Anna (51 page)

It was one of fourteen such rooms on that side of the narrow passage; and, on the other side, there were fourteen more. At the far end of the passage was a further room of the same size but with stone flooring. There was a large hip bath in it. The jugs of water had to be carried up the staircase from the floor below; and the slops carried down again.

The nun who had brought Anna there had gone away again. And, with the dwindling sound of her footsteps down the long corridor, the silence of the convent began gathering in again. There was nothing now but the emptiness that lay between these four close walls, the cold silent emptiness. Anna stood there and looked
towards the bed. There was a bundle of grey clothes on it: they were old but freshly washed. The nun had told her that she was to change into them.

It was as she stripped off the clothes that she thought of Annette.

“They'll be taking her pretty clothes off,” she told herself. “They won't let her wear anything pretty here. She'll be so sad, so miserable. She needs me. She's not like other children. They won't understand her. They'll be cruel to her without knowing it.”

She began crying and threw herself upon the bed. The bolster was a hard, narrow ridge on which her head half rested. Her legs slid from the hard palliasse and her knees reached the floor. She stayed like that, still crying.

Then the nun who had brought her there returned. She waited for a moment outside the door. Through the thin panel she could hear a faint sound that she recognised as sobbing. She paused. But she had gained a lifetime's experience in these matters, and knew that the kindest thing at such moments was to be businesslike and unconcerned. She opened the door and entered.

“It is time to come down now,” she said. “You had better bathe your eyes in that basin and comb back your hair.

She stood over Anna as she rose, and her hands went out to straighten the coverlet that was now crumpled and disordered. But she stopped herself: her duty was not to help, it was to instruct.

“And you must put the bed to rights,” she said. “The beds are not meant to be lain on except at night. To-morrow morning I will come round to see if you have made it properly. The mattresses have to be turned every day.

The sewing school to which Anna was attached was under the charge of Sister Ursula. She was a small, robust woman of fifty without manners, without education, without dignity, but with reserves of fractious energy that no work could exhaust. Her energy, indeed, seemed to ricochet between the four walls of the convent, so that she was forever to be found in unexpected places, grumbling at the old gardener for not having pulled a ripe peach, scolding one of the maids for having left a hidden pool of dust in a dark corner, complaining that the piano that accompanied the children's singing needed re-tuning.

In her own sphere she was ruthless and efficient; a terror. She sat on a little platform at the end of a long room, with the ranks of sewing women stretched out beneath her. And she had each garment
brought up to her before she would let it go. It was on this little platform that she ripped bad seams from top to bottom with a pair of scissors that she carried at her waist, thrust her thumb through the fresh darns on old socks; sent back buttonholes for re-making. If she found herself without a garment actually in her hands she would begin running up and down the aisles, reproving here, speeding up there, interfering everywhere. And through the whole of the sessions she kept up a constant chatter of remarks and comments and observations and clickings of the tongue. She was like a single magpie in a silent forest.

She bent over Anna's shoulder and peered at the work that she was doing. For a moment she could think of nothing to say.

“Don't make the stitches too small,” she said at last. “It all takes time and it's only an old gardening skirt that you're mending.”

When she had gone the nun next to Anna—she was in the full habit of the Order—bent over to her.

“Take no notice of her,” she said in a low pleasant voice. “Sew those beautiful little stitches that you were sewing and please God someone may be grateful for them. She'll kill herself with all her running about. She finds no peace in this world.”

But even this had not gone unobserved. There was a moment's silence and then the little trigger bell on Sister Ursula's desk was struck sharply.

“This is not the time for talking,” she said. “We have our work to do. You can talk your heads off during conversation time outside.”

The nun beside Anna smiled and resumed her task: she was stitching a new seat into the trousers of a pair of old blue overalls.

Conversation time had come round. The nuns had gathered together in the closed inner courtyard and were walking up and down in pairs. Only the old ones were seated. There were one or two of the very ancient, mere husks who had been wheeled out of the infirmary to get a little sun. They had been so long out of the world, these old ones, that they had somehow lost all resemblance to it; they were like idols. And as Anna watched this slowly moving crowd of grey, coifed figures that grew every minute as others emerged from the surrounding cloisters she began to realise the dimensions of this strange sexless kingdom over which the Mother Superior reigned undisputed. The convent where Anna had been brought up as a girl was small: there had been not more than fifty of them there. But this was different: this was a barracks. You could live here for a month and meet fresh faces every day.

On the far side of the courtyard a nun was standing alone. When
she saw Anna she came forward. It was the nun who had spoken to her in the sewing-room.

“I thought we might walk together,” she said. “My name's Sister Veronica.”

There was a friendliness about her that was warming: it was like coming suddenly upon a human being in a desert. She took her place beside her; and, as they walked, their shoulders touched for a moment.

“Are you entering the Order?” the nun asked.

Anna shook her head. “I am only a helper,” she said. “I am not in the Order at all. My child is in the school over there.”

She pointed vaguely towards the building that stood alone on the far side of the kitchen garden. It was enclosed within its own high walls; a convent inside a convent.

The nun gave a little sigh.

“It must be terrible,” she said. “But be patient.” She dropped her voice. “To-morrow if you like,” she said. “I'll show you where you can watch the children playing. Then you won't feel so much cut off.”

The bell rang—it was Sister Ursula who was ringing it—and the time for afternoon talking was over. The crowd broke up and began to move off to their various stations.

Inside the Chapel there was a small group of nuns who had not emerged at all. The Reverend Mother was among them. To-day was the anniversary of their saint and they were praying.

The infants' dormitory was large. It was high, and the shadows from the dim lamp were enormous; the stove in front of the lamp made the shape of an elephant on the ceiling. The newcomer lay there looking at it for a moment to see if it would move.

Then, when she grew tired of looking, she listened instead. The air was very quiet; but it was also full of noises. Small noises. There was the creaking of a mattress somewhere. And the sound of breathing. A lot of breathing. The low rhythmical murmur of a score of sleepers. And someone had a cough that sounded like a little dog in the room. But they had tucked her up so snugly for the night that she couldn't sit up to find out. She could only wriggle her legs and turn over on her back again. Then the person who had coughed, coughed again and she could tell that it was a cough: she gave up trying to find the little dog.

The bed was uncomfortable. It was not wide enough for both of them, and Suzette took up such a lot of room. She was a large doll with hard unbending arms and she slept sprawled out because the stitches in her shoulders had been drawn too tight. But she was an affectionate doll, and Annette loved her: she leant over and kissed the firm calico forehead.

As she did so, she realised suddenly that she wanted to be kissed herself. A fierce uncontrollable longing for kissing came over her, and she began to cry. She cried softly at first, simply sobbing miserably, her mouth still covered by the bedclothes. But, as she cried, her misery increased. They had told her that her mother had gone away but would be coming back soon; and she could not understand it. She wouldn't have gone away and left her mother. She hated her for going. Hated her for going, but still loved her enough to want her to be back more again more than anything. Loved and hated her. Hated her so much that she wanted to bite her; bite her and be kissed at the same time.

The other little girls here hadn't got any mothers. They didn't understand when she tried to explain. And they were such ugly little girls. One of them had eyes that looked at each other in the middle: she hadn't known that there were such ugly little girls in the world.

Then she remembered her new dress. It was a very pretty dress. They had given it to her the first morning when she woke up. All the other little girls—and even the big ones too—had dresses of the same kind. They were striped dresses; they buttoned all up the front, and the stripes were so close that they made you giddy to look at them. And the boots, too, were exciting: they were very heavy and hard: she liked practising walking in them. They made a noise like hammers, and she could kick things, stones and the sides of walls, that she had never been able to kick before. They were quite different from the little shoes that she had always worn.

But she forgot the boots again as suddenly as she had remembered them; and all that she could think about was her mother, and the fact that she wasn't there by her. She even forgot that she hated her for going away. She was aware of only two things, that something was wrong somewhere and that she wanted to be loved. It was a bad wrong, a very bad one if it could affect her mother, too; and she was frightened by it. The more she thought of it the more it scared her. The most awful thing was that she thought that perhaps her mother was unhappy too. It seemed suddenly as if the whole bottom had dropped out of the universe and that there was nothing that was safe and secure and comforting anywhere. She
needed her mother so badly that she realised at last that she couldn't live any longer without her.

She managed to get herself clear of those confining bedclothes and sat up. It was her mother that she wanted and she began calling for her. Calling and calling, in a voice that was all mixed up with crying, in that big dreadful room with the dim lamp and the other little girls and the enormous shadows.

“They can have them all,” Anna was saying. “They are doing no good here.”

She was on her knees in the box-room where her cases had been taken, and the clothes were spread around her like a fan. In the half light, the colours of the silks, the brocades, seemed more rich and splendid than ever: they were the living afterglow of some dead magnificence. She had started first to lay out on the floor the sheets of paper in which her maid had packed the clothes, but Sister Veronica who was with her had only laughed. The floor was clean enough, she said.

Sister Veronica picked up one of the dresses—it was an evening gown, sleeveless and cut very low at the neck, and began to finger it. Her fingers dwelt lovingly on the smooth texture; she stroked it.

“I remember once I had …” she began, and then stopped herself.

She began gathering the dresses together more roughly than she need have done. “We must hurry,” she said brusquely, “or Sister Ursula will be sending for us.”

“But there are some more,” Anna told her. “I have a whole going-away outfit in there.”

“We've enough here for Sister Ursula to get on with,” she replied. “Besides you may need them. No one ever said that you were going to stop here always.”

In the corner were two other cases that Anna had not opened. They were different from the others, smaller and of white leather. Sister Veronica glanced towards them inquiringly. Anna caught the glance and answered it.

“They are Annette's,” she said. “I cannot bring myself …”

The nun smiled.

“Leave them,” she said. “You'll feel better about them later on.”

Her own arms were now full and she stood there watching Anna pick up the garments one by one.

“I wish I had seen you wearing them, my dear,” she said. “You must have looked beautiful.”

Anna smiled at her.

“But she doesn't understand,” she thought. “She doesn't know that I don't mind giving these clothes away. I'm glad they're going to be cut up, destroyed. M. Moritz chose those clothes. They're his, not mine.”

There was a tap on the door, and one of the lay sisters, a small frightened woman in her forties, stood there.

“Sister Ursula asked me to find out how much longer you would be,” she said. “She's growing very impatient. She asks if you will return straight away.”

Sister Veronica smiled, a slow deliberate smile.

“You can follow me,” she said. “I will say that there are so many dresses that it took longer than we expected.”

She turned to the lay sister who was standing in the doorway listening.

“Be off,” she said, “or you'll have Sister Ursula after you too.”

When they reached the sewing-room Sister Ursula went over the dresses with the skill and expertness of a dealer. She shook them out, one by one, holding them at arm's length and examining them, and then folding them away again. As she put the last of them away she shook her head and complained that they were all too fine, too fancy and that there was no substance in any of them.

She had been in the convent for a week now. But it was not a week really. The days had joined and telescoped themselves together so that they stretched a solid, unbroken barrier between the old world and the present. Somewhere on the other side lay the villa, and the Casino and sunlight. Only they weren't real things any more: it was as though simply with leaving them they had ceased abruptly to exist, had dissolved suddenly with her departure. And those seven days stretched endlessly. They were a lifetime set somehow in the middle of a life. Her whole mind and body were ruled by the convent now. She did not belong to herself any more.