Obedience (6 page)

‘Please,' she said. ‘You believe me, don't you?'

She could feel the sudden chill where his hands had been.

‘I do not want them knowing. I do not want trouble.'

‘There won't be trouble.'

‘This is a war,' he said.

She had no answer to this and he left her, stuffing his hands into his pockets and whistling drily, hardly making a sound through his narrowed lips. She strained to hear him through the noise of the beasts and the shuddering leaves.

Bernard crept in through the back door of the convent, bringing a small handful of spring mushrooms as some
kind of offering. Instinctively she turned for the kitchen, stealthy in the echoing cold of the corridors. She had her eyes to the floor, and almost bumped into Sister Jean emerging from the pantry with a covered plate. The two women stood together for a moment, uncertain. Bernard saw how heavy the plate must be. She saw creases of alarm fold around Sister Jean's wide eyes and the odd way in which the other nun suddenly looked at her, as though noticing her for the first time. Then Sister Jean nodded and moved on. God reminded Bernard to clean the mud from the heels of her shoes.

As the evening drew on, the voice of God was bothersome and shrill. His nagging repetition brought on a headache and a constant trickle of sweat running down Bernard's neck and back. During prayers, she fixed her eyes on the glitter of the crucifix and pressed her hands flat against the cold floor as she knelt, so that she was thrown forwards on all fours, her head thrust upwards, ungainly, and everything but the gilt cross blurred and swirling. Her breathing came fast and noisy. When the nuns around her stood to leave, she found she could not move and someone had to put an arm across her chest and pull her to her feet. Later, in the bitter dark of her cell, with God still hammering His complaints in an incomprehensible cacophony of spite, she could not sleep. She worried that Mother Catherine's interference would put the soldier off; she wished more than anything that she had not mentioned it to him.

She had to make amends, she knew that. She had to find a way to keep him. It was all that mattered. She went over and over the things he had said; she heard his
warning fresh each time, she knew that he might leave her. And then she remembered Sister Jean, darting out of the pantry, wary. Something in the recollected movement was a shock. The dip of Sister Jean's head, the quick panic of her hands, was a revelation. She recalled other things she had heard, the gossip of snatched conversation. She remembered the way the other nuns talked of Sister Jean, with pity, as a transgressor. In Sister Jean's secrets there was an opportunity, she saw that. If she could only grasp it, she could make things right. She understood, all at once, what he had said about the war, the way it was upon them, distilling their desires. And through the confusion of God's chatter an idea came to her, a plan almost. Bernard realized that she could be indispensable to the soldier, if she were given one more chance.

B
efore the certainty of dawn was quite established, Thérèse pulled down the shelves. She stacked them neatly in one corner of her cell and kicked the objects that had fallen onto the floor into heaps. She laid her prized possessions respectfully on the bed – an origami swan folded for her over thirty years previously by a travelling salesman, a vase without a manufacturer's mark which she held to be Sèvres, a tiny wooden apple carved from a piece of walnut which she had won at a charity raffle and a large brass Buddha, its provenance unknown. Then she dismantled the system of empty orange boxes and cardboard tubes that ran around her small cell. She placed all the remaining objects on the heaps, stacking them high, and cleaned out the alcoves in the corridor to either side of her door. Finally she took the things from the bed, one by one, looking at each of them slowly, with love, and she pushed them all together, systematically smashing everything with a heavy-headed hammer she had found in the cellar. She worked methodically, trying to make the broken pieces as small as she possibly could. Chippings
and splinters flew up and around, a momentary display of something magical, and then there was just the dust, and the debris, a mishmash of spoilt things, old and pointless.

She left the Buddha. The brass, she knew, was solid. She had dropped it once by mistake when she had been cleaning and it had not dented. She sat it upright on the bed and looked at it, fingering a cut on her cheek where she had been caught by a piece of flying glass. It looked back, unblinking, unfazed by the destruction around it. It still wore its serene smile.

The noise brought Bernard scuttling from her cell. She could think only that it was workmen, sent by the diocese, come already to strip, or even demolish, the convent. Then she saw that the debris in the corridor was only outside Thérèse's door, and as she came closer some of the shards of broken ceramic and coloured glass, odd, tortured remnants of moulded plastic and splinters of wooden shelving, seemed to her familiar. Wearing only her slippers, she trod carefully, sliding past the worst of the rubbish to push open the shutter in Thérèse's cell as she did every morning.

‘Good morning, Sister,' said Thérèse from behind the bed, peering around the Buddha. ‘I will tidy up after prayers.'

Bernard clipped the shutter against the wall, looked up briefly at the heavy sky, and turned back to Thérèse.

‘There's a piece of broken pot under the bed,' she said, nodding towards a lump half-hidden by the trailing end of bedcover.

Thérèse did not look. Bernard bent and picked it up and put it slowly down on the end of the bed. It was nothing any more, a broken leftover, and Bernard shrugged,
apologetic, feeling that the fault was hers. Thérèse smiled back. The brightness of her eyes was unnerving. Nothing about her seemed quite steady. She clasped her fingers across the Buddha's sleek head and rubbed her palms back and forth, the brush of them quiet on the brass.

‘I'm sorry,' said Bernard. ‘About your things.'

‘I told you.' Thérèse held her voice flat. ‘It's a new start.'

‘Yes.'

Thérèse's attachment to the things of this life had always marked her out. It had been little more than a handful of cheap souvenirs at first. But then it had become a pleasure, a passion, everyone could see that, and the growing collection of bits and pieces, old tools and bottles, decorated boxes and plates stuck with shells, models of the Eiffel Tower and the grotto at Lourdes, coloured sands layered in gourd-shaped jars, ribbons and wrappers, had attracted attention. On more than one occasion items had been stolen. Some of them were found after searches of the other cells; several pieces were never seen again.

In the early days, before the Buddha and the Sèvres vase, the Mother Superior had gone into Thérèse's cell one afternoon while she was teaching and had emptied all the clutter into cardboard boxes which she had locked in the basement. When Thérèse had come back, her cell was as stripped and bare as the ascetic cubicles of the most righteous. Without a word she had lain out flat on her bed, where they had found her when she was missing from evening prayer. She did not move again and refused to eat until her collection was returned. After less than two days, the Mother Superior's resolve had been broken
by the stubbornness of Thérèse's spirit and the fear that she might be answerable to God for the reprobate's life. Thérèse was given permission to go for the boxes and she spent an entire day rearranging the objects on her shelves. Since then, no one but Thérèse had touched her things.

‘It'll be better,' said Bernard. ‘Without it all.'

Thérèse was wearing day clothes rather than her habit, a neat dark skirt, thick tights and a high-necked black jumper against which her cross sparkled. She wore no veil. Her thin hair was cut shorter than Bernard remembered. It had been dyed. As she rubbed her hands across the Buddha's head, she looked strange, unrecognizable.

Thérèse stopped. ‘I can't work out what to do with it,' she said, nudging Bernard's glance towards the Buddha. ‘It won't break. It won't burn, of course – whatever I do, it seems dangerous. It's indestructible – like the kingdom of heaven.'

She laughed slightly, closing her hands again across the statue's head. Bernard was watching her hair, glittering a burnished purple in the early morning light, draining the colour from Thérèse's skin, erasing her. It seemed wondrous that she had managed to dye it in the shared bathroom without leaving a single stain.

‘What are they going to do with this place anyway?' asked Thérèse. ‘Do you know? Are they going to sell it? It must be worth something.'

‘I don't think it's decided,' Bernard said, knowing that the convent could not change, its sturdiness impregnable. When they left it would go on as it always had, that was all, its vacancy finally uncontested.

‘I heard talk of a holiday village or something, for tourists,' said Thérèse. She glanced around her small cell, seeing something else. ‘It would need a bit of work, but it's possible, I suppose.'

Bernard too thought about the solid grey building.

‘Perhaps they'll knock it down,' she said, unconvinced. She was unable to conceive how this would end things.

‘Whatever it is, they'll rip it out. Change it completely,' said Thérèse. ‘They're bound to.'

Bernard did not understand. She nodded.

‘Good then,' said Thérèse. ‘That's fine.'

And she picked up the Buddha and hurled it with a long graceful action through the window. The narrow bars holding the small panes snapped instantly, the glass splintered and Bernard had a view of a chubby Buddha bottom disappearing towards the ash tip at the edge of the grounds. Thérèse stood with her arms outspread in the direction of the throw, statuesque, embracing the puff of morning air that came to them through the broken glass.

‘I don't think you should have done that,' said Bernard.

Thérèse held her pose a moment longer, like a plea for something. Then it looked as though she would fall. She put out a hand and steadied herself on the bed, reaching too far across, suddenly ungainly.

‘It won't make any difference,' she said sharply, her words too slight for her tone. ‘If they're pulling it all down, it'll all go anyway. And if not, well – the windows will be the first thing they'll have to change. They're quite rotten.'

‘But throwing a god out of the window – that's what I mean. It doesn't seem right.'

Thérèse frowned, unsettled by Bernard's unexpected confidence.

‘I'd never thought of my Buddha as a god.'

‘What else is he?' Bernard did not mean to sound accusing. She was puzzled by how they all fitted together, the obscure ecumenical arguments they had tried to teach her but that she could never quite grasp. She was curious about the Buddha; his round features seemed cosy and kind. She felt the unfairness of his ignominious fall and wanted to go after him.

‘I just thought of it as a statue,' said Thérèse. ‘It was an aesthetic thing.'

There was a long pause. Thérèse righted herself, and brushed down her skirt with quick hands. She did not look at Bernard. Bernard went to the window. Fingering a piece of the broken frame she peered across to the overgrown verge, trying to see the Buddha. But the autumn sun was full over the horizon now, dazzling, and everything below was misted and uncertain.

‘I think they could say the same about the Sacred Heart, or the Crucifix, or even the Virgin Mary, if they wanted,' she said at last. ‘I heard that once – that they were just statues.'

Thérèse sat heavily on the bed.

‘Well, you know,' Bernard went on, less sure of herself. ‘These days. They say things like that.'

The mutability of things was too evident. They did not look at each other. Thérèse buried her face in her hands, throwing her head forwards so that the dye of her hair changed colour. It was several seconds before she looked up.

‘Why didn't they say something, about me having it in my cell? What must they have thought?'

Bernard turned her back to the window and drew a foot through the clutter, clearing a narrow path. She could not think of an answer.

‘Didn't you think it was strange?' pressed Thérèse. ‘If that's what it is – a god… didn't you think it was strange?'

Bernard wanted to escape. The disintegration around their feet was too much.

‘I don't suppose it matters,' she said.

Finally Thérèse looked at her. ‘I'll fetch it back. I'll brush it down, give it a wash. I think I'd better. Just in case.'

‘Just in case?'

‘Just in case it is a god, after all.'

‘I don't suppose anyone will know,' said Bernard evenly.

‘But doesn't God know everything, Sister?'

This, of course, was true.

‘So then the Buddha, too, if he's God, would know,' Thérèse went on logically.

Bernard was confused. She felt the familiar uncontrollable flap of ideas in her head, like wind-blown laundry.

‘I said he was
a
god, not
our
God,' she said, thinking her words were too quiet now for Thérèse to hear. ‘I don't suppose he knows everything like our God, the real God.'

He didn't look like he would know everything. He was too fat for a start. And too cheerful. There was good reason why God was never cheerful.

‘Jesus never laughed, you know, Sister,' she said more distinctly.

Thérèse looked wistfully towards the broken window through which her Buddha had soared, and then full at
Bernard. Bernard did not know what to say. She smiled at Thérèse, conciliatory, but Thérèse looked away. They did not know each other. In the ruins of the small cell, with only the scraps of an old life between them, they could not begin. They were too old for that, and too alone.

Thérèse was sulky. ‘I feel like I've profaned something.'