Three Brothers (7 page)

He washed his clothes in the kitchen sink at home, and dried
them in the garden, but of course he became more shabby. There came a morning when one of the nuns approached him. “Do you know anything about gardening?” she asked him. He shook his head. “Well, you can learn. You’re strong, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“We need a handyman. Mother Placentia thought of you.”

Of Mother Placentia, he knew nothing. He had vowed never to work again, but he was drawn to the company of these women. “I can do that,” he said.

“Good. Come into the sacristy.”

He had not known that there was a convent attached to the church of Our Lady of Sorrows. This small establishment lay behind the church, surrounded by a high red-brick wall. If you had asked any of the local residents about the nuns, they would not have known how to answer. No one knew when, or from where, they had come. They had always seemed to be part of the neighbourhood. But they were rarely seen. They stayed behind the high walls.

Sam entered through the gate of the convent in the company of Sister Eugenia, the nun who had come up to him in the church. They crossed a courtyard, with the basin of a dried fountain in the middle where fallen leaves rustled in the dust. There was a sundial in the corner of the lawn, its gnomon broken. A bird was perched on the stone rim of the basin of the fountain, singing its eternal song; yet it seemed to Sam that it sang more slowly than any bird he had ever heard.

Sister Eugenia led him down a corridor, on the walls of which were hanging woodcuts and engravings of sacred scenes. The sister approached a door at the end of the corridor, and knocked upon it gently. “Who is knocking?” asked someone within.

“Eugenia, Mother.”

“Enter in God’s name, Eugenia.”

She opened the door, and asked Sam to go in before her. “It is the young man,” she said.

“Is it you? You are younger than I expected.” Mother Placentia was a small, plump woman with an expression of brutal amiability; her head was shaken by a slight but continual tremor. On the wall above her was a portrait of the Virgin, hands clasped in prayer or pity, her outline traced in blue and gold. “How old are you?”

“Seventeen.”

“So you are the young man who sees visions in the heart of London.” He said nothing but continued to look steadily at her. “You are as still as a lamb. That is good. Do you know the saying, ‘rise up west wind and refresh my garden’?” He shook his head. “You must be our wind. You must refresh our garden. Can you do that?”

“I hope so.”

“What is your name, young man?”

“Sam. Sam Hanway.”

“Hanway?” She seemed momentarily distracted. “A good name. An old name.”

“We may be old without being good,” he said.

She burst into laughter which ended with a fit of coughing. “The Lord has given you wit,” she said.

The garden smelled sweetly of several herbs, but there was little for Sam to do. One of the nuns, Sister Idonea, tended the sage and the thyme and the rue. He was there to remove the weeds, water the lawns and beds, and burn the dead leaves of autumn. He also performed the tasks that the nuns could not; he built shelves, he painted doors and fences, he restored the stone paths that crossed the courtyard. Yet it seemed that the nuns simply wanted him to be part of their community; he had been given a sign by the Virgin, and they wanted to see what might happen to him.

He came to know the sisters very well. Mother Placentia
ruled over them with the same forceful amiability she had displayed to him. She was massively calm, she was dispassionate, she was obdurate. Sister Delecta and Sister Prudentia, for example, had been involved in an argument over the number of wax candles needed for the vigil of the Assumption of Our Lady. Their quarrel had been loud, and had reached the ears of Sister Idonea. She had stopped shelling peas and listened to them with great eagerness, registering the use of such words as “pitiful” and “ridiculous.” She repeated the conversation, with some exaggeration, to Sister Clarice who was known to be a particular favourite of Mother. The abbess called in the two offending sisters. As soon as they had entered her office she rose up from her chair and slapped them both on the right cheek.

Sister Idonea was listening at the door, and later gave an exultant report to anyone who cared to listen. “
Ave genetrix
,” Mother Placentia had said. “You give birth to quarrels and dissensions, do you? You fight like sows in a sty?”

“No,
madame
,” Sister Delecta replied. She was the youngest, and supposedly the demurest, of the nuns. “We had a difference of opinion.”

“There will be no differences in this place. All are one. On your knees.”

They fell to their knees as Mother Placentia, standing before the portrait of the Virgin, began to pray in a loud voice. “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women.” The two nuns joined in the prayer, murmuring in low voices. When it was complete she turned to them. “Leave this place on your knees and creep to the cross in the chapel. There you will prostrate yourselves for an hour, before rising and resuming your duties in a cheerful spirit.” So the nuns painfully and slowly made their way towards the chapel in another part of the building. Sam had seen them. He had entered the chapel in order to mend a broken transom light,
when he glimpsed them lying on the chilly tiled floor. He backed out of the door. He gathered later that there had been much recrimination between Sister Idonea and Sister Prudentia, conducted in frowns and grimaces rather than words. The whole convent had taken sides. Salt and pepper were not being passed down the table; bread was in short supply for one or two nuns; there was much coughing and clearing of throats whenever certain nuns sang the divine office.

Yet the days passed tranquilly for Sam. He would arrive at the convent early in the morning, and would begin work at once; he hardly spoke to anyone in the course of the day, and would eat whatever food Sister Idonea had left him for lunch. In the evening he visited the young man in the park; he rarely spoke to him but gave him the crisps and sweet drink, which he could afford from the small wage the convent paid him.

It came to the attention of Mother Placentia that there were what she called “poor men and women” in the vicinity of the convent; she said that they were drawn to the place as to a shelter. If she could not accommodate them, she could at least nourish them. So she instituted an afternoon meal to be distributed at the gate of the convent. Sam volunteered to hand out the bread and soup or stew. He felt at ease in the company of tramps and wanderers. He was even comforted by their presence. He was not shy, or awkward, with them. They had looked with mild curiosity at this young man among the nuns, but soon he was expected. That is what he had always wanted—acceptance. He did not want to be singled out, to be looked on with pity or condescension.

He soon learned that no one vagrant was like another. They were all in one sense touched by misery, but it manifested itself in different ways. In some of them it was not manifest at all. These were the cheerful ones who, in the extremity of failure or distress, still laughed at the absurdity of the world. One of them wore an old and heavy coat, in the pockets of which
he kept a surprising variety of objects. He would pull out a trowel, or a chipped cup, with all the delight of a conjuror successfully performing a trick. One old woman, the creases of her hands and face lined with dirt, would sometimes dance in the middle of the road. She called Sam “sweetheart.” Yet others remained gloomy and silent. These were the ones who most interested Sam. He tried to speak to one middle-aged man, whose head was always covered by a hood, but the man had merely sighed and walked off.

Some kept themselves apart. Where the others would form groups, or pairs, they would sit by themselves on the pavement—their backs against the convent wall—or stand alone a little way off. The reason for this solitariness was clear to Sam. He had experienced it himself. It was the fruit of pride and introspection. Pride is possible even in misery. In his own misery, Sam had not wanted anyone to come too close. So he respected those who stayed aloof. He glanced at them quickly, when he handed them the food, and then looked away.

There were those who engaged him in conversation. Some of them spoke quickly and eagerly, like children, while others spoke softly and slowly. Yet it seemed to Sam, strangely enough, that they spoke with one voice; or, rather, that one voice spoke through all of them—the way that a hundred birds seem to sing the same song. That, at least, was how he put it to himself.

“Do you think you’ll be joining us?” one middle-aged man asked him. He had a bald spot on the top of his head, with long black hair cascading from its rim.

“Joining?”

“Coming along with us. When this place goes.”

“It won’t go.”

“Oh yes it will. I see it all the time. I’m used to it.”

“I don’t know whether I’ll go with you or not.”

“I think you will.”

Nothing disturbed the even tenor of the days. Sam still lived at home, but he rarely saw his father. He had not told him that he worked in the convent; it was a secret thing, belonging to a secluded part of himself. He kept the rosary on a little wooden table in his bedroom; it reminded him of his life with the nuns; it reassured him, in its plainness and simplicity. He knew now that each bead was a prayer, a prayer perfectly formed, a sphere of grace. So he would hold the rosary, grip it tightly, and close his eyes—then he saw images, images of flame and ruined walls, of sunlit fields and hills, of innumerable faces gazing upwards. He did not know what these images meant, but he was touched by them. He still sometimes visited the Lady Chapel, too, where he sat in front of the statue of the lady. “Thank you,” he said one day, “for letting me stay. I feel safe here.”

Yet, on a day after one of these visits, everything changed. He set off from his house early that morning, making his familiar way to the convent. But he could not find it. The gate and the walls were not there. The convent had disappeared. He ran through the streets, returning by different routes to the same place. The convent was gone. He looked for signs of the tramps and beggars who had wandered through the neighbourhood; they, too, had vanished. He asked several people if they had seen the nuns, but they looked at him curiously and shook their heads. Nuns? What nuns? He was distraught. He cried out—to what, or to whom, he did not know. Weeping, he beat his fists against a stone wall. Eventually he went back to the church. There was no chapel. There was no lady. The nave was dark. He sat down in a pew and began to beat his head against the wooden rail in front of him. That was the day when the young tramp in the park also disappeared.

A marmoset

H
ARRY
H
ANWAY
was bent over his typewriter, smoking as he read the page still in the machine. He was writing a story—he used the word casually and naturally now—concerning the resignation of a middle-ranking minister from the Wilson government. It was not the stuff of headlines, but with careful nurturing it could grow. Harry knew that the minister had been hastened from office as a result of his affair with his secretary, already a married woman. So Harry chose his words carefully, hinting rather than stating impropriety, lending an air of ambiguity to all his phrases, making it clear that the minister was a married man with three small children. He enjoyed this process. It gave him power.

His career at the
Morning Chronicle
had so far been a success. He had begun work as one of the reporters filing copy for the gossip column, purportedly written by “Peregrine Porcupine.” Harry found himself at parties and at first nights, at society weddings and at political conferences, on the chance that he would see and talk to a “famous name” or would pick up some gossip that could be repeated to the newspaper’s readership. His ready charm, his affability, and his London accent distinguished him from the mass of ex-public-school boys who staffed other gossip columns. He looked, and sounded, as
if he could be trusted. He soon impressed his superiors with his ability to deliver “scoops” over his rivals.

It was Harry, for example, who broke the news that Joey Hanover had been lured by ATV from BBC Television with the offer of five thousand pounds for each half-hour programme. He had seen Hanover sitting alone at a table in a pub close to Portland Place, and had sat beside him. He did not look, or behave, like a journalist. He was an ordinary Londoner. So Hanover, slightly the worse for drink, had confided in him. “You and I, chum,” he said, “are idiots. Sitting here and drinking in the middle of the afternoon.” He stared balefully at Harry for a moment. “What do you do?”

“I work in a shop. A shoe shop. It’s my day off.”

“Is it now? What kind of shoes?”

“All types.”

Hanover was silent for a moment. “Do you know who I am?”

“You’re Joey Hanover. Everyone knows you.”

“Oh do they?” Once more he lapsed into a morose silence. “What if I were to tell you that Joey Hanover is a chump? A right disaster?” Harry sensed, with growing excitement, the approach of a good story. But he took care to remain calm, and even unimpressed. “I am about to walk away from my closest mates. And for what? Lucre. Filthy lucre.”

“There’s nothing wrong with money.”

“You’re right. There is nothing wrong with money. Where would we be without it? But bang goes the old team. Whoosh.” He threw up his hands. “Excuse me.” He came back from the bar with what looked like a large gin and tonic. The other customers were still pretending to ignore him. “And what’s it all for? Five thousand per show.”

“That’s a lot of money.”

“Anyway, it’s too late now. It’s done. Hello ATV.”

Eventually Harry rose from his seat, on the grounds that he had to meet his girlfriend, and made his escape. He hailed a taxi and within half an hour he was at his desk. He opened
Spotlight
, and found the telephone numbers of Hanover’s manager and press agent. The story was on the front page of the first edition.