Seeking Sanctuary Page 5

  She only ever called him Christopher when she was two gins down. Christopher was such a pansyish name, and besides, that particular saint, as she never failed to remind him, had been knocked off the saintly calendar thirty years ago. Christopher, for whom a million medals had been forged, was no longer a proper saint for universal intercession. It seemed like the story of Father Goodwin’s life.

  ‘I like the golden Buddha,’ he said from the increasing comfort of his chair.

  ‘Oh, that?’ she said, waving a brown hand with crimson nails. ‘Thought I might become a Buddhist. They’re ever so friendly.’

  She struggled upright, the better to explain as he choked on his drink. The jumpsuit gaped to reveal a thoroughly upholstered, flower-patterned bikini, which somehow reminded him of an apron.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ she said, crossly, ‘I was only teasing, but I do sometimes think. I miss religion, God help me.’

  ‘Buddhists tend not to drink,’ he told her, gently. ‘And you wouldn’t be allowed to swat a fly, let alone kill a bird. Can I bring Anna Calvert to see you?’

  She sat bolt upright, startled. ‘Why? Why the hell should I see her?’

  ‘Because Sister Jude died. And apart from me and my scanty knowledge, you’re the only one left who knew her parents, properly.’

  ‘So that gives me a duty, does it? Bollocks. No, I shan’t see her. I’ve had it up to here with sodding duty. But you can take me to bed if you like.’

  He laughed and shook his head. It was an old joke, as old as sin. ‘I wished you’d told me as soon as Theodore went and drowned,’ he said. ‘I could have helped.’

  She shuddered, violently. ‘No,’ she said, ‘you couldn’t. I wouldn’t want anyone else to see that poor, bloated body on the beach. So near home, too. It was horrible. And besides, he would turn in his grave if he thought you were standing over his corpse, saying prayers.’

  Two in the morning, and Anna was walking home. No drinking, no shagging, just shift work at the taxi place. Therese would have been right not to fear for her soul tonight since all she had done was listen to voices.

  It was wrong to be so fearless of the dark, but it was a fear she had never learned and the lack of it made her indifferent to being followed at night. Girls being followed was a fact of life. She could run far faster than any thief and, besides, had nothing to steal in her shoulder pack, except, tonight, the missal she had placed in there without being quite aware she had done so. Placed it on the table at work alongside the sandwich and put it back in the bag to go home, unopened.

  The footsteps tailed away as she neared her own flat. Probably the one who followed tonight was one of the homeless who parked themselves at the back door of the convent, encouraged by the rumour of Christian charity. They had banged on the door last winter in the middle of the night, persisting until the ivy had grown down to shield the exit and announce its permanent disuse. The garden door was a false signal to the one or two who gathered in the hope that it would open and benefits would arrive.

  She was ashamed of herself because she should have told Sister Barbara about the pistol shot breaking the window, but she had run away instead. When the footsteps behind her trailed away into silence, long before she drew level to the back door on the way to her own, she saw that the ivy had been clipped, neatly trimmed to frame the wood. She stopped and looked.

  Once inside, she went upstairs and on to the roof to gaze down into the garden where there was nothing to see. Looking up she could see the stars, imagine the souls in the firmament. Sister Jude and her darling mother. Her father would surely be in hell.

  Tucked in bed, she took the elastic band from the missal and let it fall open. It was stuffed with holy pictures, memoriam cards, decorative bookmarks with saintly depictions and messages scrawled on the back. Not so much a book of prayer, but one of memorabilia. Anna stuffed back the notes, letters, cards, pictures, as alienated by the sentimental reproductions as she was by the texture of the old leather and the tissue-thin pages, which stuck to her fingers. Still, it looked like a holy book rather than anything else, and that would do. Maybe it would provoke Ravi to talk to her, since he always had one himself. It would be a strange way to attract attention.

  Still sleepless, warm with the indigestible anger that had hounded the day, she picked up the notebook which always remained by her bed and, propped by pillows, wrote in it, in pursuit of an old habit started by her father and encouraged by her mother, when she and Therese were confined to bed and told to record their symptoms, the better to diagnose the strange sickness afflicting them. Sometimes the notebook filled those distressing minutes when sleep was as vital as it was impossible and there was nothing else to do. When TV bored her, music failed to console and the radio was just another voice.

  My name is Anna Calvert. (She always began this way.)

  A benefactor pays my rent. I am a lucky girl.

  I want anything but guidance.

  I have read lots of books.

  I would like not to be a freak. I miss Aunt Jude.

  I wish I had never been baptised; it leaves a big black hole in my brain.

  My father was a giant.

  I am not fully formed.

  Her eyelids began to feel heavy and the pen faltered.

  There are four whole years of my life missing.

  Four whole years, and I can never get them back.

  Then she scribbled, Therese is safe! Ravi smiled at me! The old man phoned again! Can’t be bad!

  And everyone else is DEAD.

  Then she slept.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I am the Lord thy God

  Therese saw that they were lined up by the refectory door, like a waiting tribe, with Sister Joseph at the head of the queue. Today was the feast day of St Joseph, not the more famous St Joseph of Nazareth, husband of Mary and father to Jesus, but another Joseph altogether, an obscure man of Aragon, who founded a religious congregation for the education of the poor. Sister Joseph had taken the name when she entered the Order and although it was better than her own, it could never be as good as a martyr, like Agnes. The taste in her mouth was sour.

  Her feast day was going to be, if not ignored, at least diminished by more important events, such as the breaking of the chapel window, discovered last evening by Barbara on her last round of the building, the funeral of Sister Jude the day before and the consequent emptying of the larder. Her own grief and her participation in the singing did not count. She looked at the others with irritation. Helpless ninnies. Sister Bernadette had twisted her ankle and moved with a crutch and obvious heroism. Matilda, the dearest, kindest friend she had rebuffed, was waiting to eat everything available. Joseph tried to despise her. Margaret was sniffing with her usual incessancy, while Sister Joan, named for a warrior and really a mouse, sparkled with anticipation of her pathetic weekly excursion to the market. Therese, the postulant, finished off the laying out of breakfast with her usual serene efficiency, smiling as if they were all newfound friends. Silly creature. Joseph’s own room was draughty from the broken window catch; the door to this room would not shut from warping; the place was falling apart. Joseph’s feast day would be forgotten. She eyed the array of sensible cereals, already cold toast, jams and milk with the contempt she might otherwise have shown to humanity. The one thing she wanted was a drink.

  She was going to be ignored, when she was surely now the highest in the pecking order when it came to deserving respect for her achievements. She had followed the example of her saint, had worked in the missions, knew about the world, heat, dust, starvation and the devil of alcoholic addiction. Dear God, she wanted a drink. Plus a touch of respect for her age and someone to notice it was her day. And an end to the guilt she felt about hurting Matilda.

  ‘Happy feast day, Sister,’ Therese murmured, helping Joseph with the milk jug. Trust that bright-eyed girl to notice that her hands were shaking. Joseph grunted a noncommittal response and went to her usual seat at the table. A single rose, glisteni
ng with dew from the garden, lay across her place and she had the grace to feel momentarily ashamed. Matilda would have done that. Matilda never forgot. The coffee looked weak. There was the usual twittering of conversation. Barbara tapped a spoon against her cup and stood at the head of the table.The murmuring ceased.

  Not a pretty bunch, Barbara was thinking as she waited for silence. A community of thirty, once, shrunk to fifteen, with the inevitable prospect of further wastage through old age and death, although they were not dying off fast enough by certain standards. Clingers to the wreckage. Only the Irish had existing relatives, excluding Agnes, although Agnes waited at the door every day in the hope that one would arrive. The family of Christ and the Blessed Virgin were not a substitute for the ties of blood, whatever vows they had taken, and as for what they actually, individually believed, Barbara neither knew nor minded. It was bad enough keeping them fed and the fabric of their shelter from further decay.

  ‘Sisters,’ she began, knowing the need to be brief. Food was of paramount importance. ‘Sisters, a word, please. I think you all know there was an unfortunate accident with the chapel window being blown in by the wind last night, so there may be an extra bit of activity around the place while we work out how to get it fixed. There’ll be a team of useless, expensive men, I daresay,’ she added bitterly. ‘That’s all. For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful, Amen.’

  ‘Amen.’

  Each made the sign of the Cross with different degrees of absent-mindedness. Conversation began again, interspersed with the noise of cutlery. Therese took her place at the foot of the table and ate her chewy toast. From where Barbara sat at the opposite end, she looked like a little princess, small and golden and pink, doing nothing to make herself shine the way she did. It was simply youth, with nothing bleached out of her strong hair or the healthy, luminous complexion with which no other skin compared. Eight of the Sisters still wore the veil, the oldest ones who would have felt indecently undressed without the uniform they had worn for a lifetime and thus wore it still. Among the others, dressed either in the charcoal calf-length tunic or ordinary clothes of their own choice, style was difficult to detect, although here and there, there was a hint of vanity. A bright blue hairslide for Sister Joan, bought from her beloved market, and a blouse with a bow for Monica, who was given her clothes by a niece. Otherwise, they seemed to exist in various shades of grey. Barbara looked down at her plate, thought of the budget and how, if selling a soul to the devil was worth hard cash, she might do it. She was slow to notice that silence had fallen, a silence of curious wonder.

  At the door of the refectory stood the boy, Francis. He was standing awkwardly, like an old-fashioned servant anxious not to command attention, but needing it, and like Therese, he did nothing to attract the eye, although all eyes strayed towards him until eating stopped and the silence was total. He was not a complete stranger; the minority who ever went more than one or two steps into the garden knew who he was, just as they all knew Edmund, but it took a year for a face to be familiar. The decision to take him on had been hers alone, because he was free, and even she scarcely knew him. That was just after the last monthly meeting where her decisions could be discussed democratically if ever a quorum bothered to attend. Really, both she and they preferred dictatorship. The boy had simply arrived at least a couple of weeks before and, up until now, he had never come indoors. He was a creature of the garden and the garden had a life of its own. Agnes, for one, found the sheer size of it frightening and sat now, halfway up the table, with her mouth open in a smile of recognition. Matilda, always hungry, chewed methodically and thought he looked like St Michael today, clad for fighting. Joseph, with her wider education, thought he looked like the God Pan.

  There was nothing pagan about bare arms and bare knees on a boy wearing shorts and a vest on a humid morning. Loose working clothes suited his slender physique, which was in itself a lesson in anatomy. His broad shoulders and sculpted arms looked as if they had been carved out of oak to illustrate the perfect function of interconnecting sinew. Long, baggy shorts, so large they might have belonged to another man entirely, revealed brown, grubby knees and athletic calves. He stood, shyly, flexing his hands by his sides, nodding awkwardly towards the head of the table, and his knuckles, like his knees, were convincingly dirty. He looked fit to run away; a boy with work-stained knees, inhabiting the body of a man, held together with a belt round his middle, his head crowned by golden curls as if he had stepped from a medieval painting. When Barbara got up and hustled him out into the kitchen, conversation resumed behind them. The tips of his ears grew red, as if he knew he was being discussed.

  ‘You’re welcome, Francis,’ Barbara said tartly, unfazed by his beauty, but rattled by the sudden silence it had caused. ‘But we like to take our breakfast in private. What is it?’

  ‘Oh, sorry. I didn’t know what else to do but try to find you, soonest. Edmund tells me you’re going to call in the glaziers and all to do the window. It’ll cost a bomb, Sister, really it will, and . . .’

  He stuck his hands in his pockets and bowed his head. The golden curls danced. There was a single gold ring in one ear, and she noticed, with relief, a small crucifix suspended from a gold chain round his neck.

  ‘And?’

  ‘I could do it, Sister. I promise I could, only he won’t believe me. It’s only the one pane, God love us. For the price of hiring a ladder and buying the glass, I could do it, easy. To be honest, I was desperate to stop you before you spent the money. If they charge you fifty, they charge you a hundred.’

  She did a mental review of the quotations she had solicited in the last hour, from any emergency firm who happened to be awake. He was right, if inaccurate on the downside of what they quoted to do any job involving ladders and height. Nothing was done for charity, not any more.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Sure I’m sure. I’m older than I look, Sister, worked all my life. I can do anything.’

  He nodded vigorously. When he raised his head, she caught the full blast of brilliant, turquoise eyes, before he lowered them again, to stare at his own feet, clad in boots, without socks. The calves were marked with scratches. He looked competent, from this close distance, definitely more of a man than a boy and quite outstandingly endearing.

  ‘What else can you do?’

  ‘Oh, for sure, Sister, anything. Basic plumbing, electrics, washing machines, woodwork, changing plugs, mending fuses, painting, filling holes, changing carpets, shifting things, dealing with damp . . . all that. No good with cars or gas cookers, but most things else. I want to be a gardener, though, but isn’t that a waste if there’s nothing to do in a garden and you have a window to mend? If you see what I mean.’

  It was a rushed and breathless delivery, a race to provide information and, to her ears, oddly touching in its eager boastfulness. It had ever been the dream of her life to find an able-bodied man desperate to work.

  ‘You really can do all those things?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Why didn’t Edmund tell us?’

  He shook his head and scuffed his feet. ‘I don’t know. He thinks he needs me more. But I don’t think he does. It’s coming on colder, Sister, the garden can wait.’

  Barbara felt as if a cloud had been lifted as she marched him back into the refectory, guided him back to her place at the head of the table and banged again with her spoon against her cup. Undrunk tea slopped on the table and the prospect of money saved made her clumsily cheerful.

  ‘Sisters! A word, please. Francis here is going to fix the window, OK? And if there’s any one of you needs something else fixing in their own room, or knows of something needing fixing anywhere else, will you please raise your hand?’

  There was a pause, before arms were raised in an almost universal salute. White hands, pink hands, one gnarled brown hand with a missing finger.

  ‘I also do errands,’ Francis whispered to Barbara, audibly.

  Sister Joseph
raised her hand, last. Agnes gazed at him, mesmerised. Therese kept her eyes fixed on the surface of the table and her hands in her lap. She did not want to look at the boy she had glimpsed before. Instead she looked at Kim, staring at him from the door of the kitchen. Kim would like that.

  Later, to the sound of distant hammering, she and Kim stacked the dishwasher, which was a vintage model with settings of sheer simplicity and so far indestructible. There was a butler sink for the equally indestructible pans and a gas cooking range of industrial size, installed in the days when there had been more to feed and more money to go round, a sound investment. The kitchen surfaces were chipped, but that was merely cosmetic. Nothing prevented Therese from preparing the delicate food for invalids which was her speciality. One day, God willing, said Barbara, she would turn those skills into qualifications and make herself employable. She had no ambition to do anything else. Kim was the dogsbody who came in daily for the morning, Monday to Friday, foraging for cash to feed two children. Kim liked it here because it was so quiet, but for the exclusive benefit of Therese, her language was deliberately and provocatively filthy.

  ‘By yie! He’s shaggable, in’t he?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘That lad, Francis, isn’t it? Shaggable, I said. Phaw! I’d like to gerra hold of him! Have you been hiding him, or what?’

  ‘No. He’s never come in before. Edmund comes for tea.’

  ‘Yeah, I bet. Well, you better get that Francis to come for tea when I’m around. I could teach him a thing or two. My old man’s not bad in the sack, mind, but it does a girl good to have a change. Someone who’d take it a bit slower, for a start, though if I’m in the mood for a shag, I don’t care how long. Usually takes him the same time it takes to boil a kettle.’

  ‘Does it?’ Therese asked. ‘Why does it take so long?’

  ‘Shagging?’ Kim asked incredulously.

  ‘No, boiling a bloody kettle.’

  Kim cackled. This kid was smart, for a virgin. Dead easy to shock and dead good at fighting back.