Bleak Expectations (10 page)

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A genuine Act of Parliament. Forbidden contact with men, certain friskier orders of nuns built convents next to boys’ schools on the grounds that they were not forbidden contact with boys. It was a sordid chapter in the Church’s past and one only a few ex-nuns married to much younger men were proud of.

We quickly moved down the corridor and through a door at the far end, emerging into a dormitory filled with small, sleeping nuns. Conditions were not vastly different from those in the dormitory at St Bastard’s, only instead of stones and straw the floor was littered with Bibles, prayer books and hymnals. The nuns themselves slept upright, kneeling on prayer mats and with their hands clasped in front of them. Above them hung banners with encouraging religious slogans, such as ‘Nun’s the word’, ‘Nun shall pass’ and ‘Not with a bang but with a wimple’.

‘Right, let us find your sister and then get out of here,’ said the servant. I hastened to do her bidding, rapidly searching the room for Pippa, but I found her not and, indeed, did not find her.

‘She is not here.’

The servant tutted grumpily. ‘No, of course not. Because why would it be so easy? “Get the boy out,” they say, and then, as if that’s not enough, he wants his sister rescued too and his best friend. I mean, blinking heck!’

I had never heard so many words from her before, and as her speech went on, her accent slipped from peasant to pleasant, even genteel, and as it did it became somehow familiar to me, but in a way I could not quite put a finger, or indeed ear, upon. She saw me staring and stopped.

‘Mumble, grunge, mumble . . .’ Her vocabulary disappeared once more, her accent returned to pure proletarian, and my inkling of familiarity with her disappeared. ‘We’d better look harder, then.’

We passed through the dormitory and into a nunnish corridor that stretched a nunly way in each nunny direction and was lined with nunnesque doors. By now the light spilling in from the windows above was no longer the grey of pre-dawn but instead the soft yellow of actual dawn, and around us the sounds of a nunnery stirring to life could be heard: the click of rosary beads, the soft scratch of communion wafers being stacked and, from behind a door marked ‘Head Nun’, the quavering notes of a song that seemed to be all about climbing mountains and fording streams.

Then, amid the nunny hubbub, I heard a more familiar sound. Indeed, a distinctly anvilly one. ‘Tink, tink, tink,’ it went, and in return I went, ‘Pippa, Pippa, Pippa,’ for it was surely her. I hurried tink-wards down the corridor, Harry and the servant behind me, and when I was at the correct door I opened it to reveal . . .

‘Pippa! Dear sister!’ She was sitting in a large tin bath, her anvil on a table beside her. I raced across the room, relief at finding her washing over me, like hot custard over a delicious pie: sweet, comforting and oddly yellow.

‘Oh, Pip! Dear brother Pip! How happy I am to see you!’

‘Dear sister! If you are as glad to see me as I am glad to see you then you must be exactly as glad as I am!’ How happy I was to be able to express such a balanced equation of joy.

‘Glad? Oh, I am glad, so glad! So very, very glad.’ But she did not seem glad, for she now commenced to weep, great salty tears splashing down her cheeks like tiny oceans of woe, or woceans.

‘Dear sister, do not be sad.’

Through her tears, she spoke: ‘Sad? No, not sad I. For these are tears of gladness, not sadness.’ She sobbed mightily twice, then bawled, ‘Aaarrggh! I am so happy!’

Dear reader, or if someone is reading this text aloud to you, dear readee, I was at a loss to comprehend this mismatch of word to deed. Though her words said she was happy, her tear-stained, snot-bubbly actions indicated the opposite. ‘But you sound so sad.’

‘No, not sad, glad.’ At this, she let out a weepy wail that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end and the hairs on the top of my head lie down in fear.

I have rarely in my life felt more purely male in my utter bafflement by emotion.

‘Dear sister, I admit to being confused as to the difference between tears of sadness and gladness.’

‘Oh, right, it’s quite simple, really.’ She instantly stopped weeping and started explaining. ‘These are tears of gladness: wah! Wah! Bleeeurfggh-aaarrggh-waaaaaah!’

My ears filled with the sound of an angry banshee that has just discovered it has lost its wallet and then stubbed its toe. But almost as soon as it had started, it stopped, leaving my brain throbbing with unprocessed emotion.

‘Do you see? Whereas these are tears of sadness.’ She breathed in and then: ‘Woo-wah-glerrrrr-aaarrfggggh-boo-hoo-snaarrrrrrggh!’

The angry, lost-walleted, toe-stubbed banshee returned, but fortunately quickly left again as once more she returned to calmness.

‘See? Quite, quite different.’

As far as I was concerned the two sets of tears were as alike as two peas in a pod or a man in a hat who looks exactly the same as another man in a hat, but I knew that when it comes to shemotions, agreement is often the safest course of action. ‘Ah, of course, all is clear now.’ Only it wasn’t. ‘We have come to rescue you!’

‘Oh, dear brother Pip! Wah-blarrfggggh!!!!!!!!!’
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She started crying again with what I assumed was gladness. Baffled by her emotional fluidity, I decided to introduce her to my companions.

‘The rescue is all thanks to this woman here.’ I motioned to the servant standing behind me.

‘Pleased to meet you, young Pippa.’

‘The pleasure is all mine, hideous bearded crone.’

‘And this is my new best friend, Harry Biscuit.’

‘Hello!’ Harry said, a little too loudly, blushing as he did so. ‘Sorry, bit nervous. Don’t get to talk to girls much. Or ever.’ His cheeks bright red, he moved awkwardly away, as if he had slightly forgotten how to walk; I think he was quite taken with her.

‘We must get you out of this bath, dear sister.’ I offered a hand to help her from the tub.

‘Bath? But this is no bath.’

I was baffled. It certainly looked like a bath. It was the right shape. It held liquid, and a person, like other baths I had seen, apart from the empty ones. And down the side was written the word ‘bath’.

‘Then what is it?’

‘As you know, today I am supposed to be burned as Joan of Arc.’

A shudder ran through me at the idea of my sister being tied to a stake and burned, like a fifteenth-century French martyr.

‘And to celebrate that, the nunnery will have a feast.’

Now a different shudder ran through me as I realized I was actually a bit cold.

‘So this is not bathwater. This is a marinade. I am in a flavour-bath.
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To make me a tender and tasty steak from a stake.’

‘No! My own sister! Destined to be eaten!’ The two different shudders now combined into one gigantic tremor of fearful, chilly fury.

‘But no longer, dear brother, for you have come to rescue me!’

She reached her arms from the tub, and we hugged as only a brother and sister can, meaning I could not resist pulling her hair to annoy her and she could not resist straightening my collar and cleaning an imaginary stain from my cheek.

Our hug was interrupted by a slurping sound, and I looked up to see Harry licking a finger that he had just dipped into Pippa’s bath. Fortunately, it was his own finger.

‘Mmm, rosemary, garlic and olive oil. I reckon you’d have been a tasty feast, Miss Bin.’

‘Why, thank you, Harry Biscuit.’ Pippa smiled at the compliment.

‘Hurr-hurr,’ Harry stammered. ‘I feel a bit giddy.’ He blushed like an embarrassed tomato.

‘You have come in the nick of time, for shortly Sister Cookswell is to come and squeeze lemon juice over me, then stud me with peppercorns.’

‘Then we must leave at once.’ The servant came over from the door where she had been checking lest anyone approach. ‘It is now daytime, however, and the nuns are up and about. As a servant, they will not notice me, but you three will be more conspicuous. To that end, I have brought disguises for you, taken from the St Bastard’s school-play costume cupboard.’

She rummaged beneath her dirt-encrusted skirts, then withdrew piles of clothing from within, distributing an outfit to each of us. Quickly, we dressed.

I knew that the St Bastard’s school play was traditionally an incredibly violent and unusual production, but even so, the results were surprising. ‘Are you sure about these disguises?’ I asked.

‘Yes. Why? Aren’t you?’ The servant bristled defensively, like an offended hedgehog.

‘It’s just . . . well . . .’ I motioned at Harry and myself.

‘Well what?’

I decided to beat about the bush of politeness no more. ‘Harry is dressed as Admiral Nelson.’ For indeed he was, in a blood-stained costume left over from that term’s production of the
Battle of Trafalgar
in which the headmaster had shot a boy a night for a week.

‘So?’

‘But Nelson has been dead these past eighteen years! And now he will be discovered wandering round a nunnery.’

‘Exactly. Everyone will be delighted to see him again. And who would challenge such a fine figure of authority and heroism?’ The servant stared at me through her warty beardedness. ‘I suppose you’re not happy with your disguise either?’

‘I’m dressed as a rabbit!’ I blurted, for indeed I was, it being a pointy-eared, fluffy tailed costume from the headmaster’s Easter production in which the boy playing the Easter bunny had been torn apart by a pack of live foxes.

At my objecting tone, the servant stared angrily at me through her warts. It was like being hated by a currant bun.

‘Um . . .’ Now Pippa, too, had objections. ‘Perhaps I should just wear my regular nun’s outfit instead of this disguise.’

The servant sighed. ‘No. For there is nothing as suspicious in a nunnery as a nun.’

‘Do we really think that’s true?’

‘If you’re trying to escape, yes.’ The servant sounded as steadfast and resolute as a British polar explorer determined to leave a tent against the advice of everyone else.

‘So you’re saying it’s less suspicious if I look like a grandfather clock?’ Pippa held up her disguise, which was indeed a grandfather clock, a costume left over from a production before my time at St Bastard’s, but one that had gone down in school folklore, a musical written by Headmaster Hardthrasher himself called
The Beating, Shooting and Hanging of Big Ben
.

‘Look, I promised to get Pip out of here. I didn’t know there would be three of you and when I found out I did the best I could. You’re lucky I could find any disguises at all in the middle of the night while trapped in an evil boarding-school!’

Again, as she ranted and raved, her accent mutated into something higher-born and familiar, but again as before I could not identify it. Truly, this woman was a mystery; if she helped us escape, would we ever solve her? Or like a fiendishly difficult Sudoku would she be thrown angrily away unsolved?
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‘All I’m saying is, please trust me. The disguises will work.’

What choice did we have? Other than all the choices that involved not wearing her ridiculous disguises. Nevertheless, there was something persuasive about her tone and Pippa donned her clock, I tried a tentative bunny hop or two and Harry completed his disguise by stuffing an arm inside his jacket and placing a patch over his eye.

‘Actually, pretending to be Nelson is brilliant! Look at me, I’m Nelson!’

Harry’s enthusiasm melted the icy atmosphere, and even the mysterious, roving-accented servant’s mouth twitched upwards at the corners in a vague signal of amusement, dislodging a wart, which fell to the ground with a plink.

‘Good. Now we must leave.’ The servant headed for the door.

‘Not without my anvil!’ Pippa fondly stroked her paternally gifted anvil.

‘Such an item is too heavy. It will slow us down.’ There was a hint of annoyance in the servant’s voice now.

‘But it reminds me of our late father!’ she pleaded. ‘And it’s not as heavy as it looks.’ She lifted the anvil to prove her point, managing to hold it for a full no seconds before it plunged clangily and point-disprovingly to the floor.

‘Do you not have a lighter reminder?’ To the hint of annoyance was now added a pinch of peevishness.

‘Well . . . there is this one-page letter he wrote me.’ She held it up but, as if to prove its lightness, a breezy gust snatched it from her hands and wafted it out of the window. ‘Then there is this feather. Or this paper bag full of his breath.’

‘Bring those, then.’ The annoyed peevishness lifted slightly.

‘But only the anvil really reminds me of him. I must bring it.’

The servant now responded in a tone that could only be described as blinking cross. ‘No, I forbid it.’

‘But . . .’ And the angry, stub-toed, pickpocketed banshee was back. ‘Waarrfgggh-spphhllrrggh-wah!!!’

Why this should make Pippa glad, I did not know.

‘I am so sad!!!’

Ah. It hadn’t.

‘Miss Bin. I shall help you carry it.’ Harry stepped forward to help, thereby silencing the banshee.

‘Oh, what a gentleman you are, Harry Biscuit.’ Pippa leaned over and kissed Harry on the cheek.

‘Hurr-hurr, girl. Kissed by a girl. And not a pretend one.’ If before Harry had blushed like an embarrassed tomato, he now looked like a shy strawberry that had just fallen naked into a pot of red paint.

The blushing finally eased, and he attempted to pick up the anvil. It seemed far too heavy for a boy who had placed one arm inside his jacket to pretend to be Nelson, but Harry was committed to both disguise and anvil-carrying and, arm straining, eyes bulging and trousers ripping with effort, he somehow lifted the immense metallic block and quickly staggered incredibly slowly towards the door.

‘Good. Now follow me and act just like any normal dead admiral, giant rabbit and grandfather clock.’

The servant led us out into the corridor – and immediately I saw heading towards us a group of four nuns, who were having a heated discussion in song regarding the solution to a problem with a young nun named Maria.