Seeking Sanctuary

by Frances Fyfield

  She went left and left again, on to the main road. Left again, past the walls of the convent, which looked like any other walls, up the road on the left and into the block of flats where she lived. The more direct route into the convent would have been through the back door into their garden, which she passed on the way, but nobody ever used that. The door was embedded into the wall and almost obscured with ivy. Once inside her apartment block in the next-door building, she ran up the five flights to her own, took off her tidy clothes, put on T-shirt and shorts and went up to the roof.

  The route to the roof was via a retractable stepladder from her attic living room, out through a dormer window not intended as an exit, on to a flat surface flanked by a parapet that went two thirds of the way round. Anna had told Sister Jude that this was the true kingdom of heaven. A small walkway surrounding a raised roof, housing a ventilation shaft and other furniture such as an open tank covered with wire. Heaven, if anywhere, was above the height of the trees, with sufficient space to lie in the lead-lined gunwales and catch the sun.

  From the back, with her elbows propped on the parapet, she could see the convent garden. Straight into it, or as straight as it could be in the late reaches of summer, before the foliage began to go. It was ironic that in wintertime, when the human movement in this garden was minimal, she had the greatest chance to spy, whereas in summer, when there was far more to watch, she was forced to see it in tantalising glimpses down through the trees. There were the smaller trees at this end, wavering things, beastly sycamores, the weed of trees, but loved by birds. The ivy covered the inside walls; there were numerous shrubs and overflowing berberis and blackcurrant bushes. Still, she could see the paths in the wilderness, and Edmund, the gardener, sitting on a bench by his shed in the clearing at the end, getting his breath. Edmund was always getting his breath. Through the trees, she could see how his belly flowed to his thighs and the empty barrow by his side was in danger of capsizing. A youth came and joined him, lifted him gently by the arm and took him into the shade.

  Anna frowned, forgetting the grief for a full minute. The sight of this youth made her heart skip a beat. She had seen him before, several times, but she did not know who he was and she needed to know who everyone was because it was part of her mission to look after Therese and make sure she was safe. He had yellow hair before the trees obscured him and he had become, insidiously, part of the landscape. They should get a tree surgeon to those trees – there were too many sycamores, they starved the ground upon which they grew – but not even Sister Barbara would hire a tree surgeon to perform on the day of a funeral, because those days became a Sabbath and anyway, all surgeons cost money. Breeze stirred the trees, which were shabby in late summer; the same breeze stirred Anna’s long hair. Restlessly, she prowled round the small domain of the roof space, holding on to the parapet with one hand. It was chest height; she could not have fallen over, but she always held it as she moved.

  On the south side of the roof space, she could look down into the road, which was a fine contrast with the peace of the overgrown garden. It was a single carriageway road with a small row of shops, café, the Oppo Bar, the delicatessen, florist and upmarket grocery with newspapers, luxury shops, to complement the residents with money in a pleasant part of London. Plenty to watch from up here, from the emptying Oppo Bar at night, to the greengrocer unloading in the morning, with the satisfaction of bad-tempered traffic jams around parked cars at rush hour. It was early afternoon quiet. Anna returned to the garden side, sat with her back to the parapet wall with a view of nothing but her own feet. Out of the breeze, the heat warmed her; she kicked off her shoes and cried a little more.

  It was as well Therese had not come straight out into the garden, but then she never did. Her flesh and blood sister, not her sister in Jesus bloody Christ, but the dear one who had once been called by another name and was now called Therese. If she had seen her, she might have shouted down at her, Are you really all right? Are you sure? and only been heard as a distant shout, enough to give away the game and reveal the very act of watching. Therese, we are too young to be bereaved, like this. We have no one left. What did we do to deserve it? Where are you, sister Therese? Doing God’s will in the kitchen? Oh, you stupid, beautiful drudge.

  The convent drawing room was heavy with the scent of flowers removed from the chapel. Father Goodwin held his teacup awkwardly and reflected briefly on the fact that in all the years he had been coming here, he had never yet managed to explain to them how he preferred instant coffee in a mug and a seat by a kitchen table, to the faded glories and polish smell of this receiving room. Rooms like this were peculiar to convents; he never encountered them anywhere else. A room saved for best, like an old-fashioned parlour and referred to as such, used only on high days and holidays, cleaned within an inch of its life in the meantime and furnished with a couple of solid sideboards, circa 1930, too heavy to shift, too ugly to be saleable. At least, he noted with approval, there was the underlying smell of tobacco and the pile of plastic stacking chairs in the corner, which indicated it had once been used far more than it was currently, before Barbara arrived as a relatively recent Sister Superior. It had justified its spacious existence with meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous once a week, the Mothers’ Guild and other charities, which Barbara had decided simply did not pay. He thought he might prefer the company of the Alcoholics to that of Sister Barbara and then he reminded himself of his Christian conscience. She was a good woman and if she was also insensitive, that was forgivable. She was trying to preserve the unpreservable and the vulnerable, and there was a certain virtue in it. She was also a woman of genuine conscience, a listener, capable of changing her mind. Sometimes she was limited by lack of imagination. What else could he expect? He drained the teacup with loud appreciation and thought first of what a hypocrite that made him and then, wistfully, of what he was missing on television. Arsenal v. Tottenham. The Races. That was what he had planned for the afternoon before he caught the train.

  ‘It was a good send-off, Father. The family were very pleased. I wished you’d have been there.’

  ‘So do I. But you wanted the Bishop and I had another dying soul. Dermot Murray, did you ever know him?’

  He did not say that he had been glad of the intervention of duty. Sister Jude had been an obdurate friend and her demise made him sick to the heart. Barbara did not know Dermot Murray and she did not care. She crossed herself quickly.

  ‘A very good send-off. Even with her loss, little Therese excelled herself with the lunch, they ate it all. I don’t know how she manages with that foul-mouthed girl alongside. Who must be a trial to her. She’s so conscientious, so mature, for twenty-one.’ She leaned forward, confidentially. ‘And do you know what, Father? The contributions were tremendous. We’re actually in profit. The undertaker always does me a good deal. We might branch out into doing funerals, professionally, even weddings, perhaps. We’re committed to Sunday Mass, of course. The chapel, as the Bishop says, is a resource. Should I have taken the money from the relatives? Still, they should be grateful we’ve kept Sister Jude for all these years.’

  He did not suggest that such gratitude was inappropriate. Jude’s pension had kept her; a good pension after forty years’ teaching, pocketed by the Order in return for hospice care. She was not a charity case. She had been an investment. This was not a diplomatic suggestion, simply one that crossed his mind. He had been fond of Sister Jude, an intellectual of the most pragmatic kind, a lover of gossip and laughter and the keeper of secrets. Through her, he understood this institution better than he might have done if his only source of information was the Principal, whom he faced across the teacups. The strain of the day and the week before was beginning to tell on her. Barbara was in charge of a dying institution, but it did not make her immune to the personal force of death. Everyone had loved Jude, although some, like Barbara, had also been afraid of her.

  ‘Father, I can’t stand it. I wonder if God put me upon earth to tolerate a set of mo
stly elderly eccentrics gathered under the same roof, for a terrible number of different reasons. As well as bad language from the staff.’

  ‘Yes, he did.’

  ‘And do I have to tolerate the council tax and that greasy estate agent writing to me every day, telling me how much the place is worth?’

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  ‘And do I have to put up with the Bishop’s bursar phoning on a weekly basis, suggesting the place must be commercially viable, pull its weight, or otherwise it goes on the market and the Sisters out to grass?’

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  ‘And do I have to live in a building that is falling apart in all directions because we can’t pay anyone to get anything mended? And do I have to live with that wilderness of garden and the old goat of a gardener who’s fit for nothing any more?’

  ‘Yes.’ His breath became shorter and he was dreaming of football. Dreaming of another kind of YES, the roar from the terraces on his television screen, which would leave him punching the air, incoherent with pleasure.

  ‘And do I, and the rest of us, have to put up with that vicious little minx coming in and out as she pleases, simply because her sister Therese is one of us and she herself lives so near? Do I have to do it, now her aunty’s dead? The minx, the silly—’

  ‘YES!’ he shouted. ‘YES! Especially,YES.’

  She was stunned into silence, put down her own teacup with extreme caution and quietness before she remembered to close her mouth. ‘Why?’

  He paused. ‘Because she is shunned by heaven and poised for hell.You, we, cannot take responsibility for pushing her in either direction. You must let her in. Whenever she wants.’

  There was a fly buzzing at the window, unlamented. He longed to swat it at the same time as feeling grateful for the distraction of the noise. The game would be half over by now, even allowing for histrionics and injuries. Sister Barbara adjusted the folds of her skirt, disturbed, unconvinced, disappointed with everything, even the fly. He remembered diplomacy.

  ‘Anna could be very useful to you. And besides, they stand to inherit a great deal of money,’ he added, hating himself.

  ‘Who told you that?’ she asked sharply.

  ‘Sister Jude did. Of course, she was a great friend to the whole family, before the girls were . . . ill. And before their mother, poor soul, lost her reason.’ He was choosing his words carefully.

  ‘Oh Lord, I knew Isabel Calvert, too,’ she said, decisively. ‘We were at the same school for a while. She was very devout, even then, poor woman. A lesson to us all. Marries a rich man that much older and what does she get? A swine who abandons her with two sick children. It just shows you the dangers of not marrying a Catholic. Did Jude also tell you he’d abused the girls?’ She leaned forward confidentially. ‘Sexually, I mean.’

  ‘She did tell me that suggestion had been made,’ he said delicately. The fly continued its futile racket. ‘I understand it to have been her opinion that the abusive parent, if either, was the mother.’

  ‘Absolute nonsense,’ Barbara stated. ‘Everyone knows the woman was a saint.’

  They glared at one another. Christopher Goodwin knew he could not win an argument based on hearsay. He shrugged and smiled, prepared himself to move. Once he got home, he could take off the dog collar. Although he felt as naked without it as Barbara probably would without her uniform, there were days when it was an affliction. Someone must have opened a window to let in the fly: he wished they did it more often.

  ‘Well,’ he said, rising, ‘the Calvert family brought you the only young novice the Order has attracted in years. There must be something in that. Novices are as rare as hens’ teeth, are they not?’

  She nodded in reluctant agreement. ‘Surely. Therese is a blessing. It’s Anna who’s the curse.’

  ‘These things are sent to try us,’ he murmured, hating the cliché. ‘And even a curse can be useful.’

  He patted her shoulder in the manner of a senior uncle, although she was older than he, marvelling as he did so at the fact that she, the most decisive and competent of women, was always slightly deferential to men. They all were, with the exception of the late Jude, and he was never sure if it was ingrained, or if it was mocking, or if it was the result of a constant need for the foil of masculine opinion. A man could get away with murder in a convent. They were vulnerable to their own deference.

  ‘The boy Edmund has been bringing with him to help is an exceptional worker,’ Barbara said, rising and changing the subject while moving to the door in one fluid movement. ‘Would he take over on Edmund’s wages, do you think?’

  ‘You can’t sack Edmund, Sister, you simply can’t.’

  ‘I’m sick of putting up with lazy second best for the sake of charity, but I suppose you’re right. A pity: the boy’s a good Catholic.’

  Knowing this was the ultimate character reference, Father Goodwin held his peace.

  ‘We’ll talk about it at the meeting tomorrow, shall we? Anna said she would come and take the notes. You know how good she is at that, as well as with the suggestions, computer literate, too. She’s a breath of air, Sister.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

  They parted beyond the door, she to answer the phone, which shrilled in the near distance of her office, he to make his way to the front door. He was fond of this particular corridor, although always preferring it on the way out to the way in. The floor was flagged with black and white stone, diamond shaped, and the walls were panelled with warm wood, reminiscent of the graciously clumsy house it had been and where the relics of the former beauty now remained solely in the corridor, the refectory and the chapel. It had been bequeathed to the Order in the last century by a holy spinster, who had run her family house as a primary school for the poor of the area. The nuns were to continue her good work and reside in her house for ever. But the school was long closed; the place was a home for those in the Order either in transit or too old for further use, while outside its walls, the poor of the parish were thin on the ground.

  Sister Agnes was waiting in her seat by the door, where she sat for most of the day in her small cubby hole, occupying a hard seat, reading in the poor light from the leaded panes of the window next to her head and never looking at ease, even when she was asleep. Why, for Lord’s sake, did she not have a better chair? He looked at her fondly as she struggled to her feet and opened the door he could easily have opened for himself. She was dimpled and pink-cheeked and plump and breathless, with the smile of an angel. He always wanted to hug her and plant a big smacking kiss on her papery cheek, and he never did.

  So, he argued to himself as he walked quickly down the street in the evening sun, feeling as he always did after interviews with Barbara as if he had been let out of school, the place does have a purpose after all. It is to keep women like Agnes, who could no longer live in any other way, safe and free from harm, locked inside a goldmine. It crossed his mind to visit Anna Calvert, but God help him, he was charged with so much to tell her, he did not have the strength and he did not want to ring her doorbell praying she would be out at work. Besides, she would be back inside the chapel later, saying her own version of prayers; she would not be able to resist that. The child haunted the chapel. God would help her. Father Christopher Goodwin changed his mind about going home at all, and went for the train. The Lord was also served by partaking of the pleasures of friendship and any man had to pace himself, even a priest.

  Such a deceitful door, Anna thought, a door that gives no indication of what lies behind it. It was flush with the wall and the pavement, with a spiteful lintel above it, so that rain dripped directly on to the head of a waiting visitor on rainy days. The fabric of the door was wooden and cracked with something churchlike about its unvarnished, faded contours and the discreet mullioned window, about the size of a tile, set at eye level. The bell was on the side, high in the wall, so that she had to reach to ring it. A normal height person would not have to stand so close to the door to demand entry in this way, but A
nna did. She was so small she could shop in the children’s department: it was as if her height had failed to grow into the maturity of her figure. She reached for the bell, almost pressing herself to the wood, and then stood back, quickly. The door had a way of taking a person by surprise. Agnes lurked behind it, hardly ever bothering to look through the window, the worst, most indiscriminate doorkeeper they could have chosen, but there was no choice because this was her self-appointed task and she was not to be separated from it. The bell rang; she answered it. If she operated by anything, it was smell rather than sight. She would let in the devil, even without sheep’s clothing, and when she saw it was Anna, turned away in disappointment, holding the door open politely nevertheless. Anna was hardly a novelty and not even a sinner, although in Agnes’s eyes, sin was the privilege of men.

  ‘I’m sorry for your loss, Anna. Did you want Therese?’ she asked in her quavering voice. ‘It’s six o’clock, you know. She may be resting before supper.’

  ‘No. Thank you.’

  The ‘thank you’ sounded hollow. Anna strode down the black and white corridor, which always, somehow, pleased her. The tiles were worn to a dull sheen in the centre, the black sharper at the edges near the panelled walls. The geometric pattern invited a game of hopscotch, the way she had played when she came here first as a reluctant child visitor, only slightly fascinated by the prospect of visiting someone described as an aunt, but very old, dressed in a bonnet and looking like a bat. Sulky, dragged by her mother to see her mother’s Aunt Jude. Therese trailing behind and hiding resentment with better success than her elder sibling because she was instantly charmed by the place and she was, in any event, instinctively charming herself. Anna had remained churlish until she was told, yes, she could hopscotch on those black and white tiles and go into the garden and shout if she liked. A little noise would do the place good, Jude said, which puzzled her in retrospect since there had been a small Montessori school for fifteen girls held in a single classroom to the side of the corridor in those days. A long time ago. Sixteen years.