Obedience (4 page)

Bernard watched them. They stood together, almost touching, their intimacy everywhere in the flicker of their movements. Bernard saw the woman take Thérèse's hand and lift it in her own. She saw Thérèse dip forwards, perhaps laughing. It was nothing to do with her, she knew that, but nonetheless she took their closeness as some kind of insult. She shook herself down again and set off towards them, hurrying across the square, not noticing now the rain thrown at her by the gusts of wind.

‘Sister Bernard.'

Bernard looked up. Thérèse had pulled away from the other woman and was coming down the steps, her hand outstretched, offering help.

‘I thought you were already at Mass. Look at you. You're soaked through.'

Bernard could not speak. She let Thérèse take her hand and help her up the final steps, and she stood shivering alongside the other woman. Water dripped quickly from her habit onto the paving. From inside there was the rising voice of the congregation in prayer.

‘This is Corinne Bousquet,' said Thérèse. But the introduction fell awkwardly and there was a long pause before she added, ‘This is Sister Bernard. You remember? The other sister I was telling you about?'

Bernard looked at the woman called Corinne. There was nothing special about her. In her black woollen hat and heavy coat she hardly seemed there.

‘What are you doing out here?' Bernard asked.

Corinne smiled. ‘We were plotting. And now it has made us late.'

‘We're going in. We saw you, just as we were going in,' added Thérèse.

Bernard felt the cold settle across her wet shoulders. ‘Plotting,' she repeated, not understanding.

The other two women looked at each other.

‘It's nothing, Sister Bernard. Nothing to worry about,' said Thérèse. ‘I knew Corinne when we were both teaching. It was an old idea, nothing more.'

They heard the heave of the pews as the congregation rose to its feet.

‘We should forget it,' said Thérèse, looking across at her friend.

But Corinne shook her head. ‘We should think about it,' she said.

‘We're missing the Mass,' said Bernard. She was surprised at how the other women looked straight into each other's faces.

‘We are, Sister. I'm sorry.'

And Thérèse glanced only briefly at Corinne before taking Bernard's arm and walking with her into the porch.

The back rows of the congregation turned at the creak of the door, their faces unclear in the dim light. Bernard paused, half in and half out, and Thérèse had to push her gently forwards. Corinne closed the door as quietly as she could and the three women stood at the back of the church, behind the pews, seduced by the glitter of the altar, unexpectedly golden in the gloom.

‘It's different, from back here,' Bernard said very quietly.

Thérèse nodded. But Corinne had already moved to one side and was making space on one of the back pews, getting the men sitting there to slide along. She beckoned towards Thérèse who reached again for Bernard's arm.

From here, the old-fashioned gilt and candlelight glowed distant, fixing the altar in the dark; it was a show, a spectacle, the priest tiny against the stretch of the arches behind and above him, and everything magnificent. Transfixed, Bernard failed to pay attention to where she was going. With her boots still wet and the floor slippery, she tripped on the kneeler upended along the length of the pew and fell forwards with a clatter, flailing out an arm that slapped the head of the man in front, and thudding her leg hard into the seat. The kneeler swung down onto the stone floor with a clank. The noise was enormous. It seemed everywhere.

Thérèse pulled Bernard down into the pew.

‘Are you all right, Sister?'

But Bernard's hands were already sharply folded in prayer, her head bowed. It could have been that nothing had happened, except that she was trembling.

‘Sister?' asked Thérèse again, too loudly, confused by the echoes of the church.

Bernard did not move. The pain swelled in her bruised leg.

‘You see? God be my strength. You see what would happen if I went – if she were on her own?' said Thérèse, sliding onto her knees and looking at Corinne.

Corinne took her friend's hand. They bowed together, as though they were praying.

Bernard did not understand what had been said until towards the end of Mass. As the bell rang out she raised her eyes for the first time, seeing the priest on the golden stage, his arms raised, and then she realized. Thérèse was leaving her.

Thérèse was sitting at the table in the refectory. The collar of her cardigan was pulled up to her ears and she was completing another puzzle from her book, spinning the pen between her fingers as she considered the clues. She looked up as Bernard passed her; the pen dropped onto the table and rolled into the joint between two planks of oak.

‘It's All Souls, Sister,' she said. ‘It almost slipped my mind what with everything else.'

Bernard had not forgotten. ‘I could make some coffee,' she suggested. She thought about the dark, perilous pit of purgatory. When He had still been speaking to her, God had threatened her with it, a place of obscurity and absence, incompleteness. She had tried to imagine how it might be, but nothing had come to her except a muddled sense of musty cellars and damp rock and indescribable suffering. She had taken a place at the front of the gathered nuns in the chapel, motionless through the desolate night, praying on her knees without ceasing for the terrified souls who were trapped there, the damp autumn chill, the dislodged fear and the intoned rites creating a kind of bleak ecstasy.

Thérèse picked up her pen. ‘If you like,' she said.

‘To warm us through the night. We usually have coffee.'

‘If you like, Sister Bernard.'

But there was such unwillingness in her tone that Bernard did not move, and almost immediately Thérèse began again.

‘Have you see it? Les Cèdres?'

Bernard looked across at Thérèse.

‘What?' she said, the murky hollow cave of purgatory, its unfathomable loneliness, consuming her uncertain sense of Les Cèdres, the diocesan rest home for the elderly where they were being sent.

‘Have you seen it? Have you been?' Thérèse glared, as though already Bernard was to blame.

Bernard blinked, the bare shadows of the refectory becoming clear again, familiar.

‘No. I thought I'd wait,' she said. ‘They provide everything, furniture and linen. I saw no reason to go.'

‘You weren't even curious?'

‘I've been very busy.'

Thérèse glared. ‘You're ninety-something years old. You don't have to be busy. You could have found time to go. Someone would have taken you. I've been.'

Nothing Thérèse could have said would have surprised Bernard more.

‘You've been to Les Cèdres?'

Thérèse nodded, thinking of the four magnificent cedars at the genteel religious retirement home and the room she had been allotted at the back, from which there was a view only of unkempt ground and the giant green gas cylinders for the heating and hot water.

‘You've been to Les Cèdres?' Bernard had to ask again, unbelieving. ‘You've seen it? Where we're going?'

Thérèse looked down at the word puzzle but her eyes slipped across the long table as she remembered.

‘First I went to the nursing home for Sister Marie. I know she needs extra care, somewhere with medical staff, with facilities; I know she can't come with us – but still, it's a terrible place. It stinks. I thought at first it was, you know, urine, but it's not that. I think it's what they use to clean up the urine. It's not nice. It can't be necessary. It never smells like that here.'

Thérèse sniffed, as though to make sure.

‘And of course there's men there, everywhere, in all the rooms. And brown linoleum. And it's too hot. It's very hot.'

She had hated the place so much, its inescapable heat scrubbing everything smooth, that she had left without seeing the room they were intending to give to Marie when the present occupant finally died.

‘But afterwards I went where we're going – to Les Cèdres. And that's nicer. Really. I saw them getting lunch and it looked all right. And there's a pretty little chapel where you can stay all day if you like. It's peaceful. And they were quite friendly.'

Bernard nodded. She could not picture what Thérèse was describing. She rolled fragments of paper tissue between her thumb and forefinger, still anxious about the towering emptiness of purgatory and the unheard cries of the souls that were suffering there.

‘Really. It's OK,' said Thérèse weakly.

Bernard heard the accusation in it. ‘They thought you should come with me,' she said. ‘They thought you needed some care.'

‘Because I'm deaf? That makes no sense. It's not as though I'm sick or anything.'

‘At our age…'

‘At
our
age? Sister, I am twenty years younger than you.'

Bernard frowned. ‘But living alone…'

‘I live alone here. More or less. Perfectly well. I can manage perfectly well here. Why do they think…?' Thérèse slapped shut the cover of her book and looked straight at Bernard. ‘Why do they think I can't manage just because you're old and she's senile?'

Bernard stood up, escaping the punched anger of Thérèse's questions. The cold had settled firmly in her legs. She went stiffly through to the kitchen to find a sponge and when she came back she wiped down the table. There were always crumbs from the bread stuck in the hollows and joints of the wood. She prised them up with her nail and put them aside in a small dish for the birds, knowing that when she scattered them outside nothing would come for them.

‘I don't understand, Sister,' she said at last, but not loudly enough.

Thérèse leant forwards, frowning, trying to catch the words. Bernard sat down again.

‘I don't quite understand,' she repeated, more loudly. ‘What else can we do?'

Thérèse looked for a moment at the old nun. Then she pressed her hand hard against her forehead, steadying herself.

‘I'm only seventy. I could live for years, sitting out my time in that place, with a chemical stink in my nose and nothing to look forward to except wet pasta.'

It did not seem to Bernard like an answer. She wrung the sponge in her hand and the crumbs fell to the floor.

‘I thought you liked pasta,' she said.

Thérèse sprang from her chair. She thumped her hands down onto the puzzle book, sending the pen dancing along the table, and she set her gaze on a point through the window, above Bernard's head.

‘Sister,' she said, the word snapping shut. ‘Sister…' There was a moment when she could not think how to go on. ‘How can you do it, Sister? You haven't even been there. You don't even care. You'll just do as they say. You'll just go along with it, with God's will, if that's what it is, and you'll never say a word, never even wonder.' She dropped her eyes for a moment and saw Bernard's unruffled face gazing at her. ‘God have mercy, how can you be so… good?'

Thérèse pushed back from the table, and her chair clattered to the floor. Bernard could see pink spots spreading across her cheeks and tears gathering.

‘I'll put the coffee on,' she said, as some kind of comfort. ‘For All Souls.'

Thérèse shook her head. ‘I can't,' she said. ‘I can't do that tonight.'

‘You're not coming to the chapel?'

‘Is Sister Marie?'

Bernard was confused.

‘No,' she said.

‘No. Well then. We are not gathering in the chapel. Not this year.'

‘No one will pray for us, Sister, when our time comes. We'll be trapped there, in purgatory, with our sins. We'll be lost. No one will think of us.'

Thérèse could not bear Bernard's panic. ‘I'm sorry, Sister,' she said. ‘It's too much. I can't do the vigil for All
Souls.' She gripped the edge of the table, startled at having said such a thing. She did not know what was happening.

Bernard sat for a long time in the refectory. Then she went to the chapel, lighting a single candle at the back, near the door, and sitting near its puttering glow. The shadows around her would not stay still. The altar loomed, undeniable, but the crucifix above was flat and unreal, disappearing into the gloom. Bernard did not kneel. She kept her hands gripped together, her fists tight. The words of the prayer would not come, just the thought of her soul, spinning in a dark place, cold and sick and in pain, entirely forgotten.

She blew out the candle and waited for the smell of the smoke to clear. Then she went back to her cell. The convent was closed in behind the shuttered windows, and the greyness within it hung steady. But Bernard could not sleep. She could hear rain starting and a car struggling up the hill out of the village. Somewhere downstairs something cracked.

She switched on the light by the side of her bed. The luminous yellow Christ which had glowed in the dark above her head went out, leaving only a badly modelled plastic blob, the colour of old bone. From the drawer in the bedside table she took out a thin leaflet, a photocopy folded clumsily where the binding would have been in the original. The front page displayed dark trees with something, impossible to pick out, in the smudgy ink beneath them. The words ‘
Les Cèdres
', italicized, were draped above the trees, and beneath, in a smaller, plainer font, ‘Diocesan rest home for the elderly.' It had been sent
to her in the post, along with a list of the things she was permitted to take with her, which included medication, nightwear and items for individual prayer, but not soap or toothpaste, which would be provided communally. This would prevent, so the letter had suggested, unnecessary expenditure or ‘personal hoarding'.

The photocopied leaflet offered little information. There was a photograph of the chapel, looking dingy, and another of the day room, at which Bernard peered long and hard. The description listed the ‘public areas' as a refectory, television room, library and entrance hall, as well as the chapel and day room, but there were no photographs of these; there was nothing about the bedrooms. While it looked and sounded much like the convent in which Bernard had spent the last seventy-five years, it still terrified her. She wished she could have died earlier.