Obedience (20 page)

‘You can't leave them there like that, Sister,' she said, hardly looking up.

Bernard ignored her. She went through to the refectory and reached above the fireplace for the matches. When she came back through to the snug, Thérèse had her bag fastened and was standing in the turn of the corridor, everything about her expectant.

‘We should go. I think they beeped again, Sister. I think I might have heard it.'

The first match snapped and the head sizzled onto the tiles near Bernard's feet. The second burned slowly and Bernard angled it down to encourage the flame.

‘Oh no,' said Thérèse, suddenly understanding. ‘Oh no, Sister. You can't do that.' She let her bag drop and lurched towards Bernard. ‘They'll – burn.'

‘I want them to burn,' said Bernard.

She put the match up towards the papers, holding it against the edge of the newspaper clipping. For a moment there was the smell of charring. But the paper browned unevenly, resisting the flame, and soon the match went out with the slightest wreath of smoke.

Bernard began to strike another match.

‘Sister, they're your things. The things you've kept.'

‘You didn't keep your things, Sister,' Bernard pointed out.

‘But I couldn't – they were… they took up so much space. And anyway—'

‘Everything belongs here,' Bernard said, finishing Thérèse's sentence. She shook her head. ‘I don't want it now. I don't want it – any of it.'

As she reached again to put a match to the papers, Thérèse pushed forwards, flapping her hands out to stop her. Bernard pulled the match away, trying to avoid Thérèse's arm; she raised her other hand to protect the flame, attempted to turn her back on Thérèse, her veil falling awkwardly across her face. It was confused and clumsy, their age making them slow. And somehow, between them, they crashed into the niche. The papers
flapped up, the Virgin wobbled and then everything fell onto the floor between them.

Thérèse stepped back. ‘Oh no – look at her! Look what you've done, Sister – to Our Lady.'

The Virgin had fallen on her side. The end of the nose was chipped, and one or two of the long white folds of veil were cracked and broken. The left arm was completely smashed to the shoulder; the robe down the left side was splintered into a series of jagged edges. The fall had revealed the back of the statue where the paint was unfaded and startlingly blue, a maker's paper label stuck near the feet. Smashed and deformed, there was something antique about it, a clothed Aphrodite, but from the back it was like something else, a toyshop mannequin.

The minibus horn sounded long and loud, and almost immediately afterwards the doorbell rang too.

‘We'll have to leave it,' said Bernard.

She let the match drop, burnt out now, and she moved away to pick up her bag. Thérèse was still looking at the toppled Virgin.

‘You couldn't have imagined it, could you,' she said, ‘a few years ago? Even a few days ago.'

And she shook her head at the incredible mystery of it all.

Bernard allowed them to strap her into a seat near the back. She could see Thérèse's bare head several rows in front of her, bowed, the colour of her hair still unexpected. Their bags were on another seat, pushed together. Bernard kept her eyes fixed on the ridged plastic of the floor, pocked and worn by the rub of feet. She did not look out of the
window. As the bus bumped down the gravelled driveway, she prayed to her silent God to release her from the world; she prayed without ceasing, without recourse to the learnt formulae, in her own meagre words. The bus paused at the entrance. A slice of sun lit the open gates and skewed back behind them, reaching up the convent walls. The plastic Christ nailed to the reconstituted wooden crucifix, atrophied now by the faint glimmer of afternoon light, hung still in Bernard's cell where she had left it.

Bernard prayed only for herself. She begged that the minibus journey might end, the rattling of the old seat ease and the draughts around the grimy windows be plugged. She prayed that she might be spared from whatever was coming. She pleaded with God to heal the old wound that seemed to be tearing within her, the irreligious urge to find Veronique and hold her. She implored Him to strike down Sister Thérèse there and then, as proof of His displeasure. But there was no sign that any of this was heard. The minibus continued to weave its way among the afternoon traffic, its engine noisy through the thin floor, as pain cramped weakly in Bernard's legs and feet.

‘So then – Les Cèdres,' said one of the young men, leaning towards his passengers and lowering the volume of the radio.

Thérèse turned in her seat and looked at Bernard. The prayers in Bernard's head hammered on. She looked back blankly. Thérèse took it as an accusation.

‘There's a mistake on your papers,' she said, turning back and summoning her teaching voice. ‘We need to go to Les Cèdres, that's right. For Sister Bernard. But I have another address; I'm going somewhere else.' She gave the
address to Corinne's apartment without hesitation. To her surprise the driver accepted her authority to make such a decision. He shrugged.

‘OK. We'll go there first. It's nearer,' he said, raising the volume of the music again.

They drove on to where the roads became narrower and busier. Then they pulled into a quiet street of tall shuttered houses and narrow iron balconies. There was a
boulangerie
with a small window filled with large flat baskets of loaves: baguettes and round country breads and knotted lengths that Bernard had never before seen. Outside a café, several men sat drinking wine from tiny round glasses, their backs pressed against the wall and their hats pulled low against the wind. An alarm sounded as an automated garage door heaved upwards between two buildings. It was suddenly urban and unimaginable. Bernard bowed her head.

The minibus pulled up outside a neat apartment block. At a second-floor window a curtain moved. What seemed like only a moment later, Corinne appeared at the main door, waving. She was wearing a blue striped shirt neatly tucked into some kind of soft trousers, as though she had been sleeping, Bernard thought. Corinne came close to the minibus window and tapped at it, in front of Bernard's face. She mouthed something, a greeting of some kind, and turned to embrace Thérèse. The driver waited and handed Thérèse her bag. Bernard turned away.

At the threshold to the apartment block, Thérèse paused and looked along the street for a moment, as though there was something particular she expected to see there. Then, her face puzzled and drawn, she turned to Bernard
and raised a hand, absolving the old nun of everything. But Bernard did not see it. Her anger had impaled her. She could not move. Staring at the grease-stained back of the headrest in front of her, she pleaded with God to make the world end. Thérèse went inside the building and the minibus moved off.

‘Les Cèdres?' asked the boy.

‘Yes,' said Bernard. ‘Please.' She could not think of a different reply.

The cold seeped through the church, falling on the congregation with the weight of sin. Bernard's attention had drifted during the young priest's long sermon. She may even have slept. The heavy missal, which had come to her on the death of her father, dropped from her folded hands with a thud which shuddered through the church, startling and confusing her. When Sister Marie's name was read out among the notices at the end of Mass, Bernard was for a moment unsure of what she had heard. It was only when the priest went on to offer a brief summary of Marie's life, thanking God for the gift of her long vocation at the convent and leading the parish in a prayer for the dead, that Bernard was finally sure that the nun was gone. She looked up at the faint glow of the stained glass and the slender stone arches above her, blotched with damp and old dirt, and she rejoiced.

At the end of Mass, Bernard tapped the arm of the priest to ask him the details of Marie's funeral.

‘Ah, Sister Bernard, how are you? How are you finding your new home?' he asked, distracted, his eyes not on her.

‘It's fine, Father.'

‘Good – that's good. Yes. I see someone is bringing you to church here, on the transport rota.'

‘I've always come here,' Bernard said, unwilling to tell him how difficult a thing it had been to arrange with the staff at Les Cèdres.

‘Yes, yes, of course. And sad news about Sister Marie. What a saintly woman! It was a blessed release, perhaps.'

‘She was well looked after, Father.'

One of the altar boys skidded down the aisle to his parents. The priest glared at him over Bernard's shoulder.

‘Is that right? Well, that's good,' he said.

Bernard traced the cross on the front cover of her missal with her finger, slowly following the indented gilt line right round before she spoke. The priest closed his hands, waiting.

‘Father, could you tell me again the time of the funeral?' she asked in the end. ‘I didn't quite catch it.'

‘For Sister Marie?'

‘Yes, Father.'

‘Tuesday morning at ten. At Sainte Famille.'

This was a church to which Bernard had never been. The thought of it alarmed her.

‘She would have liked to have it here. Couldn't it have been held here?' she said.

‘Would she? Do you think?' The priest nodded, answering his own question. ‘Ah well, it's Sainte Famille. It's the parish for the nursing home. Father Gabriel does a lot of work there.'

It was a new church. Its brick bell tower, punctured by an elaborate lattice of rectangular holes, dominated one end of the town, its colour odd among the dry ochres of the
old stone. Inside it was hollow and bare, unwelcoming. Bernard sat firmly to one side, one of the smooth white walls almost within reach. The suited diocesan official who had picked her up from Les Cèdres sat in the pew in front of her, as though this might help to fill the space. There were only seven mourners. Three parishioners, who were there simply to attend Mass, sat together near the front. Sister Thérèse arrived a few minutes after Bernard, on her own. Bernard recognized the clipped rhythms of her step and glanced back to watch her come up the aisle. They smiled at each other, but Thérèse went to sit apart, on the far pews. Veronique and her colleague from the nursing home were alongside the looming coffin, directly in Bernard's vision.

Bernard knelt and dipped her head. Her veil fell around her, closing her in. When the priest entered, she did not raise her head. The sounds of the Mass went on, unequivocally solemn, and once or twice the bells rang. Bernard said the responses quietly but did not look up. She could not. She could not be sure it was not all some kind of shadow play, a manifestation of the terror of her first few days at Les Cèdres, an inevitable result of the disorientation and dismay that had made everything insubstantial and out of place, driving her into the corridors and the garden in the freezing hours of the night. She could not be sure that if she looked at Veronique, even once, her granddaughter might not disappear and leave her again, with only the unendurable ache of longing.

It was Thérèse who spoke to her.

‘I didn't expect to see you again quite so soon, Sister. In such circumstances.'

Bernard raised her head, and her veil fell back to her shoulders. The Mass was over. The undertakers were fiddling with the latches that secured the coffin trolley and Thérèse had moved onto the pew alongside Bernard.

Bernard blinked, wondering at the solidity of things.

‘May God grant her eternal rest,' she said.

Thérèse tutted quietly. ‘It'll save the diocese some money, at least – with my moving in with Corinne and Sister Marie going to heaven. They must be relieved.'

Things were settling around Bernard, coming clear. Veronique was still there, bending in her pew to pick something from the floor, her bag, perhaps, or an umbrella.

‘Maybe that was a comfort to her,' Bernard said.

‘They found her in a heap, you know, on the floor,' said Thérèse. ‘On the stinking linoleum. She'd been lying there for hours, her leg skewed from the hip at an unholy angle.' She shook her head. ‘A torment, that's what it was. And unnecessary. If she'd only been taken care of properly…'

‘She always had a special talent for sacrifice,' said Bernard.

The trolley rolled past them, one of the wheels creaking. Thérèse crossed herself and, for the slightest of moments, touched the coffin as it passed.

She was not wearing her habit, and Bernard noticed that the large metal crucifix which habitually hung between Thérèse's breasts had disappeared. A small cross and chain, perhaps gold, snuggled instead in the dint at the base of her neck.

‘Is it working well, your… arrangement?' Bernard asked.

Thérèse turned from the coffin. Her voice was newly supple. ‘Oh, it is, Sister, it really is. Corinne is such a marvellous cook, for a start. We have such meals! And I've signed up for a yoga class – for the spring and…'

She fingered the new chain round her neck.

‘It was the right decision, Sister. That's the thing. I know that now. It must have been right. It must have been God's will. After all.' She let the cross fall lightly against her jumper and her face stiffened. ‘And you, Sister? How is Les Cèdres?'

Even now, after several weeks, Bernard had only the faintest sense of the place, like a tremor in her stomach, the endless nausea of falling.

‘It's fine,' she said.

‘Yes. Yes.' Thérèse nodded hard. ‘I thought it would be, in the end. I thought that.'

‘I can't seem to find my way around,' said Bernard.

The church was empty now. The mourners had followed the coffin outside and the nuns' conversation, tuned for Thérèse's deafness, was too loud. It seemed like sacrilege. They were quiet. They slid along the pew and genuflected stiffly, side by side, as they came out into the aisle. Then Bernard and Thérèse made their way along the strip of bright carpet that split the rows of benches and stopped outside the wide door, on the top of the steps. The coffin was being manoeuvred into the back of the hearse and they stood to watch. The parishioners had left. The diocesan man in the suit took a cigarette from a crumpled packet of Gauloises in his inside pocket and smoked quietly, scenting the air. Bernard found herself standing next to her granddaughter.