Free Le Temps des Cerises by Zillah Bethel Page B

sandcastles or watching a Punch and Judy show.
    The words of the psalm were quite lost to Bernadine, she couldn’t sing the devotions or pray – her conscience troubled her too much – and when she closed her eyes the only face she saw was Aggie’s, pale and wet, and the tiny blue baby’s beseeching eyes. She struggled to remember her favourite psalm from Tierce. I lift up my eyes to the mountains… He shall not let thy foot slip. The sun shall not burn thee by day nor the moon by night. The Lord shall keep thee from all evil.
    She was out of step with the others, quite out of step and she thought they must be aware of it. Once, just once she felt the eyes of the old abbess upon her, eerily calm and smiling as if she knew everything, understood everything, and then they turned away. The Lord lets happen what has to happen, they seemed to say, at least they did in Bernadine’s imagination. Her imagination attributed the words to the nun who’d gone mad in the library, cutting up her rare and illuminated manuscripts into inch-thick pieces. The Lord lets happen what has to happen. In the old days she would have believed it but not now. Now her mind spoke the words but her heart did not, they had an empty, hollow ring to them. Her lack of faith dawned on her with the clarity of daylight; and as the Sisters lifted their hearts all together for the Deo Gratias , she sat a sinner amidst a sea of worthy souls, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a hypocrite. The confessional stood in the shadows like the outlines of a sentry box, beside the bell rope, knotted and black from greasy hands. How many times had Father Stephen sat in there nibbling on a tablet of chocolate to keep his strength up for the inevitable list of petty slips, vanities and misdemeanours that waged war in the souls of the perfect nuns. How many times had real secrets of the soul passed from lip to ear, been understood, forgiven? She wondered how she could have gone on so long believing herself to be forgiven, believing she was living in accordance with the Holy Rule when all the time her body and soul raged against it.
    She bowed her head and cried out from the De Profundis . Out of the depths I cry to thee, O Lord. Do not forsake me now . The words echoed in her head but there came no reply. No reply but the murmur of nuns like a drone of bees and the boom of guns in the distance like an Almighty reprimand. They filed out, one by one, flat as shadows or blackened ghosts and Bernadine noticed that the shoes of the old abbess were torn and misshapen at the toe from the press of praying. Her heart cried out within her. Humility was endless here. Humility was endless. She crept past the Passion with the self effacement of a gnat, catching sight of the Mother Superior who wafted towards her like a zephyr breeze and whispered softly in her ear, so softly Bernadine thought she might have been dreaming.
    â€˜No keeping! No redeeming. No keeping! No redeeming.’
    And the boom of guns again in the distance, an Almighty reprimand.

Chapter nine

    The queue for Potin’s was swelling by the moment despite the hour, the drizzle and the drear, half-leaden light of the morning. Smiles were wan but resolute, umbrellas up – a sea of stripes in the sombre light – and metal soup tins glimmered in straw baskets, over arms and in red, frozen hands. Here and there a bayonet stuck up in the air, jagged and fearsome in between the umbrellas, indicating the presence of a National Guardsman bundled up and on duty to ensure fair play, an equal distribution of rations and to quell the fights that commonly broke out between the women. Fights that could turn uncommonly vicious, for the women used anything that came to hand: nails, teeth, handkerchiefs, even the spokes of their umbrellas. It was a standing joke amongst the Guardsmen that you had a better chance in arm-to-arm combat with a Prussian than with a woman in the queue for Potin’s.