And as to the garden—surely the contact of Christ’s body would have fertilised it, a thousand times more than Lorenzo’s head the pot of basil, making it riot into a forest of fantastic symbolic blossoms: great racemes, perhaps, which, with their orange-pollened pistils protruding like flames from their seven long, white, waxy blossoms, would recall the seven-branched candlestick in the Temple; bell-flowers shaped like chalices and stained crimson inside as if with blood; monstrous veronicas, each blossom bearing the impress of the Holy Face.
What an unutterably ridiculous faith it was! But, for good or ill, her own imagination was steeped all through with the unfading dye of its traditions.
Then she went downstairs, and David drove them through the fresh morning to mass.
The nearest Catholic church was in a small market-town some ten miles distant. It was always a pleasure to Teresa to drive through that town—it had the completeness and finish of a small, beautifully made object that one could turn round and round in one’s hands and examine from every side. The cobbled market-place, where on Saturdays cheap-jacks turned somersaults and cracked jokes in praise of their wares, exactly as they had done in the days of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson; the flat Georgian houses of red brick picked out in white and grown over with ivy, in one of which the doctor’s daughters knitted jumpers and talked about the plays they had seen on their last visit to London—“a very weepie piece; playing on nothing but the black notes, don’t you know!” the heraldic lion on the sign of the old inn; the huge yellow poster advertising Colman’s Mustard—it was all absorbed into a small harmonious whole, an English story. All, that is to say, except the large Catholic church built in the hideous imitation Gothic of the last century, that remained ever outside of it all, a great unsightly excrescence, spoiling the harmony. It had been built with money left for the purpose by a pious lady, who had begun her career as a Belgian actress, and ended it as the widow of a rich manufacturer of dolls’ eyes, who had bought a big property in the neighbourhood.
“I used to think when I was a child,” said Teresa, who was sitting in front beside David, “that the relics under the altar were small wax skulls and glass eyes.”
He turned and looked at her with an indulgent smile.
“I believe he looks upon me as a little girl,” she said to herself; and she felt at once annoyed and strangely glad.
Then they went into the dank, dark, candle-lit church; and it was indeed as if they had suddenly stepped on to a different planet.
A few minutes of waiting—and then mass had begun.
Resurrexi, et adhuc tecum sum, alleluia; posuisti super me manum tuam, alleluia: mirabilis facta est scientia tua, alleluia, alleluia.