Morna stood at the window, appraising her mother’s crew-cut hedge and well drilled lupins, watching the sunlight fidget on the lawn. She felt fidgety herself, no longer in the mood for tragiromantic German verse. She went to fetch a duster, could find no use for it. The house was always immaculate and Bea had spent the day before her hospital admission improving on the perfect. Perhaps she should walk the dog. Service to bird and animal was service to her mother.
‘Joy!’ she called. Her mother’s dog was an aggressive and irascible Yorkshire terrier bitch. (Bea had never had a male dog.) Joy nipped friends, maimed postmen, and was redeemed only by her name. She minced in, snapped at Morna’s hand as she tried to buckle on her tartan coat, barked hysterically when the phone rang.
‘Damn,’ said Morna. It would be another of her mother’s pious female friends. Three had rung already. ‘Please tell Bea we’re saying a novena for her.’ ‘Father Clarke offered Mass for her today.’ ‘I made my Holy Communion for her this morning.’
The voice was male.
‘Hallo, Father Clarke here. That’s Morna, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, hallo.’ She refused to add ‘Father’. Father Clarke had married her and Neil. In twenty years she had gone from virgin to bride to mother to divorcée, while he remained unchanged—smug, stubborn, petty, ever-virgin, closed to all new ideas, only his joints stiffening, his hair receding.
‘How’s your mother?’
‘She’s … er … quite comfortable.’
‘Good, good. Why I’m phoning, my dear, is that there’s going to be a summer school later on this month and I thought Beatrice might …’
Summer school? Bea had never studied anything, never taken a job. She had been a full-time widow and an overtime Catholic. It was she herself who attended summer schools, to dilute the isolation of her work, make her feel more of a professional. Father Clarke was coughing. He smoked too much—a pipe. He cleared his throat.
‘Well, it’s really a retreat—but not just prayer and silence. They’re inviting a few speakers from outside this time—a little bit of history, a talk on religious poetry—you know the sort of thing.’
‘I see.’ Morna tried to disguise her disappointment. She would have liked to have seen her mother mugging up Old Norse or having a crack at morris dancing.
‘I know Beatrice hates to be unoccupied, so I thought she might …’
Beatrice. Father Clarke avoided abbreviations as he avoided sloth and slovenliness. If you were sloppy over words, lazy about spelling out a name, it was all too easy to become sloppy over more important things—morals or good manners. He and Beatrice kept their standards high in both.
Morna realised she was slouching, stood up straighter. ‘When exactly is it?’ she asked. ‘Mummy may not be well enough to …’
‘That’s just the point. I thought she might regard it as a sort of convalescence. The programme’s very relaxed and it’s not even far to travel. It’s less than half an hour from here, in a delightful little village on the Surrey/Hampshire borders. The house itself is set in thirty acres of grounds, so she’ll have peace and quiet and country air and someone to cook the meals and …’
‘I’m cooking the meals.’
There was a short uneasy silence.
‘I mean I’m staying with her all summer, Father, looking after her. Chris is away in France, so …’
‘Why don’t you come as well, then? I mean, it’s … er … not exclusively Catholic. There’s an Anglican vicar speaking and an ecumenical discussion on the church and disarmament.’
He was offering lollipops. She already regretted the ‘Father’. It had merely been a sop because she’d sounded rude. She had been to confession to Father Clarke twenty years ago. Another sham. ‘Father, I have eaten meat on Friday.’ It was no longer a sin, and even at the time, she had trotted it out to conceal her graver lapses.
‘Why I’m phoning now is …’ The priest’s voice was engulfed a moment in another burst of coughing. ‘If … If you want to come, you’ll have to book more or less immediately. They’re almost full already.’
‘Right, I’ll tell my mother. I’ll be seeing her tomorrow.’
‘Good. Give her my regards—and prayers, of course.’
‘Of course.’
Morna put the phone down. Joy was still trailing her lead. She took it off, unzipped the tartan coat. She didn’t feel like service any more.
Chapter Two
‘Push,’ the midwife shouted. ‘Push!’
Bea couldn’t push, hadn’t any muscles. Hadn’t any body at all. There was just her head, hugely blindly throbbing, and then a vague, hollow, floating blur below it. They must have given her gas and air, or one of those new-fangled epidurals.
There was a nurse still in the room, heavy clumping shoes punishing the lino, voice Irish-shrill and hurting.
‘Wake up, Mrs Conyers.’
Stupid girl. She wasn’t asleep. You didn’t doze off in the second stage of labour. She could even feel the contractions now, the faintest griping somewhere at her outer edges. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. She was crying because her husband wasn’t there, would never see his baby.
‘It’s a little girl.’
Edward had wanted a girl, chosen only girls’ names—romantic fancy names—Miranda, Roxanne, Morna. Morna meant ‘beloved’. He was her beloved. They had sent back his remains. Not bones or flesh or even ashes. Just his medals and a pile of books and papers, and a few limp pathetic clothes which still smelt of brilliantine and pipe-smoke. They had even sent his pipes back. Or two of them. His favourite one had crashed with him. Bits of briarwood, bits of body exploding over Hamburg. A seven-hundred-andforty-strong bomber raid. Thirty planes had never returned, fifty others damaged, over two hundred young and plucky aircrew lost in one short night.
‘Wakey-wakey!’
That nurse again. Why did she talk as if the place were Butlins? Always did in hospitals. Or treated you as pre-school.
‘Come on, Mrs Conyers. Let’s get you sitting up, then.’
Hot heavy arm around her shoulders, freckled face looming close to hers. Bea tried to struggle up, then fell back again, supported by the arm. She hadn’t wanted drugs. They only made you fuddled, turning childbirth into nightmare.
‘Your daughter’s here.’
Bea nodded. She hadn’t felt a thing. Yet her baby was a big one. Eight pounds seven ounces; eyes screwed up in fury, fuzz of Titian hair. They would lay her in her arms soon. Red face, red hair, white shawl. And she’d cry again because she wanted Edward in her arms, not a wailing infant.
‘Let’s comb your hair then, shall we? Make you look pretty for your visitor.’
‘I’m not a child.’ Her voice surprised her, loud and petulant. She was suddenly awake, squinting against the cruel beam of sunlight lasering from the window. The nurse was too close, breath fierce with peppermints. Bea seized the comb herself, tried to make her hands work.
‘What … What time is it?’
‘Half past three, my dear. High time you woke up.’
‘You mean the … the afternoon?’
‘Yes. Tea time. They’ve brought your tray already. Chocolate cake.’
Bea could see a metal teapot glinting in the light, a face distorted in it. She had lost another half-a-day then, as well as yesterday. The day had dawned for other people, dragged or busied, wept or shone, but she had had no part in it.
‘You were awake this morning. We even got you up. Don’t you remember?’
Bea didn’t answer. Infants and idiots forgot things. You were always both in hospital.
The nurse was sponging her face. Nanny O’Riley. She’d had a nanny once, but not an Irish one. She remembered her as dark, casting shadows everywhere she went. Nurse O’Riley was ginger. She could see tiny auburn hairs glinting on her arms, even on her thumbs.
‘Shall I fetch your daughter now?’
Bea nodded. It wasn’t just a day she had lost, but a thousand thousand, while the daughter gr
ew from a bundle in a shawl to a clever distant stranger, passing exams, speaking foreign languages, marrying a man who didn’t believe in God or …
‘Mummy darling.’
The lips barely grazed her cheek. Morna always kissed so warily. Hadn’t as a child. When she had picked her up from infant school, there had been long wet eager smacking kisses, both arms flung around her neck.
‘How you feeling?’
‘Not too bad, dear.’
‘I brought you some freesias.’
‘Lovely.’ Their scent was sickly like the gas. Her friends had sent more flowers. Fragile tiger lilies which looked pale beneath their speckles, blood-coloured roses with more thorn on them than bloom.
‘And grapes.’
‘You’re spoiling me.’ The grapes were black and plump and slightly mottled as if someone had tried to shine them up, but left smears on them instead. She couldn’t eat. The numbness was throbbing into pain now. Pain everywhere, even in her throat, scratchy when she swallowed. They must have put some tube down.
‘Bring that chair up, darling.’ The scrape of wood on lino etched an extra line of pain across her head. She picked up the freesias, cradled them in her arms. They were damp at the bottom like a baby. ‘And why don’t you have my tea? I don’t want it.’
‘Aren’t you meant to drink?’
‘I’ll have a glass of orange. I prefer it.’
The chair yelped back again. Clink of jug against glass. Good girl, Morna—pouring orange, bringing flowers, looking after house and dog.
‘How’s Joy?’
‘She rolled in something unspeakable last night and this morning she refused to eat her veal, but apart from that …’
Bea put her glass down. It hurt to laugh, but they had to make a joke of Joy. She knew Morna didn’t like her much. She and Neil had never had a dog.
‘It’s best if you do a rota. Veal one day, then beef or chicken the next. She gets bored, you see, if you don’t vary it a bit.’ She had left all the different dishes in the freezer, clearly marked with dates. Simpler than opening a tin. You couldn’t trust those tins. They were dog themselves, so Mrs Miller said.
‘Are you managing to walk her?’
‘Yes, of course. We’ve been twice today already. To the woods.’
Her daughter’s hair looked different—still longish at the back, but layered around her face. Pretty. Her father’s hair. The same rich auburn colour. Not ginger like that nurse’s, a different class entirely. Edward would have been grey now, had he lived. Morna’s first grey hairs had appeared about six months ago, though they seemed to have vanished for the moment. She must have pulled them out or been persuaded at the hairdresser’s into one of those colour rinses which gave you cancer. She seemed a trifle subdued, not her usual chatty self. Was she simply being thoughtful, trying not to tire her, or sickening for something?
‘Are you eating properly, Morna? I left plenty in the larder.’
‘I know. Provisions for a year of siege.’
‘Have that chocolate cake, darling. It might taste better than it looks.’
‘No, really, I had a late lunch. Have you seen the doctor yet?
‘Not since the op. He’s coming later on, I think.’ Embarrassing to be inspected by a man there. Huge gloved hand thrusting up inside you; the booming public way he spoke about highly private things. ‘Nothing to worry about, my dear. The bladder wall’s beginning to sag down a bit into your vagina, so we’re going to tighten you up …’
Bea blinked the surgeon away, fixed her attention on her daughter. Morna was running through the phone-calls—Vera, Norah, Agnes, Father Clarke. A Mass for her recovery, a retreat in late July. Bea tried to think of God, but like the doctor, He had kept His distance since the operation. The ornate and gilded photo frame where she kept Him bright and polished in her mind was strangely blank—the first time in half a century. She had always seen God clearly—not an old man with a beard or a Middle Eastern gentleman with grubby robe and sandals, but a tall clean-shaven Englishman, someone like her husband’s Air Vice-Marshal, whom she had only met the once, but who had impressed her with his spruce good looks, his steel-and-velvet voice. He’d had a ten-column-inch obituary when he died, just two years after Edward. Bea clutched the end of the counterpane. God couldn’t die, could He? Or only for clever wilful daughters. Not for her.
‘What d’you think, then, Mummy?’
Bea wiped clammy palms on the sheet. ‘Wh … What about?’
‘The retreat of course. D’you fancy the idea?’
‘When exactly is it? And what sort of retreat—a silent one or …?’
‘Wake up, Mum! I’ve just been telling you about it. Didn’t you hear?’
‘I’m s … sorry, Morna. It’s difficult to concentrate.’
‘It’s just a week—starting on 22nd July. And mainly silent, but with talks and things as well. Well, what’s the verdict? Shall I book you in?’
Bea hesitated. You needed legs to go places and hers were still two humps beneath the blanket, with neither bone nor muscle. It was an effort to keep sitting up at all, keep smiling. Her lips ached along with all the rest.
Morna inched her chair up. ‘I‘ll come with you, if you like. Father Clarke seemed to think I’d quite enjoy it.’
Was her daughter mocking her? Morna classed Father Clarke with Joy—both her mother’s creatures who had to be treated with respect, fed and cossetted, but never actively sought out. Morna hadn’t been to Mass (or priest) for years, but perhaps she was missing them, groping back to some meaning in her life.
‘Well, if you’d like to go, darling …’
‘Would you, though, Mummy?’
Bea took a sip of orange, glanced around the small quiet uncluttered private room. Her son-in-law paid her BUPA subscription, even now, half a world away. She tried to like Neil for it, failed. At least she was grateful, though. Norah Miller had been in a public ward, seen it all—women of all colours without teeth or shame or even please and thank you. Bea sank back on the pile of clean white pillows, laundered by someone else, closed her eyes. All she really wanted was a week of total rest. She had planned to take her convalescence at home, with Morna acting nurse. But was that fair on Morna? Perhaps her daughter would prefer a retreat to another week in Oxshott, another round of chores. At least there’d be some outside company, someone more stimulating than a doddery mother and her dog.
She tried to scan her daughter’s face for boredom or resentment. Neither showed. They didn’t reveal their feelings, either of them. Probably safer not to. Yet if … if anything should happen to her, an accident or …, then so many things would be left unsaid. There were new lines around her daughter’s eyes, eyes not the clear no-nonsense blue her own were, but a soft smoky colour, neither grey nor blue but somewhere in between. That fine fair skin didn’t wear too well—perfect at eighteen but complaining at forty. She felt angry with the lines, longed to lean across and wipe them off her daughter’s face as she had mopped up her tears, scrubbed at sticky cheeks. You couldn’t do that any more. Daughters grew up, kept their distance. The older your child became, the nearer you were yourself to … to … Bea broke off a grape, forced it down with the fear, reached out for Morna’s hand. ‘I’ll do what you want, darling.’
‘Don’t be silly. It makes no difference to me.’
Bea was silent. Ludicrous to want to cry because a daughter sounded sharp. ‘Hail Mary,’ she murmured under her breath. Prayer was always calming. At least it would stop her snivelling, embarrassing her daughter. She was only weepy because of the anaesthetic. The nurse had warned of that. ‘Full of grace …’ Morna was full of grace, pretty still, young, for heaven’s sake, might even remarry. A decent man this time, with principles, faith in something greater than himself. Except remarriage was forbidden by the Church. Perhaps God would understand, though, make an exception in her daughter’s case, grant one of those complicated annulments. She glanced at the photo frame again. Still empty. ‘The Lord is with th
ee.’ Was He? How could you ask Him favours if He wasn’t there?
She crammed in three more grapes, heard the pips crunching in her head, gripped her daughter’s hand. ‘Let’s go, please—both of us.’
Chapter Three
Morna pushed open the heavy wooden door, held it for her mother. The garden scents of new-mown grass and lime trees gave way to convent smells—polish, incense, piety, cabbage cooked to punishment. A tall bony woman in a navy skirt and blouse with a plain metal cross around her neck was standing behind the desk.
‘Good afternoon. Nice to meet you both. I’m Mother Michael.’
Morna forced a smile. There had been a Mother Mary Michael at her school. Chief of persecutors. This nun wore semi-mufti, her short blue veil revealing a fringe of grizzled hair, her skirt reaching only to her calves. Yet she had the earlier Mother Michael’s piercing gaze—one which could bore through brick, excuses, lies.
‘Names, please.’
‘Mrs Conyers and Mrs Gordon.’
Morna watched her scan the list, tick their names off. She hoped nobody would ask about Mr Gordon. Should she have said ‘Miss’? Ms was impossible—suggested permissiveness and feminism—both strictly banned in convents. Names had always been a problem. Her Reverend Mother had refused to call her Morna because it was not a saint’s name and therefore unsuitable for any Catholic girl.
‘Have you got a second name, my child?’
‘No, Reverend Mother.’
A frown. ‘What about your confirmation name? You are confirmed, I hope?’
‘Yes, Reverend Mother.’
‘Well, what name did you take?’
‘Joachim, Reverend Mother.’
Joachim was the Blessed Virgin’s father, and since she had no father of her own, it had seemed logical at the time, as well as original. Most of her classmates chose Thérèse after the Little Flower, who spent a lifetime doing Little Things, or Francis because he was the patron saint of animals and they were all dog- and pony-mad.
The Stillness the Dancing Page 2