Seeking Sanctuary Read online

  ‘Francis? I’m Therese. We haven’t met. Can I talk to you later?’

  It came out in a stutter. She had no social graces appropriate to men: she could only be silly, or silent, or gruff. She did not quite know what to do when he offered his hand, except take it, shake it and feel the fact that it was twice the size of her own and like dry sandpaper encircling her own, callused palm. He shook her hand vigorously, holding her arm by the elbow with his other hand as he did so, steadying her.

  ‘Very pleased to meet you, Therese. Sure, I’m in the garden today. Or somewhere. Wherever Barbara lets me go.’

  Which was everywhere, she thought, remembering the new window catch in Joseph’s room as he relinquished the hand and the arm. She had the sensation of the grin and the eyes without really seeing either, rubbed her hand down the side of her tunic and heard him stride away, as softly as the rest of them, in indefinable shoes, which made no sound. She touched her right palm with her left and relived the feeling of his handshake. It had been so spontaneous and undemanding, not like the grasp of the old. There was no time for thinking about it. Their dual motion, the moving handshake, had brought her to Barbara’s door. She would tell Barbara everything. She would confess.

  You are even prettier than your sister. Anna clambered up to the roof and gazed down into the convent garden, seeking him out. It was a cold morning: summer had ceased the rearguard action against autumn and it seemed as if, overnight, the last of the leaves had gone from the deciduous trees, leaving them stripped bare. If she knew how, she could shoot him dead from here and she wished she did know how. She tried to imagine what it was like not to feel in disgrace. It felt like a state of sin, and she wished she could not recall the stupid act of putting out her tongue. She tried to be nonchalant about being dismissed from the Garden of Eden and told herself there were others.

  Facile. The garden was empty and her mouth was dry with a sense of dread, the half-formed knowledge of something she had to do. So much confusing rubbish floating round in her sore head, the prospect of going to work and immersing herself in that other world beckoned attractively. She wanted to forget the place she watched, and everyone in it, as well as her own wretched stupidity. What was the worst thing she had done? Put out her tongue? Scratched his face? Encountered evil and run away? Torn herself from its grasp.

  The breeze was strong, gusting in the night and tearing at the leaves. She settled herself down in the gully behind the parapet out of the wind. If she could not berate Therese’s God in the chapel ever again, she would have to do it here. She took the little statue of Ganesh out of her pocket and put it down beside her, trying to find defiance, but it was difficult.

  ‘Well, a fat lot of good you were,’ she said, clutching her knees to her chest. ‘I know you didn’t have the power, but I still say you should have stopped me climbing over the wall, but there you go. If I hadn’t climbed over the wall, I wouldn’t know what was going on.’

  She could feel the grazes on her knees through the stiff fabric of her jeans. Punishment.

  ‘I’m sorry, Elephant God, but I really can’t talk to you. Nothing personal.You’re just far too nice. I want an ugly, vengeful sort of God. A brute. I want someone to shout at.’

  She adjusted herself for comfort, looked at her feet. Boot weather today, all the better for kicking shit. Shit, shit, shit. She stood up stiffly, and with folded arms regarded the sky. There were scudding clouds, grey and greyer, no inspiration. Down in the garden, she could see the stripped trees and the figure of Matilda, aimlessly waving. Without Edmund, it seemed as if she was calling down the birds to eat. Anna ducked back behind the wall.

  ‘Look here, Lord, I don’t know what it is, but you seem hell bent on destruction.’

  She closed her eyes and imagined the chapel crucifix, with its weary face and artistic blood. The image was fuzzy and pale. Anna rubbed her eyes, furiously. All she could feel was the repellent sensation of Golden Boy’s kiss, the confirmation of utter humiliation. Tried to remember when she had ever felt so claustrophobically powerless inside the embrace of someone who wished her harm. Without any prompting, she remembered struggling in the arms of her mother.

  There were two hours before the start of her shift. Just enough time to find Father Goodwin, if she ran on her jelly legs. She wanted to ask him something in particular – did Edmund wear a little crucifix, I can’t remember – but when she arrived at his door, there was no reply. God and his officials were always out.

  Therese came back to the kitchen about eleven. She had detoured via the chapel, stayed there a long time. Kim had unloaded the laundry into the dryer and was bagging rubbish for the Tuesday collection. Somewhere in her sorting, she had found six cans of Diamond White and an empty vodka bottle.

  ‘Bugger me, Treesa. No wonder you’re so pale. You weren’t fucking joking, were you?’

  CHAPTER NINE

  ‘Weren’t you a little harsh?’ Father Goodwin asked.

  He remembered that St Barbara was the patron saint of gunners: a virtuous virgin imprisoned sometime in the third century AD and then executed by her father in some bloody fashion for espousing the Christian faith. But as soon as he murdered her, he was himself struck by lightning and reduced to ashes, leaving his daughter’s legend to be symbolised as a tower of strength. All that fitted the current image, although he was finding it hard to reconcile this bosomy Barbara with the beautiful girl of the story, as well as finding it easy to imagine why the parent of the original saint had wanted to kill her.

  They had removed themselves from the office to which he had been summoned peremptorily for the interview with Therese, and into the parlour with the view of the first part of the garden. The paved area he could see through the French windows was cleaner and tidier than he recalled, so much so that it was faintly reminiscent of the immaculately manicured patio where Kay McQuaid lived. This time last year, he was sure that all he could see was a mess of dead leaves and leggy plants long past their best. Now he could see black bin-liner bags ready for removal, a colourful array of busy lizzies in the pot nearest the window, and Francis, stage left, tidying an already clean and empty border. In less than a fortnight, he had made a revolution. The dead and the dying souvenirs of summer had been ruthlessly removed.

  ‘We’ve loads of bulbs for a good show in the spring,’ Barbara said, chattily, evading the issue.

  ‘Isn’t it a little early yet to plant bulbs?’ Father Goodwin asked.

  ‘Francis says not. Bulbs are so cheap. We shall have three dozen daffodils for a matter of pennies.’

  ‘But no birds.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘No Edmund to encourage them. And there’s a cat.’

  ‘Has Francis provided a cat? How clever of him. We had mice in the place last winter. I never thought of a cat. You were saying, Father?’

  ‘I was saying, weren’t you a little harsh on Therese?’

  She reached for the coffee pot and filled his cup. He was unsure if the taste was blander than the tea and decided he would not take bets on it. Later, in the afternoon, he would be visiting the sick, namely a virtually speechless old man equipped with a huge television. They would join in pastoral care by the silent watching of old football replays. The prospect beckoned sweetly.

  ‘I didn’t mean to sound harsh, Father. Should I apologise?’

  He remembered, reluctantly, Barbara’s good points, including her occasional bouts of humility.

  ‘What you told her will have made her very unhappy.’

  ‘Oh, come now, Father, I only told her that her sister was a disgrace and we didn’t want her coming in here ever again.’

  ‘You told her Anna was a thieving little savage with aspirations to burglary and assault, and also the person who broke the window. You told her all that on what seemed to me to be the scantiest of evidence—’

  ‘But Francis told me. He was hurt.’

  ‘Yes, Francis said and has the wounds to prove it, but tell me, Sister, does any of this a
ccord with the Anna Calvert you know? The one who makes helpful suggestions, supplies useful outside knowledge, and was so kind when Edmund died? An orphan of considerable bravery. A young woman with no elders of her own. Dead mother, dead father, and then Sister Jude? Surely she’s allowed to be a little unhinged.’

  Barbara was breathing like a horse at the end of a race.

  ‘Not on our premises, she isn’t. I can’t take responsibility for her, I simply can’t. We’re stretched to the limit as it is. We haven’t either the financial or spiritual resources to deal with a window-breaking heathen who wants to undermine us. Of course, it’s terrible she’s had to face so much death, but I can’t shoulder that, either. She hurt Francis, how could she? Poor, dear Francis, so good to us. And we all lose people sooner or later and their father was no loss at all.’

  He spluttered over the coffee, temper rising, thought of a perfect goal, soaring high and down into the net and the elated roar of a crowd.

  ‘How do you know? They hadn’t seen him for years, but it doesn’t mean it didn’t matter. The point is that there is no one left, for either of them. You can’t ban Anna from Therese, because Anna’s all she’s got.’

  ‘Anna annoys her and Therese has us,’ Barbara said, defensively.

  It seemed imprudent to say, It isn’t enough.

  ‘Well, you can’t forbid Anna from Sunday Mass. It’s open to the public and if you do, I can’t possibly say it for you.’

  ‘There are other priests,’ she said, loftily.

  He found he was biting his tongue to the point of pain.

  ‘I believe,’ he said, ‘that the business of Theodore Calvert’s estate remains unsettled . . .’

  She shifted uncomfortably.

  ‘Well, yes and no. I’ve meant to discuss it with you ever since Sister Jude died, but it’s been so busy. I get regular letters from a dry lawyer who speaks gobbledygook. He tells me that there is an ongoing argument about something or other. At first he wrote that the will was complex, and then he says there must be investigation into blood relatives, in case the will is invalid, which won’t make any difference, because under the rules of intestacy, his daughters inherited anyway, but he has to look for forebears, or something. Only a matter of time, he keeps saying.’

  ‘You get the letters?’

  ‘Yes. I don’t censor incoming mail for everyone, if that’s what you think. Therese asked me to do it for her, and some of the others do as well. They want bad news to be filtered and they want complicated news to be decoded. What I mean is that they’d rather hear about illness in the family from me than read it before breakfast.’

  ‘But you never hide anything from them?’

  She cleared her throat and considered the question. She wants to be truthful, Christopher realised with a start of surprise. She just can’t quite do it.

  ‘No, of course not. But I do ration, we all have to do that. If Matilda was stricken with pneumonia, I might decide that the time was not right to tell her that her brother had died. And if ever it happened that Agnes’s so-called son demanded to see her again, I might not tell her at all.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘I can’t discuss it with her because I’m not supposed to know. There’s a lot of it about, Father,’ she said kindly, in deference to his ignorance of things sexual, ‘just as there was forty years ago.’

  He was silent, thinking of Agnes waiting at the door, day in, day out. Of the cruelties of youth and how Barbara’s decision might endorse them: of a disgraced girl from rural Ireland being taken in by a convent, to sit by the door ever since. Of Barbara as the buffer zone between herself and her Sisters, and how she did, at least, take decisions and stick to them, rather than use his own evasive techniques, and he humbly supposed there was a degree of moral courage in that. He held his hands steady in his lap, almost sorry that his temper was under control.

  ‘Did Therese ever get a copy of her father’s will?’

  ‘She handed it to me, unread. A will and a draft will, which seems to be there by mistake. I’m afraid I kept it from her. It was obscene. I shall let the lawyer sort it out.’

  ‘You kept it from her?’ He found his voice was rising again.

  ‘As I was asked to do.’

  She sat, elbows on the knees spread beneath her long tunic, leaning forward for emphasis. She was plain and wholesome, he thought dispassionately, the most unfeminine creature he had ever known. Was it wrong to prefer a woman who smelled of perfume and cared for her skin?

  ‘Where Therese entered the Order, eighteen months ago, it was just before they’d been told, by Calvert’s fancy woman, I believe, that he had drowned. Therese was no stranger to us, as you recall, she brought with her all her worldly goods. Including a pile of correspondence addressed to Anna and herself. They were all with the same lawyer’s frank and none of them were opened. I don’t know if that was a joint decision, or if Therese kept them from Anna when they shared that flat. They are ridiculously protective of each other. I’ve no doubt Therese kept house . . . she’s the responsible one. She told me that neither of them had any interest in their father . . . why should they respond to letters from the grave when he had never responded to the letters they wrote to him when they were ill? So the lawyer writes to me. Oh, come, Father, you know very well that I didn’t just sit on them when Sister Jude was alive. She agreed with me that the will was obscure but obscene. She saw all the correspondence and very likely showed it to you.’

  There was a hint of something, a kind of jealousy. Barbara was suspicious of clever people conversing with one another. It was bound to be subversive.

  ‘No. She discussed the situation with me in broad terms, not the letters or the will itself.’

  ‘Oh Lord, the pedantry of priests. Isn’t it better for them not to know that their father was as mad as a snake?’

  ‘And their mother . . .’

  ‘Died of a broken heart when she was parted from them. A saint.’

  ‘Oh yes, I’d forgotten.’

  He rose, stiff in the limbs and suddenly cold. The parlour was never really warm, not even in summer. He tried to imagine the empty fireplace full of logs and cheerful flames, and found it a leap of imagination too far. Perhaps the wonderful Francis could sweep the chimney and provide cheap fuel: all he would have to do was cut down the trees in the garden. Father Goodwin moved to the windows and looked out over the clean patio towards the forest of shrubs beyond the bend in the path. Francis had disappeared. Christopher had a vision of a golden serpent slinking back into obscurity and the clarity of the image shocked him.

  ‘Shall I apologise to Therese?’ Barbara asked, humbly.

  ‘I can’t advise you on that, Sister.You are the one in loco parentis. But I do think you should reconsider about Anna.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘In which case, I think you should give me copies of the letters and that wretched will. You might have the right to withhold such things from your postulant, but not from her sister, who is not, as you say, your responsibility.’

  She nodded, patently relieved. ‘I’ll get the copies for you.’

  And that, he thought to himself, as she fetched a bulky envelope of papers, was what you call an Own Goal. The final confirmation of an uncomfortable commitment to interfere in other lives. As he took the parcel and turned to leave, he saw Francis entering through the French windows and heard Barbara greet him with anxious affection.

  ‘Ah, you poor pet . . .’

  The boy was welcome to the remainder of the coffee and the sympathy of his adoring employer. He had more power here than Father Goodwin had ever had and the priest was ashamed of his own petulance.

  The nondescript premises of Compucabs looked as safe as any prison. All Anna wanted was a longer shift than six hours, ten until four with no time to think. From her knapsack, she took the little statue of Ganesh and put it next to the paper cup of coffee she had brought in with her. It would have been kind to bring one for Ravi, but, as she remembered, he drank
neither tea nor coffee, only water. The presence of Ganesh by the telephone would be her conciliatory gesture for all that infantile, childish foot-stamping of the distant afternoon before, which sneaked in around the edges of bigger anxieties and made her blush.

  She had distracted herself on the way here, pushing back the essential, indigestible weight of panicky worry, by trying to think up an alternative place to pray. Not praying as in pathetic rosary bead praying, or kissing the ground, but praying as in thinking and arguing with a logical force, and that, she had realised on the rooftop this morning, definitely required a designated place. That was what places of worship were for. She wanted a place where she could shout inside her own head and ask, What are you going to do about my sister? She wanted a place where she could hear some reassuring voice come back and say, It is all your imagination that she is locked inside strong walls with a virus that has already affected all her brethren. She is not in danger. She is really stronger than you and all the more strong with a barrage of saints and angels to protect her. Of course.

  As she walked, not jogging today in her autumn jeans, because her legs were wooden, she was remembering the grander churches they had frequented as children on the high days of her mother’s religion. Wherever they went, they had found a church, entered it and exited quickly if the church was not one of Rome. It was as if her mother was drawn to them all, regardless of denomination, purely for the purposes of comparison, so that she could say, see? Ours are so much better. Cathedrals in Coventry, Ely and Canterbury had all been spurned. She had promised them Chartres and Palma, although it had never happened. She mourned the fact that they lived in the wrong country for the best examples of Roman Catholic cathedrals and they had to make do with Westminster, where they had gone sometimes, like tourists to a palace. There had been an Easter service there where Therese had sneezed at the incense and Anna, prodded by her father, had giggled.

  The other item in the rucksack was the missal, carried around for no good reason but the comfort granted by its weight. Anna surveyed the room, looking for Ravi’s sleek black head and listening to the buzz of conversation. He looked up and smiled at her, stuck up his thumb in a brief salute and carried on talking into his mouthpiece. The smile was like a blessing. Everyone knew that Ravi was incapable of smiling to order. She was forgiven. He found it impossible to pretend. Unlike herself, who made an effort to smile, because she knew a smile helped to offset the sullen and ferocious impression she so often created. The smile of a person so insecure, she had practised it earnestly and used it not necessarily to express pleasure but to please. Somewhere in the sick years, she had lost the art of smiling and had made an effort to reacquire it, in shops, the hall, the bedroom or bathroom, wherever there was a mirror. She could be a smile counsellor now, with all that practice, and smiled at the thought, for a brief moment, laughing at herself for no longer ever knowing when she smiled or scowled. Maybe concentrate on being ridiculous; she could turn it into a whole way of life, wear scarlet and feathers and furs and hats, or nothing at all . . . She waved at Ravi and the room, wiggled her hips in the way she and Therese had done as they aped magazine models in the invalid years and sat down to imagined applause. Her phone buzzed as she donned the headpiece.