The Mermaid Garden(49)

“You can get inside?”

“Where there’s a will, there’s a way, as they say. Come on.”

She hurried round to the back of the church where a few steps led down to a little wooden door carved into the stone. “Must have been a back entrance for dwarfs,” she said with a chuckle. “Or maybe people were very small all those hundreds of years ago.”

“How old do you think it is?”

“Well, inside, there are tombs of people who died in the thirteenth century.”

“Increíble!” he exclaimed under his breath.

She pushed, and the door opened with a deep groan. Inside, the air was cold and dank. They left the door wide open to let in the light and proceeded up a windy stone staircase into the main body of the church. It would have been dark were it not for the holes in the roof and where some of the boards blocking the windows had rotted in the damp and come away from their frames. They stood in silence and looked around.

In spite of the cold the place felt strangely warm, as if the air itself were made of something soft. The altar was draped in the habitual white cloth with a mildewed vase sitting empty on the top. The pews were in their neat rows, made of oak, blackened over the years, and on the stone beneath them remained a few cross-stitched hassocks for prayer. On a table by the front door was a pile of green hymn books, and opposite, a crimson velvet curtain separated the nave from a little annex where the stone font was dry.

“It’s as if they finished a service and left, locking the door behind them forever,” said Clementine.

Rafa sat on the organ stool and began to play a few notes. The inharmonious sound echoed off the walls, unsettling a couple of pigeons that had made their nest underneath the eaves.

“Good Lord, that organ’s out of tune!” Clementine exclaimed, putting her hands over her ears. She stood in the choir stall that consisted of two rows of pews facing each other in front of the altar. “Do you play?” she asked.

“No. Can’t you tell?”

“I thought it was the organ that sounded dreadful, not you.”

He got up. “So what do you do when you come here on your own?”

“Nothing.” She shrugged. “I wander around and read the inscriptions on the tombstones. The names are wonderful. I stand above them and wonder whether all that remains of them is beneath my feet, or whether their spirits are in some other dimension beyond our senses. I’d like to believe there’s a Heaven.”

Rafa wandered over to a large slab that stood out from the rest by virtue of its size and the clarity of the words engraved onto it. “Archibald Henry Treelock,” he read.

“Great name, Archibald.”

“What do you think Archibald might be doing now?”

“My head tells me that dear old Archie is nothing but dust. But my heart tells me he’s in Heaven dancing a branle with his wife, Gunilda.”

“I think your heart is right. At least, that’s what my heart tells me, too. I don’t believe my father is dust and earth. I believe his old body is buried in the pampa but his spirit is somewhere else.” He ran his eyes around the church and lowered his voice. “Perhaps he is here with us now, in the house that God forgot.”

“I haven’t yet encountered death. Both sets of grandparents are alive, unfortunately. My mother’s parents are very tiresome, but thankfully they live far away so I never see them.”

“Where do they live?”

“In Scotland with my mother.”

He stared at her for a long moment, frowning. “Sorry, I don’t understand. Your mother lives here with you, no?”

“No, Marina’s not my mother. God forbid! No, my mother lives in Edinburgh with her second husband, Martin, who’s a fool. Marina is my stepmother.”

“I thought she was …”

“Most people do. But I don’t know why. We don’t look at all alike.”

“No, you don’t.”

“I look like my mother, which is a pity as she’s no beauty. I was taught that beauty comes from within, and I choose to believe it.” She gave a hollow laugh.

Rafa wandered up the steps to the pulpit. “Does Marina have any children of her own?”

“No. She’s unable to have children. It’s a very sore point, so don’t ever bring it up.”

“I see.” He put his hands on the edge of the pulpit as if he were a vicar about to give a sermon. His face looked grave.

“Jake and I are the closest to children she’s ever going to get.”

“You don’t seem very sympathetic.”

“Am I so transparent?” She gave a little sniff. “We’re very different, she and I.”