Country Girl: A Memoir (10 page)

To my astonishment, when the Halloween parcels were handed out, I received one. It was a cone-shaped glass bowl filled with delicacies, covered with red transparent paper that came to a crown at the top and was tied with a white satin bow. It had been sent directly from a shop, and on a white card was printed a woman’s name and her compliments. I remembered my mother and I visiting her just outside Galway city, in Salthill, and how smartly dressed she was in a fitted suit as she sat watching us eat, not touching a pick of the food that had been prepared for us. She told us something that nearly caused my mother to faint. For her operation, which she called an “op,” and which I suspected concerned women’s ailments, her husband had been allowed into the operating theater for a moment beforehand, where he saw her naked. She took pride in telling this. Why she had sent me a parcel I would never know, but my popularity soared as I handed out slices of chocolate cake each evening and gave girls in the dormitory monkey nuts and hazelnuts to crack on.

The air was damp, and that, along with cold nights, as we shivered under one blanket and a cotton eiderdown, meant that girls got chilblains, sore throats, and coughs; some were confined to the big lonely dormitory and given a cup of senna for a cure.

One evening at Benediction the coughing got out of hand. At the very moment when the priest, his hands covered in a white veil, held up the monstrance that contained the Blessed Sacrament and a choir nun was pouring her ecstasy into
Stabat Mater,
a bout of multiple coughs eclipsed all else. It was sacrilege. Afterward the Head Nun asked for those who had been culpable to put their hands up, and my hand went up automatically,
but I was alone. For punishment I was told that I would have to stand in the chapel the following day when the other girls went out for their walk.

Standing by the rails that led to the altar, I feared that my nun might come in to say a hurried prayer, and seeing me, she would wonder what my most heinous sin could be. The chapel, without lit candles and other girls, felt lonely, and the smell from the chrysanthemums that were on the altar steps also had a sad smell of clay.

But it was worth everything, the standing, the humiliation, and my smarting at the injustice of the fact that other girls had not owned up. At evening rosary, I noticed that my prayer book had been put back the wrong way. Girls kept prayer books in cubby holes at the back of the chapel, and the nun must have discovered mine with the name “Drewsboro” on the flyleaf. There was a holy picture on yellow parchment. From a golden-hazed sky, watery rays of light, needle-thin, poured down onto a host of angels who were also suspended in a kind of ethereal light. So holy was it that it could serve as a little portable altar. But it was the words written on the back that made me gasp:
O Lord, rebuke me not in thy wrath, neither chasten me in thy hot displeasure.
What did it mean? It didn’t matter what it meant. It would carry me through lessons and theorems and soggy meat and cabbage, because now, and in secret, I had been drawn into the wild heart of things.

For the Christmas entertainments a trunk was flung down for us to pick our costumes. Fancy dresses, capes, shawls, all smelling of camphor, for us to rifle. As I was going to recite Mark Antony’s baleful speech over Caesar’s body, I chose a velvet toga that was much too big and a roped curtain cord to hold it up. When my nun arrived, I was already rehearsing, feverishly—
“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears”—and she drew me aside and said to take the speech a little less impulsively, to live the lines and enter into the pity of them, of imperial Caesar, whose wife had warned him not to go out that morning, having seen that he would be slaughtered. She helped me into the clogs that were too big for me and, from a dampish sponge, smeared white matte pancake makeup all over my face. For the performance she stood in the wings praying, and I was conscious of her being there. Afterward she beckoned, and I followed her to the reception parlor, which was exclusive to the Head Nun, yet she risked it. She had a surprise for me, which she hauled from her big, deep pocket. It was a quarter-pound box of chocolates with pictures of blue kingfishers on the paper wrapping. How had she come by it? I thought it must have been a gift to her, and instead of handing it over to the Reverend Mother, in rampant disobedience she had hidden it for me.

That first Christmas at home I was chillier with my mother, who could not understand the change in me. I would not eat the cakes or the trifle that she foisted on me, and I went out each evening to neighbors’ houses to sit with them, while my mother longed for me to sit with her. There was a widow whose new house was halfway between the two villages, pebble-dashed, with flower beds in front. It smelled of mortar and fresh paint. In her small kitchen, our knees close up to the enamel stove, we sat, her breakfast things already laid at the far end of the table, a cup and saucer, a porridge bowl, and a linen napkin in a bone ring. She would fill me in on all the latest news, which was unvarying, publicans that were in trouble with guards for after-hours drinking, neighbors in bitter land disputes, and husbands and wives who threatened to kill one
another. After a decent interval, she would say, “What about a little toddy?” and disappear, swiftly coming back with the sherry bottle under her arm and two glasses, a small liqueur glass for me and a larger cut-glass one for herself. The sherry was a dark, rich amber color, and there were soft lemon biscuits to break and dip into it and suck from. After a few drinks, she got either skittish or maudlin, missing the husband that had drowned, still cut up because spiteful people had said that it wasn’t an accident and that he had done it on purpose, to get away from her. She would then, in a bathos of tears, recite a poem called “People Will Talk.”

I did not shed a tear going back after the holidays, knowing that my nun was there waiting for me, and the very first moment that we bumped into one another, I knew by certain signs that, if anything, her affections had deepened.

The County Home, run by the same order, was a mile outside the town, overlooking the lake, and a cousin of my father’s, a nursing sister, was matron there. The grounds were full of old people, old men and old women, dribbling and pottering and tending to the rockery. It was not nearly as regimental as the convent, as they were nursing nuns and had a bit more pity. I had brought a Christmas cake from my mother to my father’s cousin and so was allowed to deliver it to her. A tiny woman who did not reach my shoulder, she had a birdlike flutter, all excitement, as she laid down the tea tray, rushing in and out, calling to her charges, saying they were stone deaf, giving orders that they could not hear and going herself to get the cup and saucer and the teapot and the large slice of sponge cake with the raspberry jam filling that was on a plate covered with a white doily. She was the soul of affection and far more outspoken than other nuns. She said that had she known how hard
religious life was to be and the trials and severities that awaited her, she would never have entered at all.

I did not stay long, because I had a plan. It meant taking a longer route around the lake and to the far end of the town, so as not to be spied upon. A statue of Stoney Brennan, with his bulbous head, whom the English had hanged for having stolen a turnip, was in a recess in the wall, and possibly in honor of Christmas, someone had streaked his cheeks with cardinal-red paint and stuck a cigarette butt in his mouth. The other sign of Christmas was the long strips of tinsel in the pharmacy window, idly whirling.

The sense of elation was almost unbearable: to be out on the street, breathing, as I believed, the wicked air, harboring a hectic love for my nun, and on the point of buying her the gift that would be a godsend to her on cold, frosty nights. In the window of the draper’s shop, there was a mannequin of a lady, a Miss Moderna, in a black crepe dress, cut on the bias, and I would have given anything to have been slender enough to fit into it. The shop smelled of every kind of cloth, wool and linen and serge, and the woman behind the counter looked up, surprised to see a convent girl in a navy gabardine coat and school cap. She guessed that I had stolen a march. I had come to buy bed socks. A white shoebox stacked with socks, summer and winter, was flung on the counter, and I picked out a pair in wool and angora that was striped in contrasting shades of pink. The woman complimented me on my taste and said I had picked the most expensive pair of socks in the batch. All I had was two shillings, but since she knew where to find me, and was in on my transgression, she was certain to receive the remaining sixpence. Nevertheless, she wrote my name and the IOU into a big ledger that seemed to be full of names and IOUs written with a scratchy pen in heavy brown ink. She wrapped the socks in silver paper. It was not a flashy silver, more a dun silver, the
same as used to be around a cake, called Oxford Luncheon, which my grandmother presented to my mother when she came on her annual holiday, never staying the full week, missing home and the mountains; somehow there was an estrangement between them, mother and daughter. The silver paper around the Oxford Luncheon smelled of raisins, sultanas, and candied peel, whereas the silver paper around the pink socks smelled of nothing. I placed it in the pew where my nun knelt.

I knew that she had received them and possibly loved them, because not long after, and quite irrelevantly, she spoke of the difference between angora wool, which is the down of the rabbit, and cashmere from the down of the goat, both being very sought after.

That term was one of ecstasies and doubt, the seesaw of love, the shiverings, depriving myself of the pleasure of seeing her in order to think about her and then flinging myself in front of her, like a fawning dog waiting for its reward. Our friendliest times were in the cookery kitchen, when after the class she would sometimes ask me to stay behind and help clear up. It was informal: white flour on her fingers and on her habit, stacking saucepans and colanders, as occasionally we would say small things to one another that meant multitudes. She seemed to guess that I had decided to become a nun, and that in a few years we would both be under the same roof, subject to the same rules, in our hair shirts, sleeping on iron springs, stoically immune to passions and temptations.