A Demon Summer (21 page)

She acknowledged the remark with a short nod of her head. “Anyway, we take the main meal after Vespers. I gather they used to alter mealtimes according to the season, but not any longer. Artificial light, even the feeble variety available at Monkbury, changed the need. There is a ritual washing of hands before the meal, and we take turns reading aloud. We can't speak during the readings. I am not certain I would survive a nunnery where talking was forbidden altogether.”

This silence, Max supposed, was what made the life of the sardine possible, all of them packed together the day long, the modern concept of privacy banished.

“The Great Silence after Compline is easy enough—I'm asleep before my head hits the pillow most nights. The last thing I want to do is stay up and chat. This week I have light duty, though. In the evenings, I merely sit and keep watch on Dame Meredith.”

“As I said, it's a long day for you.”

“But I love the life,” she said simply. “It is hard, but I do love it. I will adjust eventually. Look at that. It seems we're going to get some rain after all.”

Indeed white clouds were now scudding against a darkening sky, which held an eerie promise of a summer squall. He decided to return to his room to wash up before lunch and collect a weatherproof jacket, just in case. After lunch he needed to keep his promise of a bedside visit to Dame Meredith in the infirmary.

“Funny, but the cows always know when it's going to rain,” said Sister Rose, pointing. “See them in the farthest pasture? They're sitting down. That's always a sure sign.”

Good to know, thought Max. Animals, if not people, could be relied on for useful information.

 

Chapter 17

THE INFIRMARY

The sick are not to make excessive demands on those who care for them, but should offer up their sufferings.

—The Rule of the Order of the Handmaids of St. Lucy

“Did you never see
The Nun's Story
?” demanded Dame Petronilla. The postulant, Mary Benton, was sorely trying her patience. The infirmary needed reliable helpers. Dame Petronilla was more and more convinced Mary belonged in the kitchen or garden or somewhere she could do less damage than in what was, in effect, a hospital ward.

“With Audrey Hepburn? Wasn't she lovely in her nun's habit? Those cheekbones! Yes, of course I did; I loved that movie. I learned all I know about the religious life from watching that movie. Why?”

Well, that explained so much. Dame Petronilla, busy with tweezers, plucking the thread from an old pillowcase she was restitching, reminded herself to be charitable. Mary was a young widow and was still probably adjusting to that status. Had she been admitted to the order too soon? Dame Petronilla thought so. But any more, any reasonably able-bodied young woman who did not appear to be completely insane was being admitted. That explained the high dropout rate, too, she was certain. The vetting process was not what it once had been.

She looked sternly at her charge, as if she could frighten some sense into her. Mary, like Audrey, had thick, beautifully arched eyebrows over hooded, dark eyes that belied her tardiness and other drawbacks by blazing with intelligence. There the resemblance stopped: Her small white teeth protruded ever so slightly, marring her otherwise good looks. She flashed the teeth now in a tentative, hopeful smile.

“It's the same principle at work here,” Dame Petronilla explained patiently, or as patiently as she could, having been reduced to movie metaphors to make her point. “Audrey as Sister Luke kept getting into trouble for wanting to finish what she was doing and ignoring the bell pulling her away. Obedience to God is what matters. It is all that matters. And stop that yawning.”

“Sorry, sister. I just can't get used to the long hours yet. But surely, in the case of a nurse who is tending the ill…”

“The seriously ill—yes, of course, exception would be made for that. If someone were having a stroke or some sort of fit no one would expect a nurse to stop what she was doing and attend to the Holy Office. But the fact is, once you decide you know better than the Rule, that you are going to think for yourself, you become a disruptive force not only to the nunnery but to yourself and your own vocation. Obedience for all of us is the most difficult thing, because as human beings, we are always convinced we know everything.”

“Yes, Dame Pet—Petronilla. Of course you're right.”

“I will expect you to mention this when the abbess tells us to name our faults.”

“Yes, Dame Petronilla.” Oh, bother, thought Mary. I will never get the hang of this effing obedience thing. I
mean
, this blessed obedience thing.

May God grant her a long life so she has time to improve, Dame Petronilla was thinking. It was different in the old days. The infirmaress would in effect be a hospital administrator, with dozens of helpers in her charge. Now here she was, alone with one hopeless postulant to help. Still Mary was adequate to attend to Dame Meredith, who was little trouble. And Dame Petronilla counted herself lucky that there were never many ill nuns. The diet and hard work and peace of their lives saw to that. The fact that they were all aging and liable to give out at once—well, she'd cross that bridge when she came to it.

Dame Petronilla was about to resume her lecture of the postulant when Father Max appeared at the open door.

She sent Mary to make sure Dame Meredith was ready to receive visitors. Then Dame Petronilla herself went to admit the priest to the premises.

*   *   *

“It is difficult to describe, Father Max. The horizon changes here. The more so when you know you are approaching the end at last.”

He was at the bedside of Dame Meredith née Fitzwilliam in the infirmary of Monkbury Abbey. In one corner of the room sat the postulant, Mary Benton, acting rather as a
duena
to chaperone the encounter, he supposed. She was darning a sock—rather badly, he thought. In these days of disposable everything, he wasn't sure when he'd last seen anyone, man or woman, darn a sock. Certainly he'd never seen his rather impractical mother do anything of the sort.

“I have reached,” Dame Meredith said on a whisper, “the end of my journey.”

Journey. When, wondered Max, had everyone started talking about their journeys? Only Awena, the most spiritual of people in his experience, could use the phrase without sounding like a daft hippie. But this nun, clearly, as she said, nearing the end of her time on earth, touched his heart with the phrase. Gently, he squeezed her hand.

“We believe and hope it's the beginning,” he said.

Max looked at the pale, drawn face of the aristocratic-looking woman lying before him in the hospital-style bed, with its metal side rails designed to catch a fall. She looked familiar, resembling the portraits of an aging Queen Elizabeth I—a fading Gloriana. Her skin stretched over the high-bridged nose had the gray-bluish tinge of someone who wasn't getting enough oxygen to her blood, and the thinning of her hair, no doubt from the cancer treatment, was evident, all of this giving her likeness to a newly hatched and highly vulnerable chick. Because of her condition, she had been allowed to wear a modified version of the habit, with an old-fashioned nightcap and nightdress in place of the more elaborate headdress and layers of cloth. Her usual habit was on a chair at the side of the bed, folded with military, ritualistic precision, her sandals tucked beneath the chair.

At one side of the room was a folding white examination screen of the type found in hospitals, and beside that was a tall window that allowed a view onto the orchard trees fronting the abbess's lodge. It was as peaceful a place of healing as could be imagined, but with gleaming stainless steel everywhere reflecting the afternoon light.

Dame Meredith opened her eyes suddenly and caught Max staring at her.

“I don't blame you for staring,” she said. “I am sure I look as if I lost a fight, which I guess in a way I have. It's a blessing not to be allowed mirrors. We have only the haziest idea what we look like. You would be surprised how freeing that is. Especially now. Losing my hair to chemo, as little as there was of it, was as upsetting for me as I imagine it is for most people with long flowing locks.”

At Max's stricken look, her face softened. “Forgive me. I indulge in a lot of gallows humor. It passes the time and it seems to be how I cope with things. Anyway, at Monkbury, we concentrate on the interior—on what's under the hood, so to speak.”

He guided the conversation with questions about convent life in general—of the choices she had made, and of how, nearing the end, she had come to regard these choices. Was there regret? She claimed not, or very little.

Max was aware that given the impending birth of his and Awena's child, he was perhaps not in the best position to appreciate the choice these women had made, to forgo family life in the traditional sense. Calling another woman “sister” was a poor substitute for having a flesh-and-blood sister, was it not?

And less than that, the simple pleasures of watching television or taking in a movie were forbidden to them. He had seen no television set anywhere on the guest premises, but a daily newspaper had been delivered, rather late, to the gatehouse. He asked Dame Meredith now about this.

She told him, “One of the villagers brought us a television set when the planes flew into the Twin Towers. We couldn't bear to watch the images. After a day or two the abbess asked that it be removed. There is the Internet, of course, but the longer you are here the more you grieve for the world anyway and don't need the reminders.

“Sometimes the abbess selects passages in the news to be read aloud to us in chapter—generally news of an uplifting nature. A royal birth, for example. We were very excited by the news Prince William and his bride—Kate, is that her name?—were having a baby. That is very rare, however.”

Dame Meredith had not elaborated on whether good news was rare or just the reading aloud of it. Max imagined that both things came into play. So even their knowledge of outside events was censored, if such a harsh word could be used. They were sheltered from all that was wicked in the world, so that they could concentrate on the world's healing. He saw the logic but wondered if he wouldn't himself chafe at never being allowed to decide for himself what was important to read and know.

“I suppose I should care less about these things—you would think it would seem irrelevant. But the more the world draws away from one the more interest one takes. I want to know everything, especially the happy and intriguing things. If I have regrets it is really only that I am running out of time and there is so much out there to see.”

“What did you mean when you said the world draws away?”

“Haven't you noticed, Father? When you have a disease—any disease—people assume you're contagious. They should give me a bell. A leper coming upon a village in the Middle Ages had to ring a bell to warn people of his approach. I need a bell.”

His heart fell at the image. “Mostly, I've found people just don't know what to say and are terrified of saying the wrong thing.”

“I live in a place that, when you get right down to it, welcomes death—lives with it, understands it, embraces it. But my sisters are human beings first of all, and no one would welcome reminders of such a sentence as this one. I've told them: no more treatment. I'm done. If I'm going to be cured, God will cure me.”

Max looked at her doubtfully. Clearly, the inclination was to pray over the matter some more. God worked in mysterious ways but God also worked through us, thought Max. But according to all he knew of her condition, man's best efforts had already failed her.

“But I know,” she told him earnestly, “God is with us even in suffering. God doesn't watch from a distance, but I believe is right here, with me now. He doesn't shoot us full of arrows and then turn away. Who could live believing in a God capable of that?”

Max had no answers for her. His strength as a priest lay not in offering bromides but in listening as people tried to come to terms with unthinkable realities.

He looked again at the tidy room, white and gleaming steel, with some sort of lighted apparatus blinking softly in one corner. Everything was as immaculate as would be expected, and on the way in he had passed some impressively modern if small-scaled equipment. He was reminded of a hospital on a cruise ship—small and compact and able to handle most crises, but at the end of the day extremely limited. A day out at sea and they were out of the reach of helicopters and other ships, and had to trust to what the ship's doctor could manage without the resources of a proper hospital and equipment. Remote Monkbury Abbey was just like being at sea, he supposed, when it came to any real emergency.

He said something of this aloud, adding: “I am impressed at how smoothly the abbey is managed, however. It seems you could go for months here without really needing anyone's help from outside.”

She followed his gaze and said, “Dame Infirmaress manages very well. She even makes sure Dame Hephzibah is fed on time.”

“I was wondering today how the portress gets her meals, since she always seems to be on duty somewhere.”

“Lately Dame Pet has been taking meals out to her, or sends her assistant to do so. It saves Dame Hephzibah having to walk as much.”

“Her assistant being Sister Rose?”

“Yes, the novice. Sister Rose. She learned first aid in the Army—actually, she was a full-fledged medic. She's been a real boon to us. Anyway, after the portress is taken care of, Sister Rose fetches her own meal, and sometimes Dame Petronilla's, and takes her meal in private in the infirmary. There's a little microwave and things for making coffee down the hall, in the kitchenette.”

His eye caught on the rosary beads on the table beside her bed. Something prompted him to ask, “Do you get many visitors?”