There was silence when he finished. She and Luke had both moved closer to him on the rug, as if magnetised, drawn in; both crouching down to watch; Luke staring at the paper with a mixture of awe and fascination; she herself trying out adjectives, dismissing all as lame. Robert sat back on his heels, eased his aching neck, then suddenly reached out both his arms, put one round each of them. Luke escaped immediately, ducked down and dodged away. She herself went rigid like a block of stone, every muscle tensing, as she sat crushed beneath the arm. It felt highly, wildly dangerous to be joined to him like that, to the rough graze of his jacket, the ripe smell of his skin – a smell she couldn’t quite define – not obvious things like sweat or aftershave, but the subtle smell of maleness.
She dared not pull away, could see he meant the gesture as just a casual friendly one, part of his expansiveness, his general bonhomie. When she’d seen that couple in the park, joined at hip and shoulder, she had envied them their closeness, but only because she’d imagined Ivan close. She tried to turn Robert into Ivan, became still more confused, shrinking from them both now, from any touch at all, wanting only to escape into her room. She glanced across at Luke, as if begging him to save her, but he was standing by the window with the drawing in his hands, talking to himself as he gave the birds their names – names she herself had invented for her stories: Droopy-Wing, Swagger-Tail, Son of Droopy-Wing. He suddenly looked up, must have felt her scrutiny; his own eyes shifting slowly from Robert back to her.
‘Did you both have your hair dyed in that shop?’
Robert’s spurt of laughter gave her the chance to make a move, scramble to her feet, pretend she was only getting up to check her hair in Stephen’s mirror.
‘Why?’ said Robert, grinning still. ‘D’you think mine looks as glamorous as Hilary’s?’
Luke shrugged. ‘They’re both the same.’
‘Ssh! Don’t say that. She’ll kill me! Hers cost pounds and pounds, while mine came free, courtesy of the sun.’
Luke didn’t understand, licked his finger, smeared the greasy plumage of the birds. ‘Nuns don’t have any hair. They have to shave it off. Hilary couldn’t go out ’cause she was bald.’
The tiny gasping silence seemed to choke the room. Hilary tried to laugh, to break the tension; hoped Robert wouldn’t laugh himself – a hoot of sheer derision. She had never been so pleased before to see Della at the door, plunged across to greet her, started swamping her with words, to cover her embarrassment, thanking her for all her time and trouble in the salon.
Della nicked her red-tipped nails. ‘You’ve said all that already. Anyway, it wasn’t any trouble. I like to get experience. In fact, will you be my guinea pig again? I want to do your make-up. We’ve been learning at college how to do a total look – you know, face as well as hair, tie them in together, plan them as a whole.’
‘I … I don’t wear make-up, Della.’
‘It’s time you started, then. In fact, tonight’s our perfect chance, with all those captive guests. You’ll get all the compliments and I can get some feedback.’
‘No, honestly, I can’t, Della. I’ve got to help your mother. She said we’re eating early and …’
‘She doesn’t want any help. I just offered her a hand myself and she said everything was under control and she’d rather finish on her own. Anyway, it won’t take long, I promise. You can help her afterwards.’
Robert had got up, joined them at the door. ‘Can a mere male come and watch?’
‘I want to watch, as well,’ said Luke, who seemed a fan of Robert’s now, and was tagging on behind him.
‘No,’ said Della, coldly. ‘We don’t want any men.’
Hilary followed her downstairs. No men, she echoed silently, with a shiver of relief, as Della slammed her bedroom door, barring all intruders. Well – no men except for Ivan, who could never be shut out, and whom she’d glimpsed just coming up the path – smiling, special, safe.
Chapter Twelve
‘No, not so bright, Della. Please. I just won’t dare to face them. I’ve never worn make-up in my life.’ That wasn’t strictly true. She and Katy had bought greasy Woolworth’s lipsticks in their teens, even rubbed them on their cheeks as rouge; borrowed Katy’s mother’s powder, puffed it everywhere. But they had never had this range of different products – things she’d never heard of – highlighters and blushers, gloss-sticks, shaders, fixers; nor these unlikely garish colours: purples, puces, mustards. Her eyelids had changed colour several times, from jade to aqua, from mulberry to rose.
‘Wait! I haven’t finished. I’m just experimenting. You’re my guinea pig, okay, and guinea pigs can’t speak. We can rub it off, anyway. It’s not indelible.’
Hilary sat silent. She was still scared of Della’s tongue. And how could Della ever understand how extraordinary it felt to sit staring at a face she couldn’t recognise, which seemed to mark the final break with Brignor? That hussy in the glass could never have been a nun, with her glossy wet-look lips, her stiffened curling lashes. She gripped the stool, fighting sudden panic. Who was she? That mirror-face was merely Della’s model, nothing more; a canvas or a collage which could be wiped clean, painted over. She had lost her convent self, but she hadn’t got a new one – only greasepaint and peroxide. She gave a sudden nervous laugh.
‘What’s the joke?’
‘I was just thinking of our Abbess. I sometimes worry that she’ll storm down here to find me, but I don’t think she’d even know me now, just pass me by and start searching somewhere else.’
Della paused a moment, her eye-brush dripping green. ‘What’s it like being a nun?’
Hilary was immediately on her guard. Della’s public questions were insensitive enough, but at least she’d managed all these weeks to avoid being alone with her, avoid an inquisition. It hadn’t been too difficult. The girl was out all day at college, out most evenings with her friends, and often disappeared for whole weekends. But now she was her captive, trapped in a chair with a towel pinned round her neck, tied to Della’s eye-brush and her whims. She struggled for an answer, one neither priggish nor disloyal. ‘Well, it was easier at the beginning,’ she admitted. ‘I went in at just your age and then it seemed …’ She faltered. Glorious? Or simply safe? A consummation, or a cowardly escape?
‘I’d rather die! All those ghastly dreary clothes and endless prayers, and everyone so gloomy all the time.’
‘Nuns aren’t gloomy. We all laughed quite a lot.’ Hilary surprised herself by saying it, yet realised it was true, despite her painful memories. Even in the later years, when she’d felt broken into pieces, tried and tested by what seemed God’s insatiable demands, she had still been able to laugh at recreations; spontaneous and childlike laughs over tiny stupid things, such as their tame mouse in the chapel, or the time they built a snowman and dressed it in a wimple. She racked her brains for something more substantial to recount, to prove that nuns were human.
‘Funny things do happen. I mean, Sister Mark went out one day, to do a bit of shopping in the town. She’s what we call an extern sister, who does our errands for us. She saw several people staring at her, but didn’t take much notice until she got back to the convent and realised why. It was her Golden Jubilee, you see, and Jubilarians always wear a wreath of golden flowers – faded ancient silk ones, on top of their black veils. It’s a very old tradition, dates back years and years. They’re meant to keep them on all week, as a sort of celebration, but only in the convent. Poor Sister Mark forgot to take hers off.’
Della didn’t laugh. ‘It sounds pretty weird to me. Like kids in fancy dress.’ She refilled the eye-brush, continued with her daubing. ‘What makes people enter in the first place? I mean, you’re not bad-looking, Hilary, and you said you did your A levels and everything, so why in God’s name did you shut yourself away?’
Hilary fiddled with a lipstick case. It was in God’s name, but how could she explain that; explain that daunting sense of being chosen; that sense of God, which she had experience
d so early, as a mere child of four or five. She had been helping her mother put a huge white tablecloth on their dark old kitchen table, which seemed very high in those days, so she couldn’t see its top. She had closed her eyes, had a sort of revelation that God was like the cloth, shining white and endless, out of reach, yet one end in her hands. Another time, when just thirteen, she had knelt at Benediction on an August evening, with the ardent sun forcing an entry through the darkly rich stained glass, throwing blue and scarlet on the chaste and chilly stone. The priest had held the monstrance up – gold spikes kindled by gold sun – and she had felt as if a flash of light had fallen on her soul, suffused her with that sense of God, which flooded through her veins like an injection. How pretentious it all seemed now, even suspect. Psychiatrists might say she was an over-impressionable child, seeking the poetry and passion she couldn’t find at home – or, worse – in search of status. Every Catholic girl knew that nuns were superior to laywomen or married women, came before them in the hierarchy; that the brightest girls at convent schools were always skimmed off as ‘the cream’, groomed to be Christ’s brides.
She cast around for a simpler explanation, something Della might respond to. ‘Well, I suppose a vocation’s a bit like toothache. It just won’t go away. Whatever else you’re doing, it keeps nagging on and on, until you’re forced to take some action.’
Della screwed her face up, as if rejecting the idea. ‘But didn’t you have a boyfriend? I mean, someone who’d have stopped you; married you or something, so you wouldn’t have to go?’
Hilary shifted on the stool. Once they were on to boyfriends, the talk would turn to sex, as it had already done with Liz. She realised with a sudden sickening dread that everyone she met, who found out she’d been a nun, would probably show the same curiosity, ask the same distasteful questions.
‘Er … no,’ she said. ‘I didn’t.’
‘What, never? You mean, you haven’t had a bloke in all your life?’
She was grateful for the make-up now, that tactful rouge and blusher which masked her own deep flush. ‘Well, there was just one. Peter Clark – or was it Clarkson? I can’t even remember. He was eighteen-and-a-half and what I thought was terribly good-looking.’ She tried to laugh, hoped Della wouldn’t ask her any more; discover Peter Clark had lasted just three days, that his first kiss had appalled her, a wet and frightening kiss in which his tongue had seemed to thrust right down her throat, choking her, invading her. She knew that it was wrong, wrong for her especially. She yearned to be immaculate, like Mary, betrothed to God, who didn’t have a tongue, or clammy hands, or a spiky metal tie-clip which had poked into her chest, even through her blazer, left faint red marks. She had never mentioned Peter, never brought him home. Her mother hated sex. She was well aware of that, though the subject was taboo. She sometimes wondered if her parents had ever consummated their marriage, or whether she, like Mary, had been conceived without the sexual act – conceived long-distance, as it were, by some mere word or sign.
‘Did you – you know – do it?’ Della frowned in concentration as she shaded green with ochre.
‘I … I beg your pardon?’
‘This guy, Peter Whatsit, did you have it off with him?’
Hilary kept tight hold of the lipstick case. No good pretending that she didn’t understand the phrase. She had been long enough in Liz’s house to have heard it several times. She recalled Liz’s own probing, that first Sunday in her bedroom. She had managed then to avoid giving any answers, but Della was less merciful.
‘Well, did you?’
‘No.’
‘So you’ve never done it?’
‘No.’
‘That’s wrong. It must be. I mean, it’s going against nature. And if you believe in God, then it was Him who made us horny in the first place. Why give us all those urges, or make men with all those dangly bits and pieces, if they’re not allowed to use them?’
‘But that’s for married people, Della, not for nuns.’
‘You weren’t a nun when you were going out with Peter – or now, come to that.’
‘I’m not married either, though.’
‘Nor am I. But it doesn’t stop me having sex. Don’t get me wrong, Hilary, I wouldn’t sleep around. It’s far too dangerous nowadays, apart from being cheap. But if I meet a bloke I like enough – and trust – then I’ll go to bed with him. It’s part of being human, part of living.’ Della tissued eye-gloss off her fingers, crumpled up the Kleenex. ‘All my crowd feel much the same. I know people say we’re too young and everything, but the average age for having your first sex today is actually fifteen years and three hundred-and-something days. I read it in Cosmo, just last month. That’s officially underage, which seems to show it’s just a basic urge, and whatever laws they pass, or ghastly warnings they keep giving about AIDS and stuff, people will still do it. D’ you want to see the survey? The whole thing was on sex – who does it and how often, and when and where and how. I’ve got it here somewhere, if you’re interested.’
No, she tried to say. She had no business to be interested, should be telling Della that a nun’s life was deliberately ‘unnatural’, that the whole point and glory of it was that they were striving for the supernatural. One book she’d read had compared contemplatives to consecrated objects like chalices or patens, reserved exclusively for use in worship. If she repeated that to Della, she’d laugh her out of court, and even to her own ears terms like ‘consecrated objects’ or ‘consecrated virgins’ mounded rather strange now, which only showed how worldly she’d become.
‘There you are. It’s right at the beginning, after all the ads.’ Della had been rifling through a pile of magazines, now tossed one in her lap.
Again, she tried to shake her head, push the thing away, yet part of her burned with curiosity. She had read so many books on chastity, virginity; none at all on sex. And if she refused to read the survey, Della would regard her as the sort of old-fashioned narrow prude who gave convents a bad name. She picked up the glossy monthly with its young girl on the cover, dressed in black net tights and leopard top, although she looked not much more than twelve. Women’s magazines still startled her – the idea that life was fun, that woman’s role was to look good, smell good, catch a man, but do as little as she could for him; to be liberated, free, yet a slave to every diet, every fashion, every latest fitness fad or make-up range. And all those intimate subjects, medical and personal, discussed so openly; the private shameful details poured out on the page. And blatant pictures of women with their legs apart, or hugging their own breasts, or posing in just bra and pants – or less.
‘Can’t you find it? Here, let me. That’s it – “Sexational”. Actually, a lot of it’s quite boring. I hate all those statistics – don’t trust them anyway. I mean, they’re claiming there that the average number of times people have it off each week is 3.9, and that’s all ages, up to seventy-five. Well, I just don’t believe it. I bet people lie, or boast.’
Hilary sat staring at the print. She had found the statistic for herself now: almost four times every week. That made two hundred times a year, two thousand times a decade, ten thousand times a lifetime – no, more, if you still had sexual intercourse up to the age of seventy-five, which seemed incredible to her. She had never done it ever; never even wanted to. Yet children only ten years old had already lost their virginity – it said so in bold print – girls of just sixteen enjoying several different partners. She couldn’t stop her eyes from reading on. Eighty-five per cent of women of all ages masturbated regularly. She sat aghast, trying to take it in. She hardly knew the word, except as sin, found it embarrassing and shameful, yet the average age they started was fifteen and a half. At that same age, her overriding aim had been to deny and disown her body, not touch it or indulge it. Was something very wrong with her, that she’d never had what Della called ‘basic natural urges’, that she fitted nowhere in that eight-page survey, was just a freak, or frigid?
Yet now she was experiencing a
curious sensation, a mixture of excitement, shock and envy, which seemed to have affected her body, as well as just her mind, left her flushed and sweaty, as if the words she’d read were hot and somehow charged. Other words were churning through her head – those graffiti in the phone box, her first day in the world, which she thought she had forgotten, but had suddenly returned, ‘Cherry, just eighteen, ripe, juicy and ready for picking …’ ‘Yasmin, young and beautiful …’ Women selling sex; women built the same as she was, yet so different they were like another species. Or were they? Maybe she had started off the same, with the same desires, same urges, but had denied them so vehemently, with – ironically – such passion, that she hadn’t even recognised them.
Della was still talking, and she hadn’t heard a word. She tried to laugh it off, sound casual, unconcerned. ‘I’m sorry, Della, I was miles away.’
‘I was just on about my Auntie Vi. You haven’t met her, have you? She’s my Dad’s eldest sister and the perfect case of what you call the dried-up loveless spinster – hates men, hates sex, hates bodies – even hates dogs because they crap. There’s plenty like her, though you wouldn’t think so, judging by that survey. And why are they dried up? Because they’ve never had it, which makes them mean and miserable, and often narrow-minded, so they disapprove of anyone who does.’
Hilary knew that she should argue, put the case for chastity, but she was seeing Father Martin in her mind, Miss Pullen and Miss Baines, Father Anstey: all those strait-laced celibates who were, indeed, intolerant and miserable. Liz was far more warm and loving, far more truly Christian, in the real sense of the word, yet she had indulged in ‘one-night stands’, which they (and she herself, indeed) viewed as sinful and disgusting.
Della had moved from eyes to cheeks again, began toning down the blusher on Hilary’s flaming cheeks. ‘Some nuns do have sex. I read it in The Sun. I mean, they’re not just breaking the rules. They actually believe in it – say you can love God through your body, as well as just your soul, and if you don’t have close relationships, you stay immature and childish.’
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