The Colour of Heaven. James Runcie

of his wife. He was prepared to sit quietly by her side and admit that he was not perfect. He was even willing to make his confession in return for the promise of paradise. But he could not believe the miraculous ‘proofs’ of faith that the priests had told Teresa. He had never been able to accept that St Olga had lived to the age of nine hundred and sixty-nine; that St Hilarion had survived on fifteen figs a day; or that St Andrew Anagni had once resurrected all the roast birds he had been given for dinner.

      Yet when Teresa looked at the church in which she worshipped, built to provide a glimpse of heaven on earth, every story and detail had meaning. She would tell Paolo to compare each stone in a mosaic to a human life and to concentrate upon it. He should know that although a fragment might mean nothing when looked at on its own, it was an essential part of the complete picture, the sum of human life, and only made sense when seen with all the others. Such is the way, she believed, that God looks down upon his creation.

      Paolo looked at the mosaic and wondered which his stone might be: whether it lay high or low, in shadow or in darkness. At times, in the early morning, when the sun shone through the windows and caught the gold in its glare, he found that he was forced to squint away from the light, so brightly did it shine. And then, in the darkness of the evening, when they went to pray once more, he would have difficulty making out the shape of the stones in the distance, or discerning the pattern they made.

      He would rub his eyes in order to see better, and Teresa would ask him what was wrong. Paolo told her it was nothing. He did not want to alarm his mother or anger his father, and so he would return to the church of San Donato on his own and look at each mosaic closely. When Teresa asked him again what he saw he would no longer guess but remember.

      Over the next three years his sight continued to decline.

      One evening he was returning from collecting alder wood out near the marshes with his mother. Teresa had lost all sense of time and found it strange that the clock on the campanile stated that it was only five in the afternoon. She wondered aloud if it was accurate.

      Paolo asked what she meant.

      ‘Look at the clock.’

      ‘Where?’

      ‘On the campanile.’

      ‘I can see the campanile, but I cannot see the clock.’

      Teresa stopped.

      ‘What do you mean? You must be able to see it.’

      ‘I cannot.’

      ‘Then what can you see?’

      ‘I don’t know. I can see you. The canal. The houses.’

      ‘Can you see the people in the boat? The women washing?’

      ‘Not clearly,’ Paolo replied.

      ‘Did you notice that swift swoop away from you?’

      ‘I heard it. I know its call, but in the skies all the birds are as one.’

      ‘You cannot tell a swallow from a hawk?’

      ‘I do not know.’

      ‘How long have your eyes been like this?’

      Teresa was suddenly afraid. She knew that Marco would not tolerate a son who could not see as clearly as he did. At the first sign of any weakness he would cast him out to fend for himself, forever dependent on alms, gifts, and the kindness of strangers.

      ‘Can you describe the end of the fondamenta – the man outside our foundry?’ she asked, beginning to panic.

      ‘I can, but it is hard. Is that a man or a woman?’

      ‘You cannot tell? The man has a beard.’

      ‘I cannot see it.’

      ‘Then what can you see?’

      ‘Nearby?’

      ‘No, far off.’

      ‘There is a wall, a shrine, and a cross.’

      ‘Can you see the flowers?’

      Paolo paused. Were they roses, or lilies?

      ‘Can you?’ his mother insisted.

      ‘No.’

      ‘You cannot tell?’

      Paolo could not. But he could see that Teresa was afraid. He knew that her eyes had narrowed and that she was angry: and he recognised that, from now on, he would have to be careful of his replies.

      ‘How can we live if you cannot work the glass?’ Teresa asked.

      ‘I do not know,’ Paolo replied. For the first time he was scared of his own mother.

      ‘We must find eye crystal to make you see,’ Teresa announced. ‘Come now. Let’s go. In the boat.’

      ‘Now? Without father?’

      ‘He must not know. I will get a man to take us over the water to the merceria. There are men there who sell lenses that will help you. I only hope we have the money.’

      She pulled at his arm and they made their way to the harbour. There they were rowed over to the mainland. Disembarking on the fondamenta, they walked through the narrow lanes of the Castello, where an elderly hunched man was selling glasses from a tray laid out in the corner of a haberdasher’s shop.

      Teresa picked at the spectacles so frantically that Paolo thought that she would break them.

      ‘Here, try these.’ She handed him a pair of twin lenses, joined at the bridge, but without arms.

      ‘Why are you here?’ said the pedlar.

      ‘You do not want us to buy your wares?’ Teresa replied abruptly.

      ‘Yes. But the boy is too young for such things …’

      ‘He cannot see.’

      ‘But these are for old men, scholars, those who read …’

      Teresa handed Paolo a magnifying glass.

      ‘Is this better?’

      ‘No, it makes things more blurred in the distance.’

      Paolo tried lens after lens, spectacle after spectacle, holding them up by the arms, amazed by the way in which vision in the right eye and then the left swam before him. The goods in the shop became strangely enlarged, almost threatening. Strips of metal, ribbons, bows, buckles, lengths of hemp and twine, mirrors and their reflections, all combined, glass on glass, reflected and refracted, lurching up to meet him.

      Paolo’s head hurt with the confusion. The lenses fought against each other, and he struggled to find focus.

      He felt as if he lived inside a cloud.

      Each time he picked up a new lens he could sense his mother’s desperate expectation.

      ‘Hold it at a distance,’ Teresa ordered.

      Paolo stretched out his arm and the building across the street suddenly appeared sharp and clear, the windows glinting in the light against pale-pink stone.

      ‘Now it makes things upside-down,’ said Paolo. ‘I can see clearly but I would need to hold the lens at arm’s length and walk on my hands.’

      ‘It is meant for close work only,’ said the pedlar.

      ‘Can you not make such a lens against my eyes, without the world turned round?’

      ‘What is it that you cannot see?’

      ‘The distance.’

      ‘But you can see close?’

      ‘Clearly. If I look at my finger, I can see the whorls of my skin more distinctly than I can through any glass. Yet nothing else is as true. Everything fades.’

      ‘Alas,’ said the pedlar. ‘These spectacles are for old men, for scholars, to aid