Quiet as a Nun (3 page)

I was only surprised that it had taken Mother Ancilla till 1960 to iron this matter out.

We had been distracted. Mother Ancilla returned to a sadder topic than her scientific victories.

'As I was saying, Sister Miriam appeared to return to normal, although she still found great difficulty in eating. Difficulty that persisted for all her valiant efforts to overcome it. She told me once that strange visions seized her, that God wanted her to die, to go to Him, so that it was His will that she should not feed the flesh ...'

For a moment, I felt a strong distaste for the whole convent and all its works expressed in such language.

'I told her that it was God's will that she should make a good nun and eat up her supper. Such as it was,' said Mother Ancilla sharply. I remembered that uncanny attribute she had of seeming to read one's thoughts.

'A form of anorexia nervosa, I suppose.'

But the story got worse. Rosabelle began to talk of her visions, eat less, hide her food, got thinner, a doctor was called, more doctors. She got fatter again. She seemed more cheerful. She took more interest in life around her. One day when attention was no longer focused on her and her affairs she disappeared. A typed note was found: 'I can no longer hide from the community that I have lost my vocation. I have gone to London to stay with my relations. Please don't try to find me. I want to find myself.'

'I want to find myself!' I echoed. It was the phrase Rosa had used to me years ago in our teenage discussions about our future, lasting half the night.

'But of course she never went,' I said.

'No, poor unhappy Sister Miriam. She went to Blessed Eleanor's Tower and locked herself in and - well, you probably know the rest. You probably read the newspapers.' I nodded.

'What's her name? The nun who knew all the time where she was and never told.'

'Sister Edward.'

Sister Edward. She was the one I felt sorry for. But how she could have been such an idiot - 'She is young, young in religion, she has only just stopped her postulancy. I think she really believed Sister Miriam when she spoke of her vision and the need to undergo a period of trial and purgation. And then when she realised that all along Sister Miriam had lain there, that the old key had snapped off, that she had tried to escape and been too weak, the door locked, growing gradually weaker, she nearly broke down herself.'

'It might have been better not to go into the court with that story all the same.'

Mother Ancilla opened her eyes wide. 'That would have been against the law, Jemima.' I was reminded of the formidable rectitude of the convent.

'All the same, to give the coroner the opportunity to refer to the centuries-long tradition of perverse practices and cruelty of the Church of Rome, and the suggestion that Sister Edward
gloried
in Sister Miriam's death.'

'Our reputation is very low around here now I fear. They are simple people. It's quite deep country you know. Churne village has people in it who have never been to London, for all the short distance. The nuns hate to go shopping alone at the moment. Some very hurting remarks are made.'

At last I perceived why Mother Ancilla had sent for me. It was, I assumed, to rectify the convent's 'image' in the national, or at any rate, the local mind. With the touching faith of ordinary people in television, Mother Ancilla obviously thought her former pupil could do it for her.

'Jemima,' said Mother Ancilla sharply, interrupting this train of thought. 'You've got to tell us. Why did she die?'

3

Jemima knows

I realised that the object which Mother Ancilla was twisting between her fingers was not, as I had imagined, a black wooden rosary such as all the nuns wore at their side. It was a scrap - no more than that - of white paper. Mother Ancilla pushed the paper towards me.

I began to read. I recognised the handwriting immediately: it was Rosa's. I thought how little it had changed over the years. That's because she's a nun. Was a nun. Frozen. Mine must have changed beyond all recognition. Not that I really use it much these days except for the odd secret note to Tom, perhaps after a speech at the House of Commons - 'Darling. You were terrific. All my love, J.' I always imagined that he destroyed such notes instantly, for fear of Carrie finding them in his pockets. Yet, perversely, I could not resist writing them in a form too compromising to be preserved. I had a secretary for everything else and then of course there was the telephone.

Rosa on the other hand would have honed and fashioned her handwriting
A.M.D.G
. -
ad majorem Dei gloriam
- To the greater glory of God. It was odd how quickly that phrase came back to me. The nuns wrote it on everything. We wrote it piously at the head of Scripture papers, and on other papers too where we thought it would help.

I looked down again at the piece of paper. No, Rosa had not written this message for the greater glory of God. At least if she had, she had not thought fit to embellish it with the customary initials.

'Jemima will understand what is going on here. Jemima knows why I have to do this,' I read carefully aloud. 'Jemima knows.'

I paused. Mother Ancilla's bright dark eyes, the focus of her face, were regarding me intently.

'I don't understand,' I said after a moment's silence. My voice sounded rather flat. 'This is written in her own hand. And you said her farewell note was typed.'

'It was in her missal. Her old Latin missal she used as a child. Not her breviary. It was dated the day of her death. We only found it later. That's why the police never saw it at the time. They took the other note away of course.' Mother Ancilla pursed her lips.

'She must have been in two minds at the time. I mean, about it all . . .' I thought: she must have been in more minds than that. And all her minds distracted.

'Poor Sister Miriam,' said Mother Ancilla sharply, 'was certainly a very disturbed person.' Disturbed: and disturbing. Disturbing to the peace of Blessed Eleanor's Convent. Potentially highly disturbing to my own peace.

On the back of the little white slip was a picture of the Virgin Mary in her blue robe, surrounded by a halo of stars.

I breathed a fairly devout prayer of thankfulness - I was almost tempted to cross myself - it was odd how these practices so slightly learnt at the time were returning to me - to whatever tutelary power hail kept Rosa's message hidden. Imagine the newspaper headlines. Yes, I could imagine them only too well. Jemima Shore in Dead Nun Drama. Mystery of last message. So much more appetising than the simple 'Nun Found Dead' which had originally attracted my attention. Suddenly a feeling of the craziness of it all overcame me. I had not seen Rosa for - how long? It had to be fifteen years, no, more. After school there had been some unsatisfactory meetings in London. I remembered particularly one girls' lunch in a store - D.H. Evans was it, somewhere in Oxford Street. It was definitely not Fortnum and Mason, as Rosa had suggested. I knew that was too expensive for me and had said so.

'I generally go there with my friends, but I don't like it particularly,' was Rosa's comment. She sounded rather blank on the telephone.

In any case, I could not even pay the price of the set lunch at D.H. Evans, so it was just as well we had eschewed Fortnum's.

'Don't be silly,' said Rosa easily, paying both bills. She took a wallet from her leather handbag. Fascinated I saw that it contained another thin white fluttery note - as five-pound notes were in those days. I suppose that note was the single positive object which told me that Rosa was rich. Our school uniform, strictly imposed, made us all equal just as the nuns' black imposed uniformity on them. Rosa the nun - Sister Miriam - would have seemed no richer or poorer than say that little nun who had let me in at the door. Because I did not want to think back into the past for too long, I allowed a more modern thought to strike me. Rosa had been rich. Even, perhaps, very rich. What happened to her money when she entered the convent? What happened to it now that she was dead?

'She was a great heiress of course.' Mother Ancilla's voice broke into my thoughts in a way I was beginning to take once more for granted. The words came to me on a sigh. 'All the Powerstock money from generations back came to her. She had no close relations left.'

I thought back.

'Land in Dorset somewhere?'

Mother Ancilla smiled sadly.

'Alas, no. Not just that. That would have been simple. But there were all the great London properties as well. Her family estates in London. The Powers Estate.'

I began to put two and two together.

'You mean Powers Square, Powers House, and all that. Good God -sorry Mother.' I had done a programme on it all some time back, a particularly successful one as it had turned out. Combining as it did questions of the environment (Powers Square was said to be Cubitt's finest achievement) and social policy (the poor families on the nearby Powers Estate were being ejected from decrepit but still elegant houses so that a monster high-rise development could take place). I had also managed to discover that a good many of my colleagues at Megalith Television were living in the aforesaid decrepit houses and had done them up very nicely, thank you. They too objected to being removed yet essentially were being asked to make way for working-class housing .. . It was all very confusing. So confusing that I could not immediately remember who Jemima Shore, Investigator, had finally decided was in the right. Tom of course had been full of special scorn for my television colleagues in their refurbished homes ('A series of I'm-all-right Jills and Jacks masquerading as liberals'). I think I decided as usual that justice lay in the middle - that is to say nowhere.

Then there were the Powers Project fanatics. I'd temporarily forgotten about them. They too had been represented on my admirably impartial programme in the shape of an interview with their leader Alexander Skarbek.

Before the programme went out, several of the directors of
MGV
had taken fright and suggested that Skarbek should be cut.

'We're not here to promote the social ideas of mad extremists,' was the general line taken. Cy Fredericks, Megalith's colourful boss, groaned to me in private:

'Jem, what are you doing to me? Lord Loggin-Smith is an insomniac and rings me up throughout the night. Dame Victoria believes in making a brisk start to the day and calls me any time from six-thirty onwards.' But in public he merely murmured a few platitudes about television being open to all sides of the question. Actually I had rather enjoyed interviewing Skarbek, who was quite young and was certainly a more sympathetic type to me, fanaticism and all, than most of the directors of
MGV
.

The Powers Project aimed quite simply to set up a type of workers' commune all over the Powers Estate. The Projectors, as they became known, dismissed with equal contumely the existing concept of Cubitt's Powers Square and Powers House, and the council's future high-rise blocks. I was never quite clear what kind of rudimentary housing would replace the present Victorian facades, but there would be acres of it, that was certain. I think they were going to grow vegetables there too, like the Diggers, and keep pigs and hens.

Tom poured scorn on them too.

'Darling, when we're trying so hard to institute a proper housing policy in that part of London, to have some dangerous loony advocating a return to the standards of the seventeenth century - yes, Skarbek is dangerous. Power mad. You watch out.'

'Everyone on this particular programme is power mad,' I countered. 'Or rather Powers Mad. In the sense that everyone wants something different from everyone else for the Powers Estate. And wants it like crazy, with no ability to compromise. To coin a phrase, this programme is turning out to be an allegory of our society.'

'Your programmes always turn out to be an allegory of our society,' said Tom crossly, 'and if you don't say it beforehand, the critics say it for you afterwards.'

But he had at least provided me with a title for this programme. Powers Mad it became. And Powers Mad it went out, Alexander Skarbek and all.

'And of course she owned the convent land itself,' continued Mother Ancilla delicately with a little cough.

This time she had really astonished me.

'Blessed Eleanor's. You mean Rosa
owned
Blessed Eleanor's.'

'No nun owns anything, dear Jemima,' said Mother Ancilla calmly. 'In the sense that you in the world own things. A nun has given everything to God. It is just a case of the formalities of the arrangement.' I had a vision of God's lawyers - hatchet-faced men, as Tom would have them - behind whom the warm and benevolent God was able to shelter. 'Of course it was all handled by the lawyers and made part of a trust. Set up by Sir Gilbert Powerstock long ago. You probably remember him at Parents' Day: an enormous man. I remember thinking what an imposing sight he must have made in his

Lord Mayor's robes, quite different from Rosabelle - Sister Miriam. She took after her mother. Poor Marie Therese was a Campion of course and all the Campions were small and dark ever since the marriage of the ist Earl Campion to one of dear Queen Mary's Spanish ladies-in-waiting.' I suddenly realised she was not referring to the late Queen Mary of betoqued fame, but to Mary Tudor. In my convent days I had to learn not to refer to her as Bloody Mary.

'You won't remember Lady Powerstock. She died very young - the Campion chest, you know. We were going through a period of grave financial difficulty at the time. And then dear Sir Gilbert stepped in and bought most of the land on which the convent stands and endowed it in perpetual memory of his wife. But for some technical reason to do with the trust, although the convent buildings became a charity, the land itself was different. I am afraid, as his heiress, Sister Miriam still owned it outright.'

'You're
afraid
she owned it outright?'