Obedience (8 page)

‘Oh,' she said.

‘Corinne. I'm Corinne. You remember, Sister?' Corinne held out her hand stiffly.

‘You met Corinne once at church,' added Thérèse unnecessarily.

Bernard shook Corinne's hand lightly. ‘Yes,' she said.

‘You've been… sweeping, Sister?' said Thérèse.

‘Yes. Perhaps. A little.'

‘Sister Bernard gave me the box, for my scraps,' said Thérèse, turning to her friend.

Corinne looked at them both blankly. Bernard moved on, without dusting herself down, her boots leaving soft prints on the tiled floor. She disappeared into the refectory.

‘I don't see, I just don't see, how she can be worth it,' hissed Corinne.

But Thérèse did not hear her; looking after Bernard, she did not know her friend had spoken.

At the nursing home in town they unloaded Sister Marie from the minibus and left her sitting outside in the wheelchair, protected from the rain by the overhang above
the entrance. She sat slouched to one side, her wimple slipped low onto her forehead. Her hands were crossed neatly on her lap, and though no one could have known this, she was praying.

She waited for nearly ten minutes before a woman in a blue uniform hurried out and grabbed the handles of the chair, pushing Marie quickly through the front door without a word. They bolted around a horseshoe-shaped corridor and then took the lift to an identical corridor higher up the building. The woman stopped to talk in a low voice to another woman in a blue uniform carrying an armful of underwear. Moving on, they nearly completed the length of the horseshoe before turning through an open bedroom door. Then the woman in the uniform left and Marie was alone. She continued to pray.

‘Ah, Sister Marie! You've arrived!'

Marie either did not hear the chirp of the sharp voice, or took no notice of it. Nor did she move when a young girl with thin hair ducked round in front of the wheelchair and crouched down to straighten Marie's veil.

‘Let's get you sorted, shall we? Are you comfortable there? Good. I'll just move you nearer the window, out of the way, and I'll get your things. Good.'

Marie looked neither at the girl, as she bustled about, nor at the view of the autumn shrubbery, but at her clasped hands still welded to her lap. She was pleading with God not to abandon her. This place did not smell like heaven; she did not want to be left here, waiting.

‘Where are your things then, Sister?' asked the nurse, pulling out a light drawer in a small dresser and finding it empty.

There was nothing in the wardrobe, on the shelves beside the window, or on the back of the wheelchair.

‘I'll ring down.'

The nurse sat on the bed as she dialled the number on the oversized red buttons.

‘I'm with the nun,' she said to someone. ‘Just came in today. Yes. Her bags aren't with her… Yes, could you? And let me know? All right then.'

She put down the receiver but continued to sit on the bed picking at the cuticles of her nails. After a few minutes the phone rang with a high-pitched buzz. At the end of her second conversation the nurse came back and crouched before Marie.

‘We haven't got your things, Sister. We can't find them. They might be on the minibus, but it's left, gone back. Do you know where your things are?'

She spoke too loudly and slowly and looked too closely into Marie's face. Marie looked back at her and smiled, but there were tears in her eyes.

‘Never mind,' said the nurse, getting up, her words softer. ‘We'll find everything, I'm sure. We'll ring the place you came from. They might have your bag. Let's get you cleaned up first. And then it will be nearly time for lunch. You'd like some lunch wouldn't you, Sister?'

Already the room smelt of Marie's farts.

The noise of the phone hardly stirred the convent quiet. But Sister Bernard heard it and promptly hurried along the corridor to answer it, her gait stiff and swaying from the creak of her joints.

‘We put her bag on the minibus,' she insisted. ‘They must have lost it. Ask the drivers again.'

Bernard had packed most of Marie's things several days before. She had not found the photograph of Monte Carlo, only a large number of prayer cards, grateful letters from parishioners, souvenirs of Lourdes and Assisi, and a selection of rosaries. In the end, there had been so little in the bag that Bernard had added a dark green woolly cardigan, a clouded half-used bottle of eau-de-cologne and a bulky encyclopedia of saints from the leftovers of past lives stored in the huge cupboard in the cellars below the convent. She presumed that Marie had edited her life's scraps at the first signs of illness, of mixing up her words, forgetting her name and wetting the bed, reinforcing years of dazzlingly public piety. She hoped God had seen Sister Marie's underhandedness.

‘We're moving ourselves in a few days. We're very busy. You should have everything. It was organized,' Bernard said to the woman on the telephone, not quite daring to be stern.

She remembered bringing the bag down from Marie's cell after she had seated her at the breakfast table. She remembered putting it by the front door and looking through the little side window to watch a thrush hammering a snail on the rubble from the broken-down wall.

‘Well then, we'll search again. I'll ring back,' said the woman wearily.

Thérèse walked the perimeter of her empty cell. It looked neat now, and clearer than it had done for many years. The outlines of her objects remained printed on the walls by the years of light and dust, the silhouette of a particularly
spectacular city skyline, but the clutter was gone. It was possible to walk in a straight line from the door to the window and from wall to wall; the untrodden boards shone in the corners. She stopped at the window to look out over the edge of the garden to the autumnal oaks and the ash tip where her Buddha lay half-buried by the force of his fall. Then she closed the door firmly and made her way quickly along the dormitory corridor with its imperishable smell of enclosure. When she emerged in the refectory several minutes later with her box neatly packed with paper and labelled in red for the dustbin men, she found Bernard crumpled on the floor shaking with sobs.

‘Oh, Lord Jesus, whatever is the matter, Sister?' cried Thérèse, putting down her box.

She helped Bernard to her feet, but Bernard's tears refused to stop and all Thérèse could do was sit her at the table and watch.

Bernard cried for almost two hours. There was no work to do any more, no duties, no rules, nobody waiting for her in the quiet corridors. There was simply the sorrow, at last. She let it come, mourning the loss of the soldier. She knew that her memories of him, Technicolor bright, mottled like old film, could not be shifted from the gathered shadows of the convent. He would have to be left behind. The abandonment overwhelmed her. For a while Thérèse hovered around her, making faint reassuring noises, sometimes taking the seat next to her and reaching out a hand. She brought a glass of water. She thought of beginning a prayer. But as the tears continued and Bernard seemed completely unaware that anyone was with her, Thérèse simply sat alongside her without speaking.
She completed two word puzzles and picked at the soft splinters at the edge of the table. There seemed no need for lunch. Some time after midday Thérèse offered Bernard a mint, but Bernard shook her head dolefully and Thérèse sucked her own sweet as quietly as she could.

When they heard the village clock strike two, Bernard stirred herself, lifting her head and pushing back the bench. She found her knees had stiffened and it was painful to flex them. She stopped crying as abruptly as she had started.

‘I should carry on packing my things,' she said.

‘Good idea, Sister.'

‘You've done yours?'

‘I have,' said Thérèse.

‘Good,' said Bernard, but still she remained seated.

Her head drooped forwards again so that she seemed to be gazing at a spot on her knees. Her elbows rested on the table in front of her and her hands were pinned to the middle of her forehead. She could have been praying; Thérèse thought she was. She tried to recognize in the shapes made by Bernard's half-hidden mouth the words of familiar prayers.

‘It's difficult for me to hear today,' said Thérèse apologetically. There was the slightest of pauses. ‘If you would like to pray, we could pray together, Sister. We've been so busy, it might be rewarding to take some time in prayer.'

‘I should pack my bags,' Bernard said.

‘But if we prayed together, Sister… praying together is like…' Thérèse could not think exactly. ‘It's a blessing, isn't it, to pray with people we love?'

The word made Bernard start. ‘Love?'

Thérèse looked away as she corrected herself. ‘To share God's love, Sister.'

Bernard only really prayed alone. There were orders, so she had heard, where this was encouraged, where each nun lived a solitary, silent, hermit's life in communion with God. This might have suited her. But her order believed strongly in the value of community and firmly advocated the merit of shared prayer. So Bernard had recited the words with hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of people. She had knelt with them, and bowed, and occasionally held hands. She had stood with them for long hours in the cold of the church. But it was only when she was on her own that she attempted to speak to God, privately and very quietly, even though she knew He would not understand.

‘Shall we then? Shall we pray together, Sister?' Thérèse was looking at her expectantly.

‘One prayer,' sighed Bernard. ‘And then I must get on. You begin.'

Thérèse sat up straighter and folded her hands on her lap where she could feel the ridges of her rosary beads through the thick material of her skirt pocket. She waited for Bernard who, after a pause, bowed her head without otherwise moving. Then Thérèse closed her eyes. There was a moment's silence in which Bernard could hear the rainwater pouring out of the broken gutter by the outside door to the kitchen.

‘Hail Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy. Hail our Life, our Sweetness and our Hope,' began Thérèse, emphasizing the capital letters as she had learnt as a child.

‘To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve. To thee do we send up our sighs mourning and weeping in
this vale of tears,' continued Bernard quickly.

Their voices blended as they joined together.

‘Turn then, most gracious advocate, thine eyes of mercy towards us, and after this our exile show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Oh clement, oh loving, oh sweet Virgin Mary.'

‘Pray for us, Oh Holy Mother of God,' continued Thérèse alone.

‘That we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ,' finished off Bernard flatly.

‘Thank you, Sister,' said Thérèse. It was a moment she would remember.

‘I'll go upstairs now,' said Bernard, rising.

T
hey were leaning side by side on the stone edge of a farm well, its circular walls raised several feet above the long grass. It was tucked away in a small secluded wood up the hill from the convent, behind a collection of barns and low buildings. There was no one left now to run the farm. The young men were all away fighting somewhere, or dead; the old woman who had lived there alone had disappeared in the cold of the previous winter, leaving the cattle to tread dark paths in the snow. Weeds had grown and the pastures had become unkempt. The well was never used and already the metal bar that hung across the deep shaft was stiff and rusting. In response to Mother Catherine's warning, Bernard and the soldier met now in the haze of half-light dawn or dusk and came here sometimes, when they could; it was a safe place. Bernard liked the way the trees encircled them, seeming ancient.

He had been sent a small parcel from home: a cigar, two newspaper cuttings reporting on the successes of the much-depleted local football team, a robust pair of knitted
socks and a small brass crucifix. He had brought the crucifix to show Bernard.

‘It used to hang above my bed. My mother has sent it.'

The crucifix had meant nothing to him until now. Bernard took it from him and held it. It was warm from his hand. She tried to imagine many things – his room at home, his bed, his mother, the industrial town parish to which he belonged – but what came to her instead was the thought of her own bed in the corner of her cell, its sheets ruffled, and the soldier lying sprawled and hot within it.

‘One day,' Bernard said, ‘you could come and be with me at home, in the warm.'

The dew lay silver on the trefoiled leaves around her feet and she scuffed at them, making the green beneath brilliant.

He looked puzzled and Bernard repeated herself more slowly. But it was not the language that was confusing him.

‘At home?' he said.

He took the crucifix back from her and put it away in his pocket.

‘At home – you know, where we live.'

‘
Ja
,
ja
, I know what it means – I know at home. But…' He paused. ‘But where?'

He did not want her at his lodgings. He did not want anyone finding them together.

‘In my cell,' Bernard said. ‘At the convent.'

She felt no thrill in saying it. It was the picture of him, skinny and languid, still in her mind, which excited her. But he immediately felt the adventure of it.

‘The convent? Your home?' He turned to face her. ‘You want that?'

The questions were quick and sharp. He leant towards her. Bernard could not decide what he thought of her.

‘Yes,' she said. ‘Perhaps.'

‘And you think…' He could not make the right words come.

‘If we're patient… if it's what you'd like.' She wanted to promise him something. ‘We'd have to be secret, that's all. We couldn't tell anyone. We couldn't let Mother Catherine find out. Or anyone.'

He swirled away, twisting his heel in the ground and spanning his arms wide, throwing his head up so that he was looking at the circle of sky through the trees. He let himself stand there like that, and Bernard waited. When he finally let his arms drop, and looked back at her, there was something bright and lively about his face, his expression would not hold.