One by One in the Darkness (17 page)

Was it possible to have too happy a childhood, to be loved too much? She had asked herself that one day, when she was travelling on the Underground and noticed a little girl with her mother. The child, aged about eight, was snuggled up close to the side of a woman whom she closely resembled and who continually stroked the child’s face with her fingertips, occasionally bending over to plant a kiss in front of the polka-dotted Alice band which spanned the small head. The little girl’s legs were curled up in such a way that her feet stuck out into the aisle, and once or twice the woman said, ‘Sit up straight, my treasure, you’re going to make people’s coats dirty with your shoes when they walk past.’ But although the child twitched her feet in vague response to this, she didn’t move. Instead she glanced around the carriage languidly, as though the people on whom her glance fell were barely worthy of her attention. Cate had stared at her, wondering how the child would adapt when she grew up, and was forced out of this bubble of maternal affection. What future love could ever match it? She would have to learn that others were indifferent to her, even that they disliked her, and would she grow to resent her mother for not having prepared her for this; for having given her so much that nothing could ever again be enough?

At the time, Cate had merely observed all this, making no connection between herself and the smug child. But when the
man had pointed out how obsessed she was with her family, she’d remembered that day on the train, and although she’d tried to deny any connection in her mind, it didn’t work. She’d not, perhaps, been as spoiled or indulged as she imagined the other child to be, but the end result was the same. If it wasn’t true, why was she here now, why was she standing with Sally in the classroom where they’d been pupils so many years ago? Why, in London, was she always not just noticing, but actually looking for things which had in them something of the intensity, the wildness she remembered from those days? In the food hall of a large department store, she’d seen glass jars packed with tiny, brown-flecked eggs in fluid, as though memory itself could be preserved, like lavender, like fruit. Certain quaint flowers: lupins, stock and snapdragons; or dim, chill rooms with mirrors and heavy furniture, could have the same effect. Even when the associations weren’t particularly pleasant, she appreciated them for the access they gave her to her own past. Best of all was the sky itself; the sky at which she now gazed through the classroom window, a watery lemon light splitting heavy, dark clouds.

‘When all this is over,’ she said to Sally, ‘they’ll probably want to make a memorial. I hope they do something original. They should build it around the sky.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean incorporate the sky into the design of it … whatever it is.’ Cate’s voice trailed away, and she continued to stare out of the window. She imagined a room, a perfectly square room. Three of it’s walls, unbroken by windows, would be covered by neat rows of names, over three thousand of them; and the fourth wall would be nothing but window. The whole structure would be built where the horizon was low, and the sky huge. It would be a place which afforded dignity to memory, where you could bring your anger, as well as your grief.

‘And what,’ Sally said, ‘makes you think it’s going to end?’

Cate turned to face her. ‘There are articles in the papers from time to time which suggest that there’s far more going on behind the scenes than we’re being told, and that things could suddenly change. I think Helen thinks the same.’

Sally shook her head. ‘I wish I could believe it. Living here, you see too much to expect anything to change quickly. I’ll
believe it’s going to end when it ends. Didn’t you hear the news this morning, about that man being shot?’ Cate nodded. They sat in silence for a few moments. ‘I hope I’m wrong,’ Sally said again. She picked up the keys to the school. ‘Come and I’ll show you the other rooms, and then we can go home.’

Helen, Sally and Kate arrived home from school at half-past four. This evening, as always, the first thing they did was to change out of their school uniforms, and put on jumpers and jeans. When they came downstairs again, their mother had a dinner of pork chops, mashed potatoes and peas ready for them. By the time this was finished, it was almost half-past five. Together with their parents, they watched the local news on television, and then at six, the international news from the BBC. Helen only watched the first quarter of an hour of this: by six-fifteen she was at her desk, preparing to start her homework.

Because their mother set such store by education, each of the three sisters had a proper place to study, unlike some of their friends at school, who had to do their homework at the kitchen table, or in a living room where the television was always on. Helen had a desk in her bedroom; Kate had a table in the bedroom she shared with Sally, and Sally did her homework in the parlour. When Helen went off to university in Belfast the following year, Sally would do her homework where Helen now worked.

Helen’s desk was beside a window which looked out on the back of the house; and in the spring and autumn it was a great distraction to her. She could see the field behind the house and the lough in the distance, and what she could see beyond that depended on the weather: sometimes the houses on the far shore would stand out, vivid and white; sometimes mist and rain would lock everything in greyness, and the shore, even the lough itself, would be obscured. Often when she should have been working her mind would wander, and she would day-dream, gazing out at the sky, or at the cattle walking slowly through the field. It was a strange and, Helen realised, an unfair thing that she was always treated as the paragon of the Quinn family, for Kate was every bit as bright as her elder sister. She was that rare thing: a studious rebel, and her powers of concentration were
far superior to Helen’s. Kate worked with her back to the window and a lamp on her desk. She completed her homework in half the time it took Helen, and spent the rest of the evening watching television, leafing through the fashion magazines she bought with her pocket money; or locked in the bathroom conditioning her hair, or giving herself face-packs. With Helen it was pure will, and no matter how much she did, she never felt that it was enough. She was a straight A student: but then so was Kate.

From six-fifteen until seven-fifteen this evening, she worked on an essay about first-person narrative in
Great Expectations
. From seven-fifteen until eight o’clock, she read a chapter of
La
maison de Claudine
, looking up in her dictionary the French words she didn’t understand, and copying them into her vocabulary notebook. At eight o’clock, she went down to the kitchen and made a cup of tea. She took it back up to her room, switched on the radio, and twiddled with the dial until she found some music she liked. As she sat listening to it, she let her mind wander around the day’s events. She realised how tired she was, but she still had her History homework to do.

This afternoon, she had had to go and see the headmistress, Sister Benedict, in her office, to discuss the choices she had made on her UCCA form. All the girls in her year had to do this, and lots of them dreaded it because the nun could be harsh, scolding them for vanity in applying to do subjects for which they had no hope of being accepted. Sometimes people would be castigated for the exact opposite, for not being sufficiently ambitious, for not fulfilling their potential.

‘Maybe she’ll try to coax you into being a nun,’ Kate had said to Helen on the bus to school that morning, and Helen had snorted with laughter at the idea of it. ‘You never know,’ Kate said. ‘I don’t think anyone’s ever going to waste their time trying to persuade me. The thought of it! Living in a big house with a pack of other women and all of them dressed exactly the same as me, and no men allowed. No chance!’

Helen had been working in the library when one of her classmates came and said that Sister Benedict wanted to see her. To reach the headmistress’s office required Helen to walk almost the full length of the school, along wood-panelled corridors, past
coloured-plaster statues on plinths, with posies of flowers before them, past closed doors from behind which came the sound of singing, or chanted verbs, or the solitary voice of a teacher explaining something to her class. Once, when Granny Kate had visited the school, she had remarked, ‘You’d nearly think a place like this ought to be more untidy than it is, with a couple of hundred girls in it, five days a week.’ Helen agreed, as she noted the neat cloakrooms, the posters pinned up along the corridors, the carefully tended plants on the window-sills. There was a smell of warm apple pie coming from the Domestic Science kitchens. That was probably Kate’s class: she’d had with her on the bus this morning the old Kimberly biscuit tin in which she carried her apron and the covered dish in which she would bring home the fruits of her labours. Kate had insisted on doing Domestic Science Ο level, because she wanted to study Needlework. She had had a difficult time persuading Sister Benedict to allow her to do this. Far from encouraging home-making skills in her pupils, the nun regarded it as a course of study suitable only for those who weren’t bright enough to do an extra science subject. She’d wanted Kate to do Physics. But whatever Kate’s skill was at Needlework, she was a hopeless cook. God, the thing she’d brought home last week! Kate had claimed it was a steamed suet pudding. Helen had seen her down at the back of the bus, trying to get some of the boys from the Academy to taste it, as a dare.

Sister Benedict’s office, when Helen went into it, was noticeably warmer than the corridor outside. It was a classic autumn day in Northern Ireland. Beyond the window, leaves were streaming down from the trees in a strong wind, and heavy rain poured down the glass. Sister Benedict, who had been staring at this, turned when Helen came into the room. The nun was wearing a thick black cardigan over her habit. She had spent over twenty years in Africa, and had never been able to get used to the Irish climate again. Every child in the school knew of this foible. ‘Isn’t it terribly cold, girls?’ she would say when she passed them in the corridor, tapping the radiators to make sure they were switched on. She used to complain about draughts, and was at loggerheads with the vice principal, Sister Philomena, who was forever opening doors and windows, and who was as
obsessed with fresh air as Sister Benedict was with warmth. But then, the two nuns were frequently at odds over many things, and the temperature of the school was one of their least significant points of difference.

Although it was Sister Benedict who, as principal, finally assessed and signed the university application forms, it was Sister Philomena, the form teacher of the final-year class, who helped the girls to fill in the forms correctly. A few years ago, she had poured scorn on the pupils who put ‘British’ in the space where they were to put their nationality, and instructed them to change it to ‘Irish’. This had not gone down at all well in the home of one girl, whose father was a policeman. He made a special visit to the school to express his displeasure to Sister Benedict, who had, in turn, so rumour had it, given Sister Philomena a ferocious lecture about what she had done. Ever since then, when they came to the section of the form dealing with nationality, Sister Philomena told the girls to ask their parents what they should put there; and ever since then, the pupils had been divided in their allegiance, admiring and supporting either one nun or the other.

In their free time, the girls would sometimes argue about this. Although the school was completely Catholic, there were still sharp divisions of political opinion within it. Girls like Brian’s and Lucy’s daughter Una liked Sister Philomena. Because she had grown up in Derry, they said, she understood how Catholics were discriminated against in Northern Ireland; unlike Sister Benedict, who was from the Republic. If you told Sister Philomena your father or brother had been pulled out of their car and beaten up at an army checkpoint in the middle of the night, she’d be angry and sympathise with you; she wouldn’t automatically assume that they must have done something to bring it upon themselves. Girls such as the policeman’s younger daughter, who was in Helen’s class, or another pupil who had an uncle an Alliance MP, resented the pep talks Sister Philomena used to give them: ‘This is your society, and don’t you forget it. You have as much right to be in it as anyone else, and I want you all to get out there and claim the place that’s waiting for you, the place you deserve.’ ‘Does she really think we need to be told all that?’ they would say with disdain. They complained that Sister
Philomena was always bringing politics into education; Sister Philomena’s supporters maintained that education was already a political issue in Northern Ireland, and that it was Sister Benedict who was at fault, for trying to deny or ignore this.

Helen’s position was unusual, in that she thought Sister Philomena was right, but she liked Sister Benedict best. It made her sad to see how Sister Benedict would unwittingly annoy or alienate some of the girls, and it had happened again that very morning at assembly, when she led them in a prayer for a soldier who had been shot during the night. ‘Bloody bitch,’ a girl near Helen hissed, folding her arms sullenly. When Sister Philomena took assembly, she would pray ‘for peace in Northern Ireland, and for all the victims of the Troubles’, to which no one ever seemed to object.

Helen was surprised at how fond she was of Sister Benedict. If she’d been her contemporary, she thought, she’d probably have been her best friend. She wasn’t like the other nuns. For one thing, she was incredibly untidy, as Helen herself was, and she knew how Sister Benedict struggled for that perfect order which came so naturally to the others: most of the time, she didn’t achieve it. She started to rummage now on a desk piled high with books and papers. ‘I know your forms are here, Helen, I saw them a moment ago.’ While she searched, Helen looked around the office, at the magnolia walls hung with a photograph of the Pope, a reproduction of Fra Angelico’s
Annunciation
, and a slender crucifix. She looked, too, at the nun whose life was a mystery to Helen.

The girls in Helen’s class had once calculated that if Sister Benedict had been to university in Dublin for four years, in Africa for twenty years and in Northern Ireland for ten, then she must have been at least in her early fifties, although you’d never have guessed it from looking at her. They knew that she had grown up on a farm in Tipperary, and that she had been the eldest of six children.

When Helen was in fifth form, there had been a one-day retreat organised for the senior girls on the theme of the Missions. Two priests, home from Tanzania, had come to talk to them about the work they did, showed them slides; and Sister Benedict had been obliged to give a testimony of her own vocation. She had told
them how happy she’d been the day she made her final vows, and described saying goodbye to her parents before she left for Kenya, knowing in her heart that she would probably never see them again ‘in this world’, was how she’d put it. It almost turned Helen against her, to hear her calmly describe how she’d received a telegram, telling of her father’s death. ‘I knew it was God’s will’ seemed an inadequate response to Helen; there must have been an underlying coldness there.

They were given an hour that afternoon to pray or to read their Bibles, and Helen had been sitting on a stone bench in the convent garden, her shut Bible on her knees, when Sister Benedict came up and sat beside her.

‘Are you enjoying hearing the priests talk about the Missions?’ she asked.

‘It’s interesting,’ Helen said, with polite diplomacy.

‘I’ll be so glad when it’s over,’ the nun said frankly, stirring the gravel on the path with the toe of her shoe. ‘I hate it, it makes me feel … homesick, looking at the slides, or even just hearing about it. It’s strange, I feel the way so many of the Irish sisters used to feel when they were out there, a terrible sense of yearning to be somewhere else. And anyway, I don’t like the way the idea of the Missions is presented here. There’s still this “pennies for the black babies” mentality; this idea that we do something for them. The people I knew in Kenya gave me more in twenty years than I could have given them in twenty lifetimes. But I was deceiving myself at some level. I liked to think I was doing God’s will, but it happened to coincide exactly with what I wanted to do, so it made it easy for me to see it in such noble terms. My vows were never a problem to me. Poverty: we’d had so little in material terms when I was a child, and there’d been no want of happiness in the house for it. It never grieved me not to get married and have a family of my own. When God gave me my vocation, he also gave me the gift of a celibate heart.’

Helen felt uncomfortable when she heard Sister Benedict talk in this way. It made her seem distant, and jarred with the image she had previously formed of her. It wasn’t that she thought the nun was insincere, but she spoke of a reality which Helen had not experienced, and with which she could not empathise.

‘My problem, I now see, was obedience. The day I was told I was being sent to Northern Ireland was the hardest day of my life. Harder, even, I think, than when my father died.’ Her words were more broken now, there were long pauses between the sentences. ‘I remember leaving the mission station. I remember saying goodbye to my friends. We flew from Nairobi to London. I had my rosary beads in my pocket, and throughout the flight I kept putting them through my fingers saying on each bead, “Thy will, not mine, Ο Lord, Thy will, not mine.” I kept saying it, when we changed planes at Heathrow. We landed in Northern Ireland; it was a day in winter. I remember the physical shock of the cold when I walked across the tarmac, I remember the rain beating into me and I thought “How am I going to live here?”’ She laughed. ‘When we got to the convent, there was a bowl of fruit in the parlour: small, faded-looking fruit; and it somehow got fixed in my mind, this is what you’ve come to. I’ve never been able to forget the fruit. I … I even thought about leaving the Order and going away again, as a development worker, but I knew that that was just the Devil trying to undermine my vocation. Because I never stopped believing in that, whatever else, and no matter how hard it became. Every morning, when I was in Kenya, I used to thank God for my vocation. Here, I pray that I’ll be able to fulfil it.’