Obedience (13 page)

Bernard handed the clipping over to Thérèse.

‘Madame Sandrine Romero, née Marty, of St Grat,' she read from the top, ‘died at home aged eighty-seven. Widow of Jimenez Romero of Madrid and much-loved mother of the late Paul Romero and of Melanie Oustal and Micheline Henry, grandmother of Stefan, Lucy, Philippe, Paul and Odile, and great-grandmother of Simone.'

Bernard did not stop her. Thérèse went on to read the short prayer-poem at the bottom of the obituary.

‘Was she a friend?' Thérèse asked at last.

‘No. It's the one below,' said Bernard.

‘Philippe Pourcel? Died 4 April, after a long illness bravely borne. That one?'

Bernard nodded.

Thérèse looked more closely at the grainy photograph.

‘I don't know him,' she said, holding the clipping at arm's length to see if a new perspective didn't somehow trigger a memory. ‘Was he special? Why is there a photograph?'

Bernard knew he was not special. He had been the ugliest of rebukes, the hardest of penances.

‘He was director of finance at the town hall,' she said.

‘But a religious man?'

‘I don't know. Does he look it?'

The doorbell sounded again and Thérèse jumped, susceptible now to noises that burst upon her silence.

‘I'll answer it,' she said, standing up and resting the piece of newspaper on the arm of her chair.

‘Perhaps it's the Dutchman come for his instructions,' said Bernard.

Thérèse did not hear her. She was almost across the hall, realizing already from the slim dark shape through the glass that it was not the Dutchman, nor Claude.

‘It is too late anyway, for any of that,' said Bernard.

‘This is Sister Bernard,' said Thérèse. ‘She has lived here over seventy years. Won't you sit down?'

Veronique nodded slightly towards Bernard and then chose the chair opposite to her, sitting uncomfortably on the edge of it.

‘I really can't stay long. I must be back at the home before the shifts change. If you could just let me have the bag.'

‘Sister Bernard is going to Les Cèdres,' said Thérèse, adding to Bernard, ‘This is the deputy director from the nursing home. She's come to collect Sister Marie's bag.'

Bernard and the woman looked at each other.

‘It's nice,' said Veronique. ‘At Les Cèdres. I know some people there. Working there,' she corrected herself quickly.

She looked tired. Her face was pallid and meagre, uninteresting.

‘You have come promptly,' said Bernard.

‘When they phoned they said it was urgent. To be done this afternoon. So I made an effort.'

‘It's because we're moving,' Bernard felt obliged to explain. But Veronique was looking away, at the empty corridor and the inexplicable hardness of the convent light. She was not paying much attention.

‘Sister Marie would be honoured, if she knew, to have
the deputy director come to pick up her bag,' suggested Thérèse.

‘It was easy enough for me to pass by.'

‘Good of you though,' pressed Thérèse. ‘On a holiday too, on Armistice.'

‘We work a shift rota. We have different holidays.'

Veronique shivered. The convent unnerved her. From the outside its blankness was disturbing, tainting the centre of the village. It was out of time, somehow, neither a part of the tumbled roofs and stone barns that had been there for ever, nor in keeping with the new-build bungalows tucked onto spare land, the pristine bar or the glass-fronted
salle des fêtes
. Inside it was simply sordid, the old nuns crawling around like slow spiders, their movements clogged with dust. She leant back in the armchair, dislodging the scrap of newspaper which Thérèse had laid on the arm. It floated down to the floor at her feet.

‘You must be sad to be leaving,' she said.

‘It's a chance to try something else,' said Thérèse.

‘We are,' said Bernard.

Veronique reached down for the scrap of newspaper and put it on the table. She glanced for a moment at the grainy photo. Then, bending forwards, she looked at it more closely.

‘Sister Bernard has been going through her papers,' explained Thérèse.

‘But I've nearly finished, Sister,' said Bernard.

‘Have you? Then that's excellent.'

Veronique picked up the obituary and turned it over at the edges with anxious fingers. Then she looked at the two nuns expectantly.

‘Sister Thérèse is not coming to Les Cèdres,' said Bernard, as though in reply. It was intimately said, a secret. Thérèse could not hear it. ‘I have to go on my own.'

Veronique held the scrap of newspaper towards them.

‘This is my father,' she said quietly.

Again, Thérèse had not heard. She smiled and nodded. ‘I'll fetch the bag,' she said, going back to the hall.

Bernard felt something flicker in her stomach. They sat across from each other, not moving. Veronique looked away from the nun, towards the bend in the corridor. She imagined the building stretching away beyond, the gloomy air still and unchanging. As soon as she heard Thérèse's footsteps coming close again she got up to leave. She placed the photograph of Philippe Pourcel back on the table without further comment. She picked something from her skirt. Her hands trembled.

‘Good luck with the move, ladies. Sorry, Sisters. It's a long time since I was in a convent.' Veronique spoke too brightly. She took Marie's bag from Thérèse. ‘I can let myself out if you're busy packing.'

‘It's all right. I'll come with you,' said Thérèse.

Bernard watched them round the corner towards the entrance hall, and sat back. As Veronique's car pulled out of the long drive and along the track to the newly renovated wash house, she sat with her hands in her lap, her thoughts spun with shadows. Nothing came clear. Many minutes passed.

Thérèse came back to the snug and turned on the television. Someone had won a holiday to Florida and was hugging the presenter energetically, bouncing and squealing, jubilant. Bernard sank back further in her chair.

S
omething about the soldier's tightness was new. His thin frame was too fragile; he seemed to be concentrating on holding it steady. He lay on the cold floor at the back of the church with his head in her lap, but she could hardly feel the weight of him.

They were away from the draughts but the door was slightly open so that they could see anyone who came up the steps. It was a fine dusk. The bats had begun their low swoop over the village square and the stone glowed golden. The air smelt already of summer dust, the promise of hot days. For a while they heard the low drone of a plane, somewhere distant, something to do with the war, perhaps. Two Germans crossed the square together, briskly, talking loudly. But then it was quiet; the birds were hushed, there were no voices.

He drank from a cloudy bottle, hardly lifting his head, letting the beer dribble down his chin and settle in pools in the creases of Bernard's habit.

‘I can't miss evening prayer,' she said quietly.

‘It is time?'

‘Nearly.' She turned to judge the light outside but the high walls of the square held the day and she was confused. ‘I don't know. They'll notice if I'm not there.'

‘Go then.'

‘A minute more.'

She wanted to close his head in her arms, sweep up the gold of it, but she did not risk it. Instead she took the slightest wisp of his hair in her fingers and held it. She did not twist or pull or caress it, but she pressed the hair tightly, as though it might float away from her. He might have felt the pull of it if he had fidgeted, but he was absolutely still and did not know she had secured a part of him.

When she let the hair fall, she said, ‘I didn't think you would stay like this – with me – so long. Usually you go.'

He flipped sideways, sliding from her lap, his head on his elbow and the beer bottle suspended. ‘I have permission.' He watched her as he said it; did not smile.

‘To stay with me?'

‘You have been useful.' He drank his beer and rolled back into her lap, gazing at the damp-pocked ceiling as though there were beauty there. ‘The information you gave was very good.'

For a moment they let this hang between them. Then, with a start, Bernard wriggled her knees, bouncing his head.

‘Wait. Look.'

With a grunt, he turned to see. Two children were emerging from the shadow at the side of the square and heading for the church, a girl of perhaps nine or ten, and a much younger boy who she was yanking along by the hand. The children trotted across the open ground to the
bottom of the church steps where the girl turned to help her brother climb up. By the time they reached the top the soldier was standing just inside the open church door, his uniform tightly buttoned, his feet confidently planted, his pistol visible in his hand. Bernard had slipped further back out of sight, but she was able to see a sliver of what was going on through the crack where the heavy church doors hinged to the stone.

The girl noticed the soldier and stopped, not quite at the top of the steps. She pulled her brother to her side. She said nothing. The boy smiled and rubbed his nose.

‘Go home,' said the soldier, his voice gravelly with borrowed age. ‘You cannot come here.'

‘I have to collect the altar cloths for washing.' The girl was matter-of-fact.

‘You cannot come here.'

She gave the slightest of shrugs but did not otherwise move. She looked back hard at the soldier, daring him. He straightened the arm holding the pistol.

‘What are you doing anyway? You shouldn't be in the church. Soldiers shouldn't go in the church. I know that. It's a safe place.'

Bernard shifted so that she had a better view of the child's face. She thought she might know her, but the light was unsteady and she could not be sure. The soldier swayed slowly backwards and forwards, his heels clicking softly on the worn stone. He looked over the heads of the girl and her brother, to the low blank buildings on the far side of the square and the dense dark gathering in the open ground beyond, the country trapping him there, a stranger.

‘Go home. Now.' There was some panic in the way he
said it, an urge to scream at the children; the words spat from him viciously.

The girl moved backwards down the steps, reluctant, one at a time, as her brother made his way down sideways like a crab. At the bottom of the steps Bernard saw the girl let go of her brother's hand. The boy moved away from her then and Bernard could no longer see him. The girl turned back, emboldened now by the distance between her and the soldier.

‘I'm going to tell them that you were in the church, with a gun. They'll come and get you for that,' she said.

His reply was low and soft and foreign, a whisper of the village night. And for the first time he moved out of the shelter of the porch.

‘Stop!' he said in French, though the girl was still, letting him speak. ‘I'll give you the cloths. Wait there.'

He was visible now, to anyone that wanted to see, and he straightened himself, his fragility absolute.

The girl smiled at him slyly as though she had won something.

‘They're folded up on the sacristy table.'

‘What is that?' He turned to find Bernard. He did not recognize the word. ‘What did she say?'

Bernard nodded. ‘I'll get them.'

The soldier stood at the back of the nave, in the dark, while Bernard went to the sacristy where the cloths were neatly piled on the corner of the table as the girl had said. There was the faded smell of old stone and worn wood, and the faint sounds of the village behind him, the squawk of a blackbird sounding an alarm above the square and the hum of evening. When he closed his eyes, it was familiar
for a moment, a place he knew already; everything was as it had been when he was a child. But then there was the squat nun picking her way back down the aisle and the pull of his uniform, heavy on his thin limbs.

He still held the pistol in his right hand, so he took the cloths in his left. There was a stain of wine on the top fold. Bernard went in front of him and pushed the door further open for him to pass through, returning into the shelter of the porch. At the bottom of the steps the girl and her brother were waiting patiently. There was no one else to be seen.

‘Here,' said the soldier. ‘Come and take them.'

The girl was pleased with her success. She skipped up the steps between them and took the cloths in both hands. Through the long crack in the door frame, Bernard could see the way she smiled at the soldier. Then, as the girl turned to go down, Bernard saw him catch hold of her light skirt with his free hand, and tug her back towards him, whipping her round as he did so until she was facing him. She watched as he pulled the girl's skirt up slightly and, in the same movement, deftly moved the hand with the pistol underneath. She watched him jerk his right arm, his pistol arm, upwards, saw the cloth of his uniform shift as the muscles tightened beneath it, saw the colour drain from the girl's face and her mouth and eyes open wide, saw the soldier and the girl sway together, almost dancing for a minute or two, the altar cloths bright in the gloom. She saw him twist his arm sharply, three, perhaps four times and a patch of dark sweat in the small of his back.

A bat passed close to the girl's head and made the soldier, for the first time, take his eyes from her face.
Bernard watched as, with a sharp tug, he pulled his arm and the pistol from under the girl's skirt. The girl let out a noise, a huff, as though she had been winded. He gave her a push back down the steps. She stumbled, still holding the bundle of cloths. When she reached the bottom of the steps, Bernard saw her stumble again. Steadying the cloths with one arm, the girl reached down with her other hand, touching her skirt lightly at one side, as if she might feel something there. She started as if burned. Then both she and the boy moved out of Bernard's field of vision.