down on the cloister every morning as she dresses. A divided square, half-yellow with morning sun, half-shadowed. At its centre one diseased and leggy rose, a sunken path of stone, a mat of tangled weeds. In the evenings she sits on a bench by the kitchen door, staring at this space without seeing, her head full of jobs for the next day ahead. To dig over the fourth bed in the physic garden out behind the infirmary. Collect the truckload of manure from the neighbouring property's cattle yards. In her bed at night she hears the desperate moans of the cows newly separated from their calves.

She stands, leaves the cloister for the kitchen to make some dinner. The vegetable garden has grown into a place of quick victories. At first it was constantly ransacked by the possums, wallabies, foxes, rabbits, birds, but the new fence, set two feet beneath the ground and taller than she is, now tends to keep most of them at bay.

She takes her plate of food back outside, this time to the front stairs, and sits to watch the sun fall behind the ridge, in that half-hour of yellow and pinking sky before dark. Across the old dried-out lawns she can see galahs nibbling the grass, and then the dark swatch of the dam,
and sometimes in the distance again the line of grazing kangaroos, those moving fence posts in the gloom.

 

She begins planting flowers for the sacristan's cutting garden, that gentlest part of monastic life abandoned here in the raw country. Along the fence line she plants melaleuca, and myrtle, and willow-leaf hakea. And falling into sleep she thinks of flannel flowers and orchid and grevillea and the native birdflower, and the purple climbing tassel flower, and of Eden.

Underneath her sleep always it is her own old Eden that shadows the edges of this grand plan, rising into consciousness, sinking away, shifting and reshaping.

I
N
G
RANADA
J
OCELYN
sat drinking her coffee and watching the early market unfolding around them. The butcher slapping lumps of pork and beef into trays, and the cured meats, the strong Iberian ham. Next to him the fruit boy reading a comic behind his stacks of apples. Across from there the fishmonger, filling trays with silver fish that caught the light.

Duncan was still giving her his Europe, but everywhere she was reminded of Martin.

At the Alhambra she and Duncan had strolled the gardens of the summer palace. These gardens were all hard surfaces and straight lines, the planting all symmetry and knife-edges, but against the hardness, everywhere, was water. Shallow, low-moving and quiet, channels of it running along the sides of footpaths, cut in steps through staircases, sliding down the tunnelled-out centre of stone
banisters. Or spraying in delicate arcs over the absolute stillness of the deep rectangular pools. Until now she had never thought about the functions of water in this way, its life, the pulse it gave to stone and symmetry.

Afterwards they climbed from the gardens, up the winding staircase in the dark with the other tourists. The only light came from occasional vertical strip-holes in the plastered stone. Then Jocelyn was cold at the top of the parapet, looking away towards the snow on the mountains. Far below them the city spread whitely. She understood oasis now, the idea of green in a pale desert. Duncan was at the other side of the parapet in the shade, watching down through an ancient, intricately serrated Moorish arch at the tiny buildings of Granada. At the next frilled window space, a boy about eight years old leaned out over the stone of the window's sill. It came up to his waist, and he stretched out over it. His mother began to walk towards him, quiet but nervous, watching her son silhouetted against the white hill and the pale sky, framed in the window. The boy glanced back at her, saw her anxiety, and then purposely stood on his toes, leaning at the wall with his lips. The stone city dizzying so far below. He pushed himself still forward, angled, tilting, inching his hips further out over the parapet. Jocelyn's mouth dried. The boy's mother called out to him, her voice strained. Duncan moved closer, Jocelyn saw, close enough perhaps to make a clutch at a trouser leg, watching
the boy's toes now only just touching the dusty ground. She imagined the child's view, all that swinging sky and white stone. The mother called out again, but now she seemed rooted to the ground, her black shoes on the pale stone, the pleats of her navy skirt shifting a little in a slow-motion breeze. Her face was white.

Then the boy suddenly thrust his hips and lurched himself forward –
Oh God
, Jocelyn heard her own voice.

The moment swayed, nauseating.

The boy flipped violently backwards, landing with a stumble on the stone floor.

He looked around, grinned at Duncan, then Jocelyn, and around at the other tourists who did not see him. It had all happened in the space of several slow seconds.

Jocelyn was enraged, wanted to grab him as he passed his mother, ignoring her.

The woman was silent now, and Jocelyn saw her eyes filling with tears in relief and shock as she moved to catch up with her son. She moved the strap of her black patent leather handbag further up her arm, smoothing the leather with her other hand, tenderly, as if to calm herself. She walked behind him, reproached the child in fierce, whispering Spanish. The boy stopped, waited a step for her to catch up to him.

And then he wheeled round, raised a hand and slapped his mother's face, hard. The noise of it made people turn
their heads, but then, seeing nothing, they went back to their views and their talking. The boy, still smiling, walked across to stand looking over the edge with his father. Jocelyn and Duncan watched from their separate sides of the parapet. The mother was silent, motionless for a moment, and then she arranged her face into a benign expression.

Her cheek began to bloom as she walked towards the staircase. As she stepped neatly over the stone paving she stared straight ahead, adjusted her clothing, pulled at the waist of her blouse. Her cheek was red. The boy's father had not seen his wife. He and the son stood together near Jocelyn, looking out over the mountains, the father's arm about the boy's shoulders.

The mother held a hand flat against the wall as she took her first step down into the dark. She had done all of this before.

Jocelyn thought of Thomas. So young it begins, the hatred of women.

Afterwards, when they climbed back down the stairs, Jocelyn and Duncan sat on large wooden benches against the coloured tiles. People's voices echoed against the marble, bounced off the orange and green and blue and purple. The ancient stone bowl of a fountain stood at the end of the long pool in front of them. People's reflections fell across the slow green water of the pool.

The boy's violence, the slap, still hung in the silent air. The water lapped at the lip of the fountain's bowl, and Jocelyn thought about hardness and softness, about movement and stillness, how over a thousand years a trickle of water can cut through stone. She thought about Duncan, and whether she herself was stone.

Then she turned back to the new ponds and pools and the rippling water appearing now in the garden in her head.

 

The garden grows. Trees are taller than she is now, the blank spaces between the shrubs are shrinking, stems grow woody and begin to withstand the animals' attacks. The benches start to look as if they belong in their resting places among the plants, the ground is littered with shed flowers, seed pods.

She still dreams of catastrophe. On one windy night the tin sheets of the roofs lift and crack and bang, and in her dream the garden is covered in weeds and great sheets of land collapse. Salt leaches up through the earth overnight and this garden is the whole continent, dishevelled, poked at, stumbled over, pocked and burned. She walks her vast, destroyed garden, distraught, picking at weeds with her hands knowing
it is useless, but through the calamity is some kind of other presence, saying
This is it, your place, this is how you live
.

In the dream the final garden is ancient, vine-covered, and she is walking through Eden, through Babylon, Gethsemane.

In the morning she goes back to work, unsettled.

A parrot on the lichen-mottled fence hops from one rail to the next, then into the grass, moving its head like a series of still photographs, an animation. The blotches on the fence are silvery, like land on earth in photographs from space.

They calm her. She is in Australia, she is in her home. Feels the shovel blade slice into earth.
This is it
. This is how you live.

 

At the beginning of her second year, the sacristan's garden has begun to flower: kangaroo paws, everlasting daisies, flannel flowers, Sturt peas, the bracelet honeymyrtle, tassel-flower, and grevillea, the bright green birdflower –
Crotalaria laburnifolia
. And down at the dam among the reeds there are swamp lilies, ivy-leaf violets, Murray lilies and vanilla plants. White and purple, green and yellow, red and black, colours with which to garland an altar or a memory.

And as the garden grows, more birds come. Rosellas, lorikeets, scrub wrens, honeyeaters, their squeaks and shirrups and squawks across the valley waking her in the mornings.