Devils, for a change

by Wendy Perriam

  She was laughing now, enjoying, doing what he said. It wasn’t even difficult. Both sun and Schubert were deliciously relaxing; warmth seeping through her skin, horns and strings beginning an antiphony, the melody repeated by a pleading oboe. Music was still a real indulgence. Stephen had walked off with her radio, at least six weeks ago, never brought it back, and the other Kingsley sets were rarely tuned to concerts. She had been starved of music in the convent; this rich and urgent music with its fierce rhythms, startling contrasts; had been rationed to an organ, or unaccompanied chant. She felt her spirits soar with the soaring woodwind, her heart twist over on the downward glide of the cellos. Robert had caned her passionate, able to respond to things. He had also called her ‘woman’. That could have sounded rude, but it hadn’t, and she’d relished it. Woman. She’d been scared of him at Liz’s because he seemed so male; male and threatening, male and coarse. He was still male, very much so, but it intrigued her now, rather than alarmed her.

  She watched him planing wood, his total concentration on the plane; his body thrusting back and forwards with it, both hands tensed and braced. He had rolled his shirt-sleeves up, and she could see the startling contrast between his tanned and roughened hands – workman’s hands, with broken nails, stained fingers – and the pale skin of his forearms, which looked delicate, almost womanish, despite the long fair hairs. His brows were fairer still, but heavy, well-defined; his strong and squarish jaw suggesting tenacity – or stubbornness. The word ‘strong’ kept returning. Strong voice, strong hands, strong principles – strong appetites, as well. He had poured himself a pint of beer, and swilled it every now and then, in noisy eager gulps. Or he’d reach out for the long French loaf, which he’d brought in with the terrine, rip a rough hunk off, almost seem to throw it down his throat. She hid a smile as she tried to imagine him in the Brignor refectory, eating with that passion, declaiming through the silence, dropping forks or food, as he tried to make his points. He stopped his planing suddenly, as the music reached a climax, started conducting with his French-bread baton, arms sweeping up and out.

  ‘I love this bit, don’t you? But they’re taking it so slowly. I’ve got six different recordings of it and none of them’s quite right. Perhaps I should have been a conductor, instead of a mere architect.’ He gestured to his orchestra, beckoned in the strings; suddenly stopped dead in the middle of a phrase. ‘Hey! Is this your sort of music? I didn’t think to ask, don’t even know if you like music at all.’

  ‘I love it!’ She flushed. She had replied with too much vehemence, surprised herself and him – by almost flinging out the words, half-rising from the sofa, as if scared he’d turn it off. ‘It’s terribly important – I mean, it was, once, still is, but …’ How could she explain – that aching sense of loss again, music sacrificed so young, flogged out of her at seventeen, labelled ‘dangerous’, ‘indulgent’? She sank back on the sofa, tried to blank out all regrets, feast herself on the exuberant violins, which were exploring the main theme, embroidering it, enlivening it.

  Robert chewed a bit of baton, watched her anxiously. ‘Are you all right, Hilary? You don’t feel ill again?’

  ‘No, I’m fine.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good.’ He broke her off a piece of bread, spread it with terrine, put it in her hands with a sudden explosive laugh.

  ‘What’s funny?’ She was amused already by the way he kept on talking, interrupting the music he claimed to find so riveting.

  ‘They thought I was your brother.’

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘The people at the conference. Well, I mean, I told them so. I thought it would be simplest. I just said you weren’t too well, so I was driving you back home. The problem was I’d already given them my name and they picked me up on it – some awful bossy girl, with a “Jesus Loves Me” badge, who said how come you were Miss Reed – and she really stressed the “Miss” – if I was Mr Harrington? I told her you were “Ms”, married and divorced.’

  ‘Oh, you didn’t, Robert.’

  ‘Yes, I did. Serves her right for being such a nosy parker. Hell! I’m yakking again, aren’t I? Sorry, Schubert; sorry, little sister.’ He picked up a piece of sandpaper, gave the wood a final rub; started humming the last phrases of the scherzo, as if it were impossible for him to be completely quiet.

  Little sister. She smiled down at her plate. She’d always wanted a big brother, someone she could turn to when her parents quarrelled, someone who’d be proud of her. And brothers were quite safe, safer than priests. She did feel safe with him. He hadn’t tried to touch her, save once, to take her hand, and that, too, had been more brotherly than lustful. She was certain now he had done nothing in the night, except look after her. She still marvelled at his kindness. She must have disturbed his sleep for two consecutive nights, if she’d been sobbing, shouting, threshing in and out of nightmares, yet he hadn’t once complained. In fact, those things, however shameful, had somehow bonded them; made them closer, in a way, than if they‘d shared their bodies, or a bed. How odd to think this almost-stranger, whom she’d met only three times in her life, knew more about her now than anyone in the world, including Liz. He knew about Simon and her loss of faith, about the whipping and the sleepwalking; had seen her cry, heard her rant; and still he hadn’t shrunk from her, just acknowledged all of it, and then gone on to compliment her.

  She glanced at him again, admiring his mixture of energy and patience, the eager careful way he worked. She liked to think of him building shelves for books, for treasures gathered round the world, a world he saw as rich and strange. She’d seen so little of that world, knew nothing of its riches. But she could learn, use him as her teacher. Teacher-brother.

  The plate felt very heavy in her hands, the inch or two of bread too daunting for her mouth. She was still so tired – often was at Easter, after all the fasts and strain of Passion Week. It had been impossible at Brignor to snatch an extra hour in bed. Easter Sunday was the greatest of all feasts, but still vigorously timetabled, with extra time in choir, extra recreation. Recreation meant sitting on a hard wood chair, sharing safe and cheerful subjects with your Sisters, not creeping up to bed to snatch a nap. By the time they’d reached their tipsy trifle in the evening, she had often felt too tired to lift her spoon. But now she was allowed to sleep, sleep all afternoon, if that was what she wanted, do exactly what she liked.

  It still felt almost wicked, yet she lay back, closed her eyes. They had reached the slow movement in the symphony, and even the music seemed to be telling her to rest, to ease up, just let go. The music of the plane was also slower now, and had somehow joined the orchestra, with Robert as conductor. She looked down at her score, saw it was marked ‘rest’, the remaining pages blank. How wonderful, how kind. This particular Easter, all the other nuns could sing, while she slept through till summer.

  Chapter Twenty One

  ‘It’s like summer,’ Robert said. ‘The first week of April and too hot for a jacket.’ He took his off, used it as a pillow as he lay back on the grass.

  Hilary removed a tiny crawling insect from her dish, parked it on a leaf. ‘I thought you said it was our New Year.’

  ‘It is. And quite right, too! One should always start a new year with some hope, not in dark and cold and snow. All we need is flowers. Another month, and there’ll be harebells and blue scabious in their hundreds here. It’s all blue in May, isn’t it – forget-me-nots and speedwells, borage, bugloss, bluebells – blue like you.’ He reached out to touch her dress, a meld of several different blues. ‘How d’you like your tipsy trifle, by the way?’

  She spooned neat brandy from the bottom of her bowl, nodded her approval. ‘There’s more tipsy than trifle. That beetle thing was reeling. And Sister Gerard would have gone into terminal shock. She used just half a spoon of cooking sherry, and thought that was pretty daring. Even so, some nuns got giggly on it. It was the only sniff of alcohol we got all year, so I suppose it went straight to our
heads, or maybe just the thought of it. It was really children’s trifle – you know, custard and red jelly, with glace cherries on the top and wet sponge at the bottom.’

  ‘I’ve made it all wrong, then?’

  ‘Yes, wonderfully wrong.’ She scooped up a fresh strawberry, layered between ratafias and double Jersey cream; held it in her mouth, let its winey flavour jolt and tease her taste-buds. She was still practising enjoyment, learning to be a hedonist, a pagan. All their meals had been improvised so far, since Robert had no cooker, but this was the first real picnic, with the springy turf as tablecloth, the curve of downs surrounding them, like the plush and padded back of some gigantic sofa. They could see the lighthouse far above them now, dwarfed into a pepperpot, a toy. They had walked down the hill to find shelter from the wind, but the terrain still felt high and breezy, with other hills below them, a humped quilt of graded greens. It was Easter Monday, Bank Holiday, yet the crowds were somewhere else. This whole wide sweep of downland seemed like Robert’s private sanctuary, which he had bought to please her, as he’d also bought the strawberries and the wine; found delicacies in tins, like olives and smoked oysters. He was gobbling olives now, spitting out the stones, arranging them in patterns.

  ‘I envy you, in one sense – the way everything’s so new for you – books, ideas, philosophies, even wine and food. So often, by your age, people have become blasé, with jaded palates, jaded minds – seen it all, done it all. But you’re just starting, coming fresh to everything.’

  ‘But you’re not jaded, Robert. In fact, you’re the least blasé person I can think of. You sort of crackle with enthusiasm.’

  He laughed. ‘All the same, I can’t eat a mere smoked oyster the way you did just now, with that mixture of surprise, delight and terror.’

  ‘Well, it sort of looked … alive, and anyway, it did taste strange, coming after – what were they? – black truffles?’

  ‘Truffes à la Périgourdine. I’ve been saving that small tin for years, waiting for someone worthy of them.’

  She was touched by all his trouble, the way he’d picked out books for her, marked passages, suggested other authors; ransacked his cupboards for exotic foods and fruits; had even made the tipsy trifle, not just because the name had charmed him, but also so she wouldn’t miss it, wouldn’t break tradition. She had been telling him about traditions in the convent, reluctantly, at first, since it still seemed like betrayal; then more enthusiastically, as he seemed to understand, and, finally, the little things – the posies at each place for Easter Sunday, the way even meals had to match the liturgy: boiled turnips for the fast days, jelly for the feasts.

  ‘Right, it’s jelly for a year then. You deserve it.’

  She let the last fat strawberry slip slowly, richly, down, then sucked the word ‘deserve’. Such a new and unfamiliar word, which brought an immediate rush of pleasure, followed by a feeling of complete unworthiness, and a small sour voice saying: ‘All you deserve is penance for a year.’ She had to quash that voice. Robert, like Ivan, had urged her to leave the past behind, concentrate on ‘now’, the precious present moment. It wasn’t easy, when she had spent so long with her sights set on eternity. And she would have to unlearn all that anxious looking inwards, all that concentration on soul and sin and conscience; look outward for a change. In just two days, the world seemed so much larger. Robert had expanded it, not only with his trips abroad, his constant references to philosophers or writers she had never even heard of; but also through his interest in things like science and cosmology, so she was aware now of other galaxies, other forms of being, worlds on worlds.

  She gazed up at the clouds, their strange and various shapes – lozenges and anvils, swags and plumes and streamers, a squat truncated gargoyle – clouds changing as she looked at them, merging, breathing, bits breaking off in ragged wispy trails. She had called them white, but that was far too simple. They were every shade of pearl and milk and oyster, with a touch of pink magnolia, a hint of amethyst; some streaked and fretted grey. As a child, she had loved the natural world – walking on a winter beach beneath a sky as churned and angry as the sea; or seeking lugworm casts on the glassy tide-washed sand, where her feet glugged in and out and the wind whipped her streaming hair. Sometimes, she had stretched out on the dunes and gulped down great strong draughts of sky, or imagined the waves breaking right across her body, instead of further down the strand, as if she were the sand itself, pounded and sucked down.

  All that had been forbidden in the convent. Brignor stood just ten miles from the coast, yet she never saw the ocean in her life again. They had lived in unspoilt country, beneath vast dramatic skies, yet had to keep their eyes down, not feast them on raw nature. She had missed so much, she realised now; had never looked before with such intensity, seen all the different greens, all the different grasses: tall and bearded ones with coarse and wiry stalks, shorter mossy growths, frail yellowed stems which trembled in the wind; had never fully noticed the way the shadows fidgeted on folds and falls of hills, or the exact shape of the gorse buds, the mixture of dead wood and new bright leaf. She picked up a grass, examined it, felt its whiskery softness on her cheek. ‘I had another dream last night. That ship again.’

  Robert reached out for the cheese, cut himself a hunk. ‘It must be the lighthouse. It’s hungry for a ship or two, so it sails them through your dreams.’

  ‘No, this was a ghost-ship, but with lots of high frail rigging. I was climbing it this time. It’s funny, really, I haven’t dreamed in years, yet now the dreams are coming thick and fast.’

  ‘You must have dreamed, Hilary. We all do every night, or so those sleep researchers say. Hey! Perhaps I’ll be a sleep researcher, instead of an Otto Klemperer. It must be really strange staying up all night with rows of snoring bodies twitching all around you.’

  ‘Well, at least I’ve given you some practice.’

  He grinned. ‘You didn’t snore – not once – and if all the subjects are as fascinating as you are, I’ll apply for the job this instant.’

  She forced some light reply, still found it very difficult to accept his compliments; was never really sure what was joke, what not. ‘Fascinating’: that was a term which applied to Cleopatra, or Helen of Troy, or to the glamorous Ms Swanson, not to her mere namesake.

  Robert swigged his wine, refilled both their glasses. ‘Tell me about the dream.’

  ‘There’s not much to tell, except the climbing, which seemed absolutely terrifying. Oh – and yes – the end. That was ghastly, too. There were all these small white bodies like cocoons. There were babies inside, baby pupae with their eyes still open – not dead at all, yet I was flinging them overboard, really hurling them in the water with an awful sort of glee. I didn’t seem to care a fig, just watched them drown and struggle, then went back for more. It felt so violent, not like me at all.’

  ‘Are you sure of that, Hilary?’

  She flushed. ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Well, sometimes I suspect you’re quite a violent person. I mean, isn’t a nun’s life pretty violent in itself?’

  ‘Violent? That’s the last word I’d use.’

  ‘Think about it, though – those things you told me just today: the whole concept of putting yourself to death, breaking down your personality – what’s that but a kind of violence and destructiveness? And I suspect some nuns become addicted to it. There’s excitement in extremes, and even pride; seeing how far you can go, how much pain and humiliation you can take without cracking. I’ve told you before, you’ve got very strong emotions, so if you’re stuck in a system which won’t allow them out in normal ways, is it any wonder that you crack? Look, Hilary, my sweet, I realise we’re both avoiding the subject, have been avoiding it two days, in fact, but I’m also well aware that those marks are hurting you. Oh, I know you haven’t said. You wouldn’t, would you? That’s all part of the package – suffering in silence, avoiding human comfort, but I can’t bear to think you want to spoil and scar your body. You ought
to cherish it, look after it, not flog it into pulp.’

  She winced, fought a jumble of emotions: embarrassment, resentment, shock at that ‘my sweet’; surprise at his own mixture of tenderness and anger. The marks were hurting, especially when she moved, and the rough fabric of her dress chafed the open skin. Whatever had sedated her had also been a painkiller, and now both effects had faded, leaving her whole body sore and throbbing. Yet she resented him for mentioning it, shadowing their day, smirching its soft colours with darker threatening tones. She caught his eye, looked down.

  ‘I’m sorry, Hilary, that must have sounded cruel, and the last thing I want is to upset you any more. But someone’s got to make you realise what you’re doing to yourself. Don’t you see, it’s very bad for you not to allow yourself to dream, or cry, or even lose your temper?’ He was fiddling with his olive stones, disrupting their neat patterns. ‘D’you know what I suspect?’

  She shook her head, didn’t trust herself to speak.

  ‘That you entered the convent to escape your own strong feelings, and that what you saw as the dark night of the soul was plain and simple depression. Because you’d suppressed all your vitality, you see, your whole sensitive and creative personality, tried to become someone else completely, a sort of saintly robot, serene and even-keeled and totally controlled.’

  She still said nothing, thought back to her child-self, lying on the sand dunes, those wild imaginary waves crashing over her body, foaming through her hair. She’d been only twelve or so, yet she’d felt so old – powerful-old, like the ancient rocks around her, or the huge cedars in the grounds of Holkham Hall. The first time she’d seen those trees, she had seemed to become a cedar with them, her top limbs touching sky, her deep roots clutching earth; endless noise and movement in her branches, the whine of wind, the flap and start of a bird. And it had been frightening, hadn’t it, the pain she’d felt in her own hands and feet and skull when they’d felled trees or scythed back hedges: her raw wrists bleeding with the stumps, ears aching with the cries of murdered flowers. She could never tell her parents what she felt; would return to the house from her wild walks in the country as a different tamer person – that timid tepid house where the only feelings permitted were her mother’s disenchantment with the weather and the world, or her father’s sullen grumblings at a change of syllabus. How strange that Robert understood – some of it, at least. She chewed her piece of grass, tried to sort her thoughts out.