Nuns and Soldiers (75 page)

They had said ‘once a nun always a nun’. They had said that they needed this thought of her as being, in their midst, still dedicated and holy. She had been so wise not to tell her love. If one syllable had passed her lips, if one gesture had escaped her, it would have changed the world, as Gertrude had said it could in seconds be utterly changed. I would be a different person, thought Anne, and that’s what’s important. Some great necessary integrity, some absolute availability, some eternal aloneness would have been lost by that revelation. She had kept her mouth shut, she had never told her love, and that at least was for her salvation. She was still ‘empty and clean’, transparent and invisible, although the voice that said this was still the voice of her pride. And she was homeless and free. She had left the convent because it was a home. Foxes have holes, but the Son of Man ... only now, after the safety of her service to Gertrude, was she facing the void which she had chosen.

But was not the idea of ‘void’ itself an illusion, something ‘romantic’ as Guy might say? How soon she might fill up that void with all sorts of rubbish! Shall I jumble it all again, she wondered, seek refuges, fall stupidly in love? Can I really be an anchoress in the world, and what ever does it mean? Life was so full of chances. She might have drowned in Cumbria before Gertrude’s eyes, she might have set off some new and awful casual chain by taking hold of Peter’s hand. Now she was completely free to put herself in bondage, but what would the bondage be? Marriage? Anne was sure that that folly at least she could avoid. She would never marry, she was not made for the particular safety of married life, and it seemed to her that she had always known this. The Poor Clares were simply a stepping stone, a starting point. Or would she perhaps stay there forever, just
at
the starting point, a shadowy helper, a servant, without even the dignity of being ‘inside’? Or would she go on to find her cell, her hermitage in a little white wooden house in a little lost senseless American town? Or work in prisons and find out herself as an eternal prisoner? Or maybe become a doctor, as her father had wished? Or would she perhaps end up after all as a priest in another church? At least she knew that she must now seek solitude, innocence and the silence of being totally uninteresting. ‘To him that hath shall be given, and from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.’ Anne gave her own sense to this saying. She knew that her salvation from a corruption which she well understood was to have not, and to be with those that have not. And she thought all these thoughts together with a full and gloomy realization that perhaps all that awaited her ‘over there’ was muddle and confusion and messy nasty moral failure.

At one time Anne would have put this self-analysis in terms of: only God can be perfectly loved. Human love, however behovable, is hopelessly imperfect. This hard truth had sent her into the convent. It had also in the end driven her out. Happiness sought anywhere but in God tends to corruption. This, which had once been doctrine for her, she held to now simply as a personal showing. She had been right after all, and the events of the last year had confirmed it, to think that she had been irrevocably spoilt for the world by God. And spoilt, and rightly spoilt, even though she no longer believed in Him. St Augustine had prayed by repeating simply again and again
My Lord and my God, my Lord and my God.
Anne felt now that she too could pray so in her utmost need, calling upon the name of the non-existent God.

Anne’s hand returned to her handbag and she touched with her finger the elliptical grey stone, slightly chipped at one end, which her Visitor had shown to her and left behind him as a sign. The dense hardness of the stone was very cold at all times. Instinctively she touched it with her damaged finger, the finger which had been scorched when she reached out to touch his garment. She could still feel the slightly rough texture of the cloth. The little scar had not healed. Victor, to whom on Gertrude’s insistence she had displayed it, had been puzzled. He prescribed antibiotics. The scar showed no sign of going septic, but it persisted. Anne felt it now against the hard cold surface of the stone: the stone in whose small compass her Visitor had made her to see the Universe, everything that is. And if it is so small, thought Anne, beginning thus a sentence which she was never able confidently to finish.

There was no God, but Christ lived, at any rate her Christ lived, her nomadic cosmic Christ, uniquely hers, focused upon her alone by all the rays of being. He was defeated, she thought, the way to Jerusalem was not a triumphal progress. He was a failure, a pathetic deluded disappointed man who had come to an exceptionally sticky end. And yet: ‘Weep not for me but for yourself.’ Could she, knowing what she knew of him, of all his failure, all of it, tread that way after him? Could she relive his journey and his passion while knowing that he was after all not God? And she remembered the ‘wonderful answer’ which had made her Visitor laugh and call her ‘witty’, when she had said, ‘Love is my meaning’. And she remembered too in an odd way something which the Count had said once about his own love and its object. ‘I did it all, I enacted both sides of the relation, and this could be done because she was inaccessible.’ And Anne cried out in her heart to her living Christ, ‘Oh Sir, your yoke is heavy and your burden is intolerable. ’ And she was answered in his words, ‘The work is yours.’

The work was hers; and as she measured its fearful ambiguity she seemed to see before her Guy’s glittering eyes and his wasted face, and hear words spoken a year ago, of which she could not tell now whether they were her words or his. We want our vices to suffer but not to die. Purgatorial suffering is a magical story, the transformation of death into pain, happy pain whose guaranteed value will buy us in return some everlasting consolation. But there are eternal partings, all things end and end forever and nothing could be more important than that. We live with death. With pain, yes. But really ... with death.

With a mental gesture as if dodging a blow Anne turned aside from these thoughts. They would go with her and there would be times when they would enter bodily into her flesh. Of this sort of corporal reality of thoughts the convent had taught her something. At least she thought it is possible to help people, to make them happier and less anxious, and this is somehow, I can’t at the moment think how, both possible and necessary
because
of all those final endings. She had helped Gertrude. Gertrude had said, ‘I was possessed by a devil and you saved me.’ How much did I really do for her, thought Anne, how far did I really crucially help that great survivor to survive? At the very beginning, yes, I soothed her pain. Anne could not think of anyone else whom she had helped since her ‘liberation’. Oh yes, she had helped Sylvia Wicks. She had met Sylvia and heard her story on one day when Sylvia, in final desperation, had come to Ebury Street seeking Gertrude. Gertrude was absent and Sylvia poured it all out to Anne, who kept it to herself. She agreed to talk to Sylvia’s son (Paul) and then to the girl (Mary) whom he had made pregnant. Soon after this the young people pulled themselves together and took charge of their weeping raving parents. They decided to have the baby and to do their exams and then to get married. Meanwhile Sylvia would help them to look after the child. The child (a boy, they called him Francis) arrived in July. He was baptized (Anne was godmother) and the grandparents, transformed, vied for his affection. In fact, Mary’s father was a widower, and, once he stopped shouting, a person of great rationality and charm. He and Sylvia became very fond of each other, to the joyful amusement of their children. Sylvia’s life was totally transformed, she had never been happier, and could hardly now believe that a year ago she had felt suicidal despair. She told Anne that it was ‘all her doing’. Well, thought Anne, I did something.

Anne met Manfred once at Sylvia’s house. Manfred, to do him justice, knowing nothing of Anne’s connection with her, rang Sylvia up out of his usual casual benevolence to find out if she needed money or anything, and he did in fact later on solve Sylvia’s financial problems for her. He was rewarded and electrified to learn by telephone that Anne was actually with Sylvia at that moment. He raced for his car and arrived plausibly before she left; and this time Anne let him drive her back to her flat. This was the one occasion when he was alone with her. Manfred, driving unusually slowly, wondered if he should stop the car in some convenient side street and take her in his arms, at least make some passionate declaration. It was one of the most agonizing moments of his life. He decided that if he did so Anne would be startled, embarrassed, distressed, annoyed, and would ask him to desist. (This prediction of Manfred’s was in fact correct, and he was of course also right in thinking that Anne never guessed his love.) His pride, equal in this respect to hers, could not have born the shock. He did not risk it. And in just this sense Mrs Mount was perhaps right to say that he did not love her enough.

Stroking Perkins, Anne began now to listen to the sounds round about her to which she had been oblivious. A group of people at the next table were having an animated conversation. Suddenly Anne was rigid with attention.

‘Daisy Barrett’s gone, you know.’

‘Yes, to America.’

‘She’s gone to join some women friends, Libbers you know.’

‘Where ?’

‘California, where else! Santa Barbara or something.’

‘That should suit her.’

‘She led a pretty crazy life here.’

‘You don’t know the half of it.’

‘At any rate she got rid of that awful red-headed creep who was always after her.’

‘I can’t think how she stood that chap so long.’

‘You heard what happened to him?’

‘What ?’

‘He married a merry widow.’

‘Rich?’

‘Of course.’

‘Daisy was too good for him.’

‘Yes, Daisy’s
someone,
she’s a
real person,
if you know what I mean.’

‘Well, God bless her, wherever she is. The sight of her boozy old painted face always made me feel better.’

‘She hadn’t an ounce of spite in her, she shouted and screamed but she forgave everybody and everything.’

‘The Prince won’t be the same without her.’

‘What did she do with all those awful potted plants?’

‘Gave them to Marje.’

‘Oh, yes of course.’

‘Did she tell you about the ghastly nun who was chasing her?’

‘Daisy would be chased by a nun!’

‘She was an unfrocked nun, actually.’

‘What’s more exciting, an unfrocked nun or an unfrocked priest?’

‘Beautiful word, “frock”.’

‘Apparently this nun was a raving lesbian and had been chucked out of her convent for seducing the novices.’

‘Darling, have you got her address?’

‘How was Daisy when you saw her?’

‘Oh in fine form. She said she was going off in search of her innocence. ’

‘Perhaps we should all do that.’

‘But not tonight. Let’s have another round. It’s Piglet’s turn.’

Anne stroked Perkins who was now purring, gently stroking the cat’s black nose where the fur grew downward. Perkins looked up at Anne with her intense sinless passionless green eyes. For the first moment Anne felt shock and distress at the image of her which had escaped somehow and was wandering abroad, bandied about over the drinking glasses. Then she relaxed and smiled. It was funny really. And by what privilege could she be exempt from so general a human fate? We are all the judges and the judged, victims of the casual malice and fantasy of others, and ready sources of fantasy and malice in our turn. And if we are sometimes accused of sins of which we are innocent, are there not also other sins of which we are guilty and of which the world knows nothing?

So Daisy had gone to America, she had preceded Anne into the New World. She is another wanderer, she thought. Well, I shall follow after and carry my cross and my Christ with me. She had found, in that scrap of conversation, the relief of anxiety for which she craved. Daisy had set off ‘in fine form’. Anne agreed that Daisy was ‘someone’. And so she was seeking innocence. It was a quest suited to human powers. Perhaps after all, Goodness was too hard to seek and too hard to understand. Anne did not now feel it her duty to search further. But she thought in an odd way that if Daisy ever terribly needed her they would perhaps meet again.

Anne put Perkins down gently on the floor. She finished up her glass of wine and began to pull on her overcoat. Suddenly there was a commotion at the other end of the bar.

‘Look, look who’s here!’

‘It’s Barkiss, Barkiss is back!’

‘I just opened the door and he walked in!’

Anne’s neighbours leapt up and ran towards the shouting. People crowded round.

‘It’s Barkiss, he’s come back to us!’

‘Look how thin he is!’

‘Quick, a ham sandwich for Barkiss!’

‘He’s been away a whole year!’

‘Look at his poor old paws, he must have walked from Land’s End!’

‘I just opened the door and he walked in!’

‘Good old Barkiss, dear old Barkiss, he’s come back to the Prince of Denmark.’

Peering, Anne saw a big yellow Labrador frisking and wagging its tail amid the cries of joy. She watched for a little, smiling, then left the pub.

‘
Time, please. Closing time. Time, gentlemen, please.
’

Outside, the shock of the cold blanched her face and the cold finger of her indrawn breath reached down into her shrinking body. She buttoned up her coat and pulled on her gloves.

It was still snowing and the roads and pavements were dark with running water and brown slush. The whitened cars moved slowly with a soft hissing sound. Anne looked upward. The snow, illuminated by the street lamps, was falling abundantly, against the further background of the enclosing dark. The big flakes came into view, moving, weaving, crowding, descending slowly in a great hypnotic silence which seemed to separate itself from the sounds of the street below. Anne stopped and watched it. It reminded her of something, which perhaps she had seen in a picture or in a dream. It looked like the heavens spread out in glory, totally unrolled before the face of God, countless, limitless, eternally beautiful, the universe in majesty proclaiming the presence and the goodness of its Creator.