Quiet as a Nun

by Antonia Fraser

  'My God, look at that.' We both stopped and observed a nun - young? old? who could tell? - carefully catching a leaf long before it fluttered to the ground. She put it carefully away in a pocket, or anyway somewhere in the recesses of her black habit.

  'Catching leaves is lucky.' My mother was quick to seize on an occasion for optimism. 'We'll find out who the lucky nun is, and you can make friends with her.' I assented rather dubiously. But we never did find out who the lucky nun was. As Tom observed thirty years later, from a distance they really did all look exactly the same.

  At that moment two nuns pulled a crocodile of small girls into the side of the drive as I passed. Identical. Two black crows. The children's uniform, a blur of maroon blazers and pink shirts, seemed singularly unchanged from my own day. I smiled. The children smiled amiably back. Both nuns smiled. The autumnal sun continued to shine, mellowing the rather fierce red brick of the convent facade. That too seemed much as I remembered it. Peaceful. Tidy. Even the creeper on the walls did not romp but climbed up in an orderly fashion. It was difficult to imagine what possible troubles could lie behind that calm exterior - troubles, that is to say, that could not be solved without recourse to the prying outside world. That was after all the world that I represented: Jemima Shore, Investigator, was how I was billed on television. It was a deliberate parody of the idea of the American detective, a piece of levity considering the serious nature of my programme. I was nevertheless an alien to the convent world. But Mother Ancilla had deliberately sent for Jemima Shore.

  I stopped feeling an alien when a nun answered the door. She was very small. Ageless, as all nuns tended to be, with their foreheads and throats covered, so that the tell-tale signs of age were hidden. The short black cape covering the upper part of her body, whatever it was called, part of the nuns' uniform, also partially hid her waist. It had the effect of making her figure into a sort of bundle. She looked a bit like Mrs Tiggy-Winkle - hadn't there been one nun we named Tiggy? Perhaps all small nuns looked like Mrs Tiggy-Winkle. I gave my Christian name just in case.

  'It's Jemima Shore to see Reverend Mother Ancilla.'

  'Ah Miss Shore,' she beamed. So I didn't know her. 'We've been expecting you.' Into the reception room, a large room just by the front door, known for some reason as the Nuns' Parlour - although it was very much not part of the nuns' accommodation, being used exclusively for confrontations between secular and religious worlds. Here parents bringing quivering offspring to the convent for the first time were welcomed, smoothed down by Mother Ancilla, and made to feel - so my mother had told me - that they themselves were about to enter a disciplined but friendly institution.

  The Nuns' Parlour really was exactly the same. The reproduction holy pictures in their dark frames, with their dully gold backgrounds. Fra Angelico seemed the prime favourite. On the table lay the familiar pile of wedding photographs, still surely dating from the forties. At any rate they were still mainly by Lenare and not by Lichfield. Perhaps the old girls of Blessed Eleanor's had abandoned their propensity for lavish white weddings, like the rest of the world? These wedding photographs, when I was at school, had exercised the same secret fascination over me as the Jesuits. I used to gaze at them covertly when my father was discussing my need for better science instruction with Mother Ancilla.

  'But Mother Curtis,' he would say at the beginning of every term, finding the name Ancilla evidently too much to stomach: 'Science instruction by post is really not enough to equip your girls for the modern world.'

  'Oh Captain Shore,' Mother Ancilla would regularly reply with a tinkling laugh. 'I keep asking Our Blessed Lord to send a vocation to a good young science mistress to help us out, but so far, He, in His infinite wisdom, has not seen fit to do so.'

  'I seem to remember a saying about God helping those who help themselves,' began my father. No doubt he intended to refer to such unsupernatural expedients as advertisements and educational agencies. But no-one bandied words with Mother Ancilla and stood much chance of emerging the victor. Especially about Almighty God, someone whose intentions, mysterious as they were to the whole world, were somehow less mysterious to Mother Ancilla than to the rest of us. In the language of today, one would have referred to Mother Ancilla as having a hot line to God: or perhaps an open line was the correct term.

  'Exactly, Captain Shore. Helping ourselves. That's exactly what we're doing with our postal science lessons. Just as Our dear Lord wants us to do.'

  My father gave up: till the beginning of the next term. I stopped gazing at the brides. Even then I suspected that I should never make that honorific folder. God might help those who helped themselves, but he did have a habit of not marrying them off. At least not in white.

  As I turned over one photograph - the face was vaguely familiar - I heard a single sonorous bell ring somewhere in the convent. I recognised the signal. All the nuns had their own calling signal, like a kind of cacophonous morse code. One ring, then another for the Infirmary Sister, two then one for the Refectory Sister and so forth. One bell on its own called for the Reverend Mother.

  Silence.

  A pattering of feet on the heavily polished floor. The swish of robes outside the door, the slight jangle of a rosary that always presaged the arrival of a nun, and then—

  'Jemima, my dear child.' Reverend Mother Ancilla kissed me warmly on both cheeks. I reflected ruefully that probably to no-one else in the world these days was I, at nearly forty, still a child. My parents were both dead. Tom? I could not remember him using the term even in our most intimate moments. Besides Tom, as a crusader, liked to see in me a fellow crusader. He had his own rather demanding child in Carrie and, for Tom, to be childlike or childish was not necessarily a term of endearment.

  I studied Mother Ancilla's face as we talked, and I answered her preliminary polite enquiries. Nuns' faces might not show age but they did show strain. On close inspection, I was faintly horrified by the signs of tension in her mouth. Her eyes beneath the white wimple were no longer the eyes of a fierce but benevolent hawk as they had been in my youth. They reminded me of some softer and more palpitating bird, the look of a bird caught in the hand, frightened, wondering.

  'You never married, my child?' Mother Ancilla was asking.

  I hesitated how to reply. There was still something compelling about Mother Ancilla. 'Too much involved perhaps in your work,' she said tactfully, after a minute's silence between us.

  I nodded, relieved and disappointed at the same time. That would do. Besides, it was true. Until I met Tom I had been too much involved in my work - for marriage, if not for love.

  'We here, of course,' continued Mother Ancilla smoothly, 'understand a life of devotion, for which the ideal of home and family is sacrificed. We too have made that sacrifice, in honour of Our Blessed Lord.' She fell into silence again. ‘It can be very hard. Even at times too hard, unless the grace of God comes to our aid. Sister Miriam—'

  'Yes, Mother?' I said as helpfully as possible.

  'Perhaps the sacrifice was a little too much for her? Who can tell? Perhaps Sister Miriam should never have become a nun in the first place. I wondered so much about her vocation.'

  This was surprising. I had anticipated some more religious bromides, as I described them to myself, about the value of the sacrifice.

  Mother Ancilla took my hand and said suddenly and urgently:

  'Jemima, we must talk.' This time she did not call me her child. 'We don't have much time.'

  'I'm not all that busy,' I began. I realised with a faint chill that she was talking about herself.

  'I'll begin with Sister Miriam; Rosabelle as you knew her.' It was a pathetic story, not uncommon perhaps in a single woman these days, a spinster. But I was conventional enough to be shocked by its happening to a nun. A decline in health. A form of nervous breakdown, culminating in a hysterical outburst in the middle of teaching. Sister Miriam was whisked away to a sister house of the convent in Dorset by the sea, a convalescent home. There she found the greatest di
fficulty in eating, although with the help of tranquillizers her composure returned. After six months Sister Miriam was adjudged ready to return to Blessed Eleanor's. But she was given light duties, French conversation with the Junior school—

  I gave an involuntary smile. 'That wouldn't have been a light duty in my day,' I explained hastily.

  'We have a language laboratory nowadays. The gift of an old girl.'

  A laboratory. That reminded me of the old days of my father's arguments. I wondered if God had ever sent Mother Ancilla that experienced science mistress. And was it too much to hope that God would also have inspired an old girl to endow a science laboratory?

  'And the most beautiful science laboratory, by the way. How pleased Captain Shore would have been to hear that, wouldn't he, Jemima?' So she had not forgotten. Mother Ancilla never forgot an adversary.

  'Did you get the science mistress too?' I couldn't resist asking.

  Mother Ancilla opened her eyes wide.

  'Why, of course. They both came together. Sallie Lund, an American girl. When she joined the Order in 1960 she was already a trained scientist, so naturally she could teach science here. And as her father pointed out, she could hardly teach science without a laboratory. A very dear man, and most practical about money, as Americans generally are. So he gave us it.'

  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.