Obedience, page 23
He saluted her neatly.
‘God have mercy on us sinners, eh?’
And he walked away up the hill towards the convent, dissolving into the shadow of the clenched oaks that lined the drive.
Bernard watched him as far as she could and then listened for all sound of him to die away. She got up from the wall. She was unsteady, stumbling slightly as she stood. The air seemed suddenly too cold, and she clasped her arms around her, drawing the warmth from her body. Her injuries throbbed. Schwanz then was a part of a man, the shameful, brutal, unholy part that is hidden from God. Not a lover; not a fit name to be treasuring. She was sorry it was too late to do anything about this. Schwanz was the name she would carry with her through the despair of her mourning, and the terrible sorrow that replaced it. For the rest of her life, she knew, she would cling to it, to the radiance of her weeks with him and the frantic desire to do penance for his death. Jens Aden would mean nothing to her.
She breathed deeply, coughing, and went back inside for evening prayer. The sickle of the moon continued to rise over the convent, but its light was faint.
Twelve
At Les Cèdres the Christmas party fell on the feast of Saint Lucy. In the bustle, the saint was mostly unremembered. The uneven strings of blinking lights were a distraction, and those who thought to offer a prayer to Lucy that day were less concerned with the cult of her virginity than with a persistent pagan craving for more light to keep back the winter dark.
Immediately after breakfast, the tables were laid with bright napkins, paper plates and sprigs of cedar. A haphazard dance of skinny nativity figures and fat foil snowmen was stuck to the windows by lunch. Some of the residents enjoyed watching the preparations. One or two helped with the decorations. There was a loosening of routine, a sense of holiday. But Bernard was confined to her bed with a drip in her arm and knew nothing at all about it. For an hour or so in the afternoon she was faintly aware of unfamiliar activity in the corridor, more noise and footsteps than usual, an unaccustomed smell of spice, but she did not care to think what it might all be about.
The staff left Bernard to herself. Now and again they looked in on her, conscientiously filling up the blank lines in her medical sheet, the changes of handwriting marking the changes in shift. But there was plenty to do for the party, and the nurses took their readings briskly and left. Bernard did not move. By the time the celebration began and the buffet was irrevocably muddled, she had been lying for so long on her back with her eyes fixed to a spot in the ceiling that the bones in her hips, shoulders and ankles screamed with pain even through the fog of her medication.
Veronique heard the sound of brittle singing dribbling along the corridor. She did not recognize the tune. Two nurses hurried past her flapping something between them, a sheet or a sack, perhaps part of the fun, and she stepped aside too quickly, knocking her ankle against a sharp angle of the wall. She rubbed at it, bewildered. The bustle confused her. She had been expecting a familiar institutional hush, the permanent whisper of age. She had pictured her grandmother dozing in the corner of some deserted day room, everything about it predictable, the sticky magazines and the plastic covers and the colourless light. She had thought it would be quietly done, a secret. But now there was the sparkle of Christmas breaking through here and there, and the song. The thought of joining a festive party unsettled her.
She followed the noise and watched through the open door for a long time. All the staff and residents had their backs to her. The man who played piano was twisting bright balloons as an interlude to the music, making a series of bulging dogs. Veronique looked hard at the backs of heads, the matted and thinning hair, the skewed tufts pushed hard against the stiff antimacassars. She knew Sister Bernard would be effectively disguised if for some reason she had decided not to wear her veil, but still Veronique was quite sure that her grandmother was not in the room. She looked again, to be sure. It was very hot. She felt the bruise on her ankle throb. She had brought an extravagant selection of chocolates, piled in a gold box and tied round many times with metallic ribbon. She feared they would melt.
The show with the balloons was brief, and when the next song started up, one of the staff sidled along behind the row of chairs. She glanced at Veronique’s stylish chocolate box and pulled back, wary of some kind of trick.
‘Yes?’ She was haughty. ‘You have come to see someone?’
Veronique was not put off. ‘Yes, I have,’ she said, and paused. ‘I’ve come to see Sister Bernard.’
The nurse could feel her unlit cigarette in her pocket. She fingered the butt end, pleased by its softness. She too was hot and craved the relief of standing outside by the deliveries door in the smoky chill.
‘Sister Bernard?’ she said. ‘I think you must be wrong.’
Veronique looked at her without replying, daring her to say something else.
‘Bernard,’ said the nurse, ‘is a man’s name.’
‘It’s her name,’ said Veronique.
The nurse shrugged. She looked again at the glitzy chocolate box.
‘Ask at the desk,’ she said. She pushed past Veronique into the corridor and took the cigarette from her pocket, lodging it between her stained fingers. Then she turned. ‘Is it Sister Bernardette or Father Bernard?’
‘Neither. It’s Sister Bernard.’
There was a rumble of uneven applause from behind.
‘You’re sure?’
Veronique nodded, already doubting.
The nurse gave a half-smile. ‘Beautiful chocolates,’ she said, and she turned away sharply, cutting across the corridor and pushing through a blank door.
The slop of the nurse’s shoes on the hard floor faded quickly, there was a pause in the singing; no one else joined or left the party. It was as though everything was waiting for her decision. Veronique leant against the door frame. The heat was terrible, stifling, impossible. She could not shake the grasp of it. She closed her eyes.
Where had she got the name from, anyway? There had been a brief introduction one hurried afternoon at the old convent, nothing more. She could have misheard. At the time, it hadn’t been of any importance. There had been no reason to pay attention or remember. Perhaps she was mistaken. She tried to think back to the funeral. She thought she had heard the name again there, something the other nun had said, but it was hard to be sure. It would be an odd name to have, for a woman. She saw that. Bernadette was more likely. Veronique had heard of Bernadette. Given time, she could have remembered her visions at Lourdes. It was a genuinely religious name.
The piano began again with a soft tune, a lullaby. Veronique could not bear its melancholy. She slipped further down the corridor and found a glass door wedged open with a table. It led outside, to the back of the building. A narrow concrete path sliced down through the bins to the gas cylinders, and turned at right angles towards a square of tarmacked car park and some kind of shed, its corrugated iron roof hanging loose at one end. Veronique did not take the path. Instead, she set off across the short grass, skirting the gas cylinders and following a sparse line of shrubs, winter bare and gnarled. The ground was chill through the thin soles of her shoes. In the unwarmed shadows, frost lay, not quite silver any more. Veronique breathed in the cold. Her skin tingled. It felt like an escape.
She walked along the length of the building until she came to the back of the chapel, extending from the far corner, its long windows a break in the monotony of plain wall. She could not see in. There was just the muted colour of the glass, unspectacular from this side, dense violets pressed into fragmented frames. A ragged length of chicken wire ran from top to bottom, some kind of protection against hail or wind or boys with stones. It was the pattern of this she noticed, the loose hexagons somehow pleasing and the rusts and lichens mysterious. She stood for a while, tracing lines up and down through the wire and wondering about her grandmother’s name. Could it be a nickname? Something shortened over the years, or a tease of some kind? Did nuns do that? She did not know enough.
She looked along the back of the building. Regular rows of small windows marked the layout of the rooms inside. Each was the same, uncurtained, the winter light stifling reflections and making the glass too dark. Veronique looked at every window, but there was nothing in any of them, no clue. She shivered. The cold in her feet was damp now and almost painful. She heard a car pull up somewhere, its tyres noisy on the gravel. She knew she would have to decide. But the decision had been taken, long ago, before she even knew of it, in a time that had passed. It was perfectly made already, encrusted with age, crystalline, complete; it did not need her. Veronique realized this, too. She pulled her collar tight across her neck and walked back quickly to the party, shaking the cold from her legs, seeing the footprints she had left on the way out, pressed like bruises into the grass.
The song was one she knew. Her father had sung it with gusto every Christmas, standing on a chair at the head of the table, his arms flung wide and his head back, an enormous glass of eau de vie sloshing in his hand and tears streaming down his face, the agony of it making his voice coarse. Veronique heard it through to the end. The audience around her warbled, the high notes slipping away. At the end there was silence. Veronique edged her way forwards through the close armchairs and clutter of furniture. She put the glistening box of chocolates on the low glass table under the window, and someone nearby gasped in quiet admiration. Then she left.
When the nurse came in, she found Sister Bernard out of bed, leaning hard on the window frame, her stuttered breathing too loud in the room. Bernard turned at the noise. Her face was unsettled, so many questions there that it would not be still.
‘Sister?’
‘I can hear God again.’
The nurse smiled. ‘You should be back in bed, Sister.’
She came forwards, but Bernard batted her away weakly.
‘I’d been waiting,’ Bernard said. ‘I’d been waiting to hear God.’
‘Then it is a blessing, Sister,’ said the nurse, starting to rearrange the covers on the bed and wiping the end of the loose drip tube with a cloth.
Bernard clutched at the sill.
‘I’ve been waiting,’ she said again. ‘All this time…’
The nurse filled the glass by Bernard’s bed with water from a small bottle and snapped two white pills from their foil wrapper.
‘You’ll get cold, Sister. You should come back to bed.’
‘It’s different. It’s not what I remember.’ Bernard turned away and looked out of the window. ‘I think perhaps I might have been confused. I might have been wrong.’
She spoke quietly to a point somewhere beyond the green gas cylinders and she pushed her flat hands against the glass.
‘I wish… I wish I’d known. I wish someone had told me. I wish I’d known what God was. Do you think it’s too late?’
Blood dripped fast from the purple gash where she had wrenched the drip from the soft skin of her arm. Below her, a figure moved across the grass, but she hardly saw it. Everything was murky.
The nurse came to her and pulled her gently towards the bed, making her sit on the edge and handing her the glass of water and the pills.
‘It’ll be all right, Sister,’ she said. ‘Come on – we just need to put you back to bed. We need to get you fixed up again.’
She reached for something on the table and then pulled the drip tube across, letting it hang loose across Bernard’s shoulder for a moment.
‘I’ll pop downstairs and find someone to help me, Sister. You’ll be all right. You just lie down for me, you make yourself comfortable. And I’ll be back to sort you right out. I’ll only be a minute.’
She left the door ajar. The music pressed up from the party below. But Bernard was undisturbed by the tuneless singing and unmoved by the song of memories. She could hear nothing except the voice of God. Clear and soft, no longer strident in His scolding, He filled her with the balm of His conversation. He spoke to her without ceasing, called to her gently, intoned His love for her. The fasting had been worthwhile. The waiting had ended. He had come back to her. Her head was full of Him again, blotting everything, making sense of her. Bernard lay back on the bed. She could not feel her pains. There were only the unsteady shadows of the room, dim to her sight, and the voice, undeniable.
That God was, for some reason, speaking in an impenetrable dialect, with the rhythms of a language that sounded to her like Chinese and with a deluge of slippery phrases which made no more sense than birdsong did not, just at that moment, matter to her. She hardly noticed. The relief of an ending was warm inside her, a comfort. It was enough to know that she was again important to God and that He spoke to her in Schwanz’s familiar tones, her life dissolving in its aging melody, everything else forgotten. It was enough that her passion had not been wasted.
Jacqueline Yallop, Obedience
