ten

Looking back now, I see that it was only natural that I should first meet Justine at a funeral. Justine and Death had a natural affinity for each other: they followed each other around. Her icy demeanour enticingly challenged the warm and passionate breath of death. Death as soon as he laid eyes upon her, would have wanted his way with her. It was just that Justine played hard to get.

At the altar, my mother lay in the open coffin surrounded by the whiteness of lilies. Her ruined beauty now lay on display to the world. The service was simple and apart from the Priest there were only three people at the funeral: myself, my mother’s maid and a woman who was standing three rows in front, her back turned to me. She was wearing a dress which was cut low at the back so that I could see the sinuous muscles that twisted like snakes under her skin. Often now, when I think of Justine, it is of her back, of her turning away from me, walking away. Her back is the place from where it is always safe to watch. She was sheathed in beige silk, the colour of shadowed snow. Even from the back I could tell that she would cost me too much.

The arches of the Norman church that we stood beneath reproduced in their fluid form the curve of her shoulder. The combination of proportion and grace which was the architecture of the church, also formed the body of the woman. I still had not seen her face and as I waited for a glimpse of it I fantasized the various ways in which the bones might be sculptured. However, I had no doubt in my mind that her face would be devastating, that she would in one pure way devastate me.

The stone of the church was pale gold, like her hair, and light shone through the blood-red of the stained glass casting shadows on both. The church smelt of dust.

Only when the coffin was carried down the aisle by the bearers, did I catch a glimpse of her face as she turned to look at it. It was Justine. The face of my painting had been brought to life in front of me. The image had been made flesh. Except the flesh of this Justine was chiselled out of ice. No facial expression disfigured the Madonna-like purity of her face. The look as she followed with her eyes my mother’s coffin down the aisle had the indifferent but focused attention of a child. In the moment of recognition this stranger had been frozen into my heart. As soon as I saw her, I wanted her for my own. To place her in my flat in the best position for the light.

Suddenly the atmosphere of the church changed. The dusty light and archaic space grew distant and two-dimensional, as if they were existing only to form the background to my vision of Justine. Justine’s smooth curved body gradually, as I watched it, grew huge until her shoulders fitted into the arches of the church, her face still retaining its look of acute centredness. Until someone tapped me on my shoulder and said my name. I turned around. It was my mother’s maid, Alice, looking up at me with puppy-brown eyes. Tears were pouring down her wrinkled face.

‘I’m so sorry, Sir,’ she said, ‘So very sorry’.

I think now of my mother buried beneath the ground. She lives on but only in the unreliable memory of those who still mourn her. Her image has been lost to the vagaries of life.

Immediately after the funeral I looked around in vain for Justine but she had disappeared. I returned to the church but it was empty, except for the lilies, and as I looked around its perpendicular space, the building turned banal, became a carapace of stone, like the empty shell of a snail. There was too much room here for God.