Free The Pierced Heart: A Novel by Lynn Shepherd Page B

GOING HOME .
    I sit back and look at what I have just written, and I wonder if I really know what “home” means. It is so long since we have been there, so long that we have been away, all those years in Paris and now here, that I can scarce remember that little house my father tells me is our home. On a starkly beautiful northern shore, Father says, with a view across the bay to the town and the ruined abbey standing high above it. I have a picture in my mind when he describes all this to me, a picture of louring skies, and huge crows thrown against the wind, and a girl in white seated alone, but I do not know if this is memory, or whether I have heard him talk of it so often that I have made his recollections my own. When I told him this his face darkened for a moment, and he would not say why, but I saw his eyes stray to the locket I wear always about my neck, the locket that holds a portrait of my mother, and I had a sudden conviction that the last time we returned it was to bury her.
    But this I did not say.
    He touched my cheek then, and said I was pale, and no doubt exhausted by the exertions of last night, and I must rest before we begin the task of packing for our journey. I smiled at him because I wished to reassure him, and because there was, after all, some truth in what he said. And what remained unspoken, I can scarcely understand myself, far less explain. When he was gone I went to my casement and looked down upon the street. The sun was sinking, and though the roofs and attics were aglow with gold, the pavements were sunk in shadow, and an old woman in a wool shawl and a threadbare bonnet was shuffling painfully along with her empty basket over one arm. Empty because she is going to the market, where there will be remnants now on sale at half the price of their morning freshness—I know, because when I was a little child I would accompany my mother through the streets at the same hour of the evening, and with the same aim in view. Though when I remember that part of my past now it is not in pictures but in perfumes—the wooden tables with their crates of bitter oranges, their coils of stinking sausage, and their slabs of oozy yellow cheese, mingled with the stale sweat of the tired and short-tempered stallholders. It is strange how strong these impressions are for me, how powerfully an aroma caught randomly in the air can draw me down and backwards, to that one scent I still yearn to recapture, which my mother always had about her, which I cannot ever convey in words, and have never encountered since.
    A few moments later, as I idled still at the window, I saw a playbill come slithering in the wind towards where the old woman had paused for a moment with a neighbour. It was splashed with mud and torn at the edges, but that did not matter. I could see the strip of paper pasted to its face, and I knew that it was one of ours. And then, as I watched, the sheet of paper lifted and folded itself for a moment about the old woman’s walking-stick, and when she shook it loose and saw what it was, I saw them both gasp and cross themselves, and Iheard one whisper harshly, “
Der Teufel tut sein Werk durch den Wahnsinn dieser Verrückten.
” The devil does his work through the delusions of this lunatic.
    And then I turned and reached blindly for my chair, my breath coming hard at that word I fear so much, knowing that I will wake again tonight, in the midst of the dark, cold and shaking at the moonlit window with no recollection of how I got there, just as I awoke, once, barefoot in the street, being led into the shadows by a man I did not know.
    It was my father who saved me. My father who found me and beat the man away, and then carried me, trembling in his gentle arms, back to my bed. My father who has, every night all these years since, locked the door to my bedroom and taken away the key. But now, it is different. Now, when I catch him looking at me in the glass, there is something in his face I have not seen