Seeking Sanctuary

by Frances Fyfield

  ‘Course I’m all right, you made me jump. Go away.’

  He did not move, stared at her so intently she could not meet his eyes. She never met anyone’s eyes, except, in these last weeks, the washed-out eyes of Sister Jude and now and then, those pale green eyes of Father Goodwin, yearning to explain. Clove oil: she remembered it was an inefficient antidote for toothache, a sharp and pleasant smell when removed from those associations.

  ‘You aren’t all right.’

  There are very few people who deserve for you to be rude to them, a sentence flashing through her mind like a neon sign from the many sayings of Sister Jude, delivered in one of her memorably mild, generalised remonstrances, such as, Treat people as you would like to be treated. Strange how the epithets of an old woman had come to predominate, even to be ignored. Anna smiled apologetically, thought of a shortcut to an explanation in a form anyone might understand.

  ‘Nah, sorry. Only my aunt died, you see. Bit upset, that’s all.’

  He nodded gravely, sat on the step beside her. ‘Walk you home later?’ he asked.

  Again, the voice startled her with its depth, while the words sounded like the sort of invitation a ten-year-old might risk at school before they knew the tyranny of teasing, and that was what they would look like too if he did walk her home, two little kids walking home hand in hand down a tree-lined avenue, like something from a dimly remembered advert for Start Rite shoes. And then, a more uncomfortable thought: how did he know that she walked home, or that home was within walking distance? Was he psychic, was he guessing, or was he the one who followed her? She decided, in a fraction of a second, that it did not matter if he was, might even be nice, but she still spoke sharply.

  ‘No, thanks.’ The thanks sounded lame, the rejection immediate. He shrugged, in that ‘No offence taken’ kind of way a teenager might think they had perfected to hide wounded pride, but that was only a guess. He was almost as small as she was, at least when they were sitting down.

  ‘Can I tell you something?’ he said, ignoring the knockback. ‘There is always something you can do when you’re sad. You can always pray. I find it works best. For me.’

  This advice suddenly seemed hysterically funny. Anna threw back her head and laughed loudly.

  ‘Does it work?’

  ‘What do you mean, work? You have brought your book of prayer with you yesterday and today. I noticed.’

  She took a deep breath. ‘I meant does it work? As in getting you what you want. Do you get what you ask for after you’ve prayed for it?’

  He shook his head, puzzled. ‘We do not pray to ask for things. We pray for guidance.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ she said sharply. ‘Like those Muslims bombing New York. Guide this plane for me, God. Let’s take out a few thousand. Must have been one helluva powerful prayer.’

  She heard his sharp intake of breath, listened to it exhale in a patient sigh.

  ‘Why should a Muslim understand a terrorist murderer any more than a Christian understands an IRA bomber? I am Hindu, by the way. You and I are the freaks who carry prayerbooks. And I was worried about you.’

  It was a surreal conversation to be having on the steps of Compucabs telephone exchange.

  ‘Yeah, well. Right. We’d better get back to work.’

  ‘Walk you home?’ he repeated.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘That’d be nice.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  This wasn’t nice. It wasn’t nice at all.

  ‘Father! It’s you! I’m sent to collect you for the meeting. So you wouldn’t be late. I’m to give you a lift.’

  On that evening, Christopher Goodwin would rather have walked through the valley of death. His heart sank as he stood at the door, looking down at the squashed face of Sister Margaret, who wore her veil halfway down her forehead like a helmet, forcing her eyebrows into a frown which was at odds with her smile. Her control of the red Volkswagen made it a death trap. His TV muttered in the background with the soothing noises of a cricket commentary. He was refreshed, if troubled, by his day away and Barbara was perfectly right, he had forgotten the nuns’ meeting and his tedious role of de facto chairman. All he could remember was that he could no more refuse the lift for the mere half mile than he could otherwise have turned off the television when Beckham was about to score a goal, and wasn’t it marvellous, the way that the obligation of manners and the desire not to cause even minor offence could make a man risk his own life without a word of protest. Such was the priesthood.

  She winked at him. ‘C’mon, now, Father. It’s your last chance in this vehicle. Barbara says we have to sell the car and that’s a topic for this evening as well. What a shame.’

  He got into the passenger seat and fumbled for the belt with a fixed smile on his face. Sister Margaret never bothered with hers, or with locking the car doors when she left it parked, so that it was a doubtful act of mercy that the beast had never been stolen. She made the sign of the Cross, sang out a prayer as she gunned the engine and the car lurched off the kerb with a screaming clutch. At the first junction, he closed his eyes, waiting for her to slow down and indicate, listening to her loud humming, which was the only sound above the protests of the wrong gears. She consigned each journey to Jesus and relied entirely on His protection, a faith so far rewarded, apart from the time she had taken Edmund to hospital with his stroke scare and he had fainted in the back. Sister Margaret knew that Jesus and Mary would see her through traffic lights of any colour and five-point turns on any highway, as long as she began with a prayer and did not stop. They arrived within five terrible minutes. He opened his eyes as the car hit the kerb and he was hauling himself out like an animal escaping captivity before he remembered the seat belt. So much for dignity. He could have murdered them both. The relentless good nature and blithe optimism worn on the sleeves of the likes of Margaret this afternoon was so intensely irritating that he wanted to scream, or bark, while on another day it might infect him with a broad smile and an awful tendency towards platitudes, such as, Have a nice day, It’ll be all right on the night, Don’t worry about anything, phrases that were no use to any troubled mind. He hardly noticed the black and white tiles of the passageway as Margaret spirited him through, only hoped that someone would come along and crush the damn car before there was any chance that he would be prevailed upon to get in it again, especially after dark. And it was that time of the year when darkness began to make itself felt earlier and earlier and the idle, polite talk would be of an Indian summer to compensate for the disappointments of the real summer passing and the sky broody with rain.

  He could imagine who would be at the meeting, and hoped it included Anna, to add some substance and enliven the usual dull proceedings. They were pseudo democratic, these ill-attended meetings, invented by Barbara and frequented only by those who either were too humble to make suggestions or might otherwise be asleep. He did not know why Barbara convened them or why he, as Chaplain, should have to attend with the usual smattering of volunteers not clever enough to find alternative duties. Damn, damn, damn.

  When he entered the parlour, he was late and cross, and found, dear God and all the saints, it was full to bursting. Anna sat at a table in the corner, looking suspiciously demure and tiny, facing a laptop, ready to take official minutes. She really did look useful like that and he was touched that Barbara had found her something to do.

  ‘Ah, here you are, Father,’ Barbara said, beaming. ‘And here we all are,’ she added irrelevantly. ‘Including Anna, who insists upon being helpful. She can work that machine that Monica’s niece gave us, which is more than I can. Now we’re hoping to keep this brief and be finished in time for supper. I’ve two motions to put before the meeting. The first is that we sell the car—’

  ‘But we need the car, Sister.’ The voice of Agnes rose, quavering. ‘Shopping and emergencies and—’

  ‘It costs about three thousand a year to keep the car,’ Barbara said firmly. ‘More, if you take into account all the repairs.
’ She looked at Margaret, kindly. Divine protection had saved lives inside that car, but had not preserved the bodywork from her driving or the wing mirrors and windows from the attention of vandals. ‘Margaret is our only driver until Therese has a chance to learn, and even that’ll cost money.’

  ‘If I could make a suggestion,’ Anna said, raising her hand. They looked at her in alarm, ready to tolerate until she opened her mouth. Today, the laptop gave her a role and the proceedings a more official status. For once, Barbara was pleased with her, although she never liked to admit they needed help.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You could do the bulk shopping on-line,’ she tapped the screen of the computer, ‘and have it delivered, all the heavy goods anyway. That would save leg-work. And you could get a taxi account, so that whenever you needed one, you just phone. You’d have to go mad on taxis to spend anything like three thousand a year, even if you all use them.’

  ‘Excellent idea,’ Father Goodwin said. ‘A money saver and you’d have the money from the car itself to play with.’

  ‘That’s not the way it works,’ Barbara said. ‘There’s no money to play with.’

  He rebuked himself.

  ‘And who would do the ordering of the stuff off the computer, which I suppose is what you mean by on-line,’ Barbara went on. ‘It was good to be given that thing, but nobody knows how to use it.’

  ‘I do,’ Anna said mildly. ‘Therese does and somebody else could learn.’

  ‘I bet you Francis knows how,’ said a voice from the side. Father Goodwin turned to look at poor Sister Joseph. She was always ‘poor’ Sister Joseph in his mind because, of all them, she was the only one who struck him as profoundly unhappy, on a different scale to the others with their various moods disciplined into an even state, while her misery was permanent and unconsolable, although he had tried more than once to define it and been turned away. In Joseph, he sensed a person who was not a natural celibate or even a believer; like himself, someone who had to fight for her state of grace.

  ‘Francis could do it,’ she repeated. ‘Francis can do everything.’

  He realised, with a shock of surprise, that she was drunk. Badly inebriated rather than falling-off-the-chair drunk, her voice slurred and her face mottled. No one else appeared to notice and, as he watched, Joseph clamped her mouth shut, crossed her arms and sat straighter, aware of the danger of saying anything more. The hubbub that followed her contribution deflected attention and brought them round nicely to what they were all desperately anxious to discuss. Francis. Father Goodwin was puzzled, a frequent state and not always alarming. Francis, ah yes, the garden boy.

  ‘Can we sell the car and everything else, but keep Francis?’ Agnes asked, breathlessly. ‘That boy is a marvel. He’s mended my curtain rail and the hinge on the door . . .’

  ‘He mended the chapel window . . . no time at all . . .’

  ‘He changed the washer and stopped the tap leaking . . .’

  ‘He changed the sash cord . . .’

  ‘He put those shelves straight . . .’

  ‘And he sings, Father, he sings. Like an angel.’

  ‘What does he sing?’ Father Goodwin asked, still seeking clues, bewildered by the chorus. It seemed that he and Anna were the only ones in the room who needed them. The others were vying in the giving of praise.

  ‘He sings hymns, Father. Beautifully. “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, the King of all nations” and “I know this my Redeemer lives” . . .’

  ‘And how he works. Like a wee slave.’

  He scanned the faces, alive with enthusiasm, and succumbed to the slow realisation that in the course of a day, this boy Francis had been elevated to the level of a saint, into that dizzy realm of sanctified indispensability, which he himself had never occupied. A talented lad with a screwdriver and a bag of nails. It annoyed him. Only Matilda sat silent, counting the beads of her rosary, slower to believe in miracles.

  ‘Sisters,’ Barbara said, ‘Francis is a temporary worker, brought in by Edmund. We cannot possibly afford to keep them both. And we cannot let Edmund go.’

  She looked at the priest for confirmation. He nodded.

  ‘Besides,’ she added, ‘he’s a young man and he wouldn’t stay for long. They never do.’

  ‘He said he would stay as long as we needed,’ Agnes said.

  There was a silence, in which the priest detected disappointment rather than mutiny and wished that excitement came to them more naturally than resignation. He glanced at Joseph and wondered how the hell she had got hold of the drink or who had given it to her. Matilda gazed sadly in the same direction. Joseph kept her eyes on the ground.

  ‘But he’ll be here for a few days?’ someone asked, hopefully.

  ‘Yes. Not tomorrow. He’s away to see his mother. A good boy.’

  Again, that chorus of approval.

  ‘You should get about five thousand for the car,’ Anna said, flatly. ‘I looked up the prices and Father Goodwin could announce it in church. It’ll go by the end of the day, for cash.’

  Something had been accomplished. The buzz was satisfying.

  Over the heads, Anna looked at Father Goodwin and smiled. A real smile, not the usual perfunctory thing, warm enough to have a temporary effect on the acute feeling of unease that had suddenly engulfed him even as he tried to fathom the source of it in the bustle of departures. It was his own, self-taught custom, which owed less to religious discipline than to necessity, that he should control the uncertainties of his temper by asking himself why, at any given time, should he feel as he did. Am I hurt to have another man praised to the skies and my presence ignored? Am I upset by that dreadful car journey? Is my blood sugar low? Am I an old man who hates change, even for the better, or am I worried by the fact that I must soon have this serious conversation with Anna and I dread it? Or has it occurred to me that the only person who could have fed poor Joseph with her own poison would be this gardening boy, because Barbara scarcely lets her out?

  The meeting broke, as inconclusively as always. There was a drift towards supper. He was invited and refused; they had no time for him really. He walked through and into the garden, looking for Anna, hoping she had gone. Or maybe to find some trace of the miracle worker, Francis. The garden soothed him. It was exactly as a garden should be, with a small area of scarcely tamed ground leading on to a labyrinth, a total contrast to Kay’s garden. It was, he thought, a garden to the greater glory of God, because, like the Garden of Eden, it might well contain a serpent or two and of itself it revealed to man his own inadequacy in the face of nature. At least it did if the man in control was Edmund.

  The kiss of the sun for pardon

  The song of the birds for mirth,

  One is nearer God’s heart in a garden

  Than anywhere else on earth.

  Surely there was a tune to go with that? He began to hum. Halfway between the beginning and the end of this garden, from the point when he met that hideous statue of St Michael, only dignified in his own eyes by the amount of lichen obscuring the details of the figure, he realised that a person in search of hygienised nature in the middle of a city might be better off in the park. Indeed, that was where most of the Sisters tended to go, and with the park so near, perhaps the garden really was a waste. There was always the suspicion that Edmund let it run riot in order to deter intruders, to make life uncomfortable, since he was an awkward bugger, who might also be a breeder of rare spiders for all he knew. There was a sort of nurture going on here, which was difficult to detect. The path was swept, the bindweed under control and the shrubs were healthy. There was an interesting variety of plants of what Father Goodwin would have called the jungle variety, based only on his reading of the style sections of magazines where he so often looked and admired, the better to be able to hold informed conversations with the increasingly rich end of his parish when he visited their houses. He sighed as he pushed aside the fronds of a fern, disliking the feel of it while acknowledging that it was handsome in
a savage kind of way. Whatever had happened to lawns and roses? The sigh was on account of his inability to stop his thoughts hopping about like so many baby frogs – or more like errant toads, he told himself, because down near the bottom of this garden, he was remembering that it had shocked him to realise he preferred to visit the houses and apartments of the rich, not only for the many pleasures of looking at their arrangements, but because it was usually easier on the spirit. If the rich were in spiritual need, he was rarely the only source to which they looked. They looked also towards doctors and psychiatrists and new age gurus, or they cured themselves, while the poor of the parish sometimes reached towards him like drowning men and he the only one to save them from hell. The only one who could fill in a form, contact a relative, claim housing benefit and tell them how to get legal aid and avoid deportation, or evict a violent husband, while he, so often, would have to shake his head and say, I cannot do all that. I cannot keep you alive. It is the lot of a priest in a secular society to have responsibility without the power to influence events, let alone pull strings down at the Department of Social Security. Or the Inland Revenue or the Police or the Bailiff. He paused and fished in his pockets.

  Difficult to explain to a mother that he could not get her child off the street and into school and that all he could do was invite her to pray, be optimistic and resign herself to fate, because fate was the will of God, and belief would help, it would, honestly. He could only put her in touch with others in the same boat and mitigate the isolation. Nor could he tell the man that he was not going to die in hospital without his children around him although he had been called purely for the purpose of denial. He did not want the communicants who believed his every platitude, and on balance, was it so bad to prefer the rich? He had been a priest for a long time, become afraid of being considered indispensable, nervous of his inabilities in the face of raw need. It was simply that it was refreshing to be asked his advice by those who had other options, rather than being the one who was asked to throw the rope to the drowning man, while knowing that not only was the rope frayed, but it would not reach. Fewer and fewer of them called for a priest and he was ashamed of himself for being grateful.