Devils, for a change

by Wendy Perriam

  Christmas dinner changed to Christmas breakfast, her favourite meal of all, and eaten in the Community Room, which meant that they could talk. They even called it breakfast, since it was much more than a drink – real tea with tea leaves in, fresh white rolls with butter, which they never saw all year; sometimes even porridge, made with milk. She could see the bare wood table festive with its cloth, flowers and holly glowing in the centre, paper napkins twisted into swans; hear the happy music, as they processed in, two by two, Sisters Luke and Anna on recorders, Sister Gerard entrusted with the drum. Everybody bubbled – gnarled old nuns like children, opening gifts, and giggly. The gifts were tiny, often useful items which were needed in their work: a packet of red cabbage seeds for the nuns who did the garden; needles or a thimble for her, as vestment-maker; new dusters, wooden spoons. The extern Sisters bought them, with a few precious pounds squeezed from the donations which benefactors sent in through the year. Or someone’s friend or parent might contribute a few chocolate bars, or a box of home-made fudge, which went straight to Reverend Mother, were stored and saved for Christmas, then shared around the nuns. They couldn’t give each other presents, only holy pictures, but those, too, were loving offerings, prayers and greetings written on the back.

  And then there was the excitement of the cards – Reverend Mother as Santa Claus again, handing out the Christmas post which had piled up during Advent, when letters weren’t allowed. Her letter from Aunt Eva, the large untidy writing, the row of slanting kisses at the bottom of the page.

  She ached to see those kisses, to be back there with her ‘family’, sipping that rare tea, exchanging squares of Milky Bar. She could almost hear Sister Clare slurping down her porridge, Sister Joseph’s phlegmy snuffling wheeze – all the petty maddening things which had strained her screaming nerves for years, tested her compassion. Now she missed them.

  She eased up from the bench. She would never find her Lord and God, if she didn’t keep on calling Him, didn’t keep on walking, offering Him her pain. She shivered, as she plodded on. The tide was ebbing, the listless water silting into sludge; two glossy magpies squabbling over a carcass on the bank. Two for joy. How long this Christmas Day seemed, how sluggish, like the river. At Brignor, it would race – every hour accounted for, every minute sanctified, Christ and the community sharing it together.

  She paused to watch a surge of gulls, wheeling swooping past her, their soaring white breaking up the stillness and the grey. She envied them their wings, felt some tenuous link with them. Had they flown from Norfolk, from the bleak and lonely coast beyond the convent?

  Have mercy on me, God, have mercy …

  In the shadow of your wings I take refuge

  till the storms of destruction pass away.

  She followed where they led, turning up a narrow lane into a labyrinth of streets, dark confining ancient streets, which seemed to turn her footsteps into empty echoing sighs. Each time she turned a corner, she prayed to see another human face, even a blurred form through a window, or a driver in a car. There were no faces – save painted ones on pub signs, peeling ones on posters.

  She stopped, disorientated. Windows windows windows all around her and beyond her – hundreds of them, thousands, reflecting nothing but themselves. The streets had opened out, and she was standing in a square, gazing up at a massive soaring tower block, its dizzying glass and concrete rearing up so high, she was forced to tilt her head right back to see its topmost storeys. Another monster faced it, a third beyond, blocking off the sky. The three giants-stepped towards her, closed her in, whittled her to nothing, as they had squeezed the ancient churches trapped and pinched between them. Those churches must have once been free to soar, spires thrusting up to a huge uncluttered heaven. Now, they, too, were dwarfed.

  She backed away, still dizzy, read the sign blazoned on the square: ‘City of London’. She had heard about the City, the seething hub of London, with its banks and finance houses, its million people packed into one square mile. Where were they, all those million? Did not one single one of them still live here after work, or return to walk these streets, buy a Christmas drink? Every pub she’d seen was locked and shuttered, every restaurant closed, and those tower blocks seemed like vast abandoned monuments, left behind by a vanished master race, who had built higher and more daringly than any tribe before them, then been swept away themselves.

  At least nobody could see her in this City of the Dead; criticise her crumpled skirt, shrink from her old clothes. She had made herself a rag-bag and a solitary, when, once, she’d taken such great pride in belonging to an Order renowned for its ideals – one of the strictest left in Europe – who got up every midnight for the Office, and were back in choir again by six a.m.; still observed silence for the best part of the day, went always barefoot, even in the winter, refused to shorten their devotions or their skirts. Other nuns had modernised, relaxed the rules, relaxed the fast, docked their floor-length robes. The Second Vatican Council had ended in December 1965, just a year before she entered; had urged all nuns to embrace the twentieth century, update ancient practices which wasted time or money. Vacuum cleaners instead of besom brooms; habits which would wash, and took fewer yards of fabric; wimples with less width and starch, so that nuns could drive and still see out both sides; less starch altogether, both real and metaphorical.

  Some Orders rushed to change, took things far too far – shouted in the corridors, escaped to cinemas, gossiped over wine. A few firebrands in America went further still: started using contraceptives, wearing dungarees. Other Orders compromised – hair cut short instead of cropped, sober calf-length dresses, months of agonised debate before deciding to use Christian names. But the Sisters of Notre Dame de Bourges remained faithful to the spirit of their Foundress. They hadn’t ignored the Council; had bought their Hoover, removed the most medieval of their undergarments, trimmed their habits from eleven yards of serge to only seven. But those were merely details. Should their Foundress have returned, glided from her coffin to inspect her modern heirs, she would have found no major deviation from her own sixteenth-century practices and Rule.

  Her old headmistress, Mother Gabriel (now ‘Nancy’ in a skirt and blouse, and well into her eighties) had warned her, long ago, of the rigours of the enclosed contemplative life, counselled her to wait, to reconsider. ‘With your gifts, my dear, your good exam results, you could probably serve God better in an active teaching role. I know you’re keen to enter right away, but if you wait until your eighteenth birthday, you can do your novice year at Ely, then go on to our scholasticate at Cambridge University, study as a nun, Gloria.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mother, but I know that isn’t right for me.’ God had given her the words, the courage. Contemplatives were special – only six thousand out of a million total nuns. And their lives could touch and succour the whole world, not just one trifling school. ‘Separated from all and united to all,’ Evagrius had said. She had discovered him in the library: a fourteenth-century monk and mystic who believed that man must mortify himself until he became spirit more than matter, and could then experience union with God. She had thrilled to his ideas, longed to be pure spirit like an angel; didn’t like her body with its newly rounded breasts, its messy monthly curse, its down of pubic hair. God was Pure Light, Evagrius declared. That, too, she understood. She had often stood, transfixed, at Blakeney Point, watching the sun alchemise the sea; exulting in God’s presence as the sun went down in a blaze of painted sky.

  She was reading other books, not just for her A levels, but preparing for a future far removed from History, English Literature. One Trappistine had written that the life of a contemplative ‘prefigured heaven’ because when all other jobs had vanished – nursing, teaching, running schools – the work of contemplation would go on for all eternity. She loved that word – eternity.

  ‘Bloody waste,’ her father said. ‘Waste of education, throwing your whole life away, your chances.’

  In one sense he was right. Another book s
he’d borrowed described contemplation as ‘wasting time with God’, like Mary Magdalen’s precious ointment ‘wasted’ on Christ’s feet.

  She had always been obsessed with God, playing saints or hermits when other girls played dolls. Aged just ten, she had found her desert cave in an abandoned worked-out quarry; fasted forty nights in it – or would have done, if her mother hadn’t dragged her back to liver-sausage salad and rice pudding. Later, she played martyrs – stakes thrust in her heart, lions slavering round her bound and naked body. She begged God to give her the stigmata, kept examining her hands and feet, waiting for the bleeding wounds which would prove she was a saint. She pretended she could levitate, or spend entire nights praying on a sixty-foot-high pillar like St Simeon Stylites, who lived for nearly half a century without a wink of sleep. They weren’t just foolish games. She wanted to be special, vow herself to God.

  ‘GOD IS LOVE’, she’d seen written on a poster, when she was only eight or nine; stored the words like treasure. She knew love was important – all the grown-ups said so, and the songs. She didn’t think her parents loved each other. They shouted such a lot. God never shouted, banged His fist on tables, or complained about burnt toast. She yearned to run away from it – the rows at meals, the nagging, the brown skin on the rice, the dingy khaki kitchen which seemed to have soaked up all the rows. Heaven would be gold, she knew – and quiet.

  By seventeen, she was less naive, though still in love with God; realised now that martyrdom could mean something rather different from stakes or ravening lions. The contemplative life was itself a form of death – the equivalent of being stripped and stifled, gagged, imprisoned, bound. There was an intoxication in renouncing everything, breaking self to powder, keeping nothing back at all. Outwardly, she still laughed and joked and studied, went picnicking or swimming, shopping with her friends. She was always popular, had her crowd of cronies. She and Katy dared miniskirts and eye gloss, giggled over desperate readers’ letters in the women’s magazines. But she also had a secret life, where she tried to skimp on meals, bath in icy water, put pebbles in her shoes, sleep without a pillow, or blankets on her bed – anything that would break or hurt the body. She also refused to apply to university. Degrees were pointless, if your true work was praising God. Her parents were outraged.

  ‘I never had your chances. If you’d had to work through college, do it all the hard way, then you wouldn’t take this line. It’s completely irresponsible.’

  ‘And what about my grandchildren? I’d always hoped you’d marry, settle down close by and …’

  She heard a clock strike one, braying through her mother’s wail, returning her to London; one chime for twenty years. It was echoed by a deeper chime, a sudden peal of bells. Churches everywhere. She couldn’t get away from them. Convent bells calling her to dinner. First, she had to find it. She must eat something to get her through the day, allow her to keep walking. She should have plucked a few bananas from those bulging crates in Soho, grabbed a mouldy cauliflower. These litter bins seemed far more mean and meagre: old papers in their stomachs, dirty crumpled cartons. She stopped to check a pile of cardboard boxes, a great load and spill of rubbish heaped outside an office door – empty bottles, dribbling cans, Christmas wrappings stained with wine – a drunken office party with no food.

  The bells were ringing still – the second call for dinner. Almost automatically, she joined her hands, said grace. ‘We hope in you, O Lord, and you give us food in due season.’ She bowed for the ‘Our Father’, which always followed grace, then rummaged in the next few bins, repeating just one line: ‘Give us this day our daily bread …’

  Her hands closed round half a loaf – best white bread, fine and clean, the sort they had for Christmas, not coarse brown Advent fare. It was stale and hard, but clean. She broke a tiny piece off, ate it very slowly, as she offered up her thanks. It was difficult to swallow. Her throat felt parched, constricted. There was a puddle in the gutter, a swirl of muddy water above a blocked-up drain. She dipped the dry crust in it, sucked the moisture out. A few grey bedraggled pigeons flurried round her feet. She threw them half the bread; must share her Christmas dinner, extend her prayer of thanks.

  ‘Your mercy, O God, is boundless, and your gifts without end.’

  Two hours later, she brought the dinner up, vomiting and spitting, as spasms shook her body, racked her throat. Could one small half half-loaf take so long to void? She retched again, again, as if she were sicking up her past, her twenty years as a nun, the endless months of struggle when she’d been told by Father Martin that she should feel crushed, annihilated, totally destroyed; that only then would her humility be deep enough for her Saviour to return.

  She spewed up a last drool of smelly fluid, clinging to a ledge to keep her balance. Her whole body craved to rest, but where? She couldn’t lie on pavements, and if she fainted in the street again, there would be no obliging tramp, this time, to share his precious cardboard. Was it only yesterday she had been lying on a Dunlopillo mattress? The beds in the Infirmary were kinder than the hard ones in their cells. They even had sheets, which were normally forbidden, a luxury for invalids alone. Cool white sheets against her burning head, an iced drink on a tray …

  She inched on down the street, stopping every pace or two, to try to calm the queasiness which still churned and griped her stomach. She crossed the road in front of her. ‘NO ENTRY,’ said the sign which barred her way. That sign was right. She had no business to be out at all, when she’d made solemn vows to leave the world, shun streets and shops and cities, stay till death within the convent walls. She turned the other way, towards the shelter of a building. ‘KEEP OUT. NO ADMITTANCE.’

  She stood paralysed between both signs, both forbidding her approach. There was nowhere she could go – not back to the enclosure, nor forward anywhere. How could she go forward when she had doubted God, abused Him?

  Slowly, painfully, she knelt down where she was – her damp skirt flecked with vomit, her rough boots splashed with mud – begged her loving Saviour to return.

  WINTER

  Chapter Five

  ‘I just don’t understand how you could have behaved so irresponsibly – someone with your background, under vows …’

  Father Anstey was pacing up and down the kitchen of his Earlsfield presbytery, his tight black suit straining at its buttons, plump hands sawing the air. ‘Your Abbess has been absolutely frantic. She’s been on to the police, had half the village scouring fields and woods, every nun praying for your safety …’

  Hilary said nothing. Her own selfishness and thoughtlessness had shocked her into silence. She was stunned by what she’d done – even without this priest’s reproaches – to have dared to leave at all, tell no one where she was; to have taken money which had been donated to the convent, which belonged to Reverend Mother and therefore ultimately to God.

  ‘Couldn’t you have phoned yourself, far earlier than this – not wrecked their Christmas Day?’

  ‘I did, Father, honestly. Well, I tried, but …’ She was adding lies to theft now. She hadn’t tried, not really, had found another phone box, but stood there paralysed, unable to explain, or even dial the number, when there was no explanation, no excuse. She’d wrecked Father Anstey’s Christmas Day as well as the community’s. He should be at his sister’s, sitting down to Christmas supper – cold turkey and mince pies – and, instead, he was on duty, making soup for vagrant nuns. She forced the oxtail down, though it was still almost cold, with lumps, and she’d already had two other soups in just the last two hours. She’d been found that afternoon in the graveyard of a London church – found by the police. They had made her Cup-A-Soup, asked her a few questions, which she’d answered with evasions, terrified to say too much, in case they locked her up, or sent her back to Brignor. ‘I … I’m fine,’ she’d said. ‘No, really. I was just looking for a priest.’

  After half a dozen phone calls, and a few jokes about priests vanishing once they’d said their Christmas Masses, whil
e coppers had to sweat it out all day, they found her one – miraculously – a kindly priest, with sparse white hair, whose name she never heard. He served her home-made turkey soup, bones and skin and all, then went straight to phone his colleague, Father Anstey; returned, smiling, to his guest.

  ‘The good Lord must have sent you, dear. You say you need a job, and Father Anstey’s got one. He phoned me just two hours ago, desperate for some help. One of his parishioners is really in a spot. She had a stroke a while ago, but still needs live-in help. Her usual nurse is away on Christmas leave, visiting relations in New Zealand, so she won’t be back for weeks. They fixed her up a substitute, but the poor dear soul collapsed this very morning, and was rushed to casualty. What timing! You’d think an appendix might do the decent thing, and not perforate – bang! – on Christmas Day. Poor Father’s in a spin himself, hasn’t had much Christmas yet at all. But if I drive you down to Earlsfield right away, you can meet the invalid, then maybe …’