The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and other Strange Stories (30 page)

‘Well, all that I had expected. I was old enough in my profession to know that convents are not havens of serene sanctity. I had heard the confessions of the sixteen sisters and the Mother Superior and was preparing to leave the confessional when another slipped in to the box. I could see enough through the grill to know that it was a nun. But who was it? Was there another nun in the convent that I had not been told about; or was it one of the nuns I had heard slipping in again to tell me something she had omitted from her first confession? She said the “Bless Me, Father, for I have sinned” in a strange breathy voice, almost a whisper, that I did not recognise. The accent was Irish, but not, I thought, a genuine one. It sounded to me like stage Irish, self-conscious and mocking.

‘Obviously, Bill, I can’t tell you the substance of the confession. Even if I were released from the seal of the confessional I wouldn’t, but that confession was a horror. Oh, I don’t mean murders or anything dramatic like that, just an endless litany of cruelties inflicted on the inmates of the convent, mostly verbal, sometimes insidiously physical. Animals had been tortured too apparently. But the worst things had been done to those poor defenceless girls in Magdalene House. The recital was interspersed with the most terrible blasphemies. More than once I tried to stop her but she went on and on in this teasing mock Irish so that I began to feel that I was only the latest of her long line of victims. That was the worst of it. The creature on the other side of the grill had not only enjoyed committing her crimes, she was now taking pleasure in reciting them to me. When she had finished I began laboriously to admonish her before giving her the penance that was suitable to her. What it would have been I cannot think, because in the middle of my stumbling homily she left the confessional. I heard tripping feet running lightly over the stone of the chapel floor, then the chapel door clanged shut with a deafening reverberant echo.’

There was a long pause. Father Berrigan leaned back in his chair exhausted by his reliving of the ordeal. ‘May I come back tomorrow night and tell you the rest?’ he said.

**

The following night we had dinner together at a restaurant. He seemed more cheerful. As we walked back to my house he took up the story again. ‘There was one thing I didn’t tell you about which I should have done,’ he said. ‘There was something about my interview with the person I shall call the Seventeenth Sister that I had found exciting. Arousing even. The horror predominated, but I cannot deny the undercurrent of another feeling. It was what made my mind return to it time and again.’

Father Berrigan had made enquiries with the Mother Superior about the Seventeenth Sister, but she said that there were only sixteen sisters under her and that was that. He did not think that Reverend Mother was lying, but her dismissal of his story was abrupt to the point of rudeness. ‘There is all the difference in the world between not knowing and not wanting to know,’ was Berrigan’s comment.

The only solution that Berrigan could think of to the problem of the Seventeenth Sister was that one of the girls in Magdalene House had been playing a trick on him. But then he heard their confessions and decided that this was out of the question. None of them had the spirit for it. The faults they confessed were even smaller and drearier than those of the nuns. Had a nun come twice to confession? And if so, why?

Berrigan was still pondering these questions as he walked to his car in the drive. ‘As I was about to get into it,’ he said. ‘I was approached, rather furtively I thought, by Sister Joseph, one of the younger sisters. She was a small, almost dwarfish creature with prominent and badly arranged teeth. I sensed urgency in her manner, and fear. She told me that she had happened to overhear my conversation about the Seventeenth Sister with Mother Superior. She told me that not so long ago there had been another member of their community, Sister Assumpta, but that she had died. I tell you, I had no idea what to make of this, and I asked her what on earth she meant. She merely said: “Ask Father Coughlin. He’s in St Francis Xavier’s.” Then she looked round sharply. I turned my eyes in the same direction and we saw Mother Superior standing on the steps of the convent. She had on a face, as they say, like thunder.’

By this time my walk with Father Berrigan had taken us back to my house. I invited him in for a drink. ‘Is this all right?’ he asked with a tentativeness which was quite uncharacteristic.

‘Of course,’ I said, opening the door. ‘Tell me about St Francis Xavier’s.’

Berrigan untensed and chuckled. ‘So you’ve not heard of St Francis Xavier’s? Well, there’s no reason why you should, you being an apostate. We in Mother Church call it “the Priests’ Nuthouse”. Officially, it’s a rest home for Catholic Clergy. It’s where you go to convalesce, or if you have a breakdown, or sometimes if you are in disgrace and need some time and space to “consider your position”, as they say.’

We sat down in the sitting room and he took a glass of whiskey from me.

‘I wanted to know what was happening and I suspected that only Father Coughlin would or could give me an answer, so on Monday, my day off, I drove the two hundred or so miles to St Francis Xavier’s in Hampshire.’

His journey was in vain: Father Coughlin had died two days previously. Berrigan found everybody very unwilling to discuss Coughlin. ‘I gathered that he had had what we call “a bad death”. You know what I mean. Personally, I think people pay far too much attention to how a man dies. It’s how he lives that matters. Well, Coughlin had died in a way that everyone was reluctant to talk about, and I found myself under a strange cloud of suspicion for even asking about him.’

But his enquiries had not been entirely in vain because, a few days later, he received a package containing a child’s school exercise book and a letter. The letter was from someone signing himself Brother Michael and Berrigan never knew whether he was one of the staff or an inmate of St Francis Xavier’s. The letter informed him that Father Coughlin had been the victim of a ‘succubus’. The term was familiar to me, but only as a relic of medieval superstition: a succubus being in legend an evil spirit which sleeps with its male victim in female form. Berrigan was as sceptical as I would have been about this information. ‘As to the exercise book,’ said Berrigan, ‘I could make little or nothing of its contents. The letter told me that Coughlin had been writing in it during the last weeks of his life. The pencil script was partly indecipherable scrawl. Much of what could be read seemed to belong to an unknown language. The words “Alona Shaga” occurred often. At the time I had no idea what that meant.’

Berrigan could find at least some confirmation of what Sister Joseph had hinted at in the frequent mention of ‘Sister Assumpta’. Unfortunately the name was never incorporated into a coherent sentence, but was invariably followed by lines of meaningless scribble, or endlessly repeated syllables. Sometimes, close to where he had written the name, occurred the words, ‘under the bed,’ or ‘on the bed’, or, more rarely ‘in the bed’. Once, after Coughlin had written the name and a string of syllables which looked like ‘Bababababababa . . .’ he had scrawled the words: ‘Her mouth wept cold water on my pillow.’

After he had told me this Father Berrigan had to pause and replenish his glass. I was aware that his narration was both a necessity and an ordeal, and could, to a certain extent, understand why it was both, but quite what made the horror of it so compelling was still a mystery to me. Having swallowed his whiskey, Berrigan steeled himself to continue.

‘
The last words of the exercise book were written in a childish hand which was still just recognisably Coughlin’s. I know those words by heart. I can see them now. First there were four short sentences in Latin.
Abite procul hinc per misericordiam Christi! Noli succubere me, putida saga! Noli abripere me in abbyssum caliginis. Non sum ad te.
Then something indecipherable had been written. Then came the words:
Crist hav merci.
Those misspellings seemed and still seem heartrending to me
.
And with that the notebook came to an end.’

The words translated literally read, ‘Go far from me, for the mercy of Christ! Do not sleep with me, foul witch! Do not carry me off into the pit of darkness. I do not belong to you!’

There was a long silence, as we both absorbed the meaning of these words. Then Berrigan rose abruptly. ‘The final chapter will have to wait till tomorrow night. May I come to you at about nine?’ I nodded and he left quickly.

**

The following evening, Father Berrigan arrived half an hour before his appointed time. I apologised to him because I had with me a student Bible study group which was due to leave at nine, but he said that he was more than happy to wait in my study until it was over. I had the feeling that he had deliberately arrived early in order to gather his resources for the final episode. Nevertheless his presence in the next room made me feel uneasy and contributed to my impatience with conducting the Bible study, never, in any case, a favourite part of my duties as University Chaplain. Perhaps the poor students sensed this, because we broke earlier than usual, and when I entered my study I think I took Father Berrigan by surprise. He was seated at my desk, his elbows on it, his head buried deep in his hands. When he looked up I saw a face suddenly twenty years older, lined by a worry and perplexity that I had never seen before. With what I imagine was a supreme effort, he reorganised his features into his familiar smile.

‘Are you sure you want to go on with this?’ I asked.

‘Oh, yes. We must bring it to an end.’

So, I fetched the whiskey and the glasses, poured the drinks, sat down opposite him in my study and let him talk.

When Berrigan returned the following Saturday to the House of the Sacred Heart he decided to say nothing about the enquiries he had made. ‘To tell the truth,’ he said, ‘I was a little ashamed of my suspicions. I wanted to believe that the unease I felt was imaginary. I heard the nuns’ confessions. I waited for the Seventeenth Sister to put in an appearance, but she did not come. I felt frustrated rather than relieved. I wanted her to show her hand, you see, but she was too cunning for that. I began to feel that I might have been the victim of a delusion, even that the nuns who passed me in the white passages were looking at me strangely because I was insane. It was a relief to visit the girls in Magdalene House.’

By some hierarchical convention Berrigan did not hear the girls’ confessions in the chapel, but in a small room reserved for the purpose in Magdalene House. He noticed that one of the girls called Aileen, who was notably more pious and serious than the others, had held herself back till all the other girls had made their confession. She came in last and, after he had given her absolution, she remained seated. She looked at him for a long time in silence with frightened eyes before she told her story.

On the Thursday afternoon of the previous week Aileen had gone into the convent chapel, had knelt in one of the choir stalls and had shut her eyes to pray. She had heard no-one enter the chapel but she felt the temperature drop, though she was not conscious of a draught coming from anywhere in particular. On opening her eyes again there was a nun sitting in the choir stalls opposite her. She did not recognise her, but this did not puzzle Aileen particularly because to her, she had told Father Berrigan with a hint of defiant contempt, one nun looked very like another. This one, she said, had a particularly nondescript face. What troubled Aileen was that the nun was staring at her; and this was odd because, unless they had done something bad, the girls were usually ignored by the nuns. It did not seem a malevolent stare to Aileen, nor was it kindly: it was merely steady, unblinking, insistent. Aileen, whose natural spirit had not been totally cowed by her surroundings, decided to stare back. Then the nun did something which sent Aileen into weeping hysterics even as she remembered it. What did she do? It was a long time before Father Berrigan could get a coherent answer.

‘She blew,’ said Aileen eventually. ‘She put her lips together and blew at me from the choir stalls opposite.’ The strangeness of the action was horrible enough. The worst of it was that she actually felt the blast of the nun’s breath across ten feet of convent chapel. At first Aileen thought this must just have been a hideous coincidence: a draught in the chapel had coincided with the nun’s bizarre action. But each time the nun blew she felt a blast of damp icy air full in her face. After the third blast Aileen ran, and she had not been to the chapel since.

Aileen’s story made Berrigan decide to tackle Mother Superior. He had anticipated a difficult interview but his expectations were exceeded by the reality. ‘Perhaps,’ he admitted, ‘I got off on the wrong foot by immediately asking about Sister Assumpta. She virtually accused me of not minding my own business. She kept repeating the phrase: “We don’t talk about Sister Assumpta.” Well, I could see I was getting nowhere so I left. One other thing occurred. As I was getting into my car I happened to look back at the convent building. My eye became drawn to an upper window where I saw the face of a nun, pressed against the glass to such an extent that the nose and mouth were squashed and distorted. The tongue was out and, like a great pink slug, was smearing the glass. At first it puzzled me that any adult, let alone a nun, could do such a childish thing; then I realised. It must be Sister Assumpta. She was mocking me.’

I asked Berrigan how he could have been so sure it was her. He looked a little sheepish and admitted that he couldn’t be sure. After a pause, he said: ‘Everything I tell you is subjective. I can offer you no outside verification. All I have is my memories, and the best I can do is to be true to them.’

On the Monday of that week Berrigan had a call from his Bishop who had received a complaint about him from Mother Superior; he also knew about the visit to St Francis Xavier’s. The Bishop told Berrigan that he was not on any account to make any further enquiries about either Sister Assumpta or Father Coughlin: they were both dead and that was an end of the matter. When Berrigan said to the Bishop that if he was to continue as confessor to the convent, he must know something of what had gone on, the bishop became very indignant but reluctantly vouchsafed him a few bare facts. Sister Assumpta had fallen sick while conducting mission work overseas. On her return to England she had come to the House of the Sacred Heart to recuperate. There she was believed to have formed an ‘improper relationship’ with Father Coughlin. Shortly after its discovery Sister Assumpta had been found drowned in the River Durden about half a mile from the convent. The coroner’s jury had returned an open verdict. Had it been an accident? Had she jumped, or was she pushed? The Bishop was not prepared to say, and would not understand why these questions needed an answer. Father Berrigan was to stop this nonsense and continue his work at the House of the Sacred Heart.