Nuns and Soldiers Read online

  Of course there had been flaws, imperfections, irritants in that closely-crowded community of women. Anne had lived with these, conscious of them, letting them somehow drift as she had been taught to do, offering them to God. It was impossible to avoid the exercise of power. She did not always agree with the Abbess. There was one whom she loved more than the rest and could not change or sacrifice that love. There were reforms, alterations, plans which the Community was forced to consider. Anne’s opinion was overruled by those whom she could not judge to be less wise. These trials were not crucial, she gave them over daily to God, it was not thus that her conscience so strangely came back to her. She went on living calmly enough a stripped busy life of work and prayer, hearing (she could not sing), as a sort of pledge of the permanence of all about her, the beautiful thin constant plainsong of the nuns, so exquisitely disciplined, so frequent, so familiar, a chant of caged birds heard only by God.

  The sacrifice of the intellect had not of course proved as easy as Anne had, with fantastic confidence, anticipated. But it was no hunger for other thoughts, for different books, no stormy crisis of intellectual doubt which had now driven her back into the world. She had lived a long time with the practice of prayer, not as a regular intermittent willed routine, but as a total mode of being. She had lived with the passion of Christ, with the mystery of that supreme pain within which He also judged the world. She had lived, with a sweet and natural ease, somehow inside the doctrine of the Trinity, surrounded by the spiritual stream which united Father, Son and Paraclete. Sometimes she wondered how much she had really changed; more often, turned towards her God, the question seemed idle. She was aware that within the continual force of that spiritual current her ideas were changing, the shape of her cosmos was changing, making what was far near, and what was near far. But what these so-natural changes did, and out of their fulness and their sweetness, bring to her at last for her pain, was a profound urgent notion, felt increasingly as a duty, that she must now move away to some other place. Duty: a conception which she had somehow consigned to the past, together with her old narrow ideas of moral will and moral change. She had imagined that the way to death lay straight and clear ahead of her, a well illumined path, and that any changes lying there in wait were the concern of God alone. In the narrowing of her will, the widening of His, there could be trials, but no more problems, no more awful anxious wrenching choices. But now it was as if she was being required to abandon what had been ‘achieved’, and to start all over again.

  She discussed her motives, apparent and possibly concealed, with the Abbess and with her confessor. She had no deep or emotional bond with either. (Anne had never needed a warning against the ‘danger’ of the confessional.) She had by now asked to be relieved of her teaching duties. The exercise of any sort of spiritual or doctrinal authority had become abhorrent to her. She already felt that she was beginning to lie. She asked herself, and the Abbess asked her whether there were not some deep unacknowledged reason for her strange desire to run. One motive in particular the Abbess wished her to acknowledge, but she would not. Nor was this exactly a crisis of faith. She admitted now, more frankly than ever before, to the Abbess, how her sense of the living God had, perhaps profoundly, changed. They looked at each other in silence. The Abbess looked away. Anne and the Abbess were not, in a worldly sense, framed to ‘get on together’. They had dealt with that problem intelligently and faithfully. The Abbess, older than Anne, had joined the order in her late twenties. Out in the world she had been a titled lady and an heiress. She had been a brilliant student, then an administrator, and had turned away from a field of intellectual prowess and admired success. There were many things which Anne would have liked now to discuss with unfettered frankness with this highly intelligent woman, but it could not be. Their talk concerned only what Anne should do and why, and no hint of a shared bewilderment was allowed to soften the severity of the interrogation.

  Anne did come to agree that her sense of being ‘in the wrong place’ was somehow connected with the changed perspectives of her faith, but she refused to regard this, as the Abbess at first pressed her to do, as the usual intermittent darkness, a secheresse which must be endured and expected to pass. She equally rejected a position which the Abbess adopted later on (for these discussions continued for some time) to the effect that this change was in some exalted sense the will of God. Yes, it was no doubt God’s will, said Anne, but there was no great positive ‘showing’ here, no revelation of a new task. It was under a negative and agnostic sign that she must now proceed. To do what? asked the Abbess. Anne did not know, why should she know. But she was very determined to go, and to go with consent and if it might be with blessing, and the Abbess saw her determination. The Abbess, who had so often thwarted her, was now most unwilling to release her, but at last Anne began to have her way.

  ‘So, where will you go, to whom?’ ‘I shall live alone,’ said Anne. The Abbess, whose gentler face Anne had learnt, in these talks to perceive, looked at her piercingly. ‘Do not be too proudly confident that you can remain innocent when you are there. Think now what you are losing.’ ‘I am not proud or confident.’ But one thing I know, thought Anne, I should be able to bear any pain except that of guilt. That I must at all cost avoid, and I think I know how. ‘You will need help. Why not retain a connection with us? There are those who live as anchoresses in the world.’ ‘Perhaps I shall be an anchoress,’ said Anne, ‘but if I am I shall be so alone, and known only to God.’ ‘Then when you leave here,’ said the Abbess, ‘you leave totally and forever.’ ‘It is better thus,’ said Anne.

  In the end she departed ambiguously, quietly, by consent, but without farewells. Once outside, in the guest house, she was vanished from them forever. She saw only three extern sisters, who treated her with quiet sympathy as if she were ill. And now, she thought, sitting drinking her tea and rumpling the beautiful counterpane, I am in London and, so strangely, I have a task which will for the time put off further choices. I must see Gertrude through this awful trial and there is no point now in looking further. I have been blessed with a task. I have been honoured with an order. Was that the way to see it? Yes, I am here, and they are there, she thought. But already the words were becoming empty, like a vain plea. The convent was receding from her and was already transparent and dream-like. For two years there would be a little money in her bank. But no messages would come to her from that place ever again. It had been taken away into the invisible world.

  Now she would live secretly, as a secret anchoress. This idea put, perhaps cleverly, into her head by the Abbess, pleased her, it seemed an illumination. She felt as if she were being sent back into the world to prove something. Or perhaps she would be more like a spy, one of God’s spies, the spy of a non-existent God. What could be odder? But that was what she would now have to work out. Would that ‘working out’ be the return to ‘thinking’ which Gertrude had wished for her when she had spoken of the ‘wasted years’? Had they been wasted, those years, had she spent them inventing a false Christianity and a false Christ? She could not think so. The Abbess, who suspected Anne of a concealed spiritual collapse, and seemed to expect her to fall rapidly into trouble (yet what did the Abbess think, perhaps she envied her?), had said, ‘How can you live without the mass?’ Anne had not said so, but she had in fact no intention of living without the mass. She would not go to confession, she might or might not under the still unrevealed rule of her secrecy, permit herself to receive the sacrament. (How precious in a new way was that familiar longed-for food.) But she would not henceforth live without the mass, any more than she would henceforth live without Christ. Christ belonged to her and would travel with her, her Christ, the only one that was really hers.

  Can anyone who has once had it really give up the concept of God? The craving for God, once fully established, is perhaps incurable. She could not rid herself of the experience of God’s love, and the sense that only through God could she reach the world. Could joy be sought elsewhere save a
t that true source? And would not lesser goods corrupt her shaken soul? She was soaked in Christianity and in Christ, sunk, saturated, stained indelibly all through. The cross was round her neck like a fetter, like a noose. Could she live now by the ontological proof alone? Can love, in its last extremity, create its object? Would there be still adoration and worship, could there be? Prayer remained with her, continual prayer like breathing, but what was it now? For the time, it was like the strange awful breathing of a body kept alive by doctors after the brain is dead. Would that body rise and live again? She did not think of this as happiness. Happiness was no part of her plan. That concept at least had been, she hoped, burnt out of her by fifteen years ‘inside’. And the joy that had gone from her might never return. She knew that, through her part in Gertrude’s trial, she was strangely blessed by an interim, had been granted, before what was to come, a kind of rest. A different suffering, waiting its hour, would surely follow. The dark night had not yet begun, but would begin, and she would weep. I must be alone, she thought, with no plan and no vision, homeless and invisible, a wanderer, a no one. Otherwise, I shall prove the Abbess right and fall into the snares of the world.

  ‘Oh Anne - Guy wants to talk to you.’

  Anne who had been sewing in her room, patching a triangular tear in one of Gertrude’s favourite blouses, jumped up, looking rather alarmed.

  ‘He only likes to talk to strangers now. It’s people he knows he can’t stand.’

  Gertrude was startled all the same. Guy had not mentioned Anne since the surprise he had expressed at her arrival. Now suddenly he wanted to see her.

  Anne put her work aside and followed Gertrude out.

  ‘Don’t stay too long, will you - he gets so tired.’

  ‘No, I won’t.’ Gertrude held the door open and Anne entered Guy’s bedroom. The door closed.

  The room was rather dark with one lamp alight beside Guy’s bed. It was evening. He was lying propped up with pillows, and had been reading The Odyssey in the Loeb edition. He rose only for a little while in the morning, now, to provide some simulacrum of ordinary life by sitting in his bedside chair. His walk to the adjoining bathroom, helped by Gertrude or the nurse, made his longest journey.

  Anne saw half his face illumined by the lamp, then more of it as his head rolled. He looked to her like an old man, or like pictures she had seen of gaunt staring men just released from prison camps. There was a great pale shiny bald brow, then a thin web of grey-streaked hair. His hair was tangled, he tangled it with restless fingers, however often the nurse combed it out. He was clean shaven but with a greyish shadow of beard visible. His nose was thin and sharp, hooked, and his eyes were dark and glittering, moving quickly to Anne, then searching the room as if expecting something. She particularly noticed his mouth, which was beautiful, long and shapely, tender, sensitive. His skinny arms were stretched out, and his long white, almost bluish, thin hands clutched the blanket, then released it, in a convulsive movement. Pity filled Anne, and she thought, but he is too ill to talk, why have I come? I will say a word or two and go away. Perhaps he will not be able to talk at all. He just wants to see what I look like. How thin and far away he is.

  Guy said, ‘Hello, Anne.’

  ‘Hello, Guy.’

  ‘I’m glad you’ve come.’

  ‘I’m glad too.’

  His voice was unexpectedly strong, a voice of authority. There was a silence. Guy was turning his head rhythmically to and fro, and bending and stretching his fingers. Anne wondered if he was in pain.

  ‘Won’t you sit down? Come nearer. I want to see you.’

  Anne pulled a chair up beside the bed and sat down. She smiled at Guy.

  He smiled with a strange quick spasm. He said, ‘I’m so glad you’ve come, for Gertrude. You will stay till I go, and after too?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘She loves you, I think.’

  ‘Yes. I love her.’

  There was silence again. Anne breathed quietly, praying blankly, feeling an immense tired quiet like a cloud rising up out of her. She did not feel able to make conversation, but there might be no need, perhaps it was all right just to sit there.

  ‘Why did you leave the convent?’ said Guy.

  Anne was suddenly alert, electric with precision. ‘I changed my views about religion. It would have been a lie to stay.’

  ‘Maybe you should have hung on. Christian theology is changing so fast these days. The relieving troops would have arrived. You would have heard the sound of bagpipes.’

  ‘No theologian could have rescued me!’

  ‘Lost your faith - ?’

  ‘That’s not quite the phrase. Perhaps people don’t all that often just lose their faith. I want to make a new kind of faith, privately for myself, and this can only be done out in the world.’

  ‘Inside you had to say what you didn’t believe, even if you said nothing?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you still believe in a personal God?’

  ‘Not in a personal God.’

  ‘Then in some sort of mysterious world spirit? Zeus, whoever you are.’

  ‘No, nothing of that sort. It’s hard to explain. Perhaps I just can’t make any more use of the word “God”.’

  ‘I’ve always hated God,’ said Guy.

  ‘You mean the Old Man?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you ever have any Jewish religion? But of course your family were Christians.’

  ‘Scarcely. We knew about the Jewish festivals. There was a kind of nostalgia. It was odd. I knew about holiness.’

  ‘Isn’t that religion?’

  ‘What did you mean about a faith privately for yourself?’

  ‘I suppose every faith is private. I just mean - it wouldn’t have names and concepts, I would never describe it, but it would live and I would know it. I feel as if I’ve finished talking.’

  ‘I’ve often felt that,’ said Guy, ‘but it was an illusion. What will you do?’

  ‘I don’t know, some sort of social work, I’m not thinking about it yet.’

  ‘And Jesus, what about him?’

  ‘What about him indeed.’

  ‘Will he be part of your new faith?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Anne. ‘I-I think so -’

  ‘My uncle David Schultz once told me that if at the world’s end it turned out that Jesus was the Messiah, he would accept him. It’s interesting to speculate on the alternative.’

  ‘Some of your family kept to the Jewish faith?’

  ‘He was an uncle by marriage. But yes. You must ask Veronica Mount, she’s the expert. I used to hate Jesus too.’

  ‘However could you? I can imagine hating God, but not Jesus.’

  ‘I mean the symbol not the man. One must pity the man. Judaism is a sober religion, teaching, prayer, no excesses. But Christianity is so soft, it’s sentimental and magical, it denies death. It changes death into suffering, and suffering is always so interesting. There is pain, and then, hey presto, there is eternal life. That’s what we all want, that our misery shall buy something, that we shall get something in return, something absolutely consoling. But it’s a lie. There are final conclusions, one is shortly to be reached in this house. Eternal departures take place. Suffering has the shifting unreality of the human mind. A desire to suffer probably led you into that convent, perhaps it has led you out again. Death is real. But Christ doesn’t really die. That can’t be right.’

  ‘Right or wrong, it’s the point.’

  ‘It’s not your point.’

  ‘No -’ Anne wanted to think about what he was saying, though his strained utterance distressed her. ‘I think - we want our vices to suffer - but not to go away.’

  ‘Yes. Yes. We want ... because of the suffering ... to be able to keep ... everything ... to be forgiven.’

  ‘That seems to you soft?’

  ‘Yes.’

  They were silent again. Anne thought, I can say anything to this man.

  Guy said, ‘Yo
u don’t, I imagine, believe in the anti-religious idea of life after death?’

  ‘No. I agree it’s anti-religious. I mean - whatever it is - it’s happening now and here.’ That’s what I couldn’t tell them in the convent, she thought.

  ‘I wish I believed in the hereafter,’ said Guy. He had been looking away from her, twisting his hair with one restless hand, showing her his hawk-nosed profile. Now his eyes glittered at her. ‘Not for any vulgar reason of course. Not just to be let off this thing that’s going to happen in the next few weeks. But - it’s something I’ve always felt -’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I would like to be judged.’

  Anne reflected. ‘I wonder if it’s a coherent idea? It seems to me a little like what you didn’t care for about Christianity.’

  ‘I know exactly what you mean,’ said Guy. She had pleased him. He smiled a sweeter smile which softened the taut face. ‘It’s romantic, sado-masochistic, a story-idea, not what it seems - indeed -’

  ‘Do you mean judgement as estimation, a clear account, or as punishment?’

  ‘Oh both. I think one craves for both. To look over the Recording Angel’s shoulder. And to have consequences. Consequences would prove something.’