Obedience (22 page)

In the weeks since moving from the convent, she had already finished a short book about the Atlantic resorts around Bordeaux, a tourist board publication listing the most popular seaside excursions in Brittany and a firsthand account of a walking tour along Spain's Costa del Sol. She had reached no firm conclusions about the relative merits of any particular stretch of coast, but was beginning to understand that she had to go to the sea. She dreamt about it at night, the smell of it, indescribable. She tried to imagine the sound of it, the roar of great breakers thrashing up pebbles, pounding the cliffs on a stormy day, gurgling into rock pools, splintering into a million green and gold pieces. Sometimes, when she was sitting in the soft chair on Corinne's small balcony, she imagined what it would be like to look through the gap in the houses across the road and glimpse the water sparkling beyond. The sea was an expression of God, not quite graspable, an eternal prayer flooding the world. She thought that if she saw it once, the promise of it spilling over the horizon, she might begin to understand.

Her head dipped over the pictures of coastal spring flowers and she felt her eyes droop. She closed the book and sat up straight, her hands clasped, her usual prayers ready. She wanted to begin. She wanted to thank God for this wonderful new life, the opportunities and the pleasures it was bringing her, the joy of her soul. But something sank like a cold draught onto her prayer and all that would come to her was the familiar clutter of her
cell at the convent, the origami swan and the unchanging Buddha, the scraping of the mice in the attic above her head, the soft unlit blackness of the rising land outside her window and the dim thought of Bernard, further along the corridor, silent and unheeded. Instead of praying, she wept. It was not at all the same thing.

The following morning, Thérèse made plans with Corinne.

‘I thought we should have a holiday,' she said brightly. ‘I thought I could treat us with some of my savings. If you drive and bring the car, I can book the hotel and pay for the petrol.'

Corinne dipped her slice of baguette into her wide bowl of coffee. She took a wet bite before she answered.

‘Right,' she said. ‘That'll be nice.'

‘There's no use pining, is there? I might as well make the most of things – I might as well do the things I've always wanted and have a bit of freedom. I can…' Now that it came to it, Thérèse struggled to think what she might do. ‘I can go shopping,' she said in the end, weakly.

Corinne smiled and took another bite. ‘Good,' she said, still chewing. ‘I knew you'd be all right. I knew it. All these years we've been friends – you're an intelligent woman, after all. I've always admired you. Ever since we were teaching together, I always knew you were – I don't know – clever. Proud and modern and clever.'

She dropped the unfinished baguette onto her plate and pushed back her chair, pleased with what she had said. It seemed to put an end to any lingering uneasiness. She looked at Thérèse's tired face and smiled again, clapping her hands together in a tiny, brief round of applause.

‘Where shall we go then?'

‘To the sea.'

‘But which sea? Where?' asked Corinne. ‘Like you said – we can go anywhere. Within reason.'

Thérèse was definite. ‘The Atlantic,' she said. ‘I've been thinking about it – the big beaches and the big waves. The power of God.'

She laughed uneasily.

Corinne smiled. ‘Just the two of us?'

It seemed an odd question. Thérèse frowned, confused.

‘I thought so. Is that no good?'

‘Of course. It's fine. It's good.'

Neither of them mentioned Bernard's name, and she was only there with them, shadowy, for a moment, little more than a change in the light as the winter morning reflections shifted across the window. Then Corinne's certainty filled the room.

‘It'll be wonderful, with the two of us. And easy for getting rooms. Rooms are always for two.'

Thérèse nodded. ‘I know,' she said.

Later that morning they took down the road atlas from its shelf. Kneeling on the floor, to either side of the small round glass table in Corinne's sitting room, they traced a route across to the coast, choosing slow roads through the vineyards and along the wide rivers meandering west and then cutting across the open land on long straight roads that seemed pressed flat by the crisp light from the sea. They picked a small town, a fracture in the strip of yellow printed along the coast, and Thérèse promised to go to the library and find a hotel directory so that they could book somewhere to stay in advance.

‘It's a voyage of discovery,' she said, her finger poised over the point on the map where their route would reach the sea. She wanted to use the word pilgrimage. ‘It will be a new start.'

‘It'll be cold,' said Corinne. ‘At this time of year. And windy, too, probably. And more or less deserted.'

Thérèse sat back on her heels and sighed.

‘Oh, it'll be fine, though,' said Corinne, not understanding. ‘It's only a couple of days, after all.'

Thérèse closed the atlas.

‘Perhaps we could invite Sister Bernard on a day trip with us somewhere,' she said. ‘Before we go. That might be nice, mightn't it?'

Corinne tried not to look surprised.

‘I think she'd like it,' Thérèse went on. ‘It must be hard for her, having no one, being shut up with all those stuffy old priests at Les Cèdres. Like you said – she looked sad, and lonely. I saw that. It doesn't seem quite fair that I should have everything.' She ran her fingernail along the spiral binding of the map, not looking up. ‘I can't help thinking about her, going off there so quietly, so obediently. And she has nothing, no family, no kind friends like I have.'

‘Just that granddaughter,' said Corinne, with barely a pause.

Thérèse knew she should be curious. She had waited many years to hear such a scandal. There had been those days in the hot summer of the schoolhouse when such a revelation would have been wondrous, the answer to all kinds of questions. But that was too long ago now; she could no longer grasp the excitement of it.

‘The woman at the funeral,' Corinne went on. ‘The
woman from that home where Sister Marie was. Not the little blonde thing. The dark one in the suit. A funny-looking woman. She has an out-of-date face somehow. Anyway, that's her. That's the granddaughter. I can't remember the name but someone did tell me once.'

It seemed wicked now, such speculation. But Corinne was looking at her, expecting her to say something, and Thérèse could not help but smile.

‘I didn't know,' she said.

‘Really? I thought everyone knew. Everyone of a certain age, anyway. You do know about the baby, don't you? About Sister Bernard's baby?'

Thérèse nodded.

‘Well, that's something. It might have been a shock otherwise.'

Corinne giggled and eased herself up from the floor, shaking out her stiff knees and feet and perching on the edge of the chair.

Thérèse wondered what there was to say.

‘But how do you know, about the granddaughter? How would anyone know that?'

Corinne smiled. ‘Oh, I'm a gossip. I keep my ear to the ground. I'm interested in what's going on,' she said lightly. But there was such bewilderment on Thérèse's face that she stopped herself. ‘Really though,' she said, ‘to be serious, it's been a bit of an issue, on and off. Not now so much. I haven't heard anyone mention it for years. But at one time her son was nosing around, making parishes uncomfortable, asking questions. I was a lay member on one of the diocese committees at the time, and it came up at the end of a meeting. No names, not officially, but we all knew.'

Thérèse had been to such committee meetings once or twice when something had involved the school. She pictured the brown rooms, somehow too dark, and tried to imagine someone recounting Bernard's story from a typed sheet, speaking quickly, keen to rush through a busy meeting.

‘You discussed Sister Bernard officially?'

‘Not Sister Bernard so much as her son. He was being a pain. Several of the parish priests had complained. One of the parish committees had sent us a strongly worded letter accusing him of harassment. It was bad for morale, you understand, having someone popping up every Sunday talking about pregnant nuns and illegitimate babies. It's the sort of thing that gets into the papers and then before you know it…'

Corinne threw up her hands and her eyebrows and sighed.

Thérèse began to see how little she knew. It was a shock. She had always thought herself different from the other nuns, unretiring, practical, with a grasp of secular affairs beyond the convent. She had presumed there was more to her life than her vocation. But Corinne's casual exposition of the unmargined immensity of the world made her tremble.

‘I never thought anyone would care,' she said. ‘I never thought anyone knew. It was never spoken about – not at the convent.'

‘No one did care about Sister Bernard having had a baby as far as I knew. That had all blown over. As I say, it was just her son making waves. That's what bothered them. That's why we decided that someone would tell him
where she was. To shut him up. It was nothing to do with me, of course. Not directly. It wasn't my parish. I just had to sign something, to say I agreed to it.'

Corinne stretched out her legs and arched her back, pulling herself tall.

‘I can't remember how it was done exactly, but I know it did the trick. It all went quiet after that.'

‘So all kinds of people would have known? All over the diocese?'

‘And beyond, I suppose, in some kind of paperwork or other – reports and so on. You know how these things are.'

‘I don't think I do,' said Thérèse.

But Corinne thought it was a joke. Laughing, she got up and went through to the hall to change her slippers for some bright pumps.

‘I'm going for a stroll,' she said, calling through to where Thérèse was still wedged back on her heels. ‘I'll call at the
alimentation
. Do you want to come?'

Thérèse did not answer. Corinne took her coat and scarf from the pegs and muffled herself carefully against the winter cold.

‘It just proves one thing,' she said, as she left the apartment. ‘We're none of us too small for God to take notice of. Like the birds of the air.'

Thérèse did not see how this made sense.

Veronique was sitting with friends under the wide awning of a bar alongside the main road. The waiter came with their order, wiping round the table quickly before placing the coffee cups in a circle. Veronique paid and he took a long while to dig out the correct change from the pouch at
his waist, tearing the receipt on the table in some kind of temper, as if she had offended him. She was surprised that this bothered her. She lit a cigarette and fingered the raised crest on the wrapper of the chocolate square that poked from the edge of the saucer. Her friends talked around and across her.

‘You're very quiet, Veron,' someone said.

Veronique had eaten lunch with her mother at a nearby restaurant, and had walked briefly with her afterwards by the river. They had sat for a while in the weak sun. Veronique had not said anything about the old nun she had met, and the difficulty she was having, despite everything, to forget her; her mother, too, had accused her of being withdrawn.

‘I'm tired,' she said.

‘You need a holiday,' one of her friends suggested kindly.

Veronique was sharp in return. ‘Just an early night.'

They tried to bring her out of herself. They said she worked too hard. They made eyes, on her behalf, at a couple of young men sitting at another table. Then, because she still said nothing, they gave up. Not long after that, Veronique went home.

Crossing the road by the war memorial, the unexpected scent of flowers surprised her. The wreaths and bouquets from the Armistice Day service were still fresh there, their ribbons bright. She paused on the stone steps, and read, for the first time, the list of names carved into the stone, moving round from the panels of the First World War to the smaller ones of the Second, and wondering about the mysterious abbreviations that marked the ranks of the
fallen. On the top of the memorial there was the figure of a French soldier in a round helmet, wielding a lance or a bayonet; he was looking ferociously over her head towards the encroach of foreign armies from the supermarket near the ring road. She had never noticed any of this before, not properly. And still it did not matter to her. She knew nothing about the war, nor how it was a part of her. It was a moment of undefined nostalgia, that was all. She was just unsettled. The unknown past was too powerful for a moment, pushing its way briefly into her attention. She brushed the inexplicable tears from her eyes with angry hands.

The following day, Veronique went into the church around the corner from her apartment. First she knocked on the door, but when no one answered she pushed it and found that it was open. The inside was bare and plain and warm. It smelt strongly of furniture polish. The pale wood shone, even in the dim light, and the carpet looked new. On a table near the door, a pile of blue books was neatly stacked, each copy aligned with the one below, and on the altar several gleaming pot plants were arranged in a close semicircle around the lectern. Everything was ordered and clean. She had not expected it to be so cared for. She had thought it would be rambling and cold, and not as small as it had turned out to be. She was disappointed at its domesticity.

Veronique sat on the end of a pew near the back. She did not fidget, or weep. She did not pray. She simply sat still, looking at the stone altar and the way the little red light hanging behind flickered and jumped. She remembered, again, a morning, a long time ago, when she
had gone shopping with her father to the weekly market in the central square, the summer lingering and the stone walls sweating in the sun. It was the school holidays and the canopied stalls were colourful with summer vegetables and fruit, boxes of peaches and apricots, melons piled high and scenting the air. At the foot of the steps, two lines of old women sold eggs from baskets, carrier bags of green beans, rabbits and chickens trussed and panting. She had gone past all this and in under the stone arches, where the summer clothes and souvenir stalls were setting up in the arcaded shade, and hanging from one of the high rails she had seen the most beautiful soft yellow sundress, full and elegant, with the papery coolness of linen.