by Rumer Godden
‘Then I like Marcelline’s work,’ and yet, wasn’t it not so long ago, thought Lise, that she too had thought servants’ work degrading?
‘What has happened to those elegant hands?’ Patrice would have asked, shocked.
‘Well, never mind if sometimes they are chapped red with cold from getting up to help with the cows, or covered with mud from planting out potatoes,’ Lise would have retorted, ‘They are happy hands now,’ and, as with all the sisters, ready to turn themselves to anything. There was no sense of rank at Béthanie. ‘Take Soeur Agnès de la Trinité,’ Lise was to tell Marc. ‘It was Soeur Agnès who was sent as Prioress to found our new Béthanie in America, a high position; she also happens to be one of Belle Source’s delegates to the General Council, but it’s she who does the laundry for the whole house – all those white tunics, scapulars, black veils, blue aprons, not to mention sheets and towels and dishcloths.’
Soeur Thecla, who had been at university and was the community’s best scholar, was up at five to milk the cows and, with her sturdy strength, did the work of two men on the farm, ploughing, mowing, carting hay, straw, crops, manure. By evening she was so tired that she could not stay up for Compline but still she had translations to do, Latin to transcribe and, often, letters to write for sisters who could not write or spell. ‘Well, what of it?’ Soeur Thecla would have asked. ‘Any of us do anything – within the bounds of our capability,’ she added severely, which meant no one else could milk her cows.
There were endless needs, few of them ordinary, and, ‘I had thought a convent would be a peaceful place!’ said Lise. Now she knew the reason for those long years of training in self-denial, instant obedience – and adaptability. ‘When we get up in the morning we get through our daily chores as quickly as possible,’ the Prioress told Lise, ‘because we never know what will fall on us or what the day may bring.’ The day or night. It was nothing for the telephone or the gate bell to ring at midnight or two o’clock in the morning. ‘Nor, when the gate is opened,’ said the Prioress, ‘do we know what we shall find.’
Once it was a woman with three small children standing in the road, shivering in their nightclothes. They had escaped through a window from a drunken battering father and fled to the gendarmerie and the gendarmes, uncertain what to do, brought them to Belle Source. The woman was pregnant, beaten and bruised, the children numb with terror. Of course they were taken in and, as they could not stay long in the guest house, the Prioress, with the help of the Mairie, found them a flat, but it was the sisters who furnished it – or compelled people to furnish it, as they clothed mother and children and, eventually, provided a layette. Soeur Elizabeth, the porteress, was a conjurer on the telephone and had factories, shops, rich people on that conjuring line. ‘Yes, I’m a bully,’ she often said laughing. ‘I’m sure they must dread hearing my voice,’ but soon mother and children became another Béthanie family established and protected. ‘The baby, when he arrived, was called Dominic, for us.’
It was not always tragedy. One midnight it was two poachers who had been caught and the gendarmes did not know what to do with their catch of hares, pheasants and trout. ‘They should be eaten fresh,’ they said with all a Frenchman’s respect for food. It was the poachers themselves who suggested the loot should be given to Béthanie. ‘We lived like gourmets for a week.’
The provender, though, was not often as delectable as that or was given in such easy ways. ‘I sometimes think we are the world’s refuse-bins,’ said the Cellarer, and added, ‘fortunately.’
A fruit farm might have a glut of apples. ‘We have some cases of “seconds”, some are going rotten but you could pick them over – if you like to come and get them …’ ‘Twenty kilometres!’ said Lise, ‘and the picking over took us hours.’
A pâtisserie offered éclairs. ‘We can’t sell them; they’re yesterday’s. The cream may have gone off a little, but still …’
A farmer gave a ton of sub-standard potatoes, ‘which had to be sorted,’ groaned the nuns – some for the compost heap, some for the table, some for the pig, ‘but be careful of those,’ Soeur Thecla instructed. ‘He mustn’t have a tummy upset.’
Lise, as one of the two convent car-drivers, soon learnt of Béthanie’s innumerable errands. As well as what she called ‘foraging’, there were the sisters’ normal needs – visits to dentists, doctors, opticians, visits, almost every day, to the hospital. There was marketing, though as little as possible was bought, and there was ‘rescuing’, chiefly by the senior prison visitor, Soeur Marie Mercédes, who, just as Soeur Marie Alcide had gone once a quarter to Vesoul, made, every three months, the long journey to France’s other Maison Centrale for women, the prison of Le Fouest.
Soeur Marie Mercédes’s bones had a defect which made them so brittle they broke if she stumbled or knocked herself; often she had to walk with a caliper or had an arm in a sling, yet still she climbed the prison stairs and managed to sit through the long hours of the week on a hard wooden chair, listening, counselling, encouraging. She had surprising influence; lawyers, even judges came to consult her and she had endless protégées, especially girls to whom she was a mother. ‘I’ll die if she dies,’ said one. They had to be fetched and taken, to the guest house, the station, a foyer, or places where Soeur Marie Mercédes had found them work. She interviewed each employer remorselessly; sometimes Lise drove her to châteaux, sometimes to slums – there seemed no bounds to Soeur Marie Mercédes’ network. ‘You see, Denise has a child and if she works for Madame X, Madame will let her keep it.’ No matter that Madame X happened to live forty kilometres away … Or, ‘No, no. This will not do. They are exploiting Thérèse. We must take her away at once.’
‘The car will wear out,’ said Lise.
‘It does.’
‘How can we replace it?’
‘I don’t know, but it will be replaced,’ said Soeur Marie Mercédes.
Lise remembered an evening when she had been in and out all day with innumerable calls: the Prioress to visit one of her flock in a hospital several towns off; an urgent call to another battered family – ‘The police think the husband has found out where they are and we must act’; finally an interminable thirty kilometres through confusing country lanes to pick up a gift of pullets, ‘two heavy crates of them’. Then, just before Vespers, Soeur Marie Mercédes was called to the telephone.
‘Soeur Marie Lise, we must go. It’s Jacky. She has tried to throw herself in the river.’
‘Well, why not?’ Lise felt like saying. This was at least the tenth time she had taken or fetched Jacky, but the Prioress laid a hand on her shoulder.
‘Jacky is a nuisance, I know, but Sister – I can tell you this because she isn’t one of us – Jacky was raped by sixteen boys one after the other while the others stood by and laughed. Then, to stop her telling, they smashed her teeth in with a brick, which is why she has such difficulty in talking and that adds to her problems.’
‘I’ll go at once,’ said Lise, but the Prioress shook her head and smiled, an indulgent smile which meant that, while liking her spirit, she saw that Lise had not learned to temper herself. ‘After Vespers and supper will do.’ The Prioress could have added, ‘Even Jacky is not extraordinary; remember it’s day in, day out; and, remember too, that important as all this is, it’s still not the most important.’ Lise knew that. The first work of every house of Béthanie, of every nun, was prayer; five times a day the community gathered in choir, ‘and if you have been working outside in an overall or boiler-suit, it’s a real penance to get out of them and heavy wet boots and change back into our white – then back again … five times, dear Mother of God!’ Soeur Fiacre sighed. And if some of those set times had to be missed it was made up in private prayer, in meditation or vigil before the Sacrament. ‘Of course. How else would we get strength?’ asked Soeur Marie Mercédes.
Lise had never known anything like the strength of this fiery little nun; the way she fought for her protégées and, particularly, how she kept th
e distress and hideousness of all she heard, saw – and endured – entirely to herself being, in the community, friendly, witty and invariably unruffled. ‘I don’t think you’ll find this matter-of-course acceptance anywhere but than in Béthanie,’ Lise was to tell Marc.
What other convent, she wondered, would not have been put in a flutter by, for instance, the episode of the drugs, and how many of their Prioresses would not have condemned? It was not for nothing that the word most used at Béthanie was ‘miséricorde’ – mercy.
The ‘day of the drugs’, as she called it, had happened not long after she had come to Belle Source when as Soeur Doyenne, the oldest of the newly professed – Lise was just three months older than Bella – she was sent to the new novitiate, Saint Xavier, to help Soeur Raymonde who had an unusually large number of postulants and novices. ‘But … I thought I was to stay at Belle Source,’ Lise had not been able to help voicing her dismay.
‘When you are needed at Saint Xavier?’ The Prioress’s rebuke made Lise flush. ‘It won’t be for long, three months or so; a Sous-Maîtresse will soon be appointed and you are too junior for that. Meanwhile you can take charge on occasions, sometimes oversee work. Soeur Raymonde asked for you,’ the Prioress added quietly. ‘That, ma Soeur, is a compliment.’
The novitiate had been moved now from that far-away great house Lise and Bella had known in the French Alps, ‘where we were put through the mill,’ as Lise said, to the new building of Saint Xavier outside Paris – modern, totally different yet still Béthanie, as Lise found. Saint Xavier was beautiful in its new fashion, one that did not please many of the sisters but that the young took to at once and, above all, it was at the centre of things. ‘We must know,’ Soeur Marie Emmanuel had said, ‘not doze and dream in our rut.’
Once again Lise saw a new range of girls and women new to her, not Bella, Julie, José, Pauline, Jeanne; now it was Yolande, Gilberte, Sophie, Stéphanie, Germaine. Again there was every kind of face from young to middle-aged, open or baffling in secretiveness, pretty, even beautiful, or plain to ugliness. At that first time Lise had had to keep custody of her eyes, but now it was her duty to look, be watchful, and she had immediately noticed the girl, Sophie, seen her thinness, the pallor of her skin, the dark grey shadows like stains under her eyes; long sleeves hiding arms that Lise guessed carried telltale prick marks. Sophie would suddenly break into agitated talk, was excitable and couldn’t concentrate for more than ten minutes; Lise was certain she had been on drugs. Had Sophie been in prison too where, unless the doctor and matron were sympathetic, she probably had to go ‘cold turkey’ – endure the withdrawal without help, driven almost to dementia by the pain? – Lise had seen it often; but perhaps Sophie had not been in prison, just one of the girls, of all classes, who left home and … Lise pulled herself back; Sophie was here to forget, ‘And so are you,’ Lise reminded herself and, indeed, watching the girl in chapel, Lise could see how, at times, Sophie could be illumined by happiness; at others, Lise found her sobbing there.
‘What is the matter, Sophie?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Are you sure? Nothing I can help with?’
‘Nothing. Nothing.’
Poor waif, thought Lise. Waif in another way from Lucette.
Lucette had gone to Saint Etienne; she should have been at Saint Xavier by now. Lise had expected and half dreaded, to find her there but, ‘Haven’t you heard?’ asked Soeur Raymonde.
‘I haven’t had a letter, or a note, for almost five years,’ Lise said, ‘not since she went to Saint Etienne. I was pleased about that, thinking she was so content and busy she had no need to write.’
‘I’m afraid no. Lucette has had a blow that most of us wouldn’t have been able to take. It was kept hushed-up for her sake, poor child.’
‘But … where is she?’ Lise was filled with consternation and contrition. ‘Where?’
‘Back at Saint Etienne – miraculously. As I say, we kept it hushed, absolutely secret, but I think Soeur Théodore might tell you.’
Soeur Théodore, now Prioress at Saint Etienne, was at Saint Xavier for a conference. ‘To have you and Soeur Raymonde both here at the same time,’ Lise had said. ‘That’s a bounty I never even hoped for,’ and Lise went to her old Responsable now. ‘Ma Mère’ – she still gave Soeur Théodore that title. ‘Can you tell me about Lucette?’
‘It was terrible. Terrible.’ Soeur Théodore gave a shiver. ‘As you know, she came to us from the foyer and from her work at the hospital and was admitted as aspirant, and I have never seen anyone as happy. She went about her work sensibly and thoroughly, but as if it were in heaven. We found she had a sweet voice and Soeur Philomena was teaching her to play the cithare – just by ear, but her ear was true. Then, one evening, just before Vespers, a police van arrived with two gendarmes who had papers. It appeared that by a clerical error, Lucette had been released from Vesoul too soon. She had ten more months to serve; they had come to take her away.’
‘Away? Not – back to prison?’
‘Yes. Back to Vesoul.’
‘But – when she had been released – after all that time.’
‘She still had to pay in full.’
‘How cruel. How abominably heartlessly cruel.’
‘It was. Even the gendarmes could hardly bring themselves to do it. We managed to get a stay of twenty-four hours – our Prioress even dared to telephone the Minister of Justice – but the gendarmes had to come again next day.’
‘Lucette had, of course, been given her black dress and was so pleased and proud – and she had to take it off. I remember I folded it and said, “It will be waiting for you,” yet, as I did that, I couldn’t believe after a knock like this she would want it again, but I didn’t know Lucette. Ma Soeur, that little thing went without a cry or a tear, just held my hand tightly for a minute and then submitted. They couldn’t let one of us go with her. God knows what it must have been like to drive in through those gates again and hear them shut. Soeur Marie Alcide saw her, of course, every time she went to Vesoul and in all those months there was not a murmur or complaint – only that Lucette was counting the days.’
‘When she came out, I had permission to fetch her, but she wasn’t to put on the black dress for a long time; as soon as that horror was over, Lucette was seriously ill and for six months we thought she might go out of her mind. We kept her at Saint Etienne and one of us was with her day and night; the girls, too, helped, and gradually, slowly …’
‘But – why wasn’t I told?’ asked Lise.
‘She asked for you not to be.’
‘Not to be!’
‘I confess I was surprised,’ Soeur Théodore admitted. ‘I had thought she would have fled to you for help, but not this Lucette. She knows you have your way to make and that you should keep to that. This would have cut across it.’
‘Indeed it would, but it makes me selfish, selfish.’ In her distress Lise was crumpling her handkerchief almost to shredding it. Soeur Théodore took it from her, shook it out and folded it again.
‘Put that in your pocket. It isn’t selfish at all,’ Soeur Théodore went on. ‘You and Lucette are both trying to do the same thing – she knows that. She wouldn’t let even such an ordeal – one of the most searing I have ever known,’ said this downright Sister, ‘wouldn’t let it interrupt her; even when she was ill, not in command of herself, somehow she didn’t swerve. Nor, Soeur, should you. Lucette is not your responsibility, but I know she would treasure a letter. She is back with the others now and she will come here to Saint Xavier, but in her own time, which is God’s time. I think He has a special plan for our little Job.’
There was one thought that comforted Lise; no matter what Lucette had suffered, she was no longer a waif.
Next to Sophie, in date of coming to Béthanie, was Gilberte. Both girls were in Lise’s group and could not have been more different – Sophie a problem, stretched to tension with her scruples and fears which seemed to be growing more rather than less. She had a b
ad limp – was she born like that or did something happen? – and for all the care at Saint Xavier could not put on weight. ‘Will she ever be strong enough?’ Lise asked Soeur Raymonde.
‘We’ll see. She’s strong in love, which is what matters, isn’t it?’ Gilberte was apple-cheeked, open-looking and merry, surely one of the ‘makeweights’, as Lise secretly called them.
Lise had, wistfully perhaps, invented a family for Gilberte; a solid kind father: a mother of the same rose complexion: plenty of brothers and sisters and a noisy, friendly, hospitable and comfortable home. Lise sometimes tried to imagine what the father and mother, the whole family, thought about the coming of this cherished daughter to Béthanie and the company she kept, but nothing seemed to disturb Gilberte’s calm, her lazy insouciance and, ‘Gilberte’s a delight,’ she said.
‘H’m,’ was Soeur Raymonde’s only reply which surprised Lise but, as the days passed, she had to admit that often Gilberte was lazy, almost to sleepiness. Perhaps she’s a little stupid, Lise had to admit that too, but I like her independence. Gilberte did not cling to her in the way Sophie was already doing. ‘It seems inevitable with me and young girls,’ Lise said hopelessly to Soeur Raymonde.
One day in her third week at Saint Xavier Lise went up to her room to fetch a book; her room was at the end of the long row of cells and as she reached the corridor, she saw the Prioress coming down it with two gendarmes and a dog; the dog, an alsatian, was sniffing.
Lise stepped quickly back out of sight. As they passed, the Prioress’s face gave no hint of agitation; she walked without hurry and her hands were under her scapular as they usually were. The three were making for the rooms at the end of the corridor where the postulants slept.
When they had passed Lise slipped into her room, found the book and would have gone swiftly downstairs when she heard a sound. It was a stifled sob coming from behind the screen in the corner and there, crouched down in terror, was Sophie.
‘Sophie!’
‘Ma Soeur, don’t send me out. Don’t, Soeur Marie Lise, don’t. They won’t look in here. Ma Soeur, please, please.’
