When the organ finally gave the signal to depart, I had to hold on to the pew in front of me as I got to my feet. Of walking back down the aisle, I remember nothing. A crush of bodies in the vestibule, words I couldn’t distinguish. And then, the miracle. I have never stopped believing in miracles. Parked at the foot of the steps where no one except the minister ever parks was William Neill’s car.
He’d spotted me before I was able to distinguish his bent figure among the departing worshippers.
‘In you get, Deirdre,’ he said as he opened the door for me. ‘You got good value this mornin’. Our man must have been wantin’ his lunch.’
Dear William Neill. The sight of his whiskery brown face did more to restore my faith in humanity than a visitation from a whole delegation of angels. I sat back in my seat and watched the dispersing crowds who wandered in front of the car as if we were parked in a pedestrian area rather than waiting at a stop line to cross the main Armagh to Portadown road.
‘They’re always like this on Sunday mornin’,’ he said cheerfully. ‘So full o’ the Holy Spirit they think nuthin can git them.’
I laughed then, but inside my head I added, ‘Yes, that’s the trouble with the belief business. That’s why I want no part of it.’ As far as I could see belief was all about insulating yourself from the reality of life and particularly from anything you’d rather not face up to. I was sure at that moment that nothing would ever get me back inside a church ever again.
‘Look, Deirdre, look.’
We lurched to a halt with a disregard for the cars behind us equal to that of the pedestrians who had strolled across in front of us. I followed the pointing finger into the brilliant triangle of sky between the roof of the Courthouse and the distant twin spires of the Roman Catholic cathedral.
He said they were pigeons, but I could see only doves. Pure white against the blue, they were circling in close formation, rising and falling in an aerial ballet that was a pure delight.
Suddenly, I saw another dove and remembered immediately the small church where I had found it. Back last March, working on an article for Travelling East, I had driven around Norfolk and Suffolk visiting churches from a list the editor had made for me. The church with the dove was not a grand one, rather small as East Anglian parish churches go, with no beautiful glass or carving, but full of a marvellously clear light and a deep stillness. In the south aisle, on a tomb chest, I found a stone statue of St Francis and the dove was in his hands. At his feet someone had arranged a handful of violets in a piece of bark filled with moss.
I looked around me. The church was full of flowers, as it would be, the week after Easter. There were sprays of blossom, jugs of daffodils, some irises and forsythia and beech leaves just beginning to unfurl. Nothing from shops or garden centres. Some of the arrangements were in clean jam pots, some in metal troughs full of chickenwire, where fronds of ivy had been used to cover up disintegrating, much-used oasis and spots of rust. Offerings made in love that meant something to the people who made them. I so envied them.
As I knelt down to take my pictures of the gentle saint, whose story I have always loved, I thought of the generations of knees that had worn the chancel step, the bottoms that had polished smooth the ancient wooden benches. I knew I envied them too.
When I stood up, a great shaft of sunlight pierced the piled white cloud and filled the south aisle with sudden brightness, picking out every detail of the bareheaded saint. I lingered as long as I could, reluctant to go, but I got very cold and began to feel anxious about all I still had to do. I returned the key, as I had been instructed, to the peg basket in the garden shed of the cottage directly across the road, and drove off rather faster than I should have done.
‘Home James and don’t spare the horses,’ said William as we drew up at the foot of the drive. ‘Are you sure you won’t come on down for a bit of lunch? There’ll be a roast an shure only the two of us to eat it.’
I thanked him as I got out, explained I was expecting a call from Sandy and walked as quickly as my high heels would let me up the steep drive.
It may have been the fumes from the car, or the thought of a Sunday roast, but as I turned the key in the front door I had to make a dash for it. I just made it to the downstairs loo.
After I was sick, I did feel better though I looked absolutely dreadful. I took some tablets for my head, got out of my suit and wandered round the house drinking tumblers of cold water. I couldn’t think what had brought on so bad a head.
The afternoon had clouded over and the empty rooms felt stuffy and chill at the same time. The dim light showed up the grubby windows and made the carpets look dull and cheerless. I felt my spirits droop. I knew I must find something to do.
That was when I got it wrong again. I went upstairs to my table, took up the first of the blue notebooks and filled my pen. I would write about what had happened in church. I would set it all down, describe all the people, all the unease in their manner and their being, the boom of the men who never looked at each other when they talked, the women who wore such elegant clothes and yet scurried into their pews as if they were doing their best not to be seen.
I sat and stared at the smooth page, the page which offered such promise only a day ago. Nausea overwhelmed me. How could I ever write about what I’d experienced, ever sort out the tangled feelings, the confusions that came upon me? How could I ever write about anything?
Pain oscillated in my head. The white page broke up into jagged fragments. I staggered to my feet, heard the crash as my chair fell over. ‘No, no,’ I cried. ‘I can’t write about it. I can’t think about it. I can’t bear what I see . . . Leave me alone . . . leave me alone.’
I ran from the room, tripped on the landing carpet and just managed not to fall downstairs. Ran through the hall and out of the house and on down the drive. Cars whizzed past continually on the main road but I scarcely noticed them as I ran on, not knowing what I was doing or where I was. The pain in my head was so bad nothing seemed to matter any more. I just kept on running.
The roar of the cars grew in my ears, louder and louder as I drew closer to the foot of the drive where the gates stood open to the road. I ran on. My chest felt tight, my breathing was hard and laboured, my head throbbed as if it were ready to explode. Suddenly, I turned aside and dived through the shrubbery, as if I’d hit an invisible wall, breaking twigs and scratching my hands as I fought my way through the overlapping branches. I pitched headlong out of their shadow and threw myself down on the sunken stones beneath the three ancient hawthorns my father refused to cut down.
I lay there sobbing violently, indifferent to the rub of the gnarled roots and the dampness of the grass. My tears dripped down on to one of the well-worn stones and blurred its familiar outline.
‘You fool, you fool,’ I whispered, despairingly. ‘You should never have come. It’s your own fault completely.’
Sandy and Matthew had urged me not to stay on at Anacarrig. The clearing-out could all be done in a week, they said, once Matthew was back from India, if the three of us did it together. But I’d had to cancel my flight to India because Mother was still with us and now she was gone I couldn’t get another. I had the time; they hadn’t. Besides, I argued, I’d masses of things I wanted to do as well as sort out the house. There were people I wanted to see, places I’d once known that I wanted to revisit and I was longing to spend time with Helen, my oldest friend. Besides, I said, I could work just as easily at Anacarrig as in London.
I meant every word I said, but neither Sandy nor Matthew were happy with