Obedience (24 page)

‘It looks like stationery,' she said. ‘The usual order.'

His reply came too quickly.

‘I thought you might like to know that I've got a new job. A better job.'

He had his eyes on her face for a moment, almost smiling. She held the pen up in front of her, as though showing him something marvellous.

‘I thought you might like to know,' he said again, when she didn't answer.

Veronique did not like to look at him. She felt that he had let her down somehow. She had assumed that he would always be there, bringing the post, making the air of the nursing home bristle around his unspectacular youth. She liked the way he wrapped her delivery separately in an elastic band, as if it were important, putting it straight onto her desk if he got the chance.

The postman shuffled and then he crouched down by the chair, putting a hand on the parcel, wrinkling the smooth surface of the paper wrapping.

Veronique was brisk. ‘I'll not be seeing you again, in that case?' It was not what she wanted to say.

He had to look up at her, making his answer an appeal.

‘I'm not moving away. I'm going to work for the town. I'm going to be in charge of post, internal and external, at the town hall.' He patted the parcel, proud.

‘But you'll not be coming here.'

He nodded, as though she had said something wise. Then there was a long quiet, filled with the low buzz of office electronics and the old-fashioned hum of the nursing home, damp and thick around them. This was the moment. They both knew it.

‘If you'd like, if you'd be interested, we could perhaps… bump into each other sometime,' he suggested, straightening up and stepping away from her. ‘Maybe.'

‘That would be nice.' Veronique heard the sharpness still in her words. Then she looked at him, the way his head was turned away, and she smiled, feeling the blush warm her through. ‘Really, I'd like that,' she said, softer, as though beginning again. ‘It would be nice to see you outside of work.'

‘Without my uniform.'

‘Yes.' She laughed and clipped the pen onto her pocket. Nothing had been signed.

‘We could start on Friday. I wanted to celebrate my new job. If you'd like, we could have a meal somewhere.' His shyness folded the words one upon the other so that they came to her unready.

‘That would be nice,' said Veronique. ‘You'll be celebrating with your friends?'

‘No. Just us. Just you and me.'

It was a relief. It settled everything.

‘I'll take your phone number,' said the postman.

Veronique did very little work for the rest of the day. Something about the postman's lean uneven features disconcerted her, and when she thought of him, she thought instead of his wide palm laid flat on the parcel,
the skin clean and supple. She looked at herself many times in the small mirror that hung behind the door of her office, tracing what it was he might be thinking of, what it might be he had seen there. She put her fingers softly to her stinging eyes, feeling too old for the effort of romance. She could not imagine falling in love.

She did not post the letter to Bernard. It lay on her desk for several days gradually getting pushed further to the edge. Veronique knew it was there. She used it once or twice to rest her water glass on, although she was careful not to leave a ring on the envelope. Otherwise, she tried to ignore it. She did nothing to investigate Bernard's name. On Friday afternoon, her date with the postman almost upon her, she spent several hours pacing circuits of the corridor at extraordinary speed, everything a whirl of yellow carpet and dense smells. She stopped on one of these circuits to tear the envelope in half and put the pieces in the bin.

‘Better off that way,' she said out loud. She was used to the raw inevitable sadness of the old. Just at that moment she could not bring herself to worry about it.

Thérèse, on her knees at the side of her bed, her hands joined in front of her, cried out that morning to her God as she tried to explain how unfamiliar the world was beginning to feel. But there was no comfort. Even God had begun to sound different to her. The unequivocally patient and consoling tone she had heard all her life at the convent seemed now to have an edge to it, something jaunty, sarcastic even. It further confused and disorientated her; she dipped her head to the counterpane and her tears came fast.

They picked Bernard up from Les Cèdres shortly after eleven. She was waiting outside the front door, stamping her feet gently to keep warm, her huge dark coat leaving nothing of her. A light snow was falling, tiny indeterminate flakes that did not settle but that, for a brief moment, made her veil glitter. When she heard the car come up the drive, she thought of Veronique. There was a lurch of disappointment when she saw it was only Corinne and Thérèse, even though she was expecting them. As soon as she was in the car, she noticed that Thérèse was wearing a new jumper, a soft grey, the kind of grey that would have been considered too resonant in the old convent days.

‘It's most kind of you to take me like this,' she said politely to Corinne, who was backing uncertainly out of the closed loop in front of the entrance.

‘Oh, it was Thérèse's idea,' said Corinne. ‘She was missing you.'

They all liked the idea of this. It hung in the air for the rest of the day, clinging like perfume.

They did not go far. Corinne drove slowly. In the car, they hardly spoke. Once or twice, Corinne complained about the state of the road, or pointed out a turreted farmhouse or a wide barn, a landmark. Thérèse nodded in reply. She kept the map open on her knees and traced the route with her finger, though Corinne never seemed unsure about which turn to take and all the villages were well signposted.

Bernard was silent. Everything was new to her. It was as though the world had suddenly been rent open, laying bare great stretches of unfamiliar land, strange villages,
like her own but wretched and deformed. There were no edges to things; they kept on, as if to go for ever, taking no account of horizons, pushing the road out in front of them on and on, things shifting round every bend, unimaginable. She could not speak, even had she wanted to.

They ate lunch in a restaurant overlooking the river which ran black and slow under the winter branches. It was an uninspiring dish of flabby meat. When Corinne closed her hands over her plate and began a short grace, the other diners turned briefly to look at them and the waitress, heading their way with a basket of sliced baguette, strolled purposefully to the other side of the room until the prayer was finished. Thérèse noticed all this with alarm. She could not say the words of the grace out. Her tongue was dry and her cheeks hot. The mundane declaration of prayer, the public avowal of God, was embarrassing her. She did not know what was happening.

After lunch they headed for an abbey and parked as directed by small wooden signs. There was a printed board in the car park laying out the essential historical facts about the church and its grounds and Corinne put on her coat to stand out and read it, even though she knew the information already. Thérèse and Bernard waited in the car. The snow was faster around them now, the flakes thicker. They both watched the steady fall of it.

‘They send letters on automatically,' said Bernard, suddenly. ‘They send them on from the convent somehow. A letter came a few days ago – about Sister Marie. I had to sign something.'

‘You did?' Thérèse could not help but sound scathing. ‘Why you?'

‘I don't know. Someone showed me where to sign. At Les Cèdres. They told me what to do. But it came from the convent, the letter. That was the address it had on it, underneath.'

‘I wouldn't have thought it would have come to you. I thought the diocese dealt with everything.'

‘I don't know,' said Bernard again.

‘Perhaps it was a mistake,' said Thérèse.

They did not say anything more. They watched the fall of the snow and the long slide of the flakes down the windscreen. In this strange place it seemed something shared, the repetition of many winters.

‘It was kind of you to think of me,' Bernard said, quietly. ‘It was kind of you to bring me out.'

Thérèse did not hear. She turned her head to watch as Corinne walked across the far end of the car park, her figure blotted by the snow, and she pulled a word puzzle book from her bag. It sat unopened on her lap.

‘Are they treating you well at Les Cèdres?' she asked after a pause.

‘It's warm,' said Bernard, speaking up. ‘The rooms are always warm.'

‘God always seems to know what's best for us, don't you think, Sister? Even when we don't know ourselves.' Thérèse flipped open her book. ‘Especially when we don't know ourselves.'

Bernard had not yet worked out what God had to do with Les Cèdres. She thought He might have sent her there as a trick.

‘Yes, Sister,' she said.

Thérèse nodded. Corinne moved through the snow, strolling around the car park before coming back to the driver's door. She opened it and poked her head inside.

‘I can see someone opening up the ticket hut,' she said. ‘But it's a bit chilly. We should wait a moment or two. You'll get cold hanging around out here.'

She closed the door, not quite tightly, and left them again. Thérèse found her page in the puzzle book and tried to cross off the answers in her head. But even this felt awkward, impolite, and she closed the book again, folding her hands over it.

‘We're off on holiday in a short while,' she said. ‘Corinne and I. We've booked something at the coast. Nothing much, just a few nights in a small hotel. We got a special deal.' She spoke too quickly, already excusing herself. ‘They call it a winter break. I'm looking forward to it. I've never had a holiday. I know the weather might not be up to much, but still…'

Her sentence hung unfinished while they both thought about the enormity of this. Bernard had never heard of a nun taking a holiday that didn't involve ministering to sick pilgrims or making a retreat. She presumed such pleasure-seeking would be sinful. She presumed someone would put a stop to it.

‘Was this Corinne's idea?' was all she asked, however, her tone flat.

‘No. Mine. I wanted to see the sea.' She felt she had given herself away to the old nun. ‘Anyway, as I say, it's nothing much.' She wanted to change the subject. ‘Do you have outings from Les Cèdres?'

‘A minibus comes sometimes, some days,' said Bernard. ‘I don't know what it's for.'

‘Haven't you asked someone? Perhaps it goes to the market. Or around and about, you know, on outings. You should ask, Sister. You could go.'

Bernard could not bring her mind back. She had a picture in her head of Thérèse and Corinne, arm in arm, strolling along a sunlit promenade, the breeze skipping in their hair and brushing their cheeks red, Thérèse eating a coloured ice cream from a large cone, licking at the drips. The picture glowed and flickered, something taken from the television, undeniable. It made her think of the warmth of Corinne's hand closed around her own, their communion in the graveyard after Marie's funeral, and she shut her fist tight, squeezing her flaked nails deep into her palm.

Corinne hurried across to the car and opened the door again, surprising Bernard with where she was. The snow had eased, and the flap of the ticket hut was propped open.

‘I think they're ready for us,' said Corinne. ‘Look, there's more people coming.'

Another small car pulled down the driveway and parked at the far corner of the car park. Two elderly men got out and headed slowly for the ticket booth, one walking gingerly with a stick.

Bernard and Thérèse got out, too. They fetched their coats from the boot and muffled themselves against the cold they expected in the abbey. Bernard pretended not to notice when Thérèse offered her an arm for support so they crossed the car park separately, scuffing faint prints into the thin layer of wet snow. Corinne was already at the office, buying their tickets and talking to the young man who was serving her. He turned out also to be the guide,
and less than ten minutes later he shut up the ticket booth again and came out to give them an official welcome.

Corinne kept up with the guide. She had been to the abbey many times in the past; twice she had come on pilgrimage.

‘You'll like it,' she promised, as they all turned at the end of the path into the square that fronted the church. ‘It's beautiful, really.'

‘I remember it,' said Thérèse. ‘I brought a class of girls one day on retreat. Ages ago now, of course – years. But I can't imagine it's changed.'

They waited for Bernard as they began the climb up the long flight of unevenly worn stone steps.

‘It stank of varnish.'

Thérèse remembered the peace of it, even with visitors coming and going and workmen clanking tins on the hard floor. She remembered now, suddenly, the strips of red and white tape that had closed off the pews while they were refurbished, the tiny flick of them in the breeze from the door.

She shook her head. ‘It was a good day. When the monks had finished talking to the girls, they all came back out here, into the square and went up the stairs again, on their knees. It's what the pilgrims used to do, apparently.'

No one laughed at the idea. The guide took it as a cue, and explained some more about the old-fashioned habits of worship. One of the men asked a question. Thérèse stood apart, looking back down the steps, remembering the face of every girl that had come with her that day, seeing them there, their knees grazed and bloody, their tights ruined, their eyes shining. Sitting afterwards on the daisied lawn
in the cloisters, three of them had declared their firm intention to become nuns. None of them had fulfilled their vocation.

The guide held the heavy door for them to pass through into the church. Bernard was last, puffing with the cold and the climb, unable to understand why they had come here. The guide smiled at her and the door sprang shut with a soft clank. It was, for a moment, dark.