Devils, for a change

by Wendy Perriam

  Sex kept cropping up today, and her strict internal censorship was crumbling. She realised she was wondering what it felt like – to be kissed like that, so roughly and intensely. She didn’t think she’d like it. Men still seemed alien creatures – not Tim perhaps, or Ivan – but all the rest of them; all those raucous guzzling strangers at the bar, with their loud guffaws, their bellowed orders, the way they gulped their beer or shovelled in peanuts, spraying salt and foam, as they ate and drank and talked and laughed at once; used their hands to thump or grab or grope. She was fascinated, frightened, kept fearing they’d turn violent, like those scenes she’d watched on television, where men in bars suddenly smashed glasses – or each other – whipped out loaded guns.

  She fumbled for her glass again, tossed back a generous gulp of gin with what she hoped was nonchalance, if not exactly relish. If this was Sunday in the world, well, she wasn’t doing badly – though it did seem a waste of time. At Brignor, they’d have celebrated Mass, said a good half of the Office, spent two hours at Exposition, and another hour, at least, in spiritual reading; eaten dinner, washed it up, and she herself would be preparing the chapel now for Benediction. Tim and Jenny had only just got up, they said, never ate breakfast, and couldn’t face lunch today, after something called a ‘thrash’ last night. They’d been Neville’s friends from long ago, still stayed loyal to Liz – an easygoing, friendly pair, who had laughed quite loudly when she tried to make a joke, a feeble joke, which had sounded forced to her. She wished Sister Luke could see her – sitting in a real live pub, with a glass of gin in front of her and a man on either side. Yes, Ivan had come over, joined them at their table, told the others she had the straightest spine he’d ever seen and she ought to train as an Alexander teacher, set up as a rival.

  ‘What is Alexander?’ Hilary asked, at last. Gin made questions easier and she didn’t have to shout now. The band were taking a break.

  Ivan grinned. ‘If you’ve got three hours to spare, I’ll tell you – well, just an introduction. First of all, it was a who and not a what. Frederick Matthias Alexander, born in Tasmania, 1869, died in London, 1955 – praised by Aldous Huxley, Bernard Shaw, Colin Davis, Sir Adrian Boult, Lord …

  Liz groaned. ‘Ivan, no! I’ve got to get back home and think about a meal. It’s all to do with posture, Hilary – how you sit and stand and walk and breathe and everything. They’re obsessed with backs and necks. I tried a few lessons myself and got so confused, I couldn’t do the simplest thing like sitting on a chair, without feeling my head was in the wrong position, or my legs too bent, or straight, or …’

  ‘You’re telling it all wrong, Liz.’ Ivan turned back to Hilary, drew his chair up closer. ‘It’s really all to do with how we use ourselves – you know, like using tools or instruments. You have to do it skilfully, learn the right techniques. If we rely just on our feelings, we can go completely wrong, because feelings spring from habit, and habits may be bad ones, which cause stress and even pain. Alexander started on himself. He was an actor, actually, a Shakespearian orator who kept losing his voice when he tried to go on stage.’

  Liz split a bag of crisps open, passed them round. ‘You can’t explain in theory. It’s far too complicated. It’s a body thing, Hilary. The teacher uses his hands on you, to put your posture right, correct any part that’s stiff or out of line. Hey, Ivan, why not give Hilary a lesson, sometime when you’re free? It’ll make a lot more sense then.’

  Ivan shrugged, seemed hurt. Hilary would have liked him to continue. She was intrigued by the thought of learning to use oneself; surprised to hear him say that one mustn’t rely on feelings. At Brignor, too, feelings had been suspect, had always to be discounted. Yet this was ‘a body thing’, not soul.

  Jenny brushed crisp crumbs from her skirt. ‘I had a lesson once myself, but the teacher chap was really very formal – all dressed up in pinstripes and a watch chain, as if he’d come from Harley Street, or some swanky City bank. Forgive me being personal, Ivan, but why do your crowd look so weird?’

  Ivan grinned, gestured to his own strange combination of loose multicoloured waistcoat over purple tracksuit bottoms. ‘We believe in being comfortable, that’s all. You can’t do body-work in pinstripes – though the old school do, of course, and dear F.M. himself always wore a suit, and even spats.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say you’re typical, though, would you, Ivan?’ Liz shook out the crisp bag, retrieved a few last broken shreds.

  ‘What’s typical?’

  ‘Well, take Keith Thompson. He’s an Alexander teacher, but much less way-out than you.’

  ‘And what’s way-out? A very relative concept, and often a judgemental one.’

  ‘Oh, Ivan! You’re impossible.’

  ‘No, I’m not. And anyway, it’s really very simple. As far as I’m concerned, clothes reflect the spirit, and vice versa, so if you’re imprisoned in tight belts and stiffened collars, you can’t feel free or open. The way most people dress is only sheer convention. They’re mostly far too scared to break the rules or differ from the herd. Yet people just don’t realise how simple it is to dress the way they want, rather than be dictated to by fashion – which is only another name for tyranny and money-making.’

  ‘Strong talk, Ivan! You should have brought your soapbox.’ Liz drained her glass, stood up. ‘You layabouts can stay here. I’ve got work to do – a meal to cook and about five full loads of washing. I don’t know why I do my daughters’ washing, when one’s left school and the other’s married.’

  Tim lolled back in his chair. ‘People wash too much these days. Labour-saving machines actually make more work, Jenny keeps bunging in my shirts to justify the expense of our new Zanussi Super. Then someone has to iron them.’

  ‘Someone?’ Jenny asked. ‘I wonder who.’

  ‘That’s not the point. It’s extra work, whoever does it. If I were female – which God forbid – I’d rather have dirty sheets, but more time to sleep on them.’

  Hilary was tempted to agree, once she saw the pile of washing – almost spotless sheets and shirts, things worn twice, at most, yet all bundled into the dirty linen basket. She wouldn’t dare confess to Liz that their Brignor habits were washed just once a year, and blankets every three years. (Sheets they didn’t use at all, except in the Infirmary, and even those were rarely laundered, unless a nun had something contagious like mumps or shingles.) They had lived like sixteenth-century peasants who had to wash their clothes in ponds and streams. She was beginning to feel more and more extraordinary, a throwback to medieval times, who had been pitched into the present with all the wrong conditioning and customs.

  ‘If you bring your washing down, Hilary, I’ll bung it in as well.’

  She stood rigid, unresponsive. She hadn’t any washing, had been there just one day, couldn’t bear anyone to see her underclothes; private things like knickers which might be stained or even smell. People were so open in the world – everything offered freely for inspection: feelings, sex-lives, underclothes. She had been private for so long; no one entering her cell, or mind; her whole life and body covered, under wraps.

  ‘Look, let me help,’ she offered, as Liz sorted clothes into piles of whites and coloureds. This was Sunday, so all work was forbidden, but Liz had called it woman’s one free day, so why should she work, either?

  ‘No, you sit down. You’ll have enough to do tomorrow, once Di throws all those hems at you. Why not read the papers? We get three or four delivered every Sunday and they’re chucked away unopened half the time.’

  Hilary obeyed, although the papers seemed more a chore than washing, especially the fat Sunday ones with all their different sections, which made her feel so ignorant. She had tried to learn from them, but even that was tricky, since they assumed you knew so much already, were aware of the whole background to a story or an issue, and didn’t need a child’s-type introduction. There were such a lot of complicated crises – faction fighting faction for no reason she could grasp, and in esoteric places she’d nev
er even heard of, or countries which had changed their names since she’d learnt them in the sixth form. Names, in general, were an endless shaming problem – so many people she ought to know, and didn’t – not just heads of state and politicians, but chat show hosts, or leading lights in what were called ‘the soaps’, whom other people seemed to know as friends.

  Their world at Brignor again had been medieval, restricted to their village and a few scraps of news from the bigger town beyond. She had prayed for places like the Middle East and Ireland, but they always seemed remote, not dragged into the chapel bombed and bruised and bleeding. Did people really need all that information, detail; all those gruesome close-up pictures of casualties or kidnaps? She’d found, even in her own case, that she was already becoming blasé, less shocked by atrocities, less outraged by injustice. When you saw so much of it, it seemed impossible to respond, each time, with quite the same pity and compassion. You could weep for one man’s fate – your neighbour’s, or your relative’s, or your fellow villager’s, but the bleeding millions left you still dry-eyed. And those blandly smiling newsreaders, who reported daily carnage without ever breaking down or displaying any emotion of their own, somehow made disaster more acceptable. A global village, they called it now, but a medieval village was simpler; heaven above, hell below, and a few simple Catholic peasants in between.

  She refolded The Observer, picked up its colour supplement. Everyone inside it seemed confident and glossy, loaded down with things she’d never needed – cameras, cars, computers – complicated things again, which she knew she’d never master. Yet Della, at seventeen, could drive; owned a fancy camera, was learning word-processing on her boyfriend’s Apple Macintosh – another strange new word she’d stored away. She flicked on through the pages – a cooking feature by a star she’d never heard of, who drove a hundred miles each week to get goat’s cheese and fresh chervil; a fashion spread which forecast that women would have to change their shapes again, as curves went out and the Belsen Look came in. What had Ivan said? That fashion was tyranny and money-making. And yet Liz had claimed the opposite: that fashion left you free to choose – except then she’d talked in terms of ‘fighting nature’, complained of ‘sham’ and ‘traps’; none of which sounded much like freedom. It was all most bewildering, and easier for Ivan, anyway, since he worked from home, didn’t have to meet the sharp-eyed scrutiny of all those stylish customers, as Liz and Di did – she, too, in just a day or so.

  She tried to drown her wave of apprehension by skimming through the bookshelves; soon overwhelmed again by the scores of things she didn’t know – books on psychology and physics, politics and history, antiques and art and sculpture; books on aircraft, war, and stamp collecting; travel books and cookbooks. In their tiny Brignor library, almost every author was a devout and narrow Catholic, if not a priest or monk. Every tome led back to God, blinkered the community from knowledge of the world. Was that a good thing, or a bad – good because they avoided a tidal wave of information, much of which was peripheral, or petty, and which might well swamp them anyway, leave them still ignorant and helpless, distract them from their work of praising God; or bad because they remained too insular and narrow, cut off from the rest of humankind? She hardly knew – knew less and less, in one way, each day she spent outside the convent walls, despite the mass of so-called knowledge cascading into her ears.

  She crossed the room, stood by the piano, an old Broadwood upright which no one ever played. She stroked the polished rosewood, saw herself reflected in its shine; not a middle-aged woman who had forgotten how to play, but a young girl in her teens, working through the Mozart sonatas, practising for hours, bringing the same obsession and perfectionism to her music as she’d brought to her religion. The two were linked. Music led to God. She’d assumed as a child that people always sang in heaven, rather than merely spoke; that if you asked for manna or a halo, you must set your request to music, make it soar; that God Himself spoke, not in words, but music, in chords and cadences, a whole orchestra booming through His voice.

  Her fingers itched to play again, yet she didn’t even lift the lid. Her skill in music had been rendered back to God at the age of seventeen, and she’d no right to reclaim it. It had been hard, at first, extremely hard, and she’d always hoped secretly that she would be allowed the job of organist. When she’d entered as a postulant, a nun called Sister Dimpna had held that envied post. Wrong to criticise; brazen and conceited to assume she was more skilful on the keyboard than a nun of sixty-five, but all the same she’d longed to make the music breathe and kindle, provide the feeling Sister Dimpna lacked. After seven years or so, her longings faded. Sister Francis Xavier was now the organist – competent, no more – but Sister Mary Hilary had more pressing problems than how to shape a phrase or pace a cadence.

  She turned her back on the piano, as if renouncing it again, sat by the window watching the slight movement in the bare branches of the sycamore. Doing nothing was an art, and one she hadn’t mastered. For twenty years and more, every minute of every day had been rigidly accounted for, so no nun would ever idle, doze or daydream. She looped the curtains back, missing the wide sweep of Norfolk skies.

  ‘Are you all right, my love? You look the picture of misery, perched on that hard chair and staring into space.’ Liz had sauntered in, carrying a tray with a bottle and two glasses. ‘Liquid lunch today. We’ll have the beef this evening, once Bob’s here – or Robert, I should say. He was Bob for years, you know. No wonder I get muddled. Names again.’ She shrugged. ‘I sometimes wonder, if I’d stayed Elizabeth, my whole life would have been different. Or maybe Beth. Beths are always demure, marry the right men, get looked after and protected, then finally expire sweetly and courageously, with a throng of grief-choked mourners round their bed.’ She poured two glasses of something pale and yellowish, set them on the coffee table.

  ‘Have this chair. It’s really nice and comfortable. That’s it, put your feet up. Relax and drink your wine.’

  ‘But can’t I help, or …?’

  ‘No, really. I know I should be cooking, or at least peeling spuds, or something, but the meal can wait a while. It’s so rare to have the house to ourselves, we ought to make the most of it. Della’s out with friends, and Di’s taken Luke and Stephen to some Fun-Day thing at Battersea. Rather her than me. Cheers! Here’s to peace and quiet, good French wine, and Sunday afternoon.’

  Liz sprawled back in her chair, cupped her wine glass in both hands. Hilary tried to copy her, though she was highly nervous of drinking any more. She’d moved from a lifetime of non-drinking to a double gin and half a pint of wine in just one day. It was also hard to sprawl. She’d spent months as a novice learning just the opposite, not to run, stretch, wriggle, fidget, slouch. Both the long skirts and the Rule had helped to slow her down, restricting all her movements, limiting her freedom, both physical and mental. She hadn’t sat on a sofa or armchair for at least two decades. There was no single chair at Brignor that wasn’t hard and wooden, and at Miss Pullen’s she’d avoided all upholstered seats, partly out of habit and partly as a penance.

  Liz passed her some pistachios, took a handful herself. ‘It’s odd that Robert hasn’t rung again. I suppose he must be stranded in his car still, waiting for the AA. Poor sod! He’ll have all that time to ponder on life’s miseries. He’s usually a very positive sort of chap, but this last month, he just hasn’t been himself. God knows what’s the matter – he’ll never say, just arse about in company and pretend he’s on top form, but I always seem to pick it up when he’s going through a bad patch. It’s like I’ve got antennae.’ She reached out for a cushion, made herself more comfortable. ‘Mind you, I really got annoyed with him last week. He was drinking far too much, and then pinching Sue from under Philip’s nose like that, when he‘s well aware how jealous poor Phil is. It’s stupid, really. He gives quite the wrong impression, when underneath he’s a very serious decent guy who cares passionately about things. I mean, I bet you didn’t like him?’<
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  Hilary flushed, swallowed her pistachios too fast. ‘Oh, yes, I did.’ Another social lie. ‘What does he do?’ she added quickly, to make the conversation more impersonal. ‘For his job, I mean.’

  ‘Well, he trained as an architect, and was doing bloody well, in fact, once he’d got a partnership, but then after a few years he suddenly jacked the whole thing in, said he hadn’t any scope to follow his ideals, and all the other partners in the firm were just soaking up Arab cash by churning out these monstrous swanky palaces in the Middle East – you know, for diamond-studded oil sheiks. Well, that was true, of course. Lots of firms were doing the same thing – cashing in on the oil boom and making a quick killing in places like Bahrain.’ Liz removed her cushion, pummelled it a moment, then put it back behind her. ‘I must admit, I admire him, in a way. I mean, people called him a total bloody fool, but it must have taken guts to start again from nothing, after all those years of training and when he was earning a good screw. I know this sounds crazy, love, but there’s a part of Bob which reminds me of you. I can’t put it into words, exactly, but it’s something about ideals, I suppose, or maybe … Oh, I don’t know.’

  She shrugged, as if embarrassed, seemed to change the subject. ‘Funnily enough, his first big commission, way back in the seventies, was to build a Catholic church. Christ! He sweated blood and tears to get it right, must have worked through a dozen different schemes. He wanted the whole building to be a sort of … meditation – I think that was the word he used. The church was called St Bridget’s and he mugged up her whole life, tried to express her spirit in his structure.’