Quiet as a Nun (2 page)

I want to find myself

I arranged to drive down to the convent the following Saturday. My work would be over for the week - my programme was recorded - and by Friday I was generally filled by a post-programme adrenalin in which all things were possible, whether the programme had gone well or badly. In this case it had gone well, and on Friday night I was going to have dinner with Tom. He also said that he would be able to spend the whole night with me, in my flat.

'What if - she - telephones you at home?' I did not particularly like saying Carrie's name, or introducing her into the conversation. But the question had to be asked. In the past we had both endured some unsuccessful stolen nights, when Tom lay sleepless in my bed, wretchedly imagining the unanswered telephone and Carrie's subsequent anguish.

'She won't,' said Tom cheerfully. 'Mother-in-law's telephone has broken. She chatted the wire through. Thank God. Long may it stay that way.'

I thanked God too. The Almighty suddenly seemed to be taking a more friendly interest in my affairs. Perhaps it was the influence of Mother Ancilla and the prayers of the community? That reminded me to tell Tom that I had to be off early the next morning. For a moment I was almost tempted to postpone - no. It would do Tom no harm to find that I too had some personal commitments beyond the vicarious ones imposed on me at second hand by Carrie. Though Tom might frown.

Later, Tom did frown. After all he loved me. We were in love. He pushed back his hair off his forehead. It was a gesture almost as familiar to me as his kiss. Tom's hair, straight, floppy, unmanageable, was another of the persistent problems in his life. Still frowning, he said:

'Blessed Eleanor's Convent. Wasn't that the awful place where the nun starved herself to death? Quite mediaeval, the whole business. Nobody knows what goes on beyond convent bars, you know. It was pure chance this case got out in the open because the nun actually died. I think the coroner was quite right.'

'Oh Tom,' I burst out. 'Don't be so ridiculous. 'There aren't bars. It's a school. I was there in the war and afterwards. I must have told you. As for the coroner, I thought it was disgraceful what he said. No Popery rides again.' (I had since looked up the clippings.) 'It was accidental death, no-one denied that, and he had no business blaming that poor young nun who gave evidence. Nuns have feelings just like anybody else.'

'Well they don't look like anybody else,' said Tom.

'Really—' Mother Ancilla's letter had made me feel curiously protective, even in the face of Tom.

'Or rather they all look just like each other. I saw a couple on the tube today. Couldn't possibly have told one from the other, even if one had been my sister. Two identical black crows.'

'What extraordinary prejudice from Tom Amyas,
MP
,
that well-known hero of liberal causes.'

Tom grinned. 'Sorry. Some rooted anti-Papist prejudice in me somewhere. Relic of my childhood I think. The Inquisition and all that. I remember reading
Westward Ho
- connections with my name - and being full of British indignation about it all. It still horrifies me: the idea of the imposition of
belief
upon others . . . you should know that.'

'I hardly think that an obscure convent in Sussex full of harmless middle-aged women can be blamed for the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition four centuries ago,' I said coldly. I was oddly narked by Tom's remarks. I tried to tell myself that at the first hint of Catholic persecution returning to this country - perish the unlikely thought - Tom would be the first to throw himself into the cause of quelling it. Save The Nuns: I could see him marching now with his banner. It was one of the things for which I loved him. But we had never discussed Catholicism before - why should we - and I hated to find even this corner of prejudice in my kind and gallant Tom, the champion of all those in trouble.

I thought of telling him that Mother Ancilla too was in trouble, or thought she was. I decided not to. We dropped the subject.

But I remembered Tom's remarks the next day as I drove up the long gravel drive to the convent. It was autumn. In the sunshine the convent grounds were immaculate. It was the season in which I had first arrived at Blessed Eleanor's as a day-girl. I walked with my mother from my parents' leaf-strewn autumnal garden, which had a kind of rich self-made compost under-foot throughout at this season, through to gardens where evidently no leaf was permitted to rest for very long before being tidied away.

'The nuns must catch the leaves before they fall,' said my mother jokingly, to leaven the slightly tense atmosphere of a new school. She paused and gulped.

'My God, look at that.' We both stopped and observed a nun - young? old? who could tell? - carefully catching a leaf long before it fluttered to the ground. She put it carefully away in a pocket, or anyway somewhere in the recesses of her black habit.

'Catching leaves is lucky.' My mother was quick to seize on an occasion for optimism. 'We'll find out who the lucky nun is, and you can make friends with her.' I assented rather dubiously. But we never did find out who the lucky nun was. As Tom observed thirty years later, from a distance they really did all look exactly the same.

At that moment two nuns pulled a crocodile of small girls into the side of the drive as I passed. Identical. Two black crows. The children's uniform, a blur of maroon blazers and pink shirts, seemed singularly unchanged from my own day. I smiled. The children smiled amiably back. Both nuns smiled. The autumnal sun continued to shine, mellowing the rather fierce red brick of the convent facade. That too seemed much as I remembered it. Peaceful. Tidy. Even the creeper on the walls did not romp but climbed up in an orderly fashion. It was difficult to imagine what possible troubles could lie behind that calm exterior - troubles, that is to say, that could not be solved without recourse to the prying outside world. That was after all the world that I represented: Jemima Shore, Investigator, was how I was billed on television. It was a deliberate parody of the idea of the American detective, a piece of levity considering the serious nature of my programme. I was nevertheless an alien to the convent world. But Mother Ancilla had deliberately sent for Jemima Shore.

I stopped feeling an alien when a nun answered the door. She was very small. Ageless, as all nuns tended to be, with their foreheads and throats covered, so that the tell-tale signs of age were hidden. The short black cape covering the upper part of her body, whatever it was called, part of the nuns' uniform, also partially hid her waist. It had the effect of making her figure into a sort of bundle. She looked a bit like Mrs Tiggy-Winkle - hadn't there been one nun we named Tiggy? Perhaps all small nuns looked like Mrs Tiggy-Winkle. I gave my Christian name just in case.

'It's Jemima Shore to see Reverend Mother Ancilla.'

'Ah Miss Shore,' she beamed. So I didn't know her. 'We've been expecting you.' Into the reception room, a large room just by the front door, known for some reason as the Nuns' Parlour - although it was very much not part of the nuns' accommodation, being used exclusively for confrontations between secular and religious worlds. Here parents bringing quivering offspring to the convent for the first time were welcomed, smoothed down by Mother Ancilla, and made to feel - so my mother had told me - that they themselves were about to enter a disciplined but friendly institution.

The Nuns' Parlour really was exactly the same. The reproduction holy pictures in their dark frames, with their dully gold backgrounds. Fra Angelico seemed the prime favourite. On the table lay the familiar pile of wedding photographs, still surely dating from the forties. At any rate they were still mainly by Lenare and not by Lichfield. Perhaps the old girls of Blessed Eleanor's had abandoned their propensity for lavish white weddings, like the rest of the world? These wedding photographs, when I was at school, had exercised the same secret fascination over me as the Jesuits. I used to gaze at them covertly when my father was discussing my need for better science instruction with Mother Ancilla.

'But Mother Curtis,' he would say at the beginning of every term, finding the name Ancilla evidently too much to stomach: 'Science instruction by
post
is really not enough to equip your girls for the modern world.'

'Oh Captain Shore,' Mother Ancilla would regularly reply with a tinkling laugh. 'I keep asking Our Blessed Lord to send a vocation to a good young science mistress to help us out, but so far, He, in His infinite wisdom, has not seen fit to do so.'

'I seem to remember a saying about God helping those who help themselves,' began my father. No doubt he intended to refer to such unsupernatural expedients as advertisements and educational agencies. But no-one bandied words with Mother Ancilla and stood much chance of emerging the victor. Especially about Almighty God, someone whose intentions, mysterious as they were to the whole world, were somehow less mysterious to Mother Ancilla than to the rest of us. In the language of today, one would have referred to Mother Ancilla as having a hot line to God: or perhaps an open line was the correct term.

'Exactly, Captain Shore. Helping ourselves. That's exactly what we're doing with our postal science lessons. Just as Our dear Lord wants us to do.'

My father gave up: till the beginning of the next term. I stopped gazing at the brides. Even then I suspected that I should never make that honorific folder. God might help those who helped themselves, but he did have a habit of not marrying them off. At least not in white.

As I turned over one photograph - the face was vaguely familiar - I heard a single sonorous bell ring somewhere in the convent. I recognised the signal. All the nuns had their own calling signal, like a kind of cacophonous morse code. One ring, then another for the Infirmary Sister, two then one for the Refectory Sister and so forth. One bell on its own called for the Reverend Mother.

Silence.

A pattering of feet on the heavily polished floor. The swish of robes outside the door, the slight jangle of a rosary that always presaged the arrival of a nun, and then—

'Jemima, my dear child.' Reverend Mother Ancilla kissed me warmly on both cheeks. I reflected ruefully that probably to no-one else in the world these days was I, at nearly forty, still a child. My parents were both dead. Tom? I could not remember him using the term even in our most intimate moments. Besides Tom, as a crusader, liked to see in me a fellow crusader. He had his own rather demanding child in Carrie and, for Tom, to be childlike or childish was not necessarily a term of endearment.

I studied Mother Ancilla's face as we talked, and I answered her preliminary polite enquiries. Nuns' faces might not show age but they did show strain. On close inspection, I was faintly horrified by the signs of tension in her mouth. Her eyes beneath the white wimple were no longer the eyes of a fierce but benevolent hawk as they had been in my youth. They reminded me of some softer and more palpitating bird, the look of a bird caught in the hand, frightened, wondering.

'You never married, my child?' Mother Ancilla was asking.

I hesitated how to reply. There was still something compelling about Mother Ancilla. 'Too much involved perhaps in your work,' she said tactfully, after a minute's silence between us.

I nodded, relieved and disappointed at the same time. That would do. Besides, it was true. Until I met Tom I had been too much involved in my work - for marriage, if not for love.

'We here, of course,' continued Mother Ancilla smoothly, 'understand a life of devotion, for which the ideal of home and family is sacrificed. We too have made that sacrifice, in honour of Our Blessed Lord.' She fell into silence again. ‘It can be very hard. Even at times too hard, unless the grace of God comes to our aid. Sister Miriam—'

'Yes, Mother?' I said as helpfully as possible.

'Perhaps the sacrifice was a little too much for her? Who can tell? Perhaps Sister Miriam should never have become a nun in the first place. I wondered so much about her vocation.'

This was surprising. I had anticipated some more religious bromides, as I described them to myself, about the value of the sacrifice.

Mother Ancilla took my hand and said suddenly and urgently:

'Jemima, we must talk.' This time she did not call me her child. 'We don't have much time.'

'I'm not all that busy,' I began. I realised with a faint chill that she was talking about herself.

'I'll begin with Sister Miriam; Rosabelle as you knew her.' It was a pathetic story, not uncommon perhaps in a single woman these days, a spinster. But I was conventional enough to be shocked by its happening to a nun. A decline in health. A form of nervous breakdown, culminating in a hysterical outburst in the middle of teaching. Sister Miriam was whisked away to a sister house of the convent in Dorset by the sea, a convalescent home. There she found the greatest difficulty in eating, although with the help of tranquillizers her composure returned. After six months Sister Miriam was adjudged ready to return to Blessed Eleanor's. But she was given light duties, French conversation with the Junior school—

I gave an involuntary smile. 'That wouldn't have been a light duty in my day,' I explained hastily.

'We have a language laboratory nowadays. The gift of an old girl.'

A laboratory. That reminded me of the old days of my father's arguments. I wondered if God had ever sent Mother Ancilla that experienced science mistress. And was it too much to hope that God would also have inspired an old girl to endow a science laboratory?

'And the most beautiful science laboratory, by the way. How pleased Captain Shore would have been to hear that, wouldn't he, Jemima?' So she had not forgotten. Mother Ancilla never forgot an adversary.

'Did you get the science mistress too?' I couldn't resist asking.

Mother Ancilla opened her eyes wide.

'Why, of course. They both came together. Sallie Lund, an American girl. When she joined the Order in 1960 she was already a trained scientist, so naturally she could teach science here. And as her father pointed out, she could hardly teach science without a laboratory. A very dear man, and most practical about money, as Americans generally are. So he gave us it.'