Staring At The Light (28 page)

There was a pause for self-recrimination in the
back of the cab. Was he so little and so cowardly in himself that he had needed this promise of new, innocent life to confirm
his own certain footsteps? Was he as feeble as that? Was his passion for his wife not sufficient all on its own? He chewed
his nail and watched the blurred passage of the world outside; someone ran across the front of the taxi as it slowed for lights;
the driver swore. Oh, yes, love for Julie was enough; it was everything, but perhaps not quite enough to quell that greatest
fear of all. The fear that, one day, Johnnyboy would be diabolically clever and try the simple expedient of seeking a reconciliation
through charm and guile without any threat of force. He hadn’t learned a thing, Johnnyboy: his cruelty was powerful, his need
insatiable, his kidney punch the worst on earth, but the power of his affection and his tears and his longing, if ever he
admitted it, well, that put any kind of threat into the shade.

The taxi lurched round a corner. He was thrown back against the seat. Remembered Johnny with a hand pressed over his mouth,
both of them hiding; the fear all the time that Johnny would
beg
him back, plead with him. That he would forget to hunt and bully, that he would crook his little finger in some awful act
of kindness and tap into the common sap that made them. That was the real fear.

But not now, not any more: now this had happened, and Johnny had left the ultimate threat of sweet persuasion too late. He
would never win now, because there was so much more to lose.
Yes
! He bounded up the steps and into the shabby house,
which hid its dereliction rather well, careless for all his thinking. The office workers of the street were in full, colourful
exodus, hats and scarves donned, the girls with silly shoes incapable of keeping out cold or wet; he had a fleeting memory
of kissing Julie’s feet in her practical slippers, feeling the thin skin of an ankle. He ignored the faint scent of Johnny
inside this house, because it was impossible to explain and he wanted to concentrate on things he could explain, but it was
there all the same. Definable only to someone who had slept with the brute for all those many years, knowing every smell of
his body from the peculiar stench of his sweat to the gentle aroma of a freshly soaped chest. No, he had not been forced to
love Johnny; not at first. It had been as natural as breathing …

He could hear Johnny breathing in here, the pulse of the house; ignored that, too. Crashed through the door to the attic,
wishing he had asked the taxi to wait. More haste, less speed, Cannon, my lad.

His stash of cash was under the beam, above the portrait of Sarah without her clothes. Sarah, another convenience, how generous
she was; wouldn’t he love to do without her, like
they
wanted to do, shedding Granny when she tried, in vain, to keep them in order? And, Christ, how was he going to earn enough
to keep a wife and a child? Haste made him clumsy; the boards creaked. He glanced at the painting of Sarah: it was good, very
good, provided he did not compare it to Bonnard, and that way lay the death of all endeavour. He had talent; he had to believe
it;
there was a child to consider and the child had talent to be nurtured, too. He yanked at the beam, fingers exploring impatiently
for the plastic bag secreted up there with the survival money inside. Didn’t trust banks: you couldn’t when the State said
you owed it money. He fetched a chair to stand and reach better.

There was only the one wooden chair, a spindly thing suitable for a bedroom. He stood on it regardless, reached again, heard
the leg of it snap, clutched at the beam and hung there for a moment, thinking, This is funny. Then the beam cracked, broke,
fell, hit him a sneaking, soundless blow on the back of the head as he landed; sent him crashing forward, colliding with the
makeshift easel, both of them spinning down noisily. Then he was lying on the floor with a dead weight across his shoulders,
plaster and dust cascading into his hair like hailstones. He tried to lift himself up; could not; tried to breathe; could;
lay where he was with the cold imagination of having been hit by an explosion. Stay still, think about it; no pain yet; blurred
vision, his heart pounding. Remembered, quite inconsequentially, a remark Sarah had made about this room. It’s rotten, she
had said, but not that bad. And there’s not a single beam high enough for a man to hang himself. Such faith she had in him.
He felt delirious, ridiculous, with some half-remembered sense of happiness and optimism. He closed his eyes against the grit,
reached forward, exploring with his fingers, finding, to one side, particles of plaster and dust, pieces of torn paper, which
were oddly unexpected, and then straight ahead, the canvas of the portrait.

The last thing he remembered for a while was that the surface of it was still slightly soft and sticky. Oil paint took a long
time to dry.

Sarah rang the bell at the door of the convent and wondered idly how many times she had done this – dutiful visits to her
aunt, when she was a child and Pauline in some other institution, nearer what was then home and a long way from London, a
place with a similar door, but attached to a school. The convents she had known, her own school included, melded into one
another in a single sensation of smells, lack of comfort and a deceptive façade of gloom to hide what was behind: laughter
and warmth often enough, charity, devotion, talents and tensions, a code of conduct that kept everything in place.

She noticed the dearth of lights in windows; two, far left, for the two sisters currently bedridden, the rest in darkness,
sure sign that most of them were out. Off to the Cathedral, Pauline said, to hear the Cardinal in the afternoon, busloads
of them from all over the place, but I’ve heard enough from priests so I’ll keep the home fires burning. In virtual darkness,
it seemed. No-one here would ever leave a room empty with a light burning: they had a second sense for a switch. They closed
doors quietly and turned off the light behind them, like polite guests in someone else’s house, ever aware of cost. Sarah
had lost almost every aspect of her convent training; all she could remember was the habit of quiet movement, so ingrained
that it was natural unless she made herself stop, or
some mood of hilarity prevailed with the housework, some excitement overcame the well-absorbed reserve. It was not much to
have taken from a moral education; a small souvenir out of otherwise comprehensive rejection. She had not lost it all. There
was still that belief in redemption … for others.

She remembered, also, the slight and controllable sense of claustrophobia that preceded her like a high-noon shadow as soon
as she came here, some memory of small rooms and scoldings,
Sarah Fortune, you are beyond hope
… a feeling of inadequacy because she could never, ever get it quite right. Could manage the decorum, but not the obedience;
found the rude books about sex and made sure the other girls read them.
Stop sniggering, will you
? She rang the bell again, turned to survey the off-road parking space and the road beyond while she waited for someone to
come from the back of the house to the front. A car moved slowly down the quiet road, pausing, as if looking through the trees
for a number on one of the great big houses that flanked either side. The door opened. Pauline made a mock bow and ushered
her in with a flourish.

‘Cannon shouldn’t be long,’ Sarah said.

‘Ah, a double pleasure.’

To Sarah’s relief she detoured away from the parlour. It was a room that echoed; it was more suitable for a summit conference
than a cosy chat; she could see visiting dignitaries snoring in there on the pristine moquette, sleeping out of self-defence
against the dizzying patterns of carpet and curtain. She followed to the kitchen, where the warmth hit like a soft blow.
Julie was by the industrial oven, her face flushed. There were trays of clingfilm-wrapped food on the table, cold meats and
bread and butter, a pan of soup to one side of the hob. ‘They’ll be hungry as horses when they get back,’ Pauline said cheerfully.
‘A good sermon from a high-ranking cleric always does that for them. Say hallo, Julie.’

She isn’t a child, Sarah wanted to shout. Let her speak for herself.

Julie smiled a greeting, which lit her face, turning it from interesting to beautiful, despite the fatigue. Sarah turned to
Pauline. ‘You’re a tyrant. Julie’s a paying guest, remember?’ She did not add,
paid for by me
. ‘You make her work too hard.’

‘I do
not. You
try and prevent her. I can’t.’

‘Stops me thinking,’ Julie said. ‘I’d rather not think.’ She tucked her hair behind her ears; it was damp. ‘Can we go somewhere
else for a minute? It’s so hot in here.’ It was warm, certainly, without being uncomfortable, but then Sarah had not been
labouring over a hot stove. Hers was the easy life: she could see it in Pauline’s eyes.

‘We’ll say a prayer in the chapel, shall we?’ Pauline suggested brightly. Julie nodded and moved ahead of them. Pauline and
Sarah followed. ‘She
likes
the chapel,’ Pauline whispered to Sarah, irritating her with the assumption that Julie might not mind being talked about
within earshot, like a deaf old relative. ‘She feels at home in it, these days.’ Was this new, or a piece of invention? ‘Cannon
likes the chapel, too,’ Pauline added.

It was chill enough in here to reduce a fever. Sarah had left her coat and regretted it; the other two, a unit, did not seem
to notice. It struck her for the first time that there was a purpose to Pauline’s voluminous clothing: it was the equivalent
of wearing an adaptable blanket at any time. She herself was dressed for an overheated office, skirt and blouse inadequate
for these more Spartan conditions, and there were further advantages in being a holy nun like Pauline, such as never having
to worry about co-ordination, whether the shoes would go with the skirt, the skirt with the blouse: she could simply stick
to the shroud and put the equivalent of the handbag in the pockets, without vanity as if she had none of that commodity. Which
she did have, the darling, in plenty, but vanity of a heavily disguised kind properly belonging to a producer of a play who
might dress with deliberate insignificance in the knowledge that it was he who was pulling the strings and creating the scenes.
Sarah tried to suppress the suspicion with which she regarded both Pauline’s inscrutable face with the marble skin and Julie’s
guileless exhaustion. How melodramatic to insist on the chapel, as if it were a lay-by on the road to Damascus and Pauline,
if not the embodiment of Paul’s vision, at least the official breakdown van who collected him for the next leg of the journey.

‘There, now,’ Pauline said, making sure they were all uncomfortable. ‘Julie and I have had such a lovely quiet day together,
haven’t we?’

Why this dreadful condescension? Was it saint to
sinner? Or was it Pauline, mother appointee, becoming overprotective on the discovery that her darling little flower was in
a delicate condition? Sarah looked at the statue of St George around which they seemed to be marshalled, wondered what the
pursed-lip princeling thought he was doing waving that stick.

‘I told you Cannon’ll be here any minute,’ she said. ‘Can you hear the doorbell from here?’

‘Oh, yes. There’s a pager on the wall, a quiet one …’ That was Julie, confident in these surroundings. A waitress with slightly
buck teeth, marvellous eyes and enormous dignity. Sarah felt foolish. There was no disingenuity in either of them; there was
only her intense irritation at feeling so much at a loss, that convent feeling of guilt and powerlessness. She had her arms
crossed over her chest, defensively, less against the cold than the sensation of their innate superiority, married woman and
professional celibate. Maybe all
tarts
felt like this in such a place. Maybe it was Pauline being so condescendingly motherly to her new charge.
You always were an attention-seeking child, Sarah. Still jealous at thirty-five, are we
?

‘Look,’ Pauline said, ‘you’ve got us wrong.’ The
us
hurt. ‘We like the chapel because we like the chapel, right? And it’s perfectly fair to sit here if we’re waiting for Cannon
to join the discussion, isn’t it? He’s far more likely to come in the back way than he is the front, if he follows established
custom. Never quite took to the parlour, did he, Julie? Prefers the clandestine.’ Julie nodded. ‘If he can’t get in the front,
he’ll
get in the back. So don’t worry about Cannon. You didn’t say you were bringing him anyway; the later he is the better. Gives
us more time to sort things out.’

‘Are you pregnant for sure?’ Sarah asked, avoiding Pauline’s eyes and staring straight into Julie’s tired face, fascinated
by the changing expressions that altered it so much it could have been a different face; she would be similarly and dramatically
altered by different clothes, another chameleon. They had something in common then. It was difficult to describe the change
of mood: a sad face in repose; utterly attractive in laughter; the huge eyes of a madonna, mirroring the amazement of discovery.
She would be divinely patient with child and husband, given her chance. How they would all grow together, like a twisted and
fruitful apple tree.

‘Pretty sure. Sure as I can be, short of an announcement from the Archangel Gabriel. And Cannon won’t have any reason to think
the thing a supernatural object rather than his own, his very own.’

There was a note of irony, foreign to her, a new tough self-assertiveness. Perhaps the result of a day with Pauline, to whom
ironic understatement was second nature. Sarah could not see Julie being ironic with Cannon: he would not comprehend it. With
Cannon she was sweetness and light, not sickly sweet, but firmly indulgent of his primary status and her integral part of
his life as the decoder of his language and his needs; his passport to reality. There was pride in the symbiosis, the being
the other half; she made it
admirable. Feminist claptrap about finding oneself would find as much house room in Julie’s repertoire as it would in that
of any of the sisters here. Her kind of love made its own ultimate demands and she would obey them completely. Seen in the
context of Julie’s generously self-sacrificing soul, perhaps a temptation to include love of God into the equation was not
so surprising. Pauline had said it once: if you love completely, the heart expands, and calcifies. She always made it sound
like a disease.