The Painted Altar

Chapter Two

Plot reminder: Mary has just learnt of the passing of her biological mother and is on her way to the funeral. She has strong presentiments that something is not quite right, suspicions which will soon be confirmed...

~~~~~

Turning off the A1 north of Peterborough, the road which leads to the town of Ravensby is a strangely winding affair given the iron-flat countryside it traverses. Although the land of my birth, five or six previous visits had failed to instill in me any sense of affinity for the area. Far from liberating, the sheer vastness of the sky seems to imprison. Panning one's vision across the horizon, it feels almost as if you've been placed on a disc - a perfectly level, perfectly circular disc, one sealed by the impenetrable semi-sphere of the heavens.

As I entered town, the darkening broil of clouds overhead seemed somehow portentous. After checking in at my usual B & B, I followed the landlady's directions to the town's solitary Catholic church - this resulting as a modern brick affair next to the bus station, recognisable as a place of worship only by the wooden cross at the apex of its slanted roof. The funeral would take place at 10 a.m, I discovered, scanning the 'Forthcoming Services' board placed outside the entrance door.

Seeing her name and dates in black and white seemed to confirm the sad, sinking fact of it all.

Irene Gladys Harvey, 1925-2007

So much so that finally, a full six or seven hours after I'd been informed of her passing, I felt the first tear of filial grief swell at the corner of my eye.

*

Had Irene moved away from the Northdyke area, back to her native Liverpool or elsewhere, I most probably would never have traced her. As it was, the task had proven relatively easy. The farmhouse had been the fourth or fifth I'd tried - a fairly grim-looking red-brick affair surrounded by rusty-roofed outbuildings. The husband of the fifty-something couple who'd currently resided there had put me in touch with his father, he in turn having originally bought the place from the Harveys back in the late-fifties. Now living in a bungalow in the village, the old man and his wife had indeed heard talk of Land Girls being billeted in the farmhouse during the latter years of the war, but had advised me that really I should talk to one of the Harvey boys. None of the original farmer's three sons had been keen on the relentless dawn-till-dusk toil of agricultural life, and had all, the couple believed, sought less strenuous existences in nearby Ravensby. Of the six Harveys with Ravensby addresses listed in the local phone book, it had come as somewhat of a surprise to discover that one was named Irene.

This had been a couple of years before her passing, February half term. I remember having felt slightly absurd as I'd sat in my car at the end of that terraced street, like some gum-chewing American TV detective on a stake out. Those handful of people with whom I'd ever felt intimite enough to share the fact of my adopted state had always urged me to try tracing my biological mother. I think they believed it might somehow reconnect me to the world, recalibrate my emotional settings so they were more in line with everybody else's. I might have humoured them from time to time, promised to have a look into it, but the truth was that the idea had never appealed to me. For one thing, I had always been led to believe that the known details surrounding my birth were simply too vague and incomplete, that the chances of success were close to zero. For a second, and much more importantly, I'd spent my entire life trying to create an identity for myself and thus couldn't contemplate the idea of finding out that I wasn't who I thought I was. Not simply Mary Rice, primary school headmistress, but Mary Rice, daughter of a World War Two Land Girl. Mary Rice, centre of some war-shadowed episode of personal tragedy. Mary Rice, progeny of not just a real flesh-and-blood mother but of a real flesh-and-blood father too.