Iain Pears - The Dream of Scipio

She was working hard and didn’t notice that anyone had come in behind her. Eventually a slight rustling sound made her stop her work and turn round. Elizabeth was standing a few feet away from her, staring stonily at her back.

“Oh, hello,” Julia said. Elizabeth nodded and continued to look at her. Eventually, Julia realized she was looking at her left hand; she followed the gaze to try to work out what she found so interesting.

“No,” she said when she thought she’d worked it out. “No ring.”

“You won’t be having children,” she commented.

“I doubt it.”

“You left it too late.”

“Probably.”

“Why was that?” came the question with that alarming directness she was slowly becoming used to.

She put down her paper with a sigh, her concentration gone. “I don’t know. I’ve never met anyone I needed to live with until now.”

Elizabeth wiped a bead of sweat from her nose. “Nor have I. But I’ve been married to Pierre for fifteen years. Her fault.”

Julia looked perplexed. “Whose fault?”

She gestured in the general direction of the altar. “Pierre proposed to me in 1925. September, it was. I didn’t love him, and I knew already he drank too much, but I was past twenty and laughed at as an old maid. I dreamed someone else might ask, but he didn’t and no one else was likely to come along. So what could I do? I could go to the town and work as a servant or stay where I was and marry Pierre, who had good money as a blacksmith. A catch, he was. So I asked Sophia. She’d given good advice when I’d asked before.

“But not this time. She is not reliable in this area. Of course, she was never married herself, so perhaps that explains it. But she said I most certainly should marry him, and I took her advice.”

At least it got the conversation off Julia’s own life. “How did she tell you this?”

“The usual way. I dreamed that I was cold and hungry, living on the streets of Marseille, that no one would talk to me or give me work or food. So I took the warning, and stayed where I was, in the village, and married Pierre. And I have spent the last fifteen years wondering whether she was really trying hard enough.”

“Why?”

She shrugged. “How long have you known Julien?”

“Oh. Years. Fifteen years. Something like that.”

Julia felt the dark, inquisitive eyes studying her. “I’ve known him since he was eight.” She said it in almost a proprietorial fashion, as though it gave her a superior claim of some sort.

“Does everyone know she is not very good at this sort of advice?”

She was thinking of something else, and Julia had to repeat the question before she came back. “Heavens, yes,” she said eventually. “Even children know it. When they see a girl walking out with an unsuitable boy, they say she must have been talking to Sophia.”

“How do you know she wasn’t married?”

Elizabeth paused to consider a question she found strange. “Why would she have spent her life up here if she’d had a man and a hearth to tend?” The practicality of the response was unanswerable. “No; she was alone, and came up here to live in prayer. And was a good person, which is why people came to ask her advice even before they knew she was a saint. There were many miracles after she died, which is a sign. Of course, there are old stories.”

“Which ones?”

She looked sheepish. “Old wives’ tales,” she said. “My mother used to tell me. But even she didn’t believe them.”

“Please tell me.”

“Oh, it’s about the blind man she cured. It is said that the first thing he saw when he began to see was Sophia’s face, and he cried out in delight and said that he had seen her face in his dreams many a time, and that he had loved her all his life. And that he asked her to marry him, but she refused because she was virginal and pure. And he pined away with sorrow until she talked to him and brought him to God. But he always loved her, and swore that he would wait for all eternity until he could be united with her, and have her acknowledge his love. And she said she would wait until he understood what love was. It’s something old women say to daughters to make them go to sleep. That’s all.”

She turned away to the altar, and Julia walked outside to leave her in peace. She sat on the steps in the sunshine, basking in the heat like one of the lizards that sat motionless all around her, looking down across the valley to the lavender fields beyond the woods. She fell asleep; must have done, for when she opened her eyes once more, the blacksmith’s wife was already far in the distance, slowly picking her way through the stones and weeds.

Julia waved, but got no acknowledgment, then sat down for one of the best meals she had ever eaten, of bread and wine and salami. She felt entirely safe, and utterly happy.

FOR THE NEXT eight months Julien lived a strange double life; supposedly he was still an employee of the state, doing the tasks he had taken on in the autumn of 1940. But he allowed the lassitude that grew from his discomfort and increasing unease to take him over. He even went to his colleagues back at the university and described what he was doing. Should he resign? No, they said, one after another. You have a duty, and we are glad you are doing it. Think of who might take the position. He described the compromises he made, and again they replied, Stay where you are. He even once went to Marcel and appealed to him, but met no help from that quarter either.

“Don’t you see, Julien, that there is no room here for your delicacies?” Marcel replied with a sigh. “That your fastidiousness is out of place? Selfish? We have to keep government going. Have to keep it in the hands of men of moderation. Don’t you see that?”

Julien continued to look uneasy, unconvinced. “And you are a man of moderation?” he felt like asking, but he knew the answer. Yes, Marcel was indeed, in comparison to those others snapping at his heels.

ONLY JULIA SUGGESTED a different course of action when he went back to what he now considered his real home to be with her. “You are doing things you dislike so that others won’t be able to do worse. Are you sure that is not the case for everyone? Isn’t that what your friend Marcel is doing? The policeman who arrests people in the night? The prime minister? Even Pétain himself? They are all doing things they would prefer not to in order to prevent worse. The evil committed by good men is the worst of all, because they know better and do it anyway. Isn’t that what that manuscript of yours says?”

Her opinion contradicted those of so many others, but then she would not be affected by his resignation; all the librarians and journalists and newspaper owners and academics and teachers would be. He thought about it some more, anguishing in his indecision. And as he writhed, he came in late, if at all; memoranda and orders lay on his desk for weeks before anything was done with them, and then any work was bungled and performed incompetently. He read more, found himself obsessed with the minutiae of the life of Olivier de Noyen, to the exclusion of all else. His idleness was his refuge, and in this he was like many others in France in that period; laziness became political.

More and more, he left Avignon altogether and went east to Julia, traveling however he could. Sometimes there were buses, sometimes he managed to get a ride with a farmer on a horse and cart; most of the time he rode on his bicycle, the tires now long worn away and replaced with cloth, which he bound tightly to the rim of the wheels with wire. Once there, he would stay often for ten days at a time, finding excuse after excuse not to leave. When he did return to Avignon, he hoped to find he had been dismissed in his absence; no such good fortune ever awaited him.