Obedience (15 page)

Mother Catherine bit her bottom lip.

‘Prayer, Sister,' she said. She inclined her head slowly towards the door. ‘I think you need to ask for guidance in how to deal with this gossip.'

‘It is gossip then, Mother?'

‘It was a long time ago, Sister. These things happened a long time ago. Long before you came to us.'

‘But if the children remember it—'

‘They don't remember anything, Sister. It's their mothers, their neighbours and aunts and… it's nothing but gossip. They have nothing better to do. They are peasants.'

Mother Catherine walked slowly to the door and placed her hand flat against it for a moment, perhaps steadying herself. Once it was open, Thérèse knew, the convent's unflinching routine would knot around her.

‘I must know, Mother. Does Sister Bernard have a child?'

Mother Catherine looked away. Her thin voice was bitter.

‘Ask yourself, Sister, why you are so anxious to know these things,' she said. ‘God will reveal to you all you need to know. Trust in Him only.'

The unfamiliar desire prickled still under Thérèse's skin, but there was nothing she could do. Mother Catherine said no more, but stood by the open door watching as Thérèse made her way along the corridor to the chapel. There she spent the whole day praying for guidance, pinned to her knees, unable to shake the thought that Mother Catherine was making her pay for something. She offered up as penance the missed meals which Bernard had prepared.

Nearly two weeks later, the hay safely stacked in the barns and the rain falling hard on the dry earth, Marie-Hélène told her teacher the story of a nun found one day on the floor of the open wash house, giving birth to a son.
It had happened quickly. The nun had collapsed with a screech, folding on the cold floor with her arms tight across her. For a while her sisters had ignored her, going on with the washing, thinking it might be nothing, until one of them had noticed the filmy puddle seeping from under her habit and the swell of her stomach, clear now in the way she was lying. She had run for Marie-Hélène's mother, knocking furiously on the door of their small house, but there was no one at home and the noise had only brought several of the German soldiers onto the street. The messenger had ducked away through the narrow alleys and finally, desperate, run round to the shared rows of vines that cut up the hill behind, finding the makeshift midwife there, clipping shoots, her hat pulled low across her face. Then the two of them had started back, a flap of habit and wide skirt in the pinched streets, other women calling out, laying down their work, knowing what it must be. The soldiers, too, had followed, unstoppable, their dark uniforms silhouetting them against the cream stone.

By the time they arrived at the wash house, there was a little crowd, chattering and pushing, all the women trying to see who it was that was giving birth so publicly, ducking in under the low tiles to have a better look, and the soldiers hanging back, watching, the tedium of occupation shifted for a moment. When the women saw that it was Sister Bernard, many of them moved away. The chatter faded. There was an odd quiet, crammed with complaint, and one or two were heard to say that Marie-Hélène's mother should step away, too, from the contamination of the collaborator, leaving Bernard where she was, to die there,
if that was God's will, in the filth of her wickedness.

The bed sheets, piled on the floor of the wash house waiting their turn to be scrubbed, were put under and over the whimpering nun. Billowing in the breeze, threads catching against the bare stone, they created a kind of tent to protect the ruins of Sister Bernard's modesty from the onlooking village, and to mop up the blood. She writhed and panted and screeched, adopting an ungainly squat and calling on her God several times during the birth, none around her recognizing the form of prayer.

But the delivery of the baby was quick and the boy was healthy, sliding onto the stone floor without injury. Immediately Bernard bent to pick him up, holding him out far in front of her, his head wobbling and his face creased in a scream, his dark hair plastered to his scalp still with the wetness of birth. To everyone's surprise she ran her hand hard through his hair, easing it from his red skin and then pulling at it, somehow unbelieving. Over and over she pulled at it, as if she would pluck every strand from his head. The boy yelled but the nun kept on. She was so obviously distressed – so terrifyingly disappointed – that the women around tried to explain that things might change in a matter of days. No baby was quite beautiful after birth, they said. But when she could not make the hair come loose, she put the baby down on one of the flared scrubbing stones, disgusted by the dark features that seemed somehow to damn him. She untwined clumps of wet hair from her fingers and flung them into the pool at the centre of the wash house. Someone else wrapped the baby in an unlaundered cloth until he was almost invisible.

Bernard, unsteady, was helped back up the hill by three of her sisters who supported her under the arms so that she could walk. The soldiers slipped away, as though they had not been there. The rest of the village stayed for a while, talking quietly, and finally made their way home unwillingly, indignant, slowed by the rankling feeling that justice had been cheated. A little later, two nuns appeared back at the deserted wash house to collect the ruined sheets and to clear up the mess. They were still there at dusk scrubbing blood from the stone; stubborn dark stains remained for some years, blotchy and brown. Marie-Hélène's mother was never thanked for her intervention, nor was the incident ever mentioned to her again by anyone from the convent, but two days later the family found a large ham on their doorstep when they woke.

Marie-Hélène's story was detailed and convincing; when she was finished she looked away from her teacher for a moment, out through the long windows to the clustered village squatting in the rain beyond.

‘Thank you,' said Thérèse, the sound of the water falling from the roof making her words musical.

Marie-Hélène nodded. ‘I'm sorry now that I said about it, the first time. I shouldn't have. It was just… Anyway – I'm sorry.'

‘Well, it's all cleared up now, for good.' Thérèse was brisk. ‘It needn't be mentioned again. We've got to the bottom of it and it's forgotten.'

Marie-Hélène still would not turn back fully into the classroom. ‘Yes, Sister,' she said meekly.

‘These things are for God,' said Thérèse.

But when her pupil had gone, pulling the door softly behind her, Thérèse sat for a long time, drawing dense spirals on her wooden desk with the chalk. There was the sound of young children playing close by, and a tractor at a distance, whirring. The rain continued to be loud, resolute. The thrill of the story had already faded. But the sadness of it, the melancholy of satiation, was a surprise and she could not shift it.

Thérèse could not calm herself. At the end of the evening, her prayers would not hold steady, and she did not go to bed. She tried rearranging her small collection of things, as yet little more than a shelf of souvenirs along one wall of her cell. But somehow this unsettled her the more and with the summer light fading, and no permission to have her lamp on, she took instead to walking the short length from window to door, marking out a straight line by following a fracture in the floorboards. It was a long dusk but Thérèse was still pacing when dark finally came.

She opened her door gently and slipped down the corridor. The damp of the day lingered there, making the air thick. She walked slowly, so as not to make a noise, passing in turn each of the identical grey doors pressed into the long wall, brushing past the prayers, sobs and night terrors that punctured the silence. At Bernard's door it was quiet. She dared not knock, knowing even the tiniest rap would be heard as it echoed into corners far away, so she pushed lightly until there was enough of a gap for her to stand half in and half out of Bernard's cell, the door frame rigid against her shoulder. She was unsure of exactly what she was going to say.

The room was not dark. Two candles were lit on the small table to the side of Bernard's bed. One of them was
burning low and would soon be out. Both stuttered, casting unsteady shadows. Bernard was kneeling on the bed, her nightgown unbuttoned and rolled carefully down to her waist. Her heavy daytime chain hung around her neck, its crucifix nestling in the cleavage between her breasts. She was still, her head bent forwards, as though exhausted or asleep, or perhaps praying. But even by the light of the candles Thérèse could see the great red weals on her arms, shoulders and back, shining with new blood, the skin torn over old wounds. The cuts criss-crossed her flesh, making it seem unnaturally white and fragile, the webbing of the scars meshed more darkly around her, holding her together. On the bed beside her lay the whip, carefully knotted and tied from lengths of leather, the handle worn.

Thérèse stood in the gap in the door, watching. But nothing happened. Bernard remained perfectly still and quiet. All Thérèse could hear was the sound of her own regular breathing. At last a noise from somewhere above her – the cracking of a beam or a floorboard – made her start back from the door. It was impossible to look again, knowing this time what she would see. She stood very still for a moment, watching the moon rise red through the small barred window at the end of the corridor, and then she pulled Bernard's door shut, went quietly back to her own cell and prayed.

The following morning, Thérèse asked Sister Assumpta to stay behind in the chapel for a moment.

‘I need help, Sister,' she said.

Sister Assumpta nodded gently, as though this were to be expected, and waved a hand towards the bench beside her. Thérèse did not sit down.

‘I… I have something to tell you,' Thérèse went on, knowing it sounded like a confession. She smiled. Sister Assumpta turned the page of her prayer book and bent towards the altar, benign and quiet, a middle-aged servant of God. Thérèse began her story.

‘Of course,' Sister Assumpta said at the end of it, without looking up from the pictures of her prayer book. ‘I know.'

‘You know that Sister Bernard…'

Thérèse could not finish.

Sister Assumpta sighed. ‘Sister Bernard has much to ask God's pardon for,' she said.

‘But flagellation?' Thérèse whispered the word.

‘Sister, it is not for us to judge another's relationship with God,' Sister Assumpta said, more sternly than Thérèse expected. Sister Assumpta looked up from her prayer book now and Thérèse could not understand whatever it was that showed in her face. It looked something like envy.

‘But what should I do, Sister?'

‘Do?' The idea was cut down by the disdain of Sister Assumpta's tone, but she flattened her voice again carefully as she went on. ‘Sister Thérèse, we are a close family here. We are not all as young as you are. We have lived through many things. We are aware of Sister Bernard's imperfections. We are, God forgive us, none of us perfect.' She closed her prayer book, and stood up to leave, looking especially hard at Thérèse now. ‘There is nothing you could tell us about Sister Bernard that we do not know. There is nothing to be done.'

Thérèse could not quite believe this. But she bowed to Sister Assumpta, letting her pass out of the chapel
ahead of her, and she never again ventured out after her own cell door had been closed. Yet sometimes, even with others around, preparing for late prayers on a winter night or taking her turn to lock the outbuildings, there was something, a smell in the air or a tone in the unsteady darkness, which reminded her of Bernard slumped on her knees. At these times Thérèse wished she had gone on and disturbed Bernard from her reverie, touched her perhaps, held her even in the places where the flesh was intact. All kinds of things, she thought, might have been different then. But she found that after each time her memory came back to her in this way she spoke less often to Bernard, who seemed in any case always entirely absorbed in her chores.

It was not until several years later that Bernard was finally called into the Mother Superior's study.

‘A letter has arrived for you, Sister. It is marked personal,' said Mother Catherine, so curled with age that she could hardly be seen behind the desk. The letter lay in front of her, unopened, the envelope crisp.

‘Take a seat, Sister Bernard, if you would like.'

Bernard hesitated. The convent was smaller now than when she had arrived. The order was aging and in decline; many of the old routines had changed or even been forgotten. Discipline had slackened. Mother Catherine, wheezing noisy breaths, seemed no longer to care about what her nuns might be doing. She spent the entire day and most of the night in intense contemplation of bitter mysteries; the nuns spoke of her now in whispers, knowing she would soon be called to her rightful reward. But still
her study reeked of the power of the Church. Its calm, warm silence disturbed Bernard, the watchful gaze of the Sacred Heart testing her in ways she did not understand.

‘Could I take my letter to my cell, Mother?' she asked, not sitting down.

‘I think it better that you read it here.'

So Bernard read the letter standing in silence and slowly, because the writing was confused in places and because the thump of her heart was making her vision swim.

Philippe introduced himself without flourish as her son. He had tracked her down, he said, with difficulty. Although his adoptive mother – his ‘real' mother, he had called her – had been happy to tell him all she knew about his personal history, this had amounted to very little. As no formal adoption had taken place, with no agency involvement and no paperwork, she had only been able to tell him the story of a baby made available by the diocese and a kindly parish priest suggesting that it might prove a consolation to young parishioners lately bereaved of their second child and without natural hope of another. Philippe's ‘real' mother had not asked too much at the time, for fear of finding out something that might put the promise of the baby at risk, and in the intervening years the priest had died, and the diocese had become determinedly silent.