Seeking Sanctuary

by Frances Fyfield

  ‘I should have realised before,’ she said in that dry, matter-of-fact tone, ‘that a tall man sees such very different things.’

  She smiled with that dreadful wryness he hoped would never become permanent.

  ‘My father, you see, was a giant. As tall as you. Or at least, that’s how I remember him.’

  He ran down the stairs feeling the weight of the bundle of documents inside the anorak pocket, cooler now, just as wet, racing for that damn train. There was enough money for a taxi to the station, no cigarettes, no food and just enough of the anger to get him there. Inside the station, the dog collar got him a discount, and as he waited on the platform, a sad old geezer offered him a cigarette. God forgive him, he took one for later as well.

  Sister Barbara looked up from the bookwork in the office next to the parlour, disturbed by footsteps. They padded by her door, but the direction they took before beginning to fade was uncertain, backwards or forwards, she did not know: towards the front door, or away, she did not know. Her nerves, as she told herself, were frayed and there was something askew with the conscience she did not want to consider just at the moment and never in the middle of arithmetic at any time. Pitter, pitter, pitter, quiet as a cat, skirting round the light of her door on the black and white corridor, and then, she was sure she was right, going back as if nervous to go on. Barbara knocked her heavy ledger on to the floor where it fell with a bang. An indication she had heard and whoever it was risked displeasure.

  She waited for a minute. Too late to do anything more useful here, anyway.Young men in offices worked after ten at night, but she was not one of those, and even if sleepless, she was past her best at least three hours earlier. A good thing, too.

  Because of conscience, or something related to it, she opened her office door carefully and looked to left and right. Nothing. In her stockinged feet, she walked into the parlour. She pulled the grilles and checked the bolts and put the keys back in her office. Good. Then she went in the other direction to the chapel.

  The moon rose behind the huge windows, enhanced by the bare, still branches of the trees. She looked upwards towards it, remembered how long it was since she had last prayed in here, and hurried away. Safe for the night.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Do not fear those who kill the body and after that,

  have nothing more they can do

  Matilda saw Father Goodwin striding down the black and white corridor after supper and tried to stop him, but he did not notice. Before that unmemorable meal, she had seen Francis leave via the front door, and although she could not quite hear the fond farewells and suggestions he eat something sensible for his own supper which she was sure would come from Agnes, she could imagine the sentiments. It filled her with angry misery. Delusions were the stock in trade of the devil. All that she could remember after a sojourn in the chapel was that the rain had stopped and it would be safe to linger in the garden for more than a few minutes alongside St Michael.

  The parlour was deserted as she crept through, turned the key and went out with a feeling of relief, bearing her gifts. For the last days, she had been afraid to spend any time in her favourite place, confining her visits to quick, furtive forays, never staying for long, waving her arms towards the sky, in the hope that the little person who sometimes watched from that roof over there would see her. But Anna had been forbidden: perhaps little Anna would never come, and Matilda, with an endless capacity for forgiveness, could quite understand why she should not. She was a rash, brave child, who might have seen what she herself had seen, since she had tried to wound Francis after all and scratched his face in that futile process, poor child, but no one could be brave all the time. So, there was nothing for it but prayer, and even in the relative cold and dark, which made her mourn the blessed warmth of a kindly spring, she was pleased to see St Michael and sit in a familiar place. The benefit of small mercies was something she had learned in a long life. Each moment of peace counted; regret was as futile as the endless questions, which were a constant source of indigestible pain.

  Such as, why did God engineer life in such a way that those whom you loved were always the victims of pride and held their sufferings from you in case you should understand them all too well? Why had Joseph, her closest friend, turned away from her in such bitterness, as if she had not already accepted her frailties entirely? Perhaps because of the deafness, which inhibited their once endless conversations. And why did the God of forgiveness and understanding make those very same virtues so difficult for proud people to accept? Shame was a foreign concept to Matilda.You did what you did, felt sorry and puzzled about it, since to err was human and forgiveness just as natural. Pain was pain, to be offered comfort and the promise it would be better tomorrow, that was all. She sat heavily on the stone bench at Michael’s feet with her back to him, hating the need to ask questions at all without relying on plain, simple acceptance, which was the real virtuous state. Doubt was sin and questions were anathema.

  Such as, could she have prevented Edmund’s death? To that particular question, the answer was no, because death was the will of God and a matter entirely of His timing, and she doubted, in all honesty, if she could have done much about the method. Francis had been the instrument, first by the simple expedient of finding a way to Edmund’s heart and then breaking it by killing the birds. Heart first, spirit second, and the fragile body last. On the evening of the decimation of the chapel window, she had heard the pop of the air rifle, clear against the blur of other sounds, which her incipient deafness selected with a random choice that still amazed her, and quite apart from that, she had seen the young devil with his weapon and his artfulness, passing her by as she sat as quiet as the statue of St Michael, amused at first by this young man’s arrogant assumption that someone as old as herself would be blind as well as hard of hearing, concluding that, in the way of the young, he simply did not see her at all. But, then, most people didn’t. And she had refrained from insisting to Edmund that it was Francis who killed the birds, because that would have broken his heart sooner, at a time when he wanted love from the boy, and hoped for it. He would not have listened, and no one would listen now.

  Except Anna, who must know exactly what he was like, because Anna lived in a world full of evil persons just like that, and Anna watched, from her roof. But Anna was in disgrace, and might not come back, and Joseph, dear Joseph, as well as Barbara, had made herself blind to the boy. Oh dear, oh dear.

  Supper had been bad tonight. Cold meats and bread, leaden and inadequate, leaving an unsatisfying lining to the stomach. Therese had eaten nothing and she worried about that, too. Matilda had taken extra fruit from the plate and a lump of cheese in the same way she had when Edmund was alive and they would share her fruit in exchange for his biscuits. Grapes were his favourite, but they rarely had grapes unless they were given. Instead, there were endless apples with slightly wrinkled skin, better eaten peeled with Edmund’s fruit knife, which she had taken from where he had left it last, and kept to ward off the devil. Which was Francis, no doubt it was Francis, and she was so afraid of him she kept the knife in her pocket with her handkerchief. Sighing, she took out the lump of cheese from the wrapping of another handkerchief, the best-looking apple from the bowl plus two chocolates, which she really wanted, and laid them on the seat beside her. There were times when nothing else but sacrifice would do.

  ‘Help us, dear Michael, there’s a love. I brought them specially for you. If I leave them and don’t eat them, will you ask the Lord to take note of my hunger and make something good from it? Such as get rid of that boy, before he murders us all?’

  She sat forward, resolutely ignoring the sight of her own, tempting offerings, wanting them to be snatched away, before she could retrieve them. She watched the darkening sky and stood to greet it, moving two steps down the path so that she could see if the back bathroom window of Anna’s place was lit at all. The girl was prodigal with electricity, like the young, and she herself was a silly old woman, and i
t was late to be out, mourning unchangeable things, feeling herself swell with fury when she thought of that boy. Because he knew she knew his wickedness: she had seen it in a single, frightened glance of his and in his conspicuous failure to approach her at all, the only one of them who was not eating out of his hand. It took God years to win a heart, but the devil could do it in five minutes.

  ‘Eat it up, Michael dear, or give it away. There’s no telling what else you might get in heaven.’

  She sat, puzzling it all, elbows on knees, refusing to rest against the stone of the feet, which had once seemed so warm, trying to resist the feeling of great, helpless sadness, which her own blithe optimism kept at bay most of the time, whatever happened, even when Joseph turned her back. Then she stood and wandered the few steps further to the bend in the path, which had always delineated the beginning of Edmund’s domain and that of the birds, listening. In the height of spring, she could hear them in the morning; at this time of last year, she could hear only the shrill sounds of alarm and now there was nothing. Another few steps led on to the best view of the back bathroom window of Anna’s place. The path was slippery with the rain which still hung in the air with the promise of more. Matilda put out her hand to feel the way she knew better than the way to her own room: always wished her sight had gone sooner than the refinements of her hearing, if there had been any choice about either. Her hand felt the wire across the path. There was a rustling behind her.

  In the best of worlds, it would be St Michael, eating his food, but she knew it was the cat. She clutched the waist-height wire, which was thin, cold and moist. Which saint was it, killed by the garotte? St Agnes. She pulled at the wire; it was a further trap for the birds, as if he had not already massacred them all, the bastard. It was a warning, a keep out sign, it was abominable, and held fast. The rustling behind continued. Dear God, the wire should be around the neck of that murderous cat. Matilda yanked the wire. It loosened suddenly, so that she stumbled on her own weight, falling backwards as her feet skidded from beneath her, and stayed half upright by still holding the wire and pulling it free, as if it were bindweed. She was breathless with the effort, shaken with the overbalance.

  Thin, harmless wire, which would not have impeded anything other than a midget running at it full pelt. She flung it to one side, aware of her terrible weariness, the darkness, the futility of waving at that distant light, and retraced her steps, unsteadily. The statue of St Michael had its own familiar outline and she felt as if she were wading towards it. Sat, once she was there, and then turned to place her hands on his feet. There were countless times she had done that; her hands on his lichen-covered toes, dozing in good company, peacefully. She rested like that for a minute, trying to recapture the peace of summer. Then she noticed the damp between her fingers, raised her head and examined the strange sensation of soap that oozed between them.

  She could just about see that the feet of St Michael were covered in a foamy substance, reaching up to his manly calves. She withdrew her hands with muttered disgust and looked for somewhere to wipe them, finding nothing but the handkerchief she had left with her offerings. She worked with that, until her palms began to tingle, then to burn, and then she began to brush them against her habit frantically, until they stuck to the cloth and still burned as if they were on fire. She wiped them on her breast, spat on them, wiped again, and then, trembling, stumbled towards the patio with its light and promise of water. Fell on the slippery path, found the cool of the stone a benison to the burning skin and after that, crawled. She crawled towards the parlour door, with the cold, damp stone of the patio giving the only relief, and when she reached it, unable to bear the thought of taking her hands off the ground, raised her feet and kicked at the door. There was no response. The security light showed the closed grille and the drawn curtains.

  Matilda crawled to the planter at the side, and dug her hands into the damp soil, and even in the extremes of this dull pain cursed at the irony of a regime of obedience and silence, which in making such efforts to keep people out forgot the importance of letting them in. And as she tried to stand, feeling her feet slip from under her and her head hit the side of the pot with a thud, wondered what she had done for St Michael to reject her so much he covered his own feet with acid. Remembering asking Edmund to clean the moss away, wishing against any other wish that she had not done that, calling softly for Joseph to come and help her, hearing nothing.

  Anna needed sleep, more than anything else in the world, but pyjama-clad and restless, she climbed back on to the roof. On the busy side of the view, traffic passed and the Oppo Bar thrived, far from closing time, with a few brave customers sitting outside beneath the awning to celebrate the end of the rain and the end of the summer. On the convent side, the garden was black, until she stared down into it, and the familiar shapes began to emerge, clearer through the leafless trees. The contrast between this side of the building and the other was almost bizarre, live music and traffic visible from one angle, and from the other a place disused because everyone went ridiculously early to bed. It was not so much their style of life that isolated the dear Sisters, she thought, but the way they kept to a sleeping and eating timetable suitable for children younger than eight. What did they do with all those wasted hours? Could you dedicate sleep to God?

  The peace of the garden and the darkness of the house infuriated her: they did not deserve it.

  The new bareness of the trees allowed her to see as far as the patio, faintly illuminated by the security light, which, only a week before, had twinkled with dim insignificance behind leaves. She was too far away to observe detail, wished she had Father Goodwin’s height, which would enable her to see more, but she could see enough to notice that the patio had changed, very slightly, from when she had last looked, with him, an hour or so before. No major change, simply the addition of a big black bag in front of the door.

  Which meant, in her exhausted estimation, that someone had put it there. That someone had, perhaps, been working in the garden at an hour which was late by their standards of lateness, and the thought induced panic, because the obvious person was Francis, coming and going as he pleased, plotting whatever sabotage he meant for their lives. The panic succeeded the anger at their stupid somnolence and the anger succeeded the panic. Why should Barbara not answer her phone and why should she be allowed to sleep? Anna slithered downstairs, picked up the phone and dialled 999. She remembered to withhold the number and was the model of succinctness in her speech. She was a neighbour of the Blessed Sacrament Convent in Selwyn Road, she told the calm voice that asked her which emergency service she required: she had seen three people climb over the wall at the back and knew that everyone in the building would be dead to the world. They were old and vulnerable. Would they send someone quick? They would need to bang long and hard on the front door to get a response; the old dears never knew their danger, and no, she would not give her name.

  That done, she put the roof ladder back against the wall and drew the curtain around it, which made it look like a makeshift student’s wardrobe, and put out the bathroom light. Perhaps this piece of mischief would allow her to sleep, but oh God, she had done it again, stupid, so she was not going to watch what happened. It would invite disclosure and compound the childishness, but she hoped they caught him. Duvet over the head, willing herself into the cure of sleep, she regretted the 999 call, because it was what she did all the time, react without thinking and then regret it. Other people thought before acting, while she lived with the gaps in her life and fought with the conclusions like a mud wrestler, making futile gestures as she slithered around, and she was sick of simply reacting, rather than planning, but she did not know what else to do, except cry, for her mother, her father and Therese, not necessarily in that order, and then try to sleep, because whatever else, there was work the next day and that was the only certainty. Tomorrow, there would be a metamorphosis. She would wake up wiser, and begin to plan . . . And in the midst of this, the entryphone buzzer went
on buzzing.

  It was like a wasp, trapped in the room, and for all the time she had lived there, with visitors as scarce as friends, it was still an unfamiliar sound to be buzzing without the normal backdrop of the music she turned up loud as soon as she came inside. Against the silence, it was commanding and offered no alternative. It went against every instinct she had not to respond to the sound and fail to let someone in, because it could always be Therese; it might be Father Goodwin again. But that tiny bit of logic said, shit and damnation, it would be the police, because that was the consequence and she’d better face the music. Wearily, she pressed the button on the console: a simple, automatic reaction, followed by the single thought that maybe this was a foolish thing to do.

  Foolish, at eleven o’clock at night, when she was crazy tired, mixed up, bound to make every explanation for every stupid action sound sillier than it was. She had enough time to consider that if it was a copper asking why the hell she had called them out, she would have the option to shrug and say Who? and act like some dumb child they would be reluctant to arrest. She had to get to work the next day, had to: it was the only fixed thing in her life and she needed it. And then she thought, no, she would not behave like a child, taking advantage of her own size; she had done enough of that. She would behave like a truthful adult, tell it like it was.

  Music came from the flat below hers, a comforting reminder of close humanity and another reminder of how she had never attempted to make friends with any of them. She held the door half open, composing herself for the portentous footsteps of a policeman making enquiries. They were swifter steps, coming upwards from the well of stairs, until she saw him bounding up the last flight with his yellow hair and she was suddenly completely paralysed, until Francis was there, with an enormous boot, jamming the door open. Golden Boy, with his shining, saintly eyes.