by Thea Astley
“I say!” he started to cry excitedly, but his resentment jerked the reins. Let Leo suffer.
“Mmmm?” Leo asked abstractedly, negotiating a welded set of lovers and a car.
“Nothing,” Tommy said. “Nothing. Just thought of something.”
Leo had every light blazing in the shack like a sailor’s welcome; he set it electrically on fire, drank brandy cokes and spun endless Previn discs. Writhe, clunk! Tommy muttered sleepless on foam-rubber bunk in the sleeping annexe. Worry your pansy guts out. And he smiled through his insomnia until eleven when he heard Leo bang out of the shack and restart the car, a signal for him to nose under the bar and pour himself a muscular drink which he took back to bed.
“I’m having my Ovaltine, mumsie,” he murmured to the shadowy wall. “It brings out the best in me.”
VIII
“THIS—BLOODY—PLACE,” Sister Beatrice murmured, “will drive me up the wall. She swung her face, stuffed redly with unsaid words, and stared across the placatory landscape. It gave back its unblinking calm.
Sister Celestine nibbled at arguments like the most timid of mice.
“No one can perform miracles,” she suggested. “If you can’t get it done before September, you can’t get it done—and that’s all there is to it.”
“My dear,” Sister Beatrice said, “living, living like this is the great miracle. Oh, don’t be shocked. It’s true. Reverend Mother doesn’t expect miracles”—twisting the ring on her left hand savagely—“she gives cold commands. ‘Then all smiles stop together.’ Oh, that woman should have been an Inquisitor! Can’t you just see her roasting the heretics? Basting, perhaps!”
“Sister! Sister!” Shocked Sister Celestine turned away from the big woman, who laughed out loud.
“Oh, come. It’s simply that an old pupil of mine was visiting last month to show me her first baby—a gorgeous little boy. And do you know what she told me? Just as she drifted off under the ether she said, ‘Please, Reverend Mother, may I have permission to have this baby without curtseying?’ The doctor told her later. Isn’t that a scream?”
Sister Celestine went scarlet and could not reply. She turned her beautiful grave face away to the protection of the grape-green trellis.
“No wonder they won’t have women in the hierarchy!” Sister Beatrice continued. “Imagine it! Lady Popes!”
“Lady what?” asked a voice from the other side of the leaf curtain.
The vine ceased its writhing and Sister Philomene, angled crazily, came blinking out of the sun with her unshockable eyes and triangular smile. “I’m no Beauvais, no Stogumber. Go on. Finish what you were saying, Sister.”
She swung her beads threateningly while Sister Beatrice, knowing that every community must have its spy, pulled a large white handkerchief from her pocket and dabbled at her damp forehead.
“Nothing,” she said. “It’s nothing. The anguish of the servant, that’s all. Time-tables. Time-tables. Bells, bells, bells.”
“It’s nearly end of term,” Sister Celestine, the heavenly optimist, consoled. “Then we will all be able to have a change of scene.”
“Is it jelly for tea, Sister?” Sister Beatrice demanded blandly and suddenly. “Hadn’t you better make it now? It will never set in this heat, despite the refrigerator. You should add a pattern of shamrocks in angelica in case Monsignor might call.”
Sister Celestine was shocked, yet although humility and youth both prevented her speaking, she was scorched by the other woman’s laughter shivering through the grape trellis and clusters of round plump fruit.
Sister Philomene smiled her crooked, bitter smile and inwardly planned to report this heresy.
“To be Hibernophile is not an article of faith, my dear, though criticism uttered audibly in some places seems to constitute heresy. This country has built the Church on the superstitions and courage of the Irish. It’s natural they are a little arrogant among their own.”
Elderly Sister Philomene turned away, pointing her feet slowly in their well-polished crinkled black. Examining the toe-cap of each shoe, she was hypnotized by the sun-spot on each, the tiny turbulence of light, the only morsel of warmth she seemed to carry with her, despite the angry red capillaries that latticed her cheeks. Beneath her guimpe she folded her arms and moved crabwise to the rear of the convent building, apexed towards vengeance.
‘“Where there is no love, put love, and there’—so one supposes—’you will find love,’” Sister Beatrice quoted, her eyes absorbing more sky colour than they could possibly hold. “Heaven knows, I try. I try to love her, but she affects me the way Sister Matthew used to. But no longer. Once I could not raise a hand, let alone a heart. No one seems to help or touch her. She is so lonely, so alone.”
“But we are told you are never alone when you have God,” Sister Celestine said, a shade too sanctimoniously, but tearing a grape from a stalk as she passed and putting it to her beautiful mouth.
“My dear, you are so very young.” Sister Beatrice patted her arm kindly. “That is the greatest and most terrible loneliness of all.”
The younger woman was not sure if she should listen or even if she understood; yet observing Paddy glumly hoeing beyond the basket-ball court, his face set expressionlessly over routine, she was perplexed. Could it be, she wondered, that there was too much joy in her relationship with her Creator, that sanctity was more arid than she had supposed and all this abandonment of self was a sensual—dreadful word!—pleasure, a subjective one that should not be tolerated? Crossing the lawn in front of the stony saints, she had a further glimpse of him sauntering round the corner of the building trailing his unwilling hoe and whistling mournfully. Too shy to speak she watched him amble past, accepted his grunted good morning and grin with a smile that crept out like a mouse, then saw him bowl up to Sister Beatrice and start chattering away, an old friend.
When does the joy cease? Sister Celestine inquired of the faceless sky. Will I settle into the despairs or these older people? Following Sister Philomene she re-entered the safety of the convent walls, pausing by the chapel door which, opened, gave out its own peculiar atmosphere of silence, prayer, and security. She went in to pray for all of them, but Sister Philomene continued her angular course down the passageway to Mother St Jude’s office where, having entered with her bitter virtue, she proceeded to expose this or that folly, to insist, to complain, to demand.
Like Monsignor Connolly, she was very old and won all arguments.
Father Lingard felt oddly in the presence of all the concern. Negotiations at this level had something of the quality of prayers.
I suppose, he thought blasphemously but honestly, Christ sensed this looking down from the Cross. There they are and there am I and still I remain apart. Listening to the music. Or is it that playing in the orchestra I cannot hear a sound, perceive even the curve of this stupendous aggregate of notes?
Sister Beatrice, still flushed, but without the usual up-lilting mouth, and now mere participatory audience, leant forward over a concealed anxiety and waited for Mother St Jude’s next words that should, by all calculation of previous results, make the final decision.
“This is not common, thank God,” she stated. The set of her jaw defied its frequency. “Nor is it an everyday matter. I think here, Father, what we are confronted with is the good of the community posed against that of the individual. What we must ask ourselves is which is the more important.”
She awaited. The dustless parlour cupped itself hungry for the reply fragmented by the doubts of others while the watching crucified figure silently pleaded. On whose behalf?
“One tends to be overwhelmed by numbers.” Father Lingard said after some dubious seconds. “I cannot believe this is always right.”
“But such a disrupting influence could cause damage throughout our little community.”
“Ah, Mother, forgive me, but should not, on the other hand, your very numbers be a strength against such a happening? Somehow I can’t help believing . . .” He stopped altogether and Si
ster Beatrice’s heart thudded shockingly under her starched guimpe.
“Please go on, Father,” Reverend Mother said, or ordered.
“That—well—that the care of the individual soul is the first concern of Christianity. Not a sparrow, you know. Not one sparrow. After all, the masses can look after themselves, all welded cosily together, saved by their conventionalism.”
“But the scandal? Think of the scandal!”
“One should be able to survive that with the truth on one’s side.”
“Yes, yes.” Reverend Mother’s jaw tightened. “But have we the right to expose others to that? Have we?”
“You obviously want Sister Matthew to leave,” Father Lingard said. “After all, I am only your spiritual adviser, thank God, and have no ultimate say in the application of your community’s Rule.”
They were locked in indecision.
After that terrible evening with the unfortunate little music-teacher, Sister Matthew had become quite intolerable. They had hardly been able to prise the pair of them apart, clinging to each other for some dreadful succour in the twilight garden of the convent to the distress and scandal of silent observing neighbours. And when eventually a sedated Miss Trumper had been removed by doctor’s car to a rest and observation wing of the private hospital, Sister Matthew had plumped herself square in the grass plot and wept loudly and terribly until they had bodily carried her inside where her sobbing had gone on and on until another doctor administered an injection and she fell away from her problems into sleep. But next day she had vanished before matins and was found in the practice-rooms worrying a Bach subject until it cried aloud for release. A false calm cleansed her face. She sat chilly and reserved at table listening to the words of Teresa of Avila until her compressed lips were opened by her heart and she shouted, “Stop it! Stop it!” rushing from the refectory to the chapel where prostrate between the stalls she screamed silently to her deaf God. Somehow, during that night, again she had sought the angry core of her disturbance and scrawled on the white chapel walls the words, “Plaster Saints”.
The purple chalk, Lenten in its implications, was still on her fingers.
“Why, Sister? Why?” they had asked. And she could not say—or was unwilling.
“Have you lost your faith?” Reverend Mother had asked fatuously.
“No, she had replied, with a smile behind the smile. “My virtue.”
Of course, that was nonsense, everyone agreed at the hysterical consultations in presbytery and convent parlours, but even the utterance of such a thing hinted at an instability of temperament and wavering standards.
“What do you imagine the cause of this breakdown to be?” Father Lingard tried again.
“It’s not a sudden illness, you understand, like measles. It’s something that has been developing for a long time. In fact, I would venture to say since her noviceship. She was always the strangest of postulants—tense, appearing to conceal yet withholding nothing. Nothing that seemed of importance, anyway.”
“Then what triggered it off?”
“Sister Beatrice thinks there is some association with her music. She talks constantly about her interpretation. It really was quite embarrassing after the last examination she took.”
“She failed then?”
“No, no. She passed most creditably. It was something the examiner said to her, we feel. Some comment he made, though we are unable to find out what.”
“Oh?”
“Oh, nothing—im—improper, Father. Purely relevant.” Reverend Mother’s face would have lit a queue of martyrs to any Coliseum.
“Of course, of course,” soothed Lingard, who regarded all this as ah so much nonsense. “The real thing is, what does Sister Matthew want, poor soul? Does she want to leave? Does she wish for a dispensation?”
“She doesn’t know. She is so confused we feel we must make up her mind for her.”
“What she really wants,” Sister Beatrice interposed, and she couldn’t help her smile, “is to play the nineteenth Bach Prelude and Fugue really well.”
“‘Bach every time,’” said literate Lingard.
“What’s that?” Reverend Mother asked querulously.
“I was just quoting. Could I see her perhaps, alone, and have a little talk about all this?”
“Certainly, if you feel it necessary or helpful.” Mother St Jude, suspicious of mockery or opposition, gazed at her shoes, which she polished with missionary fanaticism. They had the gloss of a soul that could do no wrong. She nodded at Sister Beatrice, who retired to the corridor still astonished at finding her dislike transmuted to love or, if not actually love, sympathy and anxiety.
Sister Matthew was whiter than despair.
With her hands trapped in each other in the concealment of her unpinned sleeves, she entered the parlour. Objects moved away from her, for now she seemed to have no softness to give, no tenderness to explode. She sat straight on the hard chair and looked down at her lap while behind her rustling authority closed the door.
Father Lingard watched the young nun for half a minute and finally, “Well,” he said gently, “you seem determined to worry us all to death.” (The big safe chunky family doctor my dear nothing can go wrong you may have carcinoma but I’m not telling you that just a bit of a lump here is it? or here? We’ll have you fixed up in no time at all. The deeper the voice the higher the fee.) He hated himself.
“Can’t you cry?” he asked curiously. “I shan’t tell.”
And abruptly the smile went out behind the smile like a candle after Mass and without knowing she was weeping, softly and despairingly, she put her face into her cradled hands upon the table.
Father Lingard waited.
“Are you unhappy here?” he asked at last.
“Yes,” she spoke between the thin barriers of her prison fingers.
“Have you been for long?”
“I think so. I don’t really know.”
“Do you think this life is unsuitable, perhaps? Or is it just that there is someone, perhaps, you don’t like as well as you might?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t be ashamed of not liking it here,” he said. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of in having mistaken one’s vocation.”
“You talk in clichés,” she said.
“I know,” he agreed humbly. “It’s the fault of this sort of life, of this sort of training. We must believe in clichés.”
She looked up at that. “Perhaps I am unsuitable, then,” she said.
“Is there anything special worrying you? That you’d care to tell me—I mean, not as a confessor, you know, but just as another human?”
Sister Matthew went sick inside and clutched the slippery edge of the table.
“We aren’t human, though, are we? We’ve lost the habit.”
“Oh, but that’s just it,” he insisted, still gently. “We’re very human, and if anything our human qualities are magnified within, even though without they are concealed.”
She wondered about this.
“Tell me,” Father Lingard persisted. “You must tell me.”
“That letter,” she confessed at last. “About—Mr Leverson. I sent it.”
Breaths were expelled and the crucified Christ leant closer.
“Do you hate him?” Father Lingard asked after a small moment.
“No, no. Of course not.”
“Perhaps you admire him a little too much? Could that be it?”
She began to cry again.
“Please, Sister,” Lingard pleaded, confronted with the open wound, “please don’t cry. I do understand. Not fond, that way, I know. I know exactly how it is. He is kind, gifted, fatherly? That is all there is.”
“Yes.”
“And you were—let us say—hurt in some way?”
“Yes.”
“Would you care to tell me why?”
“No, please, Father. Not why.”
Lingard signed, a release that seemed to come more and more frequently
in these days of forgotten sun. Would the green ever again surge? “It’s no matter. The serious thing is you might have ruined him. Did you send the letter to anyone else?”
“No.”
“Well, thank God for that. Now the best thing you can do is make amends, I think, by writing a little note to him saying you’re sorry.”
She cried suddenly, “It’s not so simple. I don’t believe any more in sorrow and forgiveness. So what use would there be?”
“The plaster saints?” He looked straight at her bright surfaced eye. “I know. I feel it, too, at times. Not only at times. There seem to be no replies as you shout aloud in a deaf world.”
“Then what do you do?”
“You do nothing,” he said. “You endure and sit on the tip of each day, a Simeon Stylites, watching the hours tick over the west and come up in the east and eventually the drought breaks. That is what they tell me, anyway.”
Sister Matthew, propitiating her inner restless demon, was forced up with her slender face averted so that all the other could see was the pathetic curve of her black-veiled head, her narrow shoulders oppressed with what her self had revealed to her.
“May I go, please?” She remembered a confession once . . . Father, I feel sick, may I go? He had talked and talked, too long as she reeled and wobbled behind the dusty curtains with the air percolated by the drone from the grille. What could he say? But nothing was decided. Nothing seemed even moving towards any natural climax. His intention had been to open the door, even this natural one, for her, but she was through before he could reach it, and running, gauchely flying and flinging down the corridor, past a holy-water stoup towards the side garden grape-green in the half-light of the pepper-trees.
Sister Celestine was pacing the side-walk that served as a cloister, clutching at fragments of medievalism in the hot downlands and saying the Rosary sibilantly when the distressed woman bird-flapped beside her and plucked at her arm.
“What will I do? What will I do, Sister Celestine?” she begged.
“Pray,” answered Sister Celestine, who had not yet found it to fail and did not intend to be unkind.
