Obedience (30 page)

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.