Obedience (19 page)

He tried it on. He could not fit the wimple fully around his face and head but it held long enough for him to toss his head one way and the other, trying out the feeling of the long thick material, heavy like hair across his shoulders and down his back. It was then, with the veil still on his head though sliding backwards, that he moved towards Bernard. She backed away, sure of what he wanted, knowing the look. The commandant laughed again, sucking in air between his teeth.

Bernard was often afraid of everyday things, the rickety walkway around the roof of the convent or the snakes that they chased from the henhouse with sticks. But this certain anticipation of pain and humiliation was different, like the astonishing displays of divine wrath, awful and disorienting. Her cheeks reddened. She had no breath. There was a murmur in her head that might have been God, but with the dark and the laughter and the confusion she could not make anything of the noise. She only had a clear sense of her soldier, creased at an odd angle, stiffened, his blond hair haloing his face against the soot of the wall.

The commandant stopped close to Bernard. She could back up no further without pressing herself completely against the rough side wall of the house. He rubbed his feet into the sawdust as though steadying himself on sand.

‘I hear,' he said in good French, ‘that you look favourably on the attentions of the righteous, Sister.'

Bernard tried to find a prayer, a way of saving herself from the brutality she saw in the officer's face. If she could only escape this she would offer penance until the heavens fell. But the commandant encroached on her still. He was all uniform. Bernard put her hands across her bare head, but she could not cover it entirely no matter how widely she spread her fingers.

‘Look at me, a sinner!' he said, throwing both his arms open to display to her the full extent of himself. The veil slid finally to the floor. ‘Have mercy!'

She screamed. A sound came from her soldier like a moan.

He came quickly at his commandant, pulling him back hard so that the officer fell awkwardly across the chair by
the fireplace, letting out a thick grunt, hanging there for a while, one arm and one leg dangling sideways, his head thrown back, panting. The soldier pulled at Bernard, too, trying to make her move, pushing her towards the door. He said something quick and fierce under his breath. It sounded like ‘Make sure the apples are with you', but this made no sense. Either his French was garbled or Bernard had misheard him. In the end it did not matter. Except that, since she was to remember the words for ever, Bernard would have liked them to be more impressive.

With a renewed energy, his warning only a whooshing intake of breath through his nose, the commandant sprang from the chair and hurled himself at the soldier. He was a heavy man. Bernard saw them collide and heard the metallic ring of something – a uniform button, a coin? – fall to the ground as she reached the door. It was only then that she realized she was in the sunlight again, the air around her misted with the scuff of dust. The door was open already and above the crush of men blocking her exit she could see the implacable blue of the summer sky.

The Germans had waited outside in the shade of the house while the commandant went in. They had smoked. One or two of them had played with a kitten that had come to wind itself around their legs. But they had heard Bernard's scream and now they pushed across the threshold, blinking in the dim interior, shoving her aside in their efforts to reach the fighting men. It seemed to Bernard as though there was an army of them. It was mostly the energy of their movements and their thick uniforms and their shouts that made the room seem full, but it was enough to overwhelm her and she did not move.
She stood with her feet in the patch of sunlight, as around her everything shattered.

Her soldier was having the worst of it. He was too scrawny and slight, and it looked as though he would rather not have been fighting at all. He fended off the blows, his arms across his head, and only once or twice did he fling out in retaliation, his palm flat, a push. He was already cowering and unsteady. The blood from his nose was dripping fast onto the floor and his jacket was torn. When the commandant began to kick at his legs and knees, the sound of his boots cracking loud through the commotion, he would have soon fallen.

But the other Germans put a stop to them. They separated them, prying them apart, and holding them both. They scuffed at the splashes of blood on the floor and righted the furniture. There was an abrupt dusty calm, and then the commandant gave an order, and the soldier was dragged past Bernard in a flurry of uniforms, hardly visible. The commandant rested hard on the table, panting, his features swollen. The clock could be heard striking again from the back room. The last of the Germans brushed his hands against each other with a dry rasp. As he came past Bernard, still there, unmoving, he winked. But she did not make any response and so he pushed her aside, the murk closing around her again as he kicked the door closed behind him.

There was just the commandant, sitting now in the fireside chair twirling the veil between his hands, and Bernard still standing by the closed door. He looked at her again, his eye already swelling; blood was smeared across one of his cheeks. She wanted him to close his eyes,
for a moment, so that she could leave. She could not bear the look of him. She tried to edge away, but with the fear and the darkness she had no real sense of where she was, and she stumbled over something solid bolted to the floor. The commandant laughed. As Bernard looked at him, he joined his hands in mock supplication and raised his eyes to the God in the beamed ceiling. Then he fixed his stare back on her again and she saw his distaste leaking from his face.

The sudden weight of him took her breath away. There was pain everywhere, all at once, and the smell of sweat. He was tearing at her habit, snarling, biting blood from her breasts, scratching his broken nails against her thighs. She felt the rush of it all, the hurt, only just real, so intense and such a sudden surprise that it might have been imagined, the clawing and clutching insatiable and frantic, and far away the sound of the commandant breathing hard with the sharp wheeze of an asthmatic. In the midst of it, a steady thought, untrammelled, Bernard wondered if what was happening now would make it all right for her soldier, and she lay as still as she could on the gritty flags. She said nothing. She hardly breathed. The commandant, when he was finished, wondered if she was dead.

When he slapped her around the face, she blinked.

‘God be praised, Sister,' he said, standing shakily and smartening his uniform.

Bernard lay on the dirt floor and still did not move.

‘You can go,' he said. ‘In peace.'

He hardly had the energy to laugh.

He kicked at her, the mark of his boot dark on the bare flesh of her leg. But still she lay there, something on
the grimy ceiling transfixing her, and the commandant brushed himself down and left.

Bernard lay for a long time where he had left her. Pain swelled and stabbed at her; tears came after a while, flooding from her wide eyes and soaking away in the dust. She was terrified of moving, in case that would bring it all down upon her again, so she suppressed the shivers that ran through her and stilled the tight tremble of her jaw. Her body felt heavy, exhausted, splintered.

She became aware of something uncomfortable beneath her thigh, and she shifted warily to pull out a tin beaker on which she had been lying. Still she did not rise. She would have liked to pray. But not a single line of prayer would come to her, not a verse from a childhood hymn, nothing from the Bible. In her loneliness she closed her eyes, and she heard God weeping. Inconsolable, His tears of anger and frustration and shame broke the quiet with piteous sobs. This, finally, she could not bear.

She hauled herself to her feet, her legs buckling and all kinds of terrors converging upon her, and she stumbled out of the house, making her way up the hill to the convent, seeing nothing of the women gathering fruit in the orchard or the children at the well or the soldiers clustered together, conspiratorial. All she knew was the soreness deep inside her, and the howl of God in her head. She tried to run, to make the blood pound in her veins and thump in her heart, drowning out the misery of His lament for her disgrace. But she could not.

When the owner of the house returned later there were few signs of disturbance. He put a pan of water on the stove to warm and shook off his boots. Unthinking, he swept
a cobweb from the corner of the fireplace with his hand. It was only when he noticed the rounded worn-handled basket on the table that he was puzzled. And when he went out into the village in the nightingale twilight after his supper, he heard a story which astounded him.

V
eronique's car spluttered through the village. She did not quite notice where she was. All she could see, reflected back at her from the windscreen, was Bernard's still face, framed by the fall of her veil and gripped with questions. She tried to shake it away. She opened the window wide and let the cold rush in. She drove too quickly. At the edge of town, the traffic confused her. She failed to notice a junction and someone hooted as she sped across. She forgot to stop for bread, as she had intended. The nun was there still, too close.

When she pulled into her parking space at the nursing home and turned off the engine, she hauled Sister Marie's bag towards her across the seats, unzipped it and rummaged inside. She had no idea what she was looking for. When she uncovered the encyclopedia of saints, its paper cover rubbed and tatty, she turned to the entry for her namesake, Saint Veronica, and found a rose-toned picture of a young woman wiping the bleeding face of Christ with what appeared to be a bath towel. Veronique stared at it. She did not know that since the publication of
the encyclopedia almost forty years earlier, the Church had agreed, with some embarrassment, that Saint Veronica had never existed. She was moved by this image of sympathy and love, of female humanity. She felt tears and a tightness in her stomach. She sat back against her seat and looked at the concrete wall in front of her and the door to the kitchens, propped ajar. She watched the steam seep out and swirl over the parked cars. Gingerly, she thought of Bernard.

She had to wait at the door of the nursing home while two elderly residents were wheeled out by nurses. She greeted everyone cheerfully. Then she placed Sister Marie's bag on the reception desk.

‘I have the bag.'

The receptionist smiled conspiratorially.

‘I'm sorry. Was it a nuisance?'

‘It was fine,' said Veronique. ‘I'll take it up. Where is she?'

The girl was anxious to save her further trouble.

‘Don't worry. It can go later. I can put it on the trolley.'

‘Thanks.' It was a relief. Veronique did not want to see Sister Marie. ‘That's a good idea,' she said. ‘I think I'll go home early. I'm tired out.'

The girl smiled at her again.

‘Good idea,' she echoed.

Veronique locked her office and went back to the car park. She stood for a moment with her hand on the cold metal of her car roof, making her mind come clear. Then she drove the short familiar route to her apartment with determined care, as though it was important. She collected her post and cleaned the damp
soles of her shoes thoroughly on the mat at the entrance to the block. She picked up a littered wrapper from the stairs. She made and ate a chicken salad; spoke to her mother briefly on the telephone; watched the television news and weather forecast and ironed two blouses for work. Her panic subsided; everything about the day was ordinary. But still she found she took too much notice of things, scrutinizing herself, debating the simplest of thoughts, waiting.

Exasperated, Veronique went through to the bedroom. The curtains and shutters were still closed and she turned on the light. She took off her shoes and stood on the bed to take down a photograph of her father that was pushed back on a high shelf. Dust was sticky on the glass. She ran her finger round the frame several times, then she looked hard at the photo. The man in front of the camera was seated on a bright blue towel somewhere sandy, the light behind him dazzling with the promise of the sea, but he was fully dressed and unsmiling. It was as she remembered him, unspecifically stern, irritated by her when she was young, vexed by her demands for inexplicable games, exhausted. She imagined the way he would have fretted as the photograph was taken, shaking sand from his hands, brushing down his clothes, unsettled and somehow bewildered. She made herself look again, examining the face that she did not quite know, every suggestion that might be poised there. It was nothing like the round-eyed nun's that she had seen earlier that day. Her father was thin, his features angled and brittle. There was no family resemblance. Veronique let the frame drop onto
the bed and leant back, relieved. This meant things could be left alone. She began to feel that she had got away with something.

The minibus beeped in the drive at ten to four.

‘Did you hear that? It's the minibus,' said Bernard.

Thérèse had been napping. She was startled. ‘Already? What time is it? Are we ready?'

‘Not quite. Perhaps they'll wait.'

‘What have you been doing?' Thérèse was accusatory. ‘You haven't finished your papers, Sister. You're not ready to go.'

‘I have my bag. These things are not important.'

There were still two piles of papers, the one on the floor that was everything that Bernard meant to discard, and the other on the table still to be sorted. Alongside it was the newspaper obituary, lying where Veronique had left it the day before. Bernard picked up both piles and put the obituary on top. Then she moved across to the corner of the snug and stacked the papers at the feet of the Virgin, filling the niche.

‘They're not important,' she said again.

Thérèse was busy with her own bag, trying to make the zip pull across, her fingers clumsy.