The Wounds of God

by Penelope Wilcock

  They went softly from the room and closed the door. Brother John stood with his arms full of Tom’s wet clothes, his face troubled.

  ‘That was a heartless way to treat him, Brother. I don’t understand it. To have him kneel before us all—poor soul, it was cruel.’

  Brother Edward chuckled. ‘Come and dump his wet things in a pail before you’re soaked yourself—and treat them with respect. That’s Father Abbot’s good winter cloak you have there, if I’m not mistaken. Heartless, you think? Don’t you believe it, Brother. Father Abbot would give his life for that lad. You just wait and see who comes and sits at his bedside as he sweats out his fever through the night. How were you intending to vote when you came to Chapter?’

  ‘I wasn’t sure. It was a serious thing he’d done. I don’t know even now—but seeing him kneeling there—poor soul, what he’d been through! I’d not the heart to vote against him. It could have killed him, three nights in that bitter weather.’

  ‘Not him, Brother John, he’s as strong as an ox. It would take more than an east wind and a fall of snow to snuff that lad out.’

  ‘Aye, maybe, but it was hard-hearted. Father showed him no pity at all.’

  Edward shook his head, smiling. ‘No, no, that’s not the way it is. Brother Thomas has a welcome in this house again and it would have taken nothing less to win it for him. He’s a man in a thousand is our abbot, Brother John. He knows what he’s about. And he holds this community in the palm of his hand.’

  I lay on my front in the grass, absentmindedly pulling apart a daisy, watching the seagulls wheeling over the harbour. There was a fishing boat out at sea on its own. All the others were drawn up on the shingle at this time of day.

  ‘I like Brother Tom,’ I said. ‘That was a good story.’

  ‘Yes, it was one of my favourites when I was your age. But I liked Father Peregrine best. It’s a skilled job, that,’ Mother said thoughtfully, looking out at the solitary fishing boat coming in towards the beach, ‘bringing a boat safely into harbour. Especially on stormy nights when the sea is rough.’

  She yawned and stretched her arms above her head.

  ‘It’s a good story, but a long one. I could sit here all day, but I expect they’ll be wondering at home where we are, and wanting their tea. Let’s go back.’

  ‘When you began,’ I said, linking my arm in Mother’s as we started down the lane home, ‘I thought it was going to be a story about Brother Francis. It started off about him.’

  ‘Francis? Yes. He and Brother Tom tend to turn up in the same places. Although actually Brother Francis’ story is quite different from that, at least, in some ways. He had his struggles too, but they were different from Tom’s.’

  ‘Will you tell me Brother Francis’ story? Will you tell me it tonight?’

  Mother laughed. ‘Not tonight, no. I’ve had enough storytelling for one day, and I’ve promised Mary I’ll read a whole chapter of The Wind in the Willows before bed. Tomorrow, maybe.’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ I said firmly, ‘for sure.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Poor in Spirit

  Cecily had put something up her nose. She came running in to Mother from the garden with an air of great importance, to communicate her news.

  ‘There is a stone inside my nose,’ she said impressively.

  ‘Oh, no! Let me look. Come here, into the light by the window. Oh heavens, there is too. Just a minute, let me get my tweezers.’

  Mother went for the tweezers that she kept hidden away in her box of private things. She would never let the little ones play with them, because she said some pairs of tweezers were better than others, and having in the past wasted her money on tweezers that wouldn’t work properly, she didn’t want to lose a good pair. She kept them for plucking out the bristly hairs that grew on her chin. In general Mother was in favour of hair, and refused to shave the hair off her legs or under her arms like Therese and I did. But then she wouldn’t go swimming at the sports centre because she was embarrassed to be the only lady with hairy legs and armpits. She didn’t mind the beach, because you can get away from people there. So what she thought about it wasn’t quite straightforward. As she said herself, you can’t always close the gap between what is and what ought to be. Anyway, she drew the line at bristly chins.

  She poked about in Cecily’s nose with the tweezers, but the stone, though it was low enough to be seen, was too high up and too well-lodged to be freed with the tweezers.

  ‘I daren’t push it at all in case it goes even further. Beth, fetch me the pepper. Honestly, Cecily, you really are the end.’

  Beth brought the pepper and Mother shook some onto the back of her hand.

  ‘Here, sniff this,’ she said, holding it up to Cecily’s nose. Cecily obediently sniffed it, and sniffed it some more. Her eyes watered a bit, but nothing else happened.

  ‘Oh dear. Bother it. I’d better phone your daddy. He’d be coming home in half an hour anyway. We’ll have to take you to the hospital.’

  Mother phoned Daddy at the book-binding place where he worked, and he said he would come home straight away and take them in the car up to the hospital.

  ‘Therese, will you give Mary and Beth their tea if I’m not back in an hour?’ said Mother. ‘You can heat up the stew from yesterday, and there’s an apple pie in the cupboard. Open a tin of evaporated milk. I don’t know when we’ll be home. You know what it’s like waiting in Casualty. You could grow old and die before you ever saw a doctor. Come on, Cecily, don’t start crying. You’ll be all right. Fetch a book to look at and a dolly to play with.’

  ‘Can I come too?’ I asked.

  ‘We’ll be a long time, Melissa. Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, I can bring my homework.’

  I wanted to see what the doctor would do.

  Daddy came home, and we bundled Cecily, who was whimpering by now, into the car, and set off for the hospital, leaving Mary and Beth waving in the doorway.

  The hospital was a large, dingy building constructed of flat expanses of pale blue stuff and plate-glass windows. There were no spaces left in the car park, so Daddy went in search of somewhere to park while Mother and I took Cecily in.

  Cecily and I sat on two of the chairs that lined the corridor while Mother gave our details to the receptionist who sat behind a glass panel in the wall.

  A wide doorway led out of our corridor into the next corridor. That was also lined with chairs and people sitting on them, waiting. A notice over the doorway said ‘X-RAY’ with an arrow pointing one way and ‘FRACTURES’ with an arrow pointing the other way. The walls were painted with buff-coloured gloss paint. Under the plate-glass window that looked out onto the car park stood an old-fashioned radiator, and in front of it a low coffee table stacked with back copies of Country Life. Someone had pushed a cardboard box with some rather dirty toys in it half under the table. On the wall opposite me stood a fish tank. There was coloured gravel in the bottom of it, out of which grew two pieces of water weed. I counted the tropical fish swimming among the weed. I could not be sure because they were very small and kept disappearing from view, but I think there were about five.

  Mother came and sat down beside us. ‘I do hope we won’t be here too long,’ she said. ‘Come and sit on my knee, Cecily. I’ll read you your book.’

  Cecily shook her head. ‘It hurts in my nose,’ she said. ‘I want the stone out now.’

  A doctor (I suppose he was a doctor; he was wearing a white coat with the buttons undone) came walking along our corridor, out into the next corridor where the other people were sitting. He stopped beside a rather prissy-looking lady with a little girl, about five years old. The little girl’s arm was encased in a plaster.

  The doctor looked down at the little girl. ‘Hello,’ he said, in a jolly sort of way, ‘how are you?’ The little girl stared at him, and didn’t say anything. The doctor had short, frizzy black hair except for a bald bit on top. He was wearing glasses with gold rims. He kept his hands in his pockets, and h
e had a clipboard tucked under his left arm. He smiled at the little girl, but she didn’t smile back. He took his hand out of his pocket, and took hold of the clipboard and read the papers on the front of it for a minute.

  ‘Well, Mrs er… Robbins,’ he said in a brisk sort of way, looking up from the clipboard at the lady, ‘this shouldn’t take a moment. We’ll just take her dressing off and have a look at her. All right?’

  ‘Thank you, doctor,’ murmured the lady, but the silent little girl came to life quite unexpectedly.

  ‘No!’ she cried out. ‘No! You can’t! No!’ She sounded quite panicky. The lady with her looked embarrassed and cross. ‘Don’t be silly, Sarah,’ she said sharply.

  ‘Oh, don’t you worry,’ said the doctor. ‘We’ll have that dressing off in no time.’

  ‘Stop it, Sarah. Don’t be such a naughty girl.’ The lady’s voice was rising in irritation over the top of the little girl’s voice. She was screaming incoherently, ‘No! No! No! You can’t take my dress off,’ and starting to cry.

  ‘Now come on, Sarah. If you’ll just bring her along here, Mrs er… we’ll have it off in no time,’ said the doctor.

  They disappeared down the corridor out of sight, the little girl still crying and protesting, her mother still telling her off.

  Why didn’t he listen? Why didn’t he think? What was the matter with him? I looked at Mother, who was shaking her head in disbelief.

  ‘I’ll bet you that child’s never heard the word “dressing” before,’ she said. ‘Her mother will always have called it a plaster. Somebody needs to tell these young men that unless you listen and observe, and use your imagination to get below the surface of what you see, you’re not fit to be trusted with other people’s lives. Silly fool. That was our name they called there, wasn’t it? Come on, Cecily. Now you must be brave, and very, very good. If you want that stone out you must do exactly as the doctor says. No crying and no fuss.’

  Our doctor was a lady doctor. She had a small office in a cubicle at the edge of the ward. It had a big poster on the wall, covered in colour photographs of all the different kinds of injuries it was possible to do to your eye, and underneath each picture the information about appropriate treatment.

  Mother sat down with Cecily on her knee, and I stood in the doorway, because there was no room for another person. Mother explained what Cecily had done and the doctor listened quietly.

  ‘Can I have a look in your nose?’ she asked Cecily. Cecily nodded, solemnly. She tipped back her head, with a tragic look on her face. I think she was enjoying it, really. The doctor had a pencil-shaped torch to peer into Cecily’s nose.

  ‘Oh yes, I can see it quite easily,’ she said. ‘Stay like that and I’ll see if I can get it out.’

  She had a long, fine steel instrument with a circular loop at the end, and she used this as she tried carefully to hook out the stone. All she got was a bit of snot. She sat back thoughtfully.

  ‘Mmm…’ she said. ‘I’ll have another go, and if that fails we shall have to try something else.’

  But Cecily suddenly drew in her breath and sneezed an enormous sneeze. The little stone shot across the table and ricocheted under the doctor’s desk.

  ‘That thing tickled my nose,’ she said.

  When we got out into the corridor again, Daddy was sitting there, flicking through a copy of Country Life.

  ‘Look, I’ve found the house for us,’ he said. His thumb was marking a page with a picture of an old farmhouse. It had a thatched roof, and its sloping lawn ran down to a duck pond. There were big oak trees dotted about here and there in its garden. Mother smiled. ‘One day,’ she said.

  The doctor had given Cecily her stone wrapped up in a tissue, and Cecily showed it to Daddy, and to Mary and Beth and Therese when we got home. They all admired it respectfully.

  I told Daddy, in indignation, about the little girl and her plaster. He listened and nodded.

  ‘When you grow up, Melissa, my dove,’ he said, ‘remember that little girl. You can go to university and train your intellect. You can go to college and learn all sorts of skills. You can be an apprentice and be taught a trade. But, understanding… you yourself must listen to the wisdom of life itself to learn understanding. They can’t teach you that in university, or medical school, or technical college, or anywhere in the world. Now then, I don’t know about you, but I fancy a bit of cheese on toast.’

  At bedtime, Cecily’s stone was put in a jam jar on the mantelpiece, and I carried her up to bed while Mother checked Mary’s and Beth’s teeth in the bathroom.

  Mother read them a story and they played their bedtime game and had their prayers, then she tucked them into bed.

  ‘Mother, you said you’d tell me about Brother Francis,’ I said when they were snuggled in.

  ‘Yes, I know. I haven’t forgotten. Draw the curtains and light the candle. Dear me, it’s been a long day. Ah, that’s better. Settle down now, Cecily. Stop wriggling like that.’

  Well then, this is Brother Francis’ story. What do you know about him? Not much, I think, except that he was Brother Tom’s friend and made him laugh. The two of them had grown up together in the same neighbourhood, and they both came from farming families, but Brother Francis’ family were richer, and of considerable social standing. So although they had been acquainted, it was not until the differences between them were ironed out by their shared life of simplicity and poverty in Christ’s service that they discovered each other as friends. Of course, a man in monastic life was not supposed to have any particular friendships, being given as a friend to all men for love of Christ, but set apart from intimate relationships, again for love of Christ. But understanding flourished more readily between some men than others, and in that abbey natural affection was seen as a grace and a gift, provided it did not begin to develop into the kind of friendship that made other people feel shut out or unwanted. And Brother Tom and Brother Francis got on well. Any time you wanted to know how Brother Tom was, you could ask Brother Francis and he could tell you at once, because he loved him and understood him, and also because Brother Thomas was a straightforward kind of man who shouted when he was angry, wept when he was sad, and fell asleep when he was weary—whether that was in bed, or during the long psalms of the night Office, or in the middle of Father Matthew’s Greek lessons.

  Any time you had asked Brother Thomas how Brother Francis was, though, he would probably have said, ‘All right—I think. He seems cheerful enough.’ Because Francis always did. He was courteous, he studied hard, he prayed earnestly, he had a smile for everyone, and he kept his own counsel regarding his private thoughts and feelings. He was cheerful at all times, and had an irrepressible sense of humour which, along with a tendency to get into conversation at the wrong times, got him into disgrace now and then. Brother Francis made himself pleasant to everyone and was well-liked. If he had a dark side, it was not obvious. If he had troubles, no one knew; and everyone was well content with this state of affairs, except Father Matthew.

  ‘He’s like the froth on a wave, that young man,’ he would say to Father Peregrine. ‘There’s something insubstantial about him. All this light-heartedness is pleasant enough, but he seems insincere to me. He’s not a minstrel or a court jester, he’s a man of prayer and he ought to behave like one. He’s too happy. You mark my words, this eternal smile of his covers an emptiness within. He needs sobering up, that lad. We must be more strict with him.’

  The abbot considered the matter. Father Matthew, though admittedly not the most sensitive of men in helping the novices in his care through their struggles, did have, one could not deny it, an uncanny ability to spot and expose their weaknesses. If he said Brother Francis was too happy, he probably was too happy. He was certainly getting under Father Matthew’s skin.

  ‘I’ll talk to him,’ Father Peregrine said finally one Wednesday evening when Father Matthew had buttonholed him on the way out of Vespers. ‘I’ll see him after Chapter tomorrow.’

  The abbot thought a
bout Francis as he waited for him the next day. It was a fresh, chill day in early spring, when the snowdrops were out and the jasmine growing on the wall was tentatively blossoming, but not the primroses yet. Father Peregrine liked Francis, though he did not believe Brother Francis had ever really taken him into his confidence. ‘Insincere… an emptiness within….’ The abbot pondered Father Matthew’s words. The judgement seemed a bit unkind and dismissive.

  He recognised Brother Francis’ firm, quick knock at the door, which stood ajar. The knock was like the man: confident, but not arrogant.

  Father Peregrine pushed back his chair, deciding not to sit behind his great table full of books to talk to this young man. He picked up his crutch from where it lay beside him on the floor, and stood up to cross the room. Again the knock, not growing impatient, rather its assurance diminishing. The abbot hastened to the door. He kept it ajar when he was not in private conversation, partly to be welcoming, and partly because the heavy iron latch on the door was not easy for his broken hands to manipulate.

  ‘Come in, Brother.’ He smiled at Francis as he pulled the door open. ‘Come and sit down over here. Are you cold? Would you like to light a fire?’

  ‘A fire?’ Brother Francis hesitated at the prospect of this unfamiliar luxury.

  ‘Yes? The things are there at the hearth. Your hands are abler than mine; I shall fumble if I try to light it.’

  The abbot settled himself into one of the two low wooden chairs that stood near the fireplace, and watched Brother Francis as he set about making the fire. His movements were deft and brisk, economical.

  There were some men it was easier to talk to by the fire, who could not easily look into Peregrine’s eyes and tell their troubles, but unwound as they looked into the dancing flames and relaxed in the warmth. Father Peregrine thought it might well be so with Francis.