Vow of Sanctity (4 page)

‘Dougal Mackintosh,’ said Rory calmly, ‘will be all the better for a trauma or two. He’s growing up into a hooligan. Since I’m here I’ll walk along with you.’

‘Those are the groceries?’ Sister Joan eyed the sack in surprise.

‘My mother added a few extra,’ Rory said, suddenly looking embarrassed.

‘That was very kind of her.’ Sister Joan found it difficult to keep the surprise out of her voice. ‘Are you – you’re not Catholic, you said?’

‘Meaning that only Catholics do good turns for other people?’ The hostility was back.

‘Meaning that Catholics don’t seem to be too popular round here.’

‘This is John Knox territory,’ Rory said. ‘The kirk and very boring Sundays and if you’re enjoying yourself then there’s sin in it.’

‘We have our puritan side too. So you’re …?’

‘My father was a Catholic,’ Rory said. ‘I was brought up as one but I lost my faith when – I lost it.’

They had left the village and were crossing to where the gully ran between the high rocks. Sister Joan refrained from comment and after a moment or two Rory said defensively, ‘You haven’t said anything about praying for me.’

‘It always sounds a bit patronizing and pious to go round threatening prayer,’ she said mildly. ‘Of course I probably will, sooner or later. But that needn’t worry you too much.’

‘I won’t let it,’ Rory said sharply.

‘Good.’ Sister Joan grinned at him amiably.

‘My mother isn’t Catholic,’ Rory said, imparting further information as reluctantly as if she had asked for it. ‘It was a
mixed marriage, but I was reared as a Catholic. I stuck to it until – well, one outgrows it, you know.’

‘I’m afraid I’m retarded then,’ Sister Joan said
apologetically
.

Rory uttered a shout of laughter which he turned hastily into a cough. He was still very young, she thought, and felt a twinge of amused compassion. Young men leaping out of boyhood reminded her of colts trying to jump a high fence.

‘What beats me,’ Rory said as they began the climb up the slope, ‘is why someone like you should ever enter a convent. I mean, you’re still quite young, aren’t you?’

‘You think I ought to have waited until I was drawing my old-age pension?’ Sister Joan paused to catch her breath. ‘What an odd idea of nuns you have. And you a cradle Catholic too!’

‘Now you’re making fun of me.’

‘A little bit,’ she confessed. ‘However you are being slightly impertinent, don’t you think? My reasons for choosing the religious life are private.’

‘A failed love affair? If so, then I apologize for upsetting you,’ he said stiffly.

Sister Joan’s vividly blue eyes misted over with the memory of forgotten dreams. No, she and Jacob had not failed. Only the barrier between them had grown too high for either of them to breach. Jacob had reverted in the end to his Jewish heritage and she had found it impossible to give up her Christian one. But that, she reflected, hadn’t been the real reason why she had chosen the religious life. It had merely provided the particular circumstances in which she had begun to think seriously about it. The real reason was love, she suspected. A greater love seeking a lesser love in order to experience itself.

‘If you think I’m about to provide you with my life story, forget it,’ she said crisply.

‘Meanie.’ He gave her the grin that he must have worn as a schoolboy.

They had reached the steps and he stood aside to let her go first.

‘Oh, I can be terribly mean,’ Sister Joan assured him. ‘D’ye need a hand with the sack? It looks heavy.’

‘My mother put in a lot of tinned stuff,’ he told her. ‘She has a kind of liking for Catholics.’

‘Well, she married one.’

The remark, innocently meant, brought a flush of anger to his face, and the gaze he turned upon her was a stormy one.

‘She’s told you then? About my father, I mean? She often mentions it to strangers as if she’s hoping that one day someone will say, “Wait a moment! I met the man that you’re describing only last week”. She still thinks that he might come back one day. Not that she’d admit it to me.’

‘You don’t want your father to come back?’ Sister Joan opened the door and went through the narrow entrance into the cave. Behind her Rory was pulling the sack through after him.

‘No I don’t.’ He stood straighter, the sack at his feet. ‘We get on very well without him, Mum and I. He was always
wandering
off anyway – sales representative when he should have been taking some of the load off my mother’s back and helping her run the shop. Then one weekend he simply didn’t come home. We waited a couple of weeks and then Mum went to the police.’

‘She didn’t go immediately?’

‘He often stayed away for days but never for a fortnight before. Anyway she didn’t get much change out of the local Constabulary. They made some enquiries in case he’d had an accident but nothing turned up. They did find out that he’d given up his job a few days before he left. But they never found him or his car. Mum was upset.’

‘And you?’ Sister Joan asked as casually as she could.

‘I was fourteen already and not a silly kid.’ He shrugged his shoulders in a disparaging fashion. ‘We were never close anyway – my father and I, I mean. Not that I was a mother’s boy if that’s what you’re thinking.’

‘I wasn’t,’ Sister Joan said. She judged it unnecessary to let him know that she had noticed the time when his father had decamped had coincided with his loss of faith.

‘Delivery,’ he said, with an air of changing the subject, ‘is extra.’

‘And cheap when one considers the effort involved.’ She dug in her purse and found the coins. ‘Please thank your mother
for the extras. It was very kind of her.’

‘I’d better be off then.’ He bent slightly beneath the rough stone lintel, and turned to face her again as they stepped outside. ‘Look, I don’t hold any brief for the pious brigade but if there’s anything else you want …?’

‘Thanks but I’ll be fine,’ Sister Joan began, then hesitated. ‘There is one thing, probably not important. Is there anyone around here who rides along the shores of the loch on a black horse?’

‘Most people have motor cars,’ Rory said.

‘This was a horse – a big black one. It was late evening and I couldn’t see distinctly. The rider was a woman.’

‘Maybe you saw Black Morag,’ Rory said.

‘Black who?’

‘Morag. The woman the loch is named for. She used to live hereabouts and then – well, this was back in the eighth century, of course.’

‘And you’re about to embark on the local ghost story.’

‘Not that anyone really believes it,’ Rory said, ‘but the legend is that Morag rode a black stallion and was very beautiful. Then one day the Vikings raided and she was –’ He stopped short, blushed hotly and went on rather hastily, ‘Well, you know what Vikings did.’

‘When they’d finished pillaging,’ Sister Joan said.

‘Morag went crazy,’ Rory said. ‘She leapt on her horse and rode it into the loch. Since then she’s been seen from time to time, galloping her stallion along the shore.’

‘Have you ever seen her or met anybody who has?’

‘No, I can’t say I have,’ he admitted with a sheepish grin, ‘but some of the old folks roundabout say they knew people who did see her. Me, I think it’s just a story. There aren’t any spirits.’

‘None that gallop about on black horses anyway,’ Sister Joan said. ‘On the other hand it’s possible that certain places can be imprinted vividly with the memory of some tragic event and then under certain conditions – atmospheric, maybe, the event is re-enacted, like a film being reissued. But Morag’s spirit, if she ever existed, has been at peace for centuries.’

‘If you say so, Sister.’ The mockery had returned to his
eyes. ‘Anyway, that was probably what you saw. You weren’t scared, were you?’

‘Just curious. Thanks again for bringing the stuff up here.’

He raised a hand in farewell and went down the steps at a pace that argued a familiarity with steep places that she envied.

Going back into the cave she emptied the sack, noting that Mrs McKensie had added several tins of sardines and salmon and a large currant cake. Also, she noted happily, a shiny tin opener. There was something ironic about a woman stocking tinned fish when the local waters must be teeming with fish, but there were still people who didn’t think fish was real unless it came out of a tin.

By the time she had put the tins in neat pyramids at the side of the cave, heated and eaten a tin of soup and washed her bowl, the morning had fled, and her itinerary was shot to bits. The afternoon was supposed to be spent in spiritual reading and exercises, but through the open door the sunlight shafted temptingly.

She closed the door, took her Bible and sat, cross-legged on the floor, her concentration focused on the passage she had marked. If she ever made it through the heavenly gate, she decided, she would love to find out exactly what ‘Revelations’ was all about. The cadences of the sentences had a dreamy quality that half hid, half revealed the meaning. Like spray thrown up from the deep water, half hiding the figure on the black horse – and it had been no ghost. That being so, then why had Rory tried to plant the idea in her mind that it had been? Why not simply tell her who owned a horse and liked riding it as darkness began to cloak the lochside?

‘Sister, pay attention,’ she admonished herself aloud, and heard her voice echo round the cave with a soft, sighing sound that made her wish that she hadn’t closed out the sunlight.

Sunday mornings were the loveliest time of the week. On Sundays one had more leisure to spend in church or in the enclosed garden of the convent, and the pupils who came more or less willingly to the little school on the moor were not around to be disciplined, taught, fretted over. Peace arched its rainbow over the Sunday sky. It was a time for renewing one’s sometimes tenuous spiritual contacts, for dipping into books there was no space for in the week, for seeing the little faults and failings of the other sisters as endearing quirks.

Halfway up the steep cliffs with its iron-railed steps and the door of the retreat hospitably open, Sister Joan stood and breathed in the air. The Cornish air was sweet, but this air was like wine. It made her want to cry out a greeting to the rocks and the pine trees and the loch, shimmering blue-green far below. She had been awake since dawn, scrubbing herself thoroughly with cold, soapy water that made every goosebump stand out, saying her morning prayers with the energy brought by a sound sleep, and now, munching an oat cake she stood, watching the light change and strengthen as the sun rose.

‘And that foolish boy lost his faith,’ she said aloud, and laughed, hearing her own voice as a sweet ripple on the air.

Faith, she thought, wasn’t something kept in the pocket that could fall through a hole. It was a burning chain about the heart. Sometimes the only way to endure it was to deny it was there at all.

Her mood continued as she swept out the cave and replaced the burnt out candles with tall Sabbath ones she had brought with her. Far below the faint sound of bells danced up to her. The monastery signalled the approach of mass.

She was becoming accustomed to the climb up and down to the cave. Quite apart from the benefit of the exercise she liked the feeling of being high above the world. In the retreat, problems that seemed serious became insignificant.

The shores of the loch weren’t deserted this morning. She could see a few soberly clad people pushing out small boats. No more than a dozen including three small children, she calculated. A few Catholics still practising their faith in an environment that merely tolerated them at best. She walked with a springing step, enjoying the breeze on her face.

‘Good morning, Sister Joan.’

Brother Cuthbert was loping along the shore towards her, the ginger hair about his tonsure fairly crackling with energy. Just to look at him made one feel slightly weary.

‘Good morning, Brother Cuthbert.’ She stopped as he skidded to a halt, seeming to use his large, sandalled feet as brakes in his headlong progress.

‘I brought the boat over this morning and decided to offer my services as boatman in case you needed help.’

‘That’s very kind of you. It’s years since I was in a rowing-boat,’ she said gratefully.

‘One or two of the parishioners might offer you passage across but as you can see their boats are small,’ Brother Cuthbert said, guiding her to where a rowing-boat swayed gently at anchor.

‘There’s only a tiny congregation here too,’ Sister Joan remarked.

‘I understand there used to be many more,’ Brother Cuthbert said, ‘but the old ones died out and most of the young ones moved to Glasgow or Edinburgh or even down into England.’

‘Among the Sassenachs,’ Sister Joan said gravely, gathering the skirt of her habit and making a neat landing in the boat.

‘Sometimes it’s necessary if they’re to earn a living wage.’ Stepping in after her he seized both oars and began to flail the water.

‘You haven’t pulled up the anchor,’ Sister Joan murmured.

‘Sometimes I despair of ever getting my head on straight.’ Brother Cuthbert struck the offender a sharp blow and hauled up the dripping anchor.

‘The old crofters have largely gone now.’ He resumed the conversation as he pulled away from the shore. ‘It’s my belief the Highland clearances started it all, and there’s no use in turning the clock back. Yet it’s a good, healthy life. Here’s the island now – except that it’s only an island at certain times. The tides are queer just beyond the loch. If you were thinking of taking a swim then I’d advise against it – not that nuns generally do, but since Vatican Two the rules have all been changed round, so one can’t be sure. I heard of one convent where the sisters are allowed to smoke.’

‘Not,’ said Sister Joan firmly, ‘in the Order of the Daughters of Compassion.’ They were approaching the reed-fringed shore with its wooden wharf upon which the other members of the congregation were stepping, tying their boats to the sea girdled posts along it. One or two glanced her way and nodded with shy, courteous dignity.

‘Watch your shoes, Sister.’ Brother Cuthbert extended a large hand. ‘The wood can get quite slippery when the water’s high. If you’ll excuse me I have to be running ahead of you. If you follow the path you’ll come to the church and after the mass I’ll row you back again. Or find someone who can handle the boat.’

He strode off into a tangle of trees and bushes that grew down to the wharf. There was an unpaved track ahead with stone walls hiding the view at each side, and the bells sounded louder now.

Sister Joan paused to clean her shoes on a tuft of grass and walked on, following the others who looked, she couldn’t help thinking, as if they would be more at ease in jeans and sweaters than print dresses and Sunday black.

The church had a low, square tower at one end, and the rounded arches that had preceded the soaring Gothic. The wall dipped down at each side and she saw neat rows of vegetables and beyond a cluster of beehive-shaped huts built of the same grey stone as church and wall. A larger structure with smoke issuing from several chimneys stood a little way off with what looked like a covered passage joining it to the back of the church. As she entered the latter the smell of antiquity was in her nostrils.

The interior was dim until her eyes became accustomed to
the candlelight that mellowed the outlines of harsh stone. The altar in the east had a narrow window behind it on which, in stained glass, was depicted a pale, yellow-tinged crucifixion. She wondered how it had escaped the ravages of the Reformation. In accordance with modern practice a simple wooden table stood before it so the priest could celebrate mass facing the congregation. The congregation sat on equally simple wooden benches and a final touch of oldworldliness was provided by the straw scattered on the floor. It linked her with the people who must once have worshipped here – people in rough tunics, knowing only the Gaelic and a little dog-Latin, their ears pricked for any sounds of dragon ships swinging into the loch from the open sea.

Genuflecting, she took her place at the end of a bench and prayed briefly for her sisters in the convent and for the people with whom she would be, albeit briefly, connected during her month at the retreat. The tinkling of the bell brought her to her feet with everybody else as the Father Abbot, as she guessed, entered from the sacristy door, followed by two brothers who were obviously to serve as his acolytes. At the same moment she became aware that benches at the side partly hidden by a wooden grille had filled with cowled figures.

For an instant the scene of which she was a part had the quality of a medieval dream and then, with a little shock, she heard the rich tones of the celebrant intone the Asperges in modern English that jarred upon her for a moment. There were times such as this when she regretted the Latin. Mother Dorothy had occasionally chided her for the opinion.

‘It is the meaning behind the words that matters, Sister, not the tongue in which they are uttered. Using the vernacular enables the congregation to participate and brings the mysteries closer to the people.’

‘Yes, Mother Prioress,’ Sister Joan had murmured, blue eyes downcast. Perhaps, she had thought and still thought, the words themselves had vibrations that created power to join heaven and earth. It wasn’t a view that would be popular so she kept quiet about it, but occasionally she said an Ave in Latin and wished she had been reared in the traditional rituals.

The mass progressed at a brisk but not breakneck pace. The Father Abbot was tall and thin with a halo of silvery hair and a face that reminded her of the paintings she had once seen in Madrid of fine-boned Spanish grandees, with their fingers hovering near the hilts of their swords. It was probably very snobbish of her, she reflected with a glint of humour, but she did like her father abbots to look like abbots and not like anyone you might run into at the local supermarket.

The Kyrie had begun. She had wondered idly if there would be music since there was no sign of any organ loft and then one of the brothers rose and, still standing in shadow, struck the first notes on a lute. Even the first notes sent a ripple down her back. Whoever was playing was a master of the instrument, each phrase exact, delicate, exquisite. It was music to stir the soul, never once descending to banality. Monks and
congregation
chanted the ancient Gregorian chant as the notes of the lute threaded the words as neatly as pearls on a thin chain of gold.

As the Kyrie ended she risked a glance sideways and caught a glimpse of large sandalled feet and a flash of red hair in the candlelight as Brother Cuthbert sat down again heavily and pulled back his fallen cowl. Now she no longer puzzled over the presence here of that clumsy, good-natured young man.

The sermon was the kind she enjoyed – not too long, not couched in abstract theological terms but nevertheless with depths beneath its simplicity. His voice resonated through the candlelit space.

Somebody was watching her. The first faint prickle of unease ran up the back of her neck. She folded her hands tightly together, forcing her mind into the correct state for the reception of Holy Communion, but the conviction that eyes were fixed unwaveringly and thoughtfully on her back
persisted
. The stalls where the monks sat were at her left, in such gloom that it was impossible to see if the seats were all
occupied
, and impossible to pick out individual faces.

‘Discipline of the eyes,’ her novice mistress had impressed upon her, ‘is one of the most important rules to be learnt. Wandering eyes betoken a wandering mind. Keep custody of your glances especially in church. Make it second nature to yourself.’

And that meant, Sister Joan thought, resisting the
temptation
to raise her eyes briefly from her folded hands on her way back from the altar rail in order to see who stood just within the door and stared at her so intently.

Head bowed and fingers candle-pointed she moved forward with the rest of the small congregation. The monks remained kneeling in their places and the abbot stepped across, moving behind the screen to give them Communion in virtual privacy. Eyes on the straw-strewn floor, Sister Joan returned to her seat and as the feeling of being watched receded gave herself up thankfully to prayer.

The final blessing having been announced she left at the tail of the short procession. Outside the abbot was greeting
parishioners
, shaking hands, his silver haloed head bent.

Sister Joan moved past on to the track again. The sun was high and hot overhead. It was truly a St Martin’s summer. The three children, released from piety, ran on ahead, scampering like mice between the dipping stone walls.

‘Sister Joan?’ Brother Cuthbert had emerged and was
striding
after her.

‘The music,’ she said, pausing for him to draw level, ‘was truly sublime.’

‘It’s the one thing I can do without messing everything up,’ Brother Cuthbert said with a cheerful grin.

She liked the calm and modest way in which he accepted his talent and her compliment upon it without any false
protestations
. There was true humility there, she thought, and recalled with a little prick of guiltiness her own longing to see her work signed and praised on the walls of picture galleries.

‘Father Abbot wishes to know if you would be kind enough to take lunch with him,’ Brother Cuthbert was continuing. ‘On Sundays he often has guests to lunch in the parlour. One has to keep a certain amount of contact with the outside world even in a monastery.’

‘Yes, of course. And I’d be pleased to have lunch with Father Abbot,’ Sister Joan assured him.

‘As long as it doesn’t interfere with any private vows you might have made, of course?’ he said anxiously.

‘It’s hard enough for me to keep the general rules without thinking up any extra vows,’ she said, with a chuckle.

‘I’ll bet you’re better at it than I am.’ Brother Cuthbert said, pushing open a gate and standing aside to let her through. ‘I seem to be a catalogue of fearful mistakes. We can go this way past the beehives.’

‘So they’re really beehives!’ she exclaimed, looking towards the cluster of domed huts.

‘Oh no, those are our cells,’ Brother Cuthbert told her. ‘The original monks here lived in them before the main building was built behind the church. We still occupy them. The kitchens and the refectory and the infirmary are in the main house and Father Abbot and Father Denis – he’s the novice master, though we haven’t got any at the moment – they have rooms in the main house too. These are the beehives proper. We get lots of honey from them but it’s pretty hard to get it potted and labelled and sold these days – not a viable undertaking.’

He was sweeping her onward past bushes whose fragrance made her think of spice jars and Victorian pot-pourri and butterflies with the sunlight turning their wings to gold.

Behind the church the main building which was attached to the older edifice, as she had guessed, stretched back, its roof low and tiled with chimneys at odd angles. They looked as if they had been stuck on as an afterthought, and when she commented as much to her escort he nodded.

‘The fireplaces were put in later on, about the middle of the last century – there was quite a little religious revival going on then. We only have fires in the kitchen and the infirmary, of course. Oh, and in Father Abbot’s parlour if he has Sunday guests. Here we are.’

He opened a door and ushered her into a long, stone antechamber with nothing in it except a bench.