PART III BLACK VIRGIN

Jessica. We were married in 1975. I’m not interested in the ins and outs of the marriage. So, I’ll skip all that preliminary stuff. But we were married and happy for some time. Five years of happiness. Or thereabouts. She graduated from Edinburgh University, where I had met her. She had been in a show on the Fringe. Great reviews. I went backstage to meet her one night. I was a student journalist up there from Cambridge, where I was studying. And it went from there. I stayed in Edinburgh for longer than I should have. Because of her of course. And then I came back down to Cambridge. And she came with me. It was summer.

That summer was unusually hot. We put our money together and bought a little Fiat. Little blue thing, and went bombing around the Cambridgeshire countryside. Around the Fens. Up to Ely. She loved the cathedral. We spent hours just driving around. The wild marshy vastness of the Fens. The huge sky. Just me and her. That summer was bliss.

What do you mean what went wrong? Did I say that anything had gone wrong? Jumping to conclusions there, writer.

Oh, a tone? A tone, was there? Well, actually, you’re right. Things did start to go wrong. But not for a long time. Like I said, we had five years of married harmony. I loved her. She loved me. How’s the drink?

Well, things started to go wrong when we moved to Brighton on the South coast of England, in – I don’t know- it must have been October 1980. towards the end of the year anyway. Around my birthday.

We moved to Brighton. Her father had a small flat down there. We decided to move there. Permanently. And to try for a child. She wanted a child.

I was too young. I wanted to write. To put my heart and soul into writing.

She would have loved to stay at home and look after it, him, her, whatever it would have been. I was just being incredibly… selfish. Something which was to develop ten fold over the next few months. I just didn’t want to have another human being in my life. Something , someone I had to devote more time to than I did to myself.

Yes. Yes, there was a child. Of sorts.

My dear man, you are jumping ahead in our story. Almost as if you know something before-

Before I do.

She was thrilled. Absolutely. She couldn’t have had better news. I, on the other hand, went into a kind of shell. I began coming home late from work, driving around the town, going down to the beach in the evening and just sitting there- watching it all, watching the silly little world.

Silly and hollow. You see by then, our love, the spark, whatever you want to call it- it had gone. For me anyway. And she- she was so besotted with this child growing in her that she didn’t have any inkling of how I was feeling. I daresay she didn’t even notice me. But then one day things changed- something changed-

Her. She. She changed. The bloom went out of her. The sunshine that had glowed so warmly from her cheeks when she knew about the child- it just vanished. Boof! She looked like a wilting plant. A dying flower.

We had grown so distant at that time. I was-

I was – I wasn’t interested in her sexually any longer. And naturally, the streets of Brighton called. In those days it was easy to get anything. Anything one wanted. I daresay it still is.

Oh shutup, shutup. Don’t say anymore. Your words are empty. They mean nothing.


Though she was no saint. Although after the accident, many said she was. Those fools in the press. I’m sorry to denigrate your profession, but they were absolute fools when it all happened. How did they know her? What did they know?

She became ill. Very ill. Not anything physical. Or so it seemed. Something had happened in her head. Something was eating away at her. Gnawing away at her sanity. And I was having none of it. I really didn’t care.

I don’t care. Just as I didn’t care then. I told you- I didn’t want the child. I had no desire to have the child. As far as I was concerned- it was nothing to do with me.

I just didn’t want to know. I didn’t care. And I made up my mind to leave her. One weekend, I just decided. I was to go to a friend’s in London. I had contacts in a newspaper, some local rag in Ealing. I was to go there and as far as I was concerned never set eyes on her again. Or the thing she was carrying.

But something happened.

I was in a bar. In the town. Something , I don’t know what, something inside told me something was wrong at home. I got in the car and drove the half mile or so along the seafront. We lived on the outskirts of Brighton, a little terraced house, one of the last on the town’s edge, by the sea, near Shoreham, you might know.

As I turned the corner into our road, and then turned into our drive, I noticed all the lights in the house were on. Every one of them. The house was just full of light, and the front door was open. But there was this quietness. This stillness. It felt like there was no one at home. Anyway, so I went in, expecting to find her watching the tv or doing god knows what, but I could find her nowhere. She wasn’t in the house. But the house, the rooms- they were full of flowers. Huge bouquets, little posies, petals strewn on the floor, up the staircase. I had seen nothing like it. I mean, I knew she liked flowers but not to this extent. There were roses and daffodils and gardenias and – and the smell. It nearly overwhelmed me. Suffocating somehow. It reminded me of when I was a child. I was playing with a friend in the churchyard, a mile or so from my mother’s house. For some reason we thought it would be good to water the flowers people had put on the graves. I found a small bucket. And I went to this tin font which stood by the side of the old church to fill it up. The water was green and opaque and had the sweet yet repugnant smell of rotting flowers, this perfume of death, it quite scared me. And as I was leaning over the edge to dip my bucket into the water, my little friend decided it would be a hoot to push me in; which he did. I remember the awful taste of stagnant pond water in my mouth. I must have swallowed so much in my struggle to right myself in the water, I was so disorientated. Well, it brought back memories of that. The flowers in the house. There was something wrong. And I went up to the bedroom, turning off the lights as I went, and when I had turned off the bedroom light, I looked out toward the sea, over the beach, and there she was. In the moonlight on the beach. Standing talking to someone. But I couldn’t see who she was talking to. Her mouth was moving, and her arms were gesturing this way and that, but there was no one with her. She looked like she was talking to herself.

I was – intrigued. More than worried. What was she doing? So, I went out. Out into the night across the road, down the track, over the small dunes, and onto the beach. As I got closer I could hear her talking.

I couldn’t make it out. It wasn’t windy. It was a very still night. But she was speaking in such low tones, with such a muffled voice, I couldn’t work out anything she was saying. She sounded like she was chanting.

I think she must have felt my presence because she turned round suddenly. There was this wild, mad look on her face, I felt like I had disturbed her from something that I wasn’t supposed to see, wasn’t supposed to hear. I felt embarrassed. But she looked so – so gone. Like it wasn’t her. Like Jessica had gone.

What did she say?

She said that she was speaking to the Virgin Mary. But- well, it wasn’t just the Virgin Mary. She said the Virgin Mary was standing beside her on the beach, and that they had been talking for some time. And that the Virgin was black. She had black hands and a black face. And she was giving Jess advice. She was amazed I couldn’t see her.

But she kept insisting she saw.

She continued talking to her. I might as well have not been there. I wasn’t there as far as she was concerned.

She was saying that she was sorry. Sorry that she was to lose her child. But she understood that it was necessary. That it was part of a bigger plan. And that she would weep. She would grieve. But she knew why. She understood why.

She was being told she was going to lose the baby.

I finally managed to persuade her to come back into the house. Some part of me still, still was fond of her, I suppose, and – and so I took her back into the house. I called the doctor.

Her diagnosis was that the baby was fine. There was no cause for alarm. She had done many tests, and all was well. Of course, if she felt overly worried, Jess should go to the hospital and get some more tests, but as far as she was concerned everything was as it should be.

And that was that.

Iwas intrigued. Intrigued by this – this vision that she said she’d had. Of course I didn’t believe her. I mean, I thought that she believed that she had seen something, but – well, it had happened before.

This time, she had heard something. It was shortly after we had gotten married. And believe me, at that time we were very happily married. But we had gone down to Cornwall for the weekend, to visit her brother, who was selling his cottage by the sea, and I was interested in buying it. But we were sitting by the sea, on deckchairs, this grey, damp day I remember, typical English weather, though one would expect better in the south- I had fallen asleep. Well, it seemed like only minutes after I had nodded off that I woke with a start, something jolted me awake- and I looked up, and I saw her- saw her walking into the sea- with a purpose, as if she was going somewhere- but it was only the sea in front of her.

It was a surreal moment. I shouted, “Jess! Jess!” but she didn’t look back, she just kept walking. Further and further into the sea, until she was up to her waist, and still she kept walking. I was –
What? No. Well, I didn’t have the chance. Suddenly out of nowhere it seemed, her brother raced along the shore, darted into the water and pulled her out. She didn’t struggle. She was limp. It looked like she was – Next thing I know, there was all this commotion. “What’s wrong with you?” someone shouted at me. “Why didn’t you do anything?”
“I didn’t see anything,” I lied.

The situation- it was too complicated. I didn’t know what to say. And I hadn’t tried to help her. I had just sat and watched.

She had heard a voice. She said it was loud and clear in her ear. It came from over her left shoulder. It told her, “You’re no good. There’s no more use for you here. Walk into the sea.”

Had it happened before?

Yes, according to her brother. I had never seen anything. I had never suspected. To me she was just Jess.

And then she saw the Virgin.

I was intrigued. I knew what she had seen was an illusion brought on by her condition. Of that I had no doubt. But what struck me as interesting, as curious, was why had she seen a black Mary. I had never heard of a Black Virgin before. I mean I had always assumed she was white. So, I did a little investigating. There are many statues, so it would seem, of Black Madonnas. They crop up all over Europe. Some statues are made of ebony or other dark wood, but there is debate about whether this choice of material is significant. Other Madonnas were originally light-skinned but have become darkened over time, for example by candle soot. But lately Scholars of comparative religions have suggested that Black Madonnas are descendants of pre-Christian mother or earth goddesses.

Like Isis or something.

Their dark skin may be associated with ancient images of these goddesses, and with the colour of fertile earth. Black Madonnas express a feminine power not fully conveyed by a pale-skinned Mary, who seems to symbolise gentler qualities like obedience and purity.
It may be linked to Mary Magdalene and female sexuality repressed by the medieval Church. And probably the most significant to Jess is that this Madonna was particularly important to the new mother. I don’t know where she had ever found out anything about this. It baffled me.

The child was stillborn. She had it one evening. One rainy evening in the late autumn. I sat outside in the car for an hour or so. The rain was beating down on the windscreen. It sounded like...