Christmas Eve or Hoping that it Might be So
In Saint Nicolas de Pierrepont, the church bell is ringing for seven in the morning. Seven sonorous chimes, brass hoops hanging on chimney stacks and telegraph wires and on the ears of the horses pricked in enquiry. And then there is a lull, a quiet in the dark like a rope going slack. We are waiting for the Angelus. [two days ago I woke to its bells, not realising our door had been left ajar all night for the comings and goings of cat and dog. Unimpeded, the sound of the bells on the cold air felt as though it were ringing in our bedroom, the metallic drone which resonates below the peals of the bells themselves set itself up in the iron of the bedstead. A household imp]. Advent, season of waiting. Waiting without expectation, knowing only that something is drawing closer. It has already set off. Clock tutting gently on the wall, candle flames unwavering,[1] ash from last night’s fire remembering its warmth. On the farm the cockerels practice their chorus for a dawn that will be an hour or so yet in coming, above it the grace note of a blackbird. From the church tower: a light. An illuminated star which flashes rapidly on and off. A faulty constellation. The hush deepens to a point. Then the triple chimes, leaden symbolism, structure dissolving into the chaos of the final peals. I feel the energy in the village shift. Awaken. It is Christmas Eve morning. The year swings on its hinges.
Three days ago the solstice arrived on a hard frost, chasing the full moon, waning now, sitting plump and a little lopsided in a sapphire sky as I smash the ice on the water troughs. Around the world people are watching a live stream, waiting for dawn at Newgrange, for the sun to slip quietly along its passage and illuminate its central chamber as it has done for 5200 years. The solstice will be televised. The day resolves itself into perfect clarity, glacial, austere. The marais, undergoing its blanchissement, is white and silent, but for the morse code trill of a bird, valiant. The sound hangs in the air like lost drops from a chandelier. They sell them individually at brocants here, and when you search through the boxes they make fragile chiming noises, an iceberg talking to itself. Drive out to the coast to be met with a glassy flat sea, a retreating tide, which we chase and catch, icy water numbing feet and toes, siphoning the breath from our lungs. A ragged chestful of air and I am swimming beneath the empty sky. On the horizon Jersey floats like a mirror trick. Wading back to the shore, the still falling tide sucking at our thighs and calves then standing, dripping. I feel scarified, cold, clean and awake. I am aware of my muscle fibres and capillaries, the clench and swell of my heart, lungs newly capacious. If we are fortunate, there are times when we live in our bodies so lightly, so absent-mindedly, that when they jerk us back to an awareness of them, our corporeality comes as a series of tiny shocks. The tide-sculpted sand fits to the arches of my bare feet. A few meters away ringed plovers skim the sand, tiny wind-up toys. The old year trickles from me in rivulets, back into the sea. Driving home with the heating on high, English radio fades in and out unpredictably. Snatches of Christmas songs from home coming through like a festive séance. Later, glancing at the clock, I realise the apex of the solstice has passed me by without my noticing.
The final market before Christmas sprawls through the centre of La Haye du Puits, our nearest town. A twelve-foot Christmas tree, destined it seems not to be sold, is decked in lights and leans against the wall of the florist at a rakish angle. Queuing in the freezing cold for the makings of a cheeseboard, Pere Nöel passes by, handing out chocolates to bored children who weave in and out of the ranks of shoppers. The air smells of smoke, the hot spice of merguez and burned sugar. At the grocer’s stall I collect up a riot of citrus. Clementines, their papery green leaves and stalks still attached, naval oranges, blushed grapefruits, bushels of lemons. I ask for pears, thinking of the wedge of bleu d’Auvergne in my shopping bag. The stall holder asks me when I will eat them, before solicitously selecting fruit at precisely the right stage of ripeness and carefully handing it over. This is something cheesemongers and greengrocers alike do here, and it feels like a tiny, luminous kindness, this stranger thinking of your future enjoyment. In the patisseries, wood piles of buche de noel have amassed, from pure white to deep mahogany, kitsch and glittering.
And after this? A day of mist. A day of rain. And the light beginning to return but secret, slow, keeping its own council.
It is Christmas eve afternoon. As the church clock chimes 4pm I walk up through the village, in steady rain and low light, up past empty holiday cottages which seem to radiate cold, up onto Mont Doville. The dog Inka lopes ahead in the gathering dusk, through copper fern fronds and gorse which glows yellow, nose to the wet earth. We climb through the mown paths as the wind picks up and sings and makes it sound as though there are a multitude of voices amongst the twisted hawthorn and oak, which I cannot make out. I stand on top of the Mont and see that now the night is coming down. Down over a bank of cloud off the coast at Carteret. Down over the lights of the village of Lithaire blinking sleepily. Down over the hares on the marais and the crucified roadside Christs. Over the Chapelle des Marins at St Vaast where the ghosts of the drowned exchange their scallop shells in lieu of gifts and condensation clots the stained glass. Down over the squinting lights of the wind turbines at Surville. The night pools in the clam shells which hold the holy water in the Basilica of Sainte Trinity in Cherbourg, where the water clutched in the harbour darkens like ink in cupped hands. Over the church in La Haye du Puits where the curé is preparing for Midnight Mass. Down over Mont Doville’s ancient yew, with its belly of lightening struck dark, over the dunes at Glatigny where chestnut and grey horses crop the meagre grass and talk amongst themselves (and the barn cats gossip and the sparrow hawk in the bocage, with her parchment and ochre livery, speaks only to herself, for it is in the old story . . .).[2] And the night comes down over the church of Saint Nicolas, whose star flickers on and off and on again, like hope.
[1] Blue green candle flames, and a flickering when there is no wind, tells us there is something present in the room with us. Just one of the subtle dead passing through, reading over your shoulder. Just something the daylight world cannot accommodate. They right themselves soon enough but the candle burns lopsided after.
[2] In Ireland, there is a belief that honey bees awake from their winter slumber at midnight on Christmas Eve, and hum a psalm of praise for the Christ child, and only those who have lived blameless lives will hear them.