Quiet as a Nun Page 5

It made no sense. It was not particularly late by my metropolitan standards. But it was extremely late by the standards of the convent. The whole place was plunged in darkness, except for the occasional light reflecting from a corridor window where the children slept. Moreover the night owl, whoever she was, was not moving in that busy rapid fashion of all the nuns, intent on not wasting time in the service of God. She was taking step by step very carefully, stopping occasionally as though to listen for any extraneous sounds.

  I waited until I reckoned she must have reached the side door of the chapel. On an impulse, and without in any way thinking of what I was doing, I opened the door of my room and slipped out as silently as I could. I too ventured quietly, slowly, down the winding stairs. I touched the oak door to the chapel. It was not latched and pushed open in my hand. It made no sound at all as it swung forward.

  At first the chapel seemed to be totally dark except for the red light of the sanctuary lamp, hanging in front of the altar. Then I realised that a group of candles were burning unevenly in front of a statue on my left. Some patronal feast day or other. I picked up one of the candles off its little spike and held it in front of me. I steadied it, and waited for my eyes to grow accustomed to the gloom. I was quite sure I was not alone in the chapel, that the mysterious visitor could not have left by any other door, and must still be lurking in front of me in the shadows.

  The strangeness of her silence grew. Why did she not speak? Or at least make some signal. As fear, for the first time, began to catch up with me, there was a rush of cold air behind me and my candle went out. At the same time I put my hand down against the first wooden pew to steady myself. I found my hand touching warm flesh.

  I screamed.

  5

  Unnatural lives

  Shortly after my scream, two things happened. Someone or something rushed past me into the chapel from the outside, by the route I had used, out by the nuns' door and away.

  The flesh turned out to be a face turned up towards mine in a rather dazed way. There was a nun kneeling at the end of the pew I had touched.

  'Miss Shore,' said the nun in a low voice, 'I'm sorry if I startled you.' 'Who was that?'

  A rustle. The nun rose to her feet. I could not see her face and did not recognise her voice. 'I'm Sister Agnes.'

  'No, who was that? The other person who rushed past us.' I was still trembling and could not let go of the pew. 'Who blew out the candle?'

  'There was no-one else here, Miss Shore; see, the chapel is empty.' Deftly Sister Agnes took the candle from my shaky hand and relit it at the shrine. I saw that the statue was of the adult Jesus pointing to a large red heart prominent on his breast. Sacred Heart of Jesus. Sacre Coeur! I felt like exclaiming it aloud as a relief to my feelings.

  'I've been on duty in St Aloysius' dormitory, the big dormitory. I came here on my way down to say my night prayers. I'm sorry to have disturbed you.'

  'Down the visitors' staircase?' I enquired sharply. If Sister Agnes was surprised at my inquisitorial tone, she did not show it. But she did take a moment to reply. Then she said easily:

  'It is quicker that way than going back into the nuns' wing and all the way round by our own stairs. I'm making a novena to the Sacred Heart of Jesus,' she added.

  'Then I'm sorry that I disturbed you, Sister Agnes,' I answered politely. I was recovering my poise. 'I will leave you to your prayers and peace.'

  With as much dignity as I could muster I turned to go back up the winding staircase to my little room, which now seemed like a haven compared to the rustling chapel.

  'Let me put on the stair light for you,' said Sister Agnes. 'No wonder you were frightened. We nuns get used to the darkness here in the chapel.'

  Sister Agnes stepped swiftly ahead and flipped a switch outside the door. Light flooded the stairs. Enough light to show me an alcove at the bottom of the stairs. It was sufficiently large to conceal a person who might shrink back into it. A person who knew they were being followed and did not want to be seen.

  For of course Sister Agnes could not be telling the truth. There was no question of that. There was no way in which she could have slipped out of the children's wing, down the visitors' stairs and reached the pew to be kneeling there calmly and silently ahead of me. Her story was implausible from many angles. For one thing there had not been enough time. For another, the mysterious prowler had definitely come from the nuns' not the children's wing. In any case, if Sister Agnes had arrived from the big dormitory why did she not use the ordinary front staircase to the main chapel entrance, past the refectory?

  Last of all, there had been another human being there with us, someone as yet without a face, behind me in the alcove, who blew out my candle before beating a fast retreat to the nuns' part of the building. Ergo: she was a nun. Ergo: Sister Agnes must have seen her over my shoulder, her eyes accustomed to the darkness, my candle held high. Ergo: Sister Agnes was lying.

  All of this occupied my mind as I passed back up the staircase to my room.

  My last sight of Sister Agnes was of an upturned face wearing an expression of gentle concern. She reminded me of someone. Then I realised that she resembled a Murillo I had once admired of St Agnes with her lamb, the saint as a charming young creature with dark eyes and loosely playing locks. Perhaps it was that resemblance which inspired my new friend to choose the name of Agnes in religion. I had no idea what the inspiring virtues of St Agnes might be beyond a weakness for lambs like Mary in the nursery rhyme. Or was that merely a play on her Latin name? In any case it was tempting to think that Sister Agnes had secretly been prompted by human vanity. I was still thinking of the story of the Blessed Eleanor and her royal robes. It struck me that Sister Agnes must have been a pretty woman once.

  Later, when the door of my room was safely shut, it occurred to me further that Sister Agnes probably still was a pretty woman - under that confining coif and veil. It was a commonplace at Blessed Eleanor's that one could never tell the real age of nuns. The tell-tale throats and foreheads were securely hidden. From my brief glimpse of her, I put Sister Agnes at no more than thirty. The thought of that motionless figure in the pew, waiting, remained with me as I fell asleep.

  There was no doubt that the life of a nun was an unnatural one. At the age of thirty an attractive unmarried woman like Sister Agnes would be better employed meeting her married boss after hours from the office than keeping lonely trysts in a chapel. At the age of thirty, I myself had been doing just that. With the great Cy Fredericks himself, my married boss at Megalith. He had not of course been quite so great in those days. But he had been married all right. With all the heartbreak of the relationship, I doubt if I should ever have emerged as Jemima Shore, Investigator, without his help. It was not a case of string-pulling. He was just naturally infectious. You could not help catching confidence off him, like a cold.

  There was no doubt that the life of a nun was an unnatural one.

  I drifted into sleep.

  'I expect you feel that we all lead unnatural lives here, Jemima,' said Mother Ancilla the next morning, in her tiny study. It was her no-nonsense, head-of-the-school tone.

  ‘I wouldn't say that exactly, Mother,' I replied carefully. 'From my time here I respect the logic of your existence. Even if I don't share in it.'

  'I assumed that to be so. Otherwise you wouldn't be here' - even brisker. 'But that wasn't my point. I was referring to the fact that our lives do have an order, an order of their own. Which is not the slightest bit unnatural, for two reasons. First it is an order dedicated to the service of God. We are convinced that as best we may, we are carrying out God's will for us on earth. Secondly, it is not unnatural because we are all here voluntarily. Of our own free will.'

  I received a slight jolt.

  'You look surprised, my child. But what I am saying is perfectly true. We are not living in the Middle Ages. A vocation is a difficult thing to assess of course. Only Almighty God can truly see into our hearts. But we do our best to choose the members of ou
r community with care, even today when vocations are so much rarer. That is God's will too, and we must accept it.' (But I got the impression that Mother Ancilla might have a thing or two to say to God on the subject when the twain finally encountered each other.) Meanwhile, she was marching on:

  'Sometimes of course, in spite of all our precautions, our long probationary period of postulancy and novitiate, we are just plainly mistaken. Or a nun is mistaken about her vocation. And then she is released from her vows and returns into the world. You may remember Beatrice O'Dowd from your time here. She was a nun for fifteen years, and left us last year. We regretted it but we did not try to stand in her way.' All the same I got the impression that Beatrice O'Dowd, like God, was not in Mother Ancilla's best books.

  'And Rosabelle - Sister Miriam?' I was thinking of Tom. What, no incarcerated nuns, no immured and helpless victims, no white faces behind grilles?

  'Exactly. Sister Miriam never asked to be released from her vows. Even when she had her nervous breakdown, she begged the community not to reject her.'

  I had to believe all that she said.

  'Tell me about some of the younger nuns here,' I replied, changing the subject. 'I must know everything possible about the community if I am to help you. Do they not feel, well, restless, with all the changes in the modern world? Someone like,' I appeared to search for a name, 'Sister Agnes, for example.'

  Mother Ancilla's eyes met mine, level, watchful.

  'Ah, I see you have noticed the resemblance then. I wondered whether you would.'

  'The resemblance?'

  'Sister Miriam. They were first cousins - although of course Sister Agnes is considerably younger. She was born a Campion, Agnes Campion when she was at school here. She did not change her name in religion, which is of course rare in our Order. In fact,' Mother Ancilla added rather crossly, 'it used not to be allowed. Our Blessed Foundress ...' She rolled her eyes to heaven, but so automatically that I felt her mind was distinctly on earth. 'Our Blessed Foundress commanded us to throw away all earthly things in her rule, including the names our parents had given us.'

  'While keeping her own?'

  'Royalty. That's different.' Mother Ancilla swept on without embarrassment. 'A symbol for leaving our own houses for the house of God. There was a technical relaxation of the rule last year' - Mother Ancilla managed to cram an extraordinary distaste into the word 'technical' -'but I must say I was surprised when Sister Agnes took advantage of it.' After that Mother Ancilla's roving mind abandoned the subject of Sister Agnes's unexpected independence and returned to that of Rosabelle: 'The resemblance is of course much more marked in the religious habit. The eyes are so similar, don't you think? Sister Agnes had much darker hair, really jet black. Such a pretty child, her Spanish blood—'

  I felt the subject of the ancestry of the Campions looming once more and said hastily:

  'I did sense something familiar.' And so I had. 'But of course I never saw Rosabelle after she became a nun. I only heard indirectly that she had joined the community.' And that, in its own way, was true too.

  Hadn't there been a letter? A long, long letter, all very earnest. In which Rosabelle examined herself and her problems in her small neat handwriting for page after page. She was in effect consulting me as to whether she should enter the convent. I knew it. Her father had recently died, she wrote, and she felt herself to be alone. Alone that is, except for the love of God. And - me. My friendship. An outsider. Not even a Catholic. I would be able to bring a fresh eye to it all: I had such a clear mind. And I would remember all our discussions on the subject in time gone by.

  Yes, there had been a letter. And I had not answered it. Time gone by. It had arrived some time during my second year at Cambridge, when I was in the throes of enjoying that coveted place. Won with such grim concentration, it was now to be savoured. I had put the letter aside: Rosa and her problems seemed as remote as the time of the Blessed Eleanor.

  Later I heard by chance from a cousin of hers at Cambridge, Celia Campion, a cheerful type, product of another convent school and rather improbably reading Maths: Rosabelle Powerstock had entered Blessed Eleanor's. Or as Celia put it, 'Cousin Rosa has taken the jolly old veil.'

  'Mother Ancilla,' I said, 'I imagine that I am free to wander as I please while I'm here, to talk to whom I please, to ask what questions I like.'

  'But of course, dear Jemima.' Mother Ancilla threw up her hands. 'That's what you are here for. An outsider's eye to see clearly what perhaps we, so close to it all, have missed.'

  'In that case I think I should try to talk to several of the nuns singly, on the excuse of my television programme of course, try and feel my way round a bit.' That seemed to Mother Ancilla an excellent plan. Why not start tonight? Nothing wrong with that either. It was, she pointed out, the Feast of All Saints and thus a whole holiday. This evening there would be Solemn Benediction in the chapel which I might like to attend? Yes, I would like to attend it, the music at Blessed Eleanor's being a speciality not to be missed. Afterwards the children would be watching a film - The Sound of Music, as a matter of fact. Such a lovely uplifting film. Had I ever interviewed Julie Andrews? No, what a pity - but any member of the community would be free for a chat.

  In this way I had intended to ask to see Sister Edward. I thought I might just as well grasp the nettle of her hysteria at the beginning of my investigations, rather than let an unpleasant and fundamentally rather pointless interview hang over me. I shall never understand what impulse led me to substitute the name of Sister Agnes for that of Sister Edward. I certainly did not believe in such split second decisions being manifestations of some divine plan. More likely it was something in Mother Ancilla's manner, a conviction that she was unwilling to discuss Sister Agnes, which prompted me.

  Besides I was already falling half in love with my own cover story of a programme about women in orders. Why not, after all? Once I had cleared up Mother Ancilla's little problem for her. From the point of view of television, Sister Edward would be quite hopeless. But Sister Agnes now, so calm in a confused situation as I had already discovered. In her appearance, come to think of it, there was more than a hint of Audrey Hepburn in A Nun's Story. I should have remembered that I was supposed to be on holiday from my programme and not listened to the whisperings of the television devil.

  Under the auspices of Solemn Benediction, the chapel seemed to be involved in some vast royal wedding service. The priests wore heavy white robes traced with gold and silver. Great golden tassels hung down from their copes. Candles filled the chapel, a series of bright tiers, which it must have taken the sacristan nun a laborious age to light. How different the chapel seemed from the menacing darkness of the night before! As the censors were swung gravely to and fro, first to the altar, then to the congregation, the heavy fruity smell of incense began to permeate the air. It would linger, I knew, in the still air of the chapel, long after those bridal candles were extinguished, and Sister Agnes knelt alone in the darkness before the sanctuary lamp, saying her novena.

  Sweet Sacrament divine

  All praise and all thanksgiving

  Be every moment thine

  Sweet Sa-a-a-crament divine ...

  People talk of the purity of boys' voices in a choir. But to me that evening there was a purity and an anguish about the female voices singing, which lingered in my mind long after the voices were still, as the incense lingered in the chapel. All that was missing was the bride: no doubt each lonely heart imagined that she was the bride in the centre of this superb ritual: the bride of Christ.

  The nuns knelt or stood on one side of the chapel, the girls on the other. Visitors occupied seats at the back of the school benches. I glanced across at the nuns. It was no longer true that one nun looked much like another. I was beginning to be able to distinguish them again quite easily. Sister Damian the hedgehog, Sister Clare the plump coffee-bringer, and one or two nuns who had certainly been there in my day. That was Sister Elizabeth for sure, hardly changed, Sister Liz, t
he famed teacher of English, for whom Wordsworth and the lyric poets occupied roles in her pantheon not much below the saints. And Sister Hippolytus, the Hippo, who stood towards history as Sister Elizabeth stood towards English. Here the long history of the convent was the thing to conjure with, preferably in terms of the many documents and records perused by Sister Hippolytus in the convent library, to which no-one else paid any attention - foolishly, in the opinion of Sister Hippolytus. Many a history lesson had been hopelessly misrouted by a casual enquiry from Rosa or myself:

  'Sister, is it true that the O.T.I. isn't really an English foundation at all? But Belgian.'

  'Our Belgian sister house is a post-Reformation foundation' - Sister Hippo would begin fiercely, unable to resist the bait. Nevertheless, once concentrated on such matters as the Age of the Enlightened Despots, a strict teacher in contrast to the effusive Sister Liz. I owed a lot to them both, I had come to realise ... How could the younger nuns hope to compete with these established figures, who had enjoyed all the certainty of the old-style Church? Nuns in the modern world indeed. No wonder Rosabelle had collapsed under the strain. And Sister Edward looked like following her ... I really would have to talk to Sister Edward tomorrow. It was only fair.

  My chat with Sister Agnes took place in the empty guest room next to mine, by permission of Reverend Mother. She told me that I could use it as a sitting room. The decor included the Assumption by Murillo and various other scenes in the life of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Sister Agnes did indeed have a Murillo-like air as she faced me across the mock fire-place with its single electric bar. She looked both demure and collected. She did not in truth greatly resemble Rosabelle, except around the eyes, but then, as Mother Ancilla pointed out, I had never seen Rosa in her habit.

  And Sister Agnes, in response to my questions, remained demure and collected throughout. She gave the impression of a cricketer who has been instructed by his captain neither to score runs nor to let a ball pass by. Yes, these were difficult times for women in religion with so many new opportunities open to their contemporaries. No, she did not feel they were specially difficult times: for when had the life of women in religion been easy? You did not give yourself to God expecting an easy time. And so on and so on. Nothing I could not have written down in advance for myself.