God's Callgirl (21 page)

Sister Alice was a science mistress in an FCJ high school in nearby Manchester. At weekends, she and her teaching companions joined the Sedgley community because they were too few in number to form a nunnery in their own right.

I loved Alice’s deep lilting Irish voice, her strong Roman nose, her dark eyebrows, her dry wit, her sociable gracious
nature, and her natural ability for humorous sarcasm. She appealed to the very core of my romantic, passionate being. Above all I loved her sea-green eyes. They were brown most of the time, but when she became angry or emotional they would flash a marvellous green, and I was helpless in front of her. In ordinary circumstances I would have been able to speak to her as a friend, or laughed and joked with her. As it was, I internalised all my feelings because of our rule of silence, and because of one rule even more fearful than that: the rule regarding ‘particular friendships’. These were to be
avoided
; they were ‘
the bane of religious life
’. So I felt obliged to fight against my delicious feelings of appreciation for this outlandish woman. The more I fought the feelings, the more they grew. ‘
What you resist, persists
,’ is a psychological fact that escaped the careful wisdom of our foundress, who wrote the rule about particular friendships. And her matronly hierarchy of followers knew no better.

Sister Alice wasn’t like the others by any comparison. To her, clomping comfortably along the polished corridors as if she were in a farmyard not a convent had nothing to do with not being a good nun. She got away with things because it was considered that her heart was in the right place, and because she was a brilliant and popular teacher. It was too difficult to contradict her Irish logic, anyway. I saw how her superiors would save face by quitting a discussion they weren’t going to win. I heard her colleagues gasp, as if she had gone beyond every boundary. She wasn’t afraid of punishment; it didn’t seem to figure at all with her. To her, a good nun was one who was able to love a great deal. She did, and this was the main reason she was so popular with children. In the end, it was the reason she left: she became disillusioned by the rules that tried to contain her and were valued more than love itself.

I managed to hide my feelings well enough so as not to arouse her suspicions. All the same, I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to be near her for some extra tutoring in French. There we sat, tightly squeezed together at a school desk designed for one. ‘
Ca va très bon, n’est-ce pas?
’ She smiled her wide, gracious smile at me, and I melted. Alice was extremely good at French, and I wasn’t bad, hoping mightily to impress her. Alice remained kind but neutral.

I wanted her to notice me, and so when she asked for volunteers to help cover science books at school, I quickly took this chance to be in her company. I stood in her classroom, motionless with strange passion as she showed me a special light bulb she had just acquired for a project. She caressed the bulb with such sensuous delight that my mouth hung open, my eyes slowly lifting to hers to read what was being expressed by her hands. She collected herself, vaguely aware that she had caused something in me that did not quite match her own pure enthusiasm for science.

A burden of guilt now grew in my soul because of my love for Alice. Eventually, it became a weight too heavy to bear. This was a breach of the rule that I would have to confess to my superior. I was granted a private audience and entered her study. If I had known that I was about to commit the equivalent of hari-kari, I might have reconsidered.

Mother Theresa, our superior, had not been chosen, I think, for her intellect. For that side of things she could rely on her offsiders. It may be unkind of me, but perhaps she was in her position because she was a good nun; she certainly was not a good teacher or a person with any great psychological wisdom. I knelt down beside her chair, obliquely facing her, as was expected of me. To my horror, I realised that I did not know this woman in whom I was
to confide my deepest and closest secret, nor did she particularly know anything about me. All we had between us was the rule book.

My heart was full of the deepest dismay as I opened my mouth and spelt out my own doom. ‘Mother,’ I began, deciding that to be as direct as possible was the only way to break the news, ‘I have fallen in love with one of the sisters.’

Silence. All my attention was on her, my superior, and the way her matronly body sweated. I could smell her perspiration, see her short, shallow breaths moving the black cloth of her habit rapidly up and down. Her face showed wild surprise, confusion, then, it seemed to me, her ardent but hopeless wish that she did not have to deal with this. Since she was speechless I answered her unspoken question. ‘It is Sister Alice.’

Mother Theresa did not reply immediately. Her short breathing continued while she sat with eyes closed for a while, fumbling with her rosary. My heart, meanwhile, was suffocating. I felt I had done the right thing, and at the same time had make a huge mistake. I was being sincere, honest and good, but I was confessing to something very bad. So I could not win any points here whatsoever. Finally Mother Theresa regained her composure and lifted her head to me. Her look was severe. Her words were equally direct.

‘Sister, you know that this is a serious breach of our rules. I must give you a penance. You will use your whip every time you are tempted to indulge in any thought of Sister Alice. Is this understood?’

‘Yes, Reverend Mother. I am sorry, and I will do my best to follow our holy rules.’

It was late afternoon when I left her office. That evening, at dinner-time, I could not eat. That night, I could not sleep. It was in the dead of night, in the furthest toilet I could find,
that I first used my whip to control my thoughts of Alice. When I returned to my dormitory bed, I cried, stifling my sobs and sniffles in the blankets. The tears did me some good and the relief gave me blessed sleep.

That following morning, straight after Mass, when the whole community was on its way to breakfast, Alice was informed by our superior of my damnable love for her. I was not supposed to notice, not supposed to see or hear. But I looked up just as Sister Alice was being beckoned to a door recess to be spoken to discreetly, then heard her stride away abruptly, shoes clomping in an uncontrolled distressed sort of way, and I knew then that she knew. No doubt Mother Theresa’s intention was that this action would help us both. But I caught a glimpse of her agonised face as she watched Alice stride away. She might have doubted the wisdom of her decision then. It was a stupid action, even if well-meant, and one she never attempted to rectify.

Sister Alice was now implicated in my crime. Although she knew how to love, it was the overwhelming love
I
felt for
her
that she found difficult to cope with. I was convinced this wouldn’t have been the case if we had just been given a chance to talk to each other. There was an unwholesome complicity in Mother Superior not telling me that she had told Alice, and in Alice not telling me that she knew, and in me not being able to say anything to her. It made the whole affair so sordid that my heart began to break.

Our French tuition ended abruptly, and I became conscious of Alice evading me. If we happened to be coming down a corridor in opposite directions—and the corridors at Sedgley were long ones—she would turn tail. In chapel she took care to find a pew on the other side. In the refectory she would take a seat where I couldn’t look up and see her. She spoke less at recreation times, afraid of drawing my
attention to her, and she always managed to position herself so that her back was towards me. The pain I felt was hardly bearable, not only because I was so deprived of the ordinary contact I’d enjoyed with her before, but for seeing her in such distress. She seemed to instinctively reject passionate admiration from someone of her own sex. Her normally free nature and broad mind drew the line there, and I felt the rejection personally, totally and sickeningly. I might as well have worn a bell around my neck, to warn her of my presence.

For her sake, to make it better for her, I was very, very good. I tried never to be near her, though I longed with all my soul to catch a glimpse of her. I wouldn’t look at her when I had the chance and would weep when the chance was gone. Love became a sword that drove deeper and deeper into my heart. The image that was Alice became the image of all unrequited loves, tangled in one endless longing for reconciliation.

I was twenty-one and had never heard the word ‘lesbian’, nor even ‘orgasm’. In all my years as a nun and a virgin, I never masturbated, because I didn’t know about it. But in chapel I had terribly inconvenient spontaneous convulsions that went through my body whenever Sister Alice came close. Kneeling in prayer, I instantly knew when she came in and heard every step that brought her closer to me.

Here she comes; I can recognise her step, even if she tries to disguise it by walking lightly. She is still several yards away and I can smell her scent, a sort of wild heather or wet-from-the-rain smell.

Now what am I to do! Wild energy is pulsing and building up in my pelvis…Oh God, maybe if I cross my legs, I can control this. It’s so hard to cross my legs while I’m kneeling! I wobble from knee to knee. The energy wants to escape…and now my hips start swaying…Oh God, I can’t!

A force that was greater than my will exploded and ran up my spine. My head jerked up; it’s a wonder I didn’t yell out right across the chapel. My legs wobbled desperately in the aftermath of suppressed ecstasy. I bent my shoulders in shame. It had been impossible to hide what was happening. I was absolutely mortified by the thought that someone might have noticed, but how could they
not
have noticed? I froze to hear a gasp behind me and someone loudly muttering, ‘Holy Mother of God; Jesus, Mary and Joseph!’ with a noisy rattle of a rosary.

Nobody ever spoke to me about this behaviour, although it happened several times. If my throat had not been kept silent with the aid of desperate, brute willpower, I would, of course, have screamed and only God knows what would have followed.

Once a week, student nuns met in the traditional way with our immediate superior for exhortations and admonitions. We sat with our eyes down and our hands on our laps. We were told things like: ‘Ignore girls who bring their boyfriends to the college.’ Bringing menfolk onto the campus was against the rules, but the girls didn’t care, and we frequently found couples kissing goodbye on the steps leading to the main entrance. Then one day our superior told us something that was meant to be a warning, but, as it happened, her action backfired.

‘I want to remind you of the rules relating to your vow of chastity,’ she began. ‘You are to resist the temptation to visit each other in dormitory cubicles. Also, you are not to have private discussions.’ (Wow! What an idea—to visit each other privately in the cubicles!)

No names were mentioned, but I knew that this wasn’t just a warning, that it must actually be going on, otherwise our superior would not have been so nervous and the
atmosphere would not have been so tense. In spite of the eyes-down rule, I glanced around. Who was the guilty party? Why had she not been spoken to privately? Why did I seem to be the only one not in the know? In hindsight, I wonder if this was an oblique message to
me
, in case I should contemplate doing such a thing. Or maybe I was
suspected
of doing it.

I never found out the truth, but in any case the admonition electrified my imagination. From then on, I dreamed of going into Sister Alice’s cubicle, finding her asleep and looking at her as long as I liked, and then kissing her ever so gently on the mouth. I daydreamed in chapel, instead of meditating, about her coming to
my
cubicle, and of her getting into bed with me and holding me tight so I could feel her solid Irish body, smell the heather of her breath, feel her breasts close to mine—I could have fainted with the wicked pleasure of it.

Guilt set in after these self-indulgent daydreams. Sometimes I managed to keep it at bay for a little while, but sooner or later I would have to punish myself. I used the strongly plaited and knotted twine to beat my bare legs and thighs mercilessly. Sometimes it was very painful and made me tremble, especially when my legs were cold; at other times, there came a glow of warmth and wellbeing. The whippings aggravated the varicose veins I had developed as a teenager.

Over time Alice seemed to come to a more benign understanding of the whole thing. She may have begun to sense the utter and constant misery I was in, though I applied myself to my studies and took part in community affairs as normally as I could. One morning at meditation time she made a bold statement. She deliberately knelt beside me in chapel, as if to express her solidarity or her
support for me—or maybe she even thought she could do with a bit of love, for heaven’s sake, in that God-forsaken establishment. The trouble was that I didn’t know
what
she was trying to convey and I pretended not to notice her. It didn’t last for long; Reverend Mother spotted her and came over to tap her on the shoulder and whisper to her to move to the other side, which she did.

Late Friday afternoon was time for Benediction—the blessing of the faithful by the monstrance. Those who were in the choir went upstairs to sing. I loved the harmonies we made, the sweetness of it all. I enjoyed the melodiousness that came out of my own mouth, the mouth that had to stay dumb for most of the day. To sing was to express my deep soul and to feel energy running freely. It seemed to me that we sang like angels.

The clever organist was none other than our ungainly Sister Gertrude, the notorious teacher of geography. Her corpulent body swayed pompously as she pedalled the ancient organ, assisted by the skilled bellows operator, and turned out the beautiful music that she had the responsibility and good sense to pick out. Her fat fingers made magic as she flawlessly played anything from Palestrina to Paganini, Haydn to Mozart, Bruch to Albinoni to Verdi. Our ever-expanding repertoire included works by Weber, Scarlatti, Cesar Franck and Schubert, all apart from the thorough training in Gregorian chant we received from the sober Benedictine monks, who sang in choir with us on rare occasions.