Seeking Sanctuary Read online

  ‘But I only said I wished it were dead. I watched it fly and wished it. If it had stayed, making that noise, driving the others away before the weather turns cold, they won’t come back and nest. I wanted it to go. I didn’t mean to kill it.’

  Matilda marvelled at the power of prayer, and did not feel a shadow of Edmund’s guilt. He had spoken with such vitriol on the subject of the magpie from February right through to July and with greater passion when the other birds, the blackbirds and the great tits, had been brooding in their well-established nests and he had spent a fortune on cheese and nuts to augment the food supply, feeding the magpie too, to keep it quiet. Then it had left. The return had been a bitter blow. She had prayed for the demise of the bully of the garden, and her wish had been granted. The downside of the wish was turning Edmund into a murderer. She wondered how he thought he had killed it. With a catapult, like David did Goliath? Hardly. She smiled and shook her head.

  There was no doubt about the ownership of this garden and to whom it was dedicated. It had become designed, cultivated and entirely orchestrated as a reserve for birds. Matilda was always puzzled that no one else in the convent appeared to notice this. It was a secret she shared with Edmund and St Michael and would have loved to share with Sister Joseph, if Joseph were not so transfixed with misery and so irritated by Matilda’s intermittent deafness. Everyone else simply accepted the garden as being increasingly impenetrable, blaming Edmund’s infirmities and in the case of Barbara, her own indifference to anything that happened beyond the inner walls.

  The uncontrolled ivy that covered the back wall unchecked was encouraged to proliferate because certain birds liked it for nesting. The low branches of the newer sycamores were perfect perches for fledglings, who would be in danger if they slept on the ground. The ivy hid Edmund’s nesting boxes beloved of the great tit, and the virginia creeper camouflaged the holes in the wall, which he had enlarged in the hope of attracting home the house sparrows and the robin redbreast family, which had sojourned, quarrelsomely, two years before. The blackcurrants were solely for blackbirds. The oversized, ugly garden shed, which was supposed to house Edmund’s gardening tools, was bare of anything much except fork, spade, hammer, nails, knives and twine, plus his seat and a sack of grain. Matilda did not know what he had done to deter the London pigeons, but it would never have been poison. She suspected it had been the effective use of a water pistol.

  Edmund kept the area nearest the convent building at the back of the chapel neatish and tidyish, with a single flowerbed. Down this end, he let the shrubs encroach, encouraged two small, gloomy holly trees, which were good for winter berries and supporting mistletoe. The overweening cotoneaster, which crept across the path around the bend from St Michael, had an orange fruit the birds adored. Edmund was a gardener who could not prune.

  Matilda withdrew her hand from his back, suddenly disturbed. She held on to her rosary, tightly. The warm wooden beads were a constant comfort. She had learned to slip it in her pocket when she came down this end of the garden, in case the clicking sound of it should alarm the birds.

  ‘Edmund, dear, how did the poor brute die? It didn’t just fall from the sky because you wanted it dead, did it?’

  Or because I prayed to St Michael for exactly such an event, she thought, and her mind wandered. Really, Edmund was as intractable as her dear Sister Joseph: they would neither of them accept affection and forgiveness, as if they could never believe they deserved it. Dear St Michael, so much more accessible than God. Such a nice young man. She had created a whole personality for him, as well as a wardrobe. St Michael was a deferential, charming lieutenant with perfect manners and he was the only one, standing on the right side of God, who could tell God jokes. She relied upon that now, to hide a distinct feeling of misgiving. She leant further towards Edmund to hear his reply, although her deafness was confined to distant sounds and she was grateful for the cocoon it made. Matilda wanted nothing more than human voices and birdsong to intrude upon her consciousness, and only the sounds of her favourite people and favourite feathered friends, at that. There were voices she liked and those from which she shrank. She liked Edmund’s burr: she liked little Sister Therese’s youthful voice; she liked the shriller, more definable voice of that wicked sister of hers, the one who was probably named after St Ann, the mother of Mary, as boring a saint as any. Much better to be named after an angel, like Michael.

  ‘How did it die?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Edmund mumbled. ‘I wanted it to.’

  ‘So did I, but how?’

  ‘He fell out of the sky. The chapel window broke.’

  ‘Oh, dear.’

  She knew in an instant. The boy had done it. She thought she had heard him, but perhaps she was wrong. That glorious, blond-haired boy, who had slunk around Edmund for the last two weeks with the solicitousness of a doting grandson. She had seen him, sliding past earlier as she sat there, where she so often sat, treating her as if she was dumb and blind as well as partially deaf. An old woman held no interest for a boy, and when he did speak, she did not like his voice.

  ‘You didn’t kill it,’ she protested. ‘He did. The boy. The one who’s got you by the balls. He did. He’s got an air rifle. I saw it.’

  ‘No. Francis would never do that.’

  ‘He just did.’

  ‘No, he’s gone home, hours ago. He never did. He loves the birds, does Francis.’

  She closed her eyes and considered Lucifer the Serpent, who was once, in her imagination, a quite magnificent brunette youth with a pushy torso, slim hips and great big forgive-me eyes. Francis bore a passing resemblance to that Lucifer. It was an impression she could not quite shake off, despite wanting to like him if only for his name. St Francis was the patron saint of birds, and a boy with his name must be good, surely part of the reason Edmund adored him, even granting the fact that Edmund was an old, celibate homosexual, by no means beyond the demons of desire that Francis had awoken. He had no idea that Matilda knew what he had scarcely guessed himself. The crying had stopped.

  ‘Francis would never do such a thing,’ he said firmly. ‘Even if he thought it was what I wanted. Either it was done through prayer, or someone else did it. And now I’d better bury that bird.’

  She nodded, and slapped his back, heartily. If that was going to be the version of events, so be it. She was not going to add her two pennyworth or tell tales.

  ‘When you’ve done that,’ she said, ‘do you think you could give St Michael a wash? Get rid of the moss on his feet?’ And the bird shit, left by the magpie, which had been the final insult.

  Edmund leant his dusty hand on her knee to lever himself upright. ‘Good idea.’

  By the time he had gone, it was almost dark. Matilda had the fleeting thought that perhaps the young fledgling magpie sons reared in this garden might come back on some vengeful mission to look for their brother, but she dismissed the thought. The birds slept early and for now it was peaceful silence. As she moved up the path towards the beech trees and the clear ground, she paused to wave. She always knew when someone was watching.

  Yes, it had been a sin to pray for the death of a living thing. Perhaps it was also a sin to ignore God in favour of saints. She never could pray, except to an image. And she wished that Sister Joseph, whom she loved and had loved for years, would accept her own virtues and forget the rest.

  Seventy miles away, Kay McQuaid flung the dead jackdaw on to the compost heap at the bottom of the garden, wiped her hands on her trousers and walked back to the patio. It was a short, unencumbered walk across a close-cropped lawn with a circular flowerbed in the centre, containing purple dahlias and not much else. There were neat shrubs around the edges of the walls, flowerpots on the patio, which was the same size as the lawn and the most important feature of the garden. A modest sized garden, encroached upon and thoroughly tamed by a conservatory and a patio and the ruthless application of insecticide. Low maintenance was the key. Too much shade was provided at certain times of da
y by the low tree that flourished next door. It was the best a tree could do so near the sea, but if it had not been preserved by the family next door, Kay would have been over there with an axe long since. Anything that diminished the sporadic sunshine of an English summer was forbidden. The bloody jackdaw had come from that bloody tree.

  The sound of the sea at the front of the house was a soothing background murmur, punctuated with the shrill cry of a seagull.

  ‘Cheers,’ she said to her companion, raising the glass she had left on the table.

  ‘If it had been a pheasant,’ he said, referring to the dead bird, ‘you could cook it.’

  She shook her head. ‘You might. I doubt if I’ll cook anything ever again. Have the peanuts.’

  ‘You could grow vegetables instead of lawn. Eat them fresh.’

  She yawned. ‘Oh yeah? I got too much tension already, this time of year. I put the sunbed out, lie down, cloud comes over. I get up, take it in. Then I take it out again, then I take it in, and then I go and look at brochures for where else to go. I haven’t got any time to cook, God help me. Anyway, thanks for coming all this way. It’s always good to see you.’

  ‘It’s an easy journey. A break for me. You know I love coming here. How did the bird die?’

  ‘It came in the window, dirty beast, looking for my rings. I threw a plate at it, managed a hit. Not enough to kill it, mind. It was poorly to start with. Something it ate. Might have had a heart attack. They feed the wretched things next door. Then they come and shit on the patio.’

  Father Goodwin looked around the neat area. There was a water feature consisting of a stone pond, guarded by a gnome with a fishing rod and bright red and green garments. The patio floor was grey brick, designed, he thought in his ignorance of such things, for the embellishment of a few minimalist pots with monochrome evergreens, the sort he had seen in magazines. He read the style sections, mainly for the food, if there was time after the sports pages. Easy to tell what Kay had added. Orange and yellow geraniums, pink daisies and all of the seven dwarves. He eyed the one sitting to the side of the water feature, which he otherwise liked for the soothing sound of it.

  ‘Now, Father, what’s the matter? You wouldn’t be here if there was anything good on the telly. No, there never is tonight, is there? And stop looking at Droopy like that. He won’t hurt you. He’s a helluva lot friendlier than those horrible things you had in the presbytery. I always did hate that one of the Sacred Heart, the one in the glass case. The one of Himself with the heart on the front of his robe? Pickled Jesus, I used to call it. Well, we Catholics grew up with those things. Perhaps that’s why I like the gnomes. I must miss that kind of furniture. Are you sure you don’t want a drink? Yes, you do. Help yourself.’

  He went indoors, past the Pogenpohl kitchen with the air of clean disuse, through to the lounge beyond, as different from the nuns’ parlour as anything he could imagine, making him pause to wonder what it might have looked like before Kay’s relatively recent tenure as the sole occupant had stamped her definitive mark on it. Plain and functional, he guessed, without the addition of throws in vibrant colours, a huge TV-video console and a drinks cart, in the form of a wheelbarrow drawn by a toy donkey, full of highly coloured bottles of everything ranging from Tequila to Southern Comfort, through Slivovic to Martini, gifts and mementos from foreign travels, largely undrunk. There was banana liqueur from the Canaries, Metaxa brandy from Greece and something suspect from Turkey. Father Goodwin seized upon a bottle of Jameson’s, noting that only the bottle of Tanqueray gin bore the sign of fingerprints. That was Kay’s tipple, treated with care. The shininess of the display was admirable. You can give a cleaning lady new tastes, he thought, but you can’t stop her cleaning.

  In the fireplace, there was a large gold statue of Buddha with a well-polished stomach, which she may have put there simply to annoy him. He found a glass in the kitchen and sloshed a liberal dose of Irish whiskey for himself. Kay, sitting on her sunbed, nursed her long gin and tonic with the still melting ice and a cocktail stirrer with an umbrella on the top.

  She was as brown as well-tanned leather.You didn’t need a hot summer to get brown, she had told him: you simply needed time to sit in the sun whenever it came out. Especially if you’d done a bit of Tenerife in the spring. Brown skin suited her alarming choice of clothes. She was small and round and early forties, several years younger than himself, her face as sweetly wrinkled as a walnut shell, with dark brown eyes at odds with springy, bleached hair, turned even lighter by the occasional bursts of sun. He had adored her, in his understated way, ever since she had crashed into the presbytery, a skinny girl, cursing to high heaven at the time, along the lines of how she didn’t want preaching, she wanted a bloody job. Kay had got her bloody job: no one else wanted it even then, on those wages. After two weeks of reasonable cooking and cleaning, she produced the hitherto unmentioned illegitimate son. He watched her now, surreptitiously. Not much changed.

  ‘Are we all caught up with the news?’ she asked, brightly.

  She had lasted five years in the presbytery before finding the plum job with the Calverts, with plentiful, colourful rows in the meantime. Food had been thrown, he forgot why. Holy water under the bridge, she said, later. But the plum job with the Calverts had turned into the job from hell until they divorced, and Kay ended up as housekeeper to Mr Calvert, in his separate house, by the sea. This very house, which bore some resemblance to the way it was when he had been alive in it.

  Kay and Christopher Goodwin had always stayed friends, usually by short letters, for which he thanked every saint in the universe. He drank his whiskey and thought, God was good, and this was compensation enough for the guilt of evading his duty and missing the match.

  There were several compensations for missing the match. Mrs Katherine McQuaid, being drunk enough with the sun and the gin to speak freely, was a bonus for a wretched day. He put a touch more gin in her glass.Yes, the news of the old parish had been thoroughly covered, right up to the last funeral. She always wanted to know every detail of the Calvert girls.

  ‘Oh, give us a good shot, will you ever, Christopher? Then I’ll be able to pray to God for better weather and someone to supply me with drugs.’

  ‘You want for nothing, Kay.You’ve landed on your feet. Not even your son bothers you.’

  ‘No, he’s to make his own way and not sponge off me. But what do you mean, I’ve landed on my feet? None of this is permanent, although God knows, I’ve earned it. This is Cinderella stuff. The pumpkin’ll be arriving any minute. So don’t you be telling me to get off my arse and do good works.’

  ‘Would I? Didn’t he leave you enough for ever?’

  ‘Theodore? No, he bloody did not. I can live in this house for now, but his lawyer can repossess it whenever he wants. Enough money to last a year more with a few holidays thrown in. He wasn’t giving me anything permanent. He just wanted me to go on housekeeping and he made it worth my while.’

  ‘Isn’t that rather cruel?’

  ‘He could be cruel, for sure, but what’s so cruel about it? A taste of the good life’s better than no taste at all.’

  ‘Isn’t that what he gave his wife, too?’

  ‘Now, you look here, Christopher, don’t you join in maligning the dead. The trouble with you is that you’re a fool for women.You’re so soft on them, you always believe they’re right.’

  He knew this was unjust, but she was at least partially accurate. He was soft on women because he simply liked them best.

  ‘I’m not maligning him, Kay. But doesn’t a man’s choice of wife reflect upon himself? You said he wasn’t happy with the girl he had here. Can’t have been all their fault.’

  She adjusted herself on the sunbed, prepared to be angry, without quite having the energy. It was getting cold out here, but not cold enough to justify going into the conservatory. She tucked the folds of her capacious purple robe round her ankles. He wasn’t sure what you would call a garment like that.

  ‘Look,
he left his wife because she wouldn’t let him near his own children. You don’t stay with a woman who gives you the evil eye and treats you as if you were the devil. The only other girlfriend was that one he caught on the rebound, greedy little cow. You never could tell if she was feeling his prick or his wallet or both at the same time.’

  He laughed, the moment for argument over, which he regretted, slightly.

  ‘And he was very good to Jack.’

  ‘Yes, he was too, but I’m not going to talk about Jack.’

  Kay’s virtues included her passion for argument, which allowed him to indulge himself. There was nowhere else he could have an argument and no one he could argue with: he was the peacemaker, the listener, and that was his role. But with Kay, he could manufacture a quarrel just for the hell of it: they could have a shouting match and then forget all about it, no offence taken. The fact that he disagreed with her on most subjects helped, as did the way she flaunted her heresies, and she wanted pastoral care like she wanted a hole in the head. What a relief. Even the torture once provided by her physical presence was a dim, almost comfortable memory, but despite all the ease of this friendship, there were questions he never dared ask. Such as exactly what relationship Kay had had with the rich employer who had elevated her status to that of housekeeper, rather than cleaner, and endowed her so eccentrically. Nor had he ever asked her who was the father of her son. That would have been impertinent.

  ‘Remind me of how fairy godfather Calvert made his money?’

  Kay winked at him. ‘Nothing fairy about him, Christopher. He made it wanking, sorry, banking.’