I scarcely heard him. I finally managed to free my frozen limbs and take a cautious step inside the door.
Here a bay tree arched above a broken baptismal font, and delicate wild flowers quivered at my feet. Everything was green and living, even the soil sprouted moss, and the silent air around me seemed to hum with vital energy.
I nearly didn’t see him, to begin with.
He might have been a statue himself, propped against the sunlit wall. The pale hair, the white shirt, both seemed to blend into the ivory stone behind him, and his outstretched legs were buried in a waving sea of green. Only his eyes, when he opened them, commanded attention. They stared, blinked slowly, tried to focus. And then one hand came up to pull the wired headphones from his ears, and I heard the jarring click of a portable tape player being switched off.
‘Good morning, everyone,’ Neil Grantham said.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
… silent light
Slept on the painted walls …
The three of us reacted rather differently, although in my own case it wasn’t so much a reaction as a lack of one. I don’t think my expression even changed. Martine, beside me, simply laughed, a short delighted laugh, and said, ‘Neil, you idiot! How ever did you get in?’
Christian’s response was by far the most dramatic. ‘You will not move!’ he ordered, in a forceful tone that sounded not a bit like him.
Neil, who had been leaning forward as if to rise, sank back against the wall and watched benignly while Christian dropped to his knees in the damp earth and swung the bulging satchel from his shoulder, searching through its contents. I’d never seen an artist in action. It was fascinating to watch him clasp an ink pot to the edge of his sketchbook and boldly dash a straight-nibbed pen across the virgin page.
Fascinating to me, at least. No one else took any notice. Martine Muret had doubtless seen it all before, and Neil was looking, not at Christian, but at me. ‘You gave me quite a turn just now,’ he said, mildly accusing. ‘I didn’t hear you come in.’
‘I’m surprised you didn’t hear us opening the door. That lock goes off like a shotgun.’
‘I was listening to my music.’ The small movement of his head provoked a stern look of reproach from Christian.
‘Neil …’
‘Sorry.’ Neil’s head stayed very still against the glowing stone, but his eyes swung back to me. ‘Thierry loaned me this little machine to replace the one I broke yesterday. It’s working rather nicely.’
‘At this moment.’ Martine came forward, smiling, to stand between the two of us. ‘And how did you get in?’ she asked again. ‘The door, it is kept always locked.’
‘I have my methods.’ His dark eyes crinkled at the corners.
Christian sighed. ‘Martine, please, you block the light. Thank you,’ he said shortly, when she’d backed away a step. The pen went scratching across the drawing paper and Christian huddled over it, frowning with the force of his concentration. Neil seemed quite unaffected by all the attention. He didn’t stir against the wall, and when his gaze came back to mine it held a quiet resignation.
‘It isn’t me that interests him,’ he said. ‘It’s something that I’m doing, without knowing it. Isn’t that right, Christian?’
The painter looked up, briefly. ‘You make this good shadow on the column, just there. This shadow I can use.’
‘You see?’ Neil smiled at me, vindicated.
Christian lowered his head. ‘And also,’ he went on, ‘you have a quality quite unique that I try to capture. This most amazing stillness.’
‘Well, naturally,’ said Neil. ‘You won’t let me move.’
But I knew what Christian meant, and it was something deeper than the seated man’s motionless hands or his calm deliberate voice. It was a thing intangible, yet clearly felt – the sense that time was moving round him, past him, leaving him untouched. Even when the drawing was completed and Neil was finally able to stand, rising stiffly from the hard ground and stretching, the aura of stillness clung to him.
Martine smiled. ‘You are too old, I think, for climbing walls,’ she told him.
‘Have a heart, love,’ was Neil’s reply. ‘I’ve only just turned forty-three – I’m not quite ready for the eventide home.’
Not by a long shot, I agreed, turning my gaze from his boyish face and snugly fitting denim jeans to the crumbling wall above his head, which at its lowest point must still have been some ten or twelve feet tall.
‘You climbed that wall?’ I asked, incredulous, is that how you got in?’
‘Could be.’ He smiled again, refusing to appease our curiosity. Turning to Christian, he asked: ‘Have you got the keys for this gate with you? Emily might like to see the murals.’ He said my name so easily, as though we were old friends, or something more. I thought I saw a flash of curiosity in Martine’s sideways glance, but Christian found his keys again and came forward to unlock the towering black grille that sealed the sculpted saints within their inner chamber. They had an odd effect on me, those saints. Though they were trapped in shadows, while I had open sky above me, I felt somehow that it was me, not them, shut in behind the iron bars; that their eyes saw a wider world than mine.
The blind stone faces stared at me as Christian swung the great gate open and we passed into the chapel proper, where our voices echoed as we walked between stone columns soaring high to meet the ceiling many feet above our heads.