Free Obedience by Jacqueline Yallop Page A

After a few minutes the phone rang with a high-pitched buzz. At the end of her second conversation the nurse came back and crouched before Marie.
    â€˜We haven’t got your things, Sister. We can’t find them. They might be on the minibus, but it’s left, gone back. Do you know where your things are?’
    She spoke too loudly and slowly and looked too closely into Marie’s face. Marie looked back at her and smiled, but there were tears in her eyes.
    â€˜Never mind,’ said the nurse, getting up, her words softer. ‘We’ll find everything, I’m sure. We’ll ring the place you came from. They might have your bag. Let’s get you cleaned up first. And then it will be nearly time for lunch. You’d like some lunch wouldn’t you, Sister?’
    Already the room smelt of Marie’s farts.
    The noise of the phone hardly stirred the convent quiet. But Sister Bernard heard it and promptly hurried along the corridor to answer it, her gait stiff and swaying from the creak of her joints.
    â€˜We put her bag on the minibus,’ she insisted. ‘They must have lost it. Ask the drivers again.’
    Bernard had packed most of Marie’s things several days before. She had not found the photograph of Monte Carlo, only a large number of prayer cards, grateful letters from parishioners, souvenirs of Lourdes and Assisi, and a selection of rosaries. In the end, there had been so little in the bag that Bernard had added a dark green woolly cardigan, a clouded half-used bottle of eau-de-cologne and a bulky encyclopedia of saints from the leftovers of past lives stored in the huge cupboard in the cellars below the convent. She presumed that Marie had edited her life’s scraps at the first signs of illness, of mixing up her words, forgetting her name and wetting the bed, reinforcing years of dazzlingly public piety. She hoped God had seen Sister Marie’s underhandedness.
    â€˜We’re moving ourselves in a few days. We’re very busy. You should have everything. It was organized,’ Bernard said to the woman on the telephone, not quite daring to be stern.
    She remembered bringing the bag down from Marie’s cell after she had seated her at the breakfast table. She remembered putting it by the front door and looking through the little side window to watch a thrush hammering a snail on the rubble from the broken-down wall.
    â€˜Well then, we’ll search again. I’ll ring back,’ said the woman wearily.
    Thérèse walked the perimeter of her empty cell. It looked neat now, and clearer than it had done for many years. The outlines of her objects remained printed on the walls by the years of light and dust, the silhouette of a particularlyspectacular city skyline, but the clutter was gone. It was possible to walk in a straight line from the door to the window and from wall to wall; the untrodden boards shone in the corners. She stopped at the window to look out over the edge of the garden to the autumnal oaks and the ash tip where her Buddha lay half-buried by the force of his fall. Then she closed the door firmly and made her way quickly along the dormitory corridor with its imperishable smell of enclosure. When she emerged in the refectory several minutes later with her box neatly packed with paper and labelled in red for the dustbin men, she found Bernard crumpled on the floor shaking with sobs.
    â€˜Oh, Lord Jesus, whatever is the matter, Sister?’ cried Thérèse, putting down her box.
    She helped Bernard to her feet, but Bernard’s tears refused to stop and all Thérèse could do was sit her at the table and watch.
    Bernard cried for almost two hours. There was no work to do any more, no duties, no rules, nobody waiting for her in the quiet corridors. There was simply the sorrow, at last. She let it come, mourning the loss of the soldier. She knew that her memories of him, Technicolor bright, mottled like old film, could not be