Nuns and Soldiers

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘Occasionally.’

  ‘Well, you know what I think about the Roman Church, how much I hated your going in - you must allow me a little satisfaction when you come out.’

  ‘Oh, any amount of it.’

  ‘Funny, I thought you would have been a Lady Abbess by this time.’

  ‘So did I!’

  Suddenly they laughed together, an old familiar slightly crazy laugh, a special mutual intimate private laugh, signifying understanding, signifying superiority, signifying love.

  ‘Would you have liked to be a priest?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Anne.

  ‘I think there ought to be women priests.’

  ‘If you disapprove of priests so much why do you want women to be priests?’

  ‘Well, if there’s anything going I think women should have it too if they want it.’

  ‘Even if it’s bad?’

  ‘Yes.’

  They laughed again. Gertrude thought, I shall cry in a minute. Perhaps Anne will cry. We mustn’t. There will be time to cry later. She said, ‘Do you remember how, at Newnham, we used to say: we will astound everybody?’

  ‘I remember -’

  ‘My God, those days - all the men were after you.’

  ‘They were after you -’

  ‘And then we said we would divide the world between us, you were to have God and I was to have Mammon?’

  ‘I haven’t done very well with my half.’

  Gertrude thought, poor Anne, she has wasted her years, she has given away her youth for nothing. She is not a Saint, she is not even an Abbess! She has nothing to teach which anybody wants to learn. But I, what have I done? My husband is dying, and I have no children and no work. I am defeated by life. We are both defeated.

  They looked at each other wide-eyed. The resumption of friendship had been so easy, they were both almost breathless, surprised at it, surprised at the existence of such a perfect understanding. They had been prize students together, clever Anne Cavidge, clever Gertrude McCluskie. They were two strong women who might have been rivals for the world. They had divided it between them. It occurred to Gertrude now, so strangely, that she had somehow rested in her resignation to Anne’s withdrawal from life. She had not wanted it, she had vehemently opposed it, but once it had happened it seemed fated. It kept Anne safe somehow, and now her escape had changed the order of the world. Had she then wanted Anne to live behind bars and pray for her? Inconceivable. She had wanted Anne settled in some way, the problem of Anne settled. Now Anne was ambiguous, at large, and who knew what she would do with herself or what would become of her. The world would have to be divided between them once again.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ said Anne.

  ‘I’m wondering if you prayed for me in the convent.’

  ‘I did.’

  Gertrude came to her friend and stroked the sleek blonde bird-head. They gazed at each other without smiling.

  Anne Cavidge sat on the bed in Gertrude McCluskie’s handsome guest room, and looked at herself in the dressing-table mirror. She looked straight into her narrow suspicious blue-green eyes. Her face already looked different, it was a looked-at face, looked at by strangers, looked at by herself. In the convent her hands had been her eyes, and she had needed no mirror to adjust to perfection the white wimple, the dark veil.

  Anne had been with Gertrude for several days now. She had not seen Guy, but she had met les cousins et les tantes. She had been explained, a runaway nun. There had been mild friendly inquiries, even jokes. Of course she embarrassed them. Perhaps a certain awkwardness would travel with her for the rest of her life. She had irrevocably lost something worldly after all, a certain ease, a mode of growing up.

  Gertrude wanted her to borrow her clothes, but Anne would not wear Gertrude’s clothes, nor could she face going to the shops, feeling materials, looking at prices. She was still wearing the blue and white check dress, although she now agreed with Gertrude that it would ‘not do’. When she had been accepted by the order the Abbess had told her to give up any bad habits such as smoking and drinking, any little accustomed vanities, well before she came in. Would she now be living the process in the reverse direction? She would have to learn to reinhabit her name. Her name in the convent had been different, she had begun to forget who Anne Cavidge was.

  It was true that, as Gertrude said, getting out had exhausted her. Anne was more stunned, more dazed, more dazzled than she had at all conveyed to her friend. Walking in the country near to the convent she had felt calm. At Victoria when she could not find a hotel she had felt total panic. Surely people looked at her strangely. She felt like an escaped prisoner, a spy. No wonder since she had, against all that she could earlier have imagined, emerged from a place where she thought she would stay forever, in which she was certain that she would die: a place where she had solemnly vowed to remain for the rest of her life, within the same house, the same garden, giving up her will.

  After the first surprise Gertrude now seemed to take her defection for granted, as if it were an obvious outcome, the end of a brief aberration. They had by tacit agreement not renewed any extended or searching conversation, it was no time for deep inquiries into the past and the future. That would come later. They talked now of immediate things, of arrangements, of cooking and catering, of books Anne might like to read (she must have a library ticket, a better reading lamp), of what the nurses did or did not do, of politics and the public world. Gertrude talked about the family, the visitors, sketching each one: Manfred worked in the family bank, Ed Roper imported art objects, the Count was a Pole but not a count, Stanley was an M.P., Gerald was an astrophysicist, Victor was the doctor. Of Guy they did not speak.

  Anne knew that Gertrude was very very glad that she was in the house. She scarcely wanted Anne to go outside the door. ‘You’ll go away into London and not come back.’ Anne was allowed to do a little household shopping. Gertrude perfunctorily cooked. Now for the first time since her ‘escape’ Anne terribly missed the convent routine, the special silence in which activity took place, the blessed mechanism of the necessary. How could she deal with a day without a strict routine? She had to invent her own. She made herself useful. She sewed and mended. Gertrude hated sewing. The convent had made Anne a skilful and willing sempstress. She washed and tidied and dusted (Mrs Parfitt had ’flu). She could not yet, though vaguely exhorted to by Gertrude, settle down to any sort of serious study. She felt too blank about the future, too absolutely occupied by what was happening in the flat in Ebury Street. She intended to brush up her Greek to match her Latin, perhaps these were skills she could sell. She had taught a little New Testament Greek in the convent, but it was many years since she had read any classical Greek. But although Gertrude brought her Guy’s Greek grammar and The Oxford Book of Greek Verse she did not open them.

  Sometimes she sat in her room and read a novel. She had read none during her fifteen years ‘inside’ and she inspected them now with amazement. There was so much heterogeneous stuff in a novel. She had been interested in pictures once. (The practice of visual art in the convent had been limited to the creation of terrible Christmas cards and a little art deco religious sculpture.) One day she walked along the river as far as the Tate Gallery and looked at the Bonnards. They affected her rather as the novels did, marvellous, but too much. She went twice to Westminster Cathedral and sat in the huge darkness for a while. Gertrude sometimes went out briefly, she still saw one of her Indian pupils, perhaps other people. She did not always want to see Anne and there was that strange taboo upon their talk. She wanted to know that Anne was there, captive, waiting, in reserve. Sometimes they sat separately in the house for long times. There were special periods when Gertrude sat with Guy. Anne did not see Guy, did not even know whether he was aware of her presence in the house. Gertrude and Anne went to bed early. Anne missed the hooting of the owls at night which she had heard for so many years at the convent. She still always woke up at five.

  It was afternoon, already dark. The
Day Nurse had brought her some tea and smiled her lipless selfless smile. Anne felt an affinity with the Day Nurse and wondered if the nurse felt it too. Gertrude was with Guy. The flat was silent. The day had been yellow, a dark yellow London winter day, never really light at all. The snow had gone, succeeded by rain, now by this quiet murky pall. Anne had been reading Little Dorrit, it was amazing, it was so crammed and chaotic, and yet so touching, a kind of miracle, a strangely naked display of feeling, and full of profound ideas, yet one felt it was all true! How transmuted her life had been. She looked round the warm pleasant room at the ‘things’ on which she had commented to Gertrude. Gertrude wanted her to make the room her own, to colonize it, to adorn it with treasures from elsewhere in the flat, to let Gertrude buy this or buy that to make her more comfortable. Anne could not be interested, said the room was lovely as it was. The silky striped curtains had been smoothly pulled together by their strings. The mantelpiece had blue Chinese dogs, a snuff box. There was an embroidered fire screen representing a blackbird on a branch. An American patchwork counterpane which she was rumpling by sitting on. A mirror with a marble base upon the dressing table. Victorian family silhouettes upon the wall. A smell of furniture polish and continuity and well-being. Anne looked at her watch. In the dark cold chapel the nuns were singing like birds. And I am here, she thought, and they are there.

  Anne’s conversion had been a flight to innocence. Her Anglican Christianity, though not deep, had come with her a long way. Later she remembered the unformed unmarked faces of girls at her boarding school, and kneeling on lisle-stockinged knees on a rough wooden floor for evening prayers. The day thou gavest, Lord, is ended. Now close thine eyes in peace and sleep secure. She apprehended the innocence of childhood, saw it almost as her teachers perpetually saw it. The idea of a clear conscience had affected her, even as a child, as a primary moral concept. She had a happy childhood, she loved her parents and her brother. Her father was a doctor, an upright diligent conscientious man. It had seemed to her that life was and ought to be simple. Terrible things happened when she was a sixth-former. Her mother died, her brother was killed in a climbing accident. It seemed that this affliction was setting a seal upon some deep resolve. Her father died later. He had hoped that she would be a doctor. He did not want her to become a nun, but he understood.

  When Anne went up to Cambridge secrecy entered her life. Her open communication with her father came to an end. She went home for vacations, was talkative and cheerful, but never now spoke about what concerned her most. After the quietness of home and school, Cambridge had been for Anne a carnival, a maelstrom, a festival of popularity and personality and sex. She was astounded by her success. She worked hard and obtained a first-class degree in history. But most of her time and energy and thought and feeling was devoted to love affairs, to an extent which she felt bound to conceal even from her women friends. There were so many jostling men, they impeded each other, offering so many dazzling choices, so many flattering vistas. Anne, offered everything, wanted everything. She became skilful at conducting two, even three, affairs at the same time, keeping the victims happy by lying. She did not quite feel that this was wrong, because everything was so provisional and moved so fast, and other people were behaving quite as wildly as she was. She felt that she was living at an accelerated speed through a whole era, a long period of time during which she was even growing old.

  When the era came to an end and she saw her great choice looming ahead she felt it was determined by her earlier rather than by her later life. She had not (as some of her friends believed) half accidentally bundled herself into solitude from disgust at too much society. Rather that had been a teaching, a way laid down perhaps from the start. She felt no surprise at what she was, when the time came, bound to do. She had been shown the world, and what in the world she herself was. She did not later judge her sins therein too harshly. She felt no morbid guilt. Of the ‘bad habits’ which she duly dropped some considerable time (for it was not easy to get in) before she entered the order, relations with the other sex were by far the easiest to surrender. She had perceived a contrast and had chosen with knowledge what she had earlier valued by instinct.

  When she was being converted she was already purposing to be a religious. Conversion could have, for her, no other outcome. Naïvely at the start, and later out of a deep personal reflection, she had thought of her goal, any goal which at that stage concerned her, in modest terms. She was giving her life for a quiet conscience. A fugitive and cloistered virtue was better than none. She would regain her innocence and keep it under lock and key. Innocence was then the form under which God appeared to her. She wanted to be eternally possessed of a quiet mind, in a life of enclosed simplicity. She wanted to be independent of worldly thoughts, her own and those of others, to reach a certain level where she could float free. She did not, at the start, think clearly of ‘goodness’ or ‘holiness’ as a visible goal. She took to a fervent belief in a personal God, a personal Saviour, with an ease which took her friends’ breath away. All these things, the flight, the inevitable refuge, the redemption, were mingled in her mind. She felt both the distance of God, and the reality of the magnetic bond that compelled her to Him. The idea of holiness, of becoming good in some more positive sense, naturally gained power in her mind in the earlier years in the convent. As Gertrude had said, her order was not one of the most intellectual, and as Gertrude had hinted, this had been a deliberate choice. Clever Anne Cavidge, in her desperate flight from the world, had shrewdly decided to make the sacrifice of the intellect as early and as irrevocably as possible. Of course there were ‘studies’. She was marked out to be a teacher and became a highly respected one. But there were intellectual achievements in which she took care to be no longer interested. That was not for her the direction in which salvation lay. The Aristotelian philosophy she was required to teach was simplified and brittle, and in so far as she was ever tempted to enlarge it the atmosphere was against her, and the talents of her pupils not suited to metaphysical speculation. Holiness not cleverness was the path. But this path, some while after it became real to her as a sense of direction, began to fill Anne with strange doubts, doubts which were however not directly connected with her ‘defection’. Her instincts and intuitions had begun quietly to point her back towards her earlier and simpler objectives, simplicity, innocence, a kind of negative humility which did not aspire to the name of goodness.

  That the concept of a personal God began to seem to her more and more problematic did not too much dismay her. She lived as a member of a small mutually tacit ‘intelligentsia’ among those of simpler faith, a faith which she and her like refrained from disturbing. ‘The clever ones’ looked into each others’ eyes and said, on the whole, little, certainly less than all, about the changes they perceived in themselves, and which, isolated as they were, they could not help connecting with the deep spiritually guided movement of a certain Time Ghost. Most of them kept calm, Anne not least. To visitors from outside whom, under their rule, they did not see often, and always saw briefly through bars, they remained though kind, attentive, humorous, yet aloof and enigmatic. The Abbess (a new Abbess, not the one who had received Anne) did not encourage either special friendships within the house or close relations with outsiders. Thus one could go on indefinitely; and Anne knew well that many who thought as she did remained, and would remain, inside, nor did she blame them; sometimes she felt more inclined to blame herself.

  Gertrude had said it must be like getting out of prison. Well, how hard, how ardently, she had tried to get into that prison; and it was like a prison, there were cells, bars, high walls, locked doors. God had put her under house arrest, and with a glad and willing heart she identified herself as a prisoner. How did it all come, oh so gradually, to change? It was not, as Gertrude imagined, like an escape. Of course there was sadness and failure in the convent. No one spoke of this to outsiders. Ordinary relations with the outside world soon wilted, as her friendship with Gertrude had wilted, bec
ause of a certain bland reserve, an absence of familiar frank communication. Something was happening which could be variously described. Love itself altered, was constrained perhaps clarified. Some old deep anxious needful worm shrivelled, diminished. It was, within, very slow; but in the face turned to the outside the change seemed absolute. Communications of another sort took place of course, with certain seekers in certain contexts, those who gripped the bars, disciplined to receive admonitions which might seem impersonal or cool, but were perhaps nevertheless the purest form available to them of the love of God. Beyond this point ‘the world’ did not see; and even within the ‘failures’ were spoken of with restraint and only in a certain kind of language. No one spoke of ‘nervous breakdowns’. There were nuns, though in Anne’s experience not many, who became miserable or bored or mad. There were, but rarely, sudden unbridled emotions and wild tears. The characteristic calm brightness of the scene struck Anne rather, the special way nuns laughed, for they did often laugh in recreation and at times when there was no rule of silence.

  The ‘failures’ sometimes found their way back into worldly life, clutching a doctor’s certificate or a letter from a priest skilled in psychiatry. Anne’s exit had not been like that, she was one of the strong ones. She had become steadily penetrated by a sense of being ‘in the wrong place’. The enclosure itself did not irk her, she was able to love its austere beehive safety, and to make for herself a vast space inside its narrowness, which space was God. When she had entered she had spoken to her novice mistress about her conscience. She had been told to forget her conscience, to surrender it to the guiding power of divine love. To let go forever of selfish vain pettifogging moral anxiety. A cleansing sea of spirit would flow through to make her empty and clean and free. As years passed, years of confinement and prayer and teaching and manual work, these things made sense to Anne, and she released herself into that other Love whose reality, as she experienced it, she could not doubt. Not I but Christ. Worship and adoration became to her like breathing, and were sometimes a delight so intense as to seem almost sinful. Simplicity and innocence and the absence of worldly striving and concern were now her daily bread, and she was filled with a joy which was far beyond anything which she had been able to imagine beforehand, when she had first felt called to give her life thus absolutely to God. She became, in due time, novice mistress herself. She spoke with attentive wise concern to those who pressed their wrinkled branded faces to the bars. She envisaged being called by God to higher responsibilities within the order. But then, and somehow moving within her like the first tiny symptom of a serious illness or a vast physical change, she felt once again anxiety, conscience.