‘Now, what are you doing out here all on your own?’ And he felt her arms fold round his shoulders and her thick red lips nibble his ear. He had leapt up and she had laughed as he stood frozen with horror. She had grabbed him and pressed her hot, wet lips on his. He had flung her away like a snake and she had shrieked. For days afterwards he stayed indoors, mostly in his room. It had been something that he’d never been able to tell anyone and something that he didn’t understand, except he knew he must be odd. ‘Got a screw loose’ – another of his father’s expressions. All the other young men hung around the women, joking, flirting and later talking of their experiences, laughing amongst themselves. And the women were just as bad: making a play, using all their wiles, their eyes, their bodies. How he hated it!
With Padma it was different. Thank goodness for Padma, for she made him feel whole, and looking back after years of celibacy, he was especially grateful that she at least reassured him about his sexuality. He had spent so many very happy hours with her, made all the more special because of the secrecy. He often wondered what would have happened if his father had found out. He wished now, in his old age, that he had had the courage to confront him. Padma demanded nothing. Her eyes looked wide and cool and she listened. She walked quietly, serenely and spoke softly, like a child. They had walked in the gardens and along the lakeshores, sat and read from their respective books, and shared the mysteries of their religions. But although her father was an enlightened, well-educated man, one of the few Indians to work alongside the British in the civil service, they both knew that there was no question of their marrying. She went into an arranged marriage and he left for England and theological college. After a short period as a parish priest, he decided to enter closed orders, driven there by the adoration of his women parishioners.
He had thought, as a priest, he would be safe from the attentions of women. Nobody warned him about their infatuation with the cloth. But he soon learned, as he was besieged with supper invitations, presents of homemade cakes, books of poetry and religious stories. They gave up hours to clean the silver in the church, to work on fêtes. They attended every service, every meeting and squabbled amongst themselves with jealousy. He was entirely swamped and unable to extricate himself from the attention – and passion, when it came to Mrs Dearly. Under the guise of being safely married but in need of his help, she took up his last remaining hours, calling on him constantly for one reason or another and then, eventually, one night she suddenly threw herself at his feet said she loved him completely and then promptly asked his forgiveness and patience. He shuddered still, thinking about it. Anyway, it forced him to give up his work as a parish priest and to join the order. He had been in Burnham Abbey ever since.
Sometimes, in his middle years, he mourned the lack of a proper relationship and a family of his own. He had liked some women; Padma, he knew now, he had loved. He had never felt that way about a man, either. He had seen homosexual relationships, of course; they thrived under the guise of Christian love in all orders. He had seen too often the untold duplicity and complications of such friendships. It was going on under his nose right now. Oh yes! They might think no one knew. But he knew all right
There was an absurdly loud knock and immediately Brother Joseph put his head round the door, grinning like a naughty child. Godfrey was instantly irritated; it was impossible to deal with Joseph’s ebullience. Why was he always so cheerful?
‘Come in, Brother. You’ve finished clearing up, have you? Come and sit down.’
Brother Joseph produced an apple from his pocket and put it on the desk. ‘I thought you might like this.’ And Godfrey knew it was a peace offering in advance. ‘Sorry about the fish,’ Joseph gabbled. ‘It was a bad batch Mr Williams brought. Late, too.’ He paused for breath, his head nodding and his feet shuffling backwards and forwards on the spot as if he was wiping them on a doormat.
‘Do sit down, Brother. Sit down. There are a few things I think we should speak about.’
Joseph pulled up the chair eagerly and so close he was leaning across the desk and staring into Godfrey’s face. Godfrey tried to ignore the smell.
‘Firstly, Brother,’ he said avoiding Joseph’s eyes,’ I must remind you that the rabbit should not be in the kitchen. You must put it…’ – he hesitated – ‘somewhere else. Goodness knows what would happen if we ever had an inspection from the health and hygiene people.’
Joseph opened his mouth.
‘And,’ – Godfrey was not to be interrupted – ‘your laundry needs more attention. I have asked you to be more careful about your clothes. It’s a poor example for our younger members and dreadful for our visitors to see.’
Brother Joseph rolled the shiny green apple from one hand to the other and Godfrey could feel the irritation mounting.
‘Brother, I know how much you enjoy being in the kitchen, but I think you’ve done your share of hard work there.’
Joseph blinked.
‘As you say yourself,’ – he hadn’t, but Godfrey employed a familiar trick – ‘it is limiting your time for personal matters: prayer, laundry and so forth, and in any case, there is something else that I would like you to do over the next few days. Of quite some value,’ he added, as a bonus.
The apple halted in mid roll and Godfrey had an almost irresistible desire to snatch it off the table and stuff it into his top drawer. How could he ever have expected this child of a man to do anything properly? One had to feel pity for this gentle-natured innocent. One had to feel compassion.
Brother Joseph gave a little gasp and grinned hopefully.
‘I am so very busy at the moment, Brother, but I do feel that we should find time for our visitor. She looks as if she would enjoy a bit of company. I took her round some of the grounds myself this afternoon and I do believe she enjoyed it. So perhaps you could just go along and make sure she has everything she needs. Oh, and that reminds me, check to see if she has a kettle and a tray with the usual tea things. Somehow I think we may have forgotten it this time.’
Before Godfrey could say another word, Joseph had squeezed himself up between the desk and the chair and was making for the door.’
‘Joseph!’ But the words ‘Don’t overdo it,’ were lost on him as he hurried off towards the kitchen, mumbling happily to himself.
‘God help us!’ Godfrey sighed.
Chapter 12
The monks disappeared after supper just as they done after lunch, and once again I found myself alone in the corridor, but this time no one was waiting for me, so I made my way back across the lawn. Although I felt tired, it was such a gorgeous evening, the evening sun making everything yellowish, that I decided to go and sit for a few minutes in the rose garden.
It was mostly in shade then, for the sun was low and the walls cast great slabs of shadow across the paving and the beds, but one corner still held the sun and I went to sit there and enjoyed the dry, earthy smell of the evening and the sweetness of the roses, and recalled my childhood front garden.
It was a dull garden with its rectangle of neatly clipped grass surrounded by thick, high laurel hedges, but the flower beds outside the sitting-room window were full of roses in the summer.
My father was very proud of his roses and to please him I always smelled them and said how lovely they were. One Sunday afternoon he picked for me the yellow rose I had admired and put it in my bedroom as a surprise. He must have loved me very much.
He was my god on earth, my father. I was so proud of him. I thought his being a doctor was heroic. I still have this feeling about doctors to this day. He was a tall, potentially gangly man but somehow looked magnificent in his well-cut suits or Harris tweed jackets and grey flannels. He had an air about him, something strong, clever, wise. That’s what I thought. I was always aware that his patients adored him and certainly he appeared to enjoy them more than his own family, who for some reason or another were a disappointment or an irritation to him. Often, I heard him making cutting remarks to Mother, who was frivolous and
irresponsible, and he berated Duncan for being a fool of a son because he was hyperactive and a ragamuffin. However, this did not prevent him from spending what spare time he had playing with Duncan rather than me. I was simply permitted to watch the creation of complicated and ingenious Meccano cranes and pulleys, engines and bridges. Father and Duncan would kneel on the floor together, dead to rest of the world, as they worked on their inventions. And if I watched it had to be in silence; I was not allowed to distract them. There was the fabulous electric train set, too. I loved it, especially the stations and the little people with their suitcases and the guards with whistles and men with trolleys. There were horses and carts and railway bridges to cross. And the trains going underneath and round and about, with signals waving up and down. I was not allowed to touch but just to stand and watch. Yet occasionally I would dare to kneel beside them, longing for the very rare moment when father allowed me to ‘have a go’ working the trains. The excitement and the honour given to me was overwhelming, and my trains ran too fast and came off the rails and then I was sent away
So I found solace with my dolls. Here I created for myself the perfect family, the kind of family I wanted. I had three dolls and one I dressed as a boy – Johnnie; the girls were named Marguerite and Susan. I even had a husband, Roy, a sailor in the navy, who came home for holidays now and again. When I took my ‘family’ in the pram across the park, I would talk constantly to my children and husband, and sometimes Roy would be allowed to help push the pram, which meant I had to walk to one side and guide the pram with one hand only. More and more I withdrew into this private world where I could give and receive boundless love, and where I was needed and important. Loved. It compensated for the real world.
No doubt I was loved, but no one had much time for me. Mother preferred her friends and Father was too busy and very strict and I lived in fear of his disapproval. Poor Duncan had many beatings for his untidiness and clumsiness, and once I was once beaten with the back of a hairbrush.
I was standing in front of the bathroom mirror, trying to plait my hair. I hadn’t done it on my own before and was getting in a real muddle, so I called Mother to come and help me, but she was in a hurry to go out somewhere and was annoyed, saying she really didn’t have the time to spare. Nevertheless, she did begin to brush out my knots and mess, but so roughly and with such impatience that it really tugged and pulled at my scalp. It hurt me and I shouted out, ‘Stop it, will you?’ And Father overheard.
I was called to come at once to my room, where I was told to remove my knickers and to bend over. He beat me with the back of my hairbrush and I wet myself; the urine ran down my legs and into my socks. I never once hit Dan or Fleur. Not once.
But there were happy memories. On one occasion, Father took me with him in the car on his rounds and we went to visit an old lady who had an enormous lump on her face.
‘She has a tumour on her face,’ he said, ‘so don’t stare at it. Just talk to her nicely. She is very ill.’ I went with him up the steep stairs of the cottage and into the darkened room, and stood beside him. In a great double bed with its brass bedstead, propped up against crumpled pillows, lay a shrivelled old lady, almost lost amongst the bedclothes. But she welcomed us with a smile and tapped the side of the bed with a frail hand, which hung limply from her wrist. Father sat on the side of the bed, but I stood, half hiding behind him, and stared hard at the top of the grey, wispy head in my struggle to keep my eyes off the horrible bulge in her face, so scared that I might have to go near her or even kiss her. She whispered something to Father and pointed towards her dressing table and Father carried back a box to her. She lifted her head with difficulty as she struggled to open it and in the end Father had to do it for her. Out of it she took a coral necklace, which she held out to me. Father nodded that I should take it and then said I was to go downstairs and wait for him in the garden.
I sat in long dry grass under an apple tree and tried to fit the necklace round my neck but it was too difficult and so I twisted it round my wrist and ran my fingers up and down the gritty pieces of dark pink coral and watched wasps swarming the juicy pulp of the fallen apples. Years later I gave the necklace to Fleur, and it is still in her box with all the other jewellery and ‘precious ‘stones that we collected together.
Mother was short and plumpish, with bright hazel eyes and a wickedly infectious laugh. She was intelligent, witty, vivacious and much too busy having a good time, playing tennis, bridge or going to tea parties. She didn’t mean to be a bad wife and mother. But running a house was of no interest to her and although we had a cook and several housemaids, she was disorganised and untidy and the meals were often late because she had failed to give any instructions. Sometimes she forgot meals altogether. Behind the cushion in the morning room was years’ worth of darning and mending. In desperation Father would sometimes sew on his own buttons. There were many arguments behind closed doors. And then ‘Aunt’ Prue offered to do some darning and mending. It was all a joke, of course; Mother was incorrigible, wasn’t she? Father became increasingly irritated and bad tempered; he only ever laughed when ‘Aunt’ Pru was around. In the end, he sent Mother packing and married Pru.
At the time, I could find no fault with Mother. I loved her very much and quite accepted that she was ‘far too busy’ or ‘exhausted’ to do either this or that, and therefore I went out of my way to avoid troubling her.
My make-believe world was everything. I made up endless stories and little plays, which I so enjoyed acting out with my few friends. I especially remember one occasion when I arranged for a group of children, three girls and a boy, who was to play the role of prince, to come to my house after school. We would rehearse in the front garden so as not to get in the way and I asked them to bring their own tea in the form of sandwiches, because Mother was sure to be too busy to provide anything for them, and in any case I dreaded the huffing and puffing irritation of Mother whenever I asked her for anything. But when Mother saw us, and the children’s jam sandwiches, curled and dry after a day at school, she looked momentarily ashamed and then turned her shame onto me.
‘Fancy asking them to bring sandwiches! Really, Rose! What will their mothers think? You should have asked them to tea. Don’t ever do anything like this again.’ Then she disappeared and still didn’t produce any tea for us, so it was just as well they had their sandwiches, dried up or not.
Yet later, some other time, not bedtime, because she never seemed to be around then, Mother said suddenly, kneeling on the floor and looking at me sadly, ‘You don’t have much of a life, do you?’ and I hadn’t understood at all. But a few days later she took me to see Sixty Glorious Years at the local cinema and that was one of the greatest moments of my childhood. I went home and dressed up in a long dress and put a veil over my head and looked in the mirror. Honestly, I’m telling you, I saw Queen Victoria looking back at me. ‘Mummy, Mummy! Look! I look exactly the same, don’t I?’
‘Oh yes! Exactly!’
Dreaming again! But the gnats were worrying and I shook my head suddenly, shaking the memories away at the same time. I didn’t want to think, and this sitting about with nothing to do was giving me time to think and the memories left me unsettled. I was detached from them and without any feelings, as if I was recalling some vague dream or story from a long-forgotten book. Sometime after the accident someone had said how angry I must feel, but I didn’t. I had no energy for anger. But perhaps one day there would be an almighty explosion. Maybe I would explode or implode or something-plode. Something. Sometime.
I used to be only too capable of losing my temper and I do remember with great satisfaction the morning when I threw my cooked breakfast of fried bread and tomatoes on the floor in front of Mother and some guests who were staying, because she had promised me fried egg and had laughed secretly with her friends when I showed my disappointment. It was wonderful that rush of blind temper, so sudden, so uncontrolled. Where did it come from? I even surprised myself as I saw the red, oozing tomatoes s
quashed into the dining-room carpet and I can see their stupid, stunned faces even now. Mother didn’t laugh then. I had power. I was powerful. I was someone to be reckoned with. My punishment was to go back to bed and miss breakfast altogether. But boy, was it worth it! How often I longed to do something like that again. Did it cross my mind that I would do something at the monastery? Of course not.
Chapter 13
I was waving the gnats away when I saw the monk with the rabbit coming through the arched wall. ‘I’ve brought Francis to meet you,’ he said as he puffed towards me ‘It’s after St Francis.’
It was greyish, wild rabbit with startling eyes, sniffing round my feet like a dog.
‘That’s very appropriate. The name.’ I like rabbits and to show him I did I stroked it and it put its head up as if to catch the tips of my fingers. ‘He’s very tame, isn’t he?’ I was aware of the man’s pale pupils staring at me through watery films, first grinning up at me and then down at his pet.
‘And what’s your name? Mine’s Rose.’
‘Joseph.’
‘Brother Joseph?’
He nodded briefly. ‘He thinks he’s human.’ And he bent twiddling his fingers on the rabbit’s nose. ‘Don’t you! Don’t you!’
He was a grubby, ill-shaven old man, now totally absorbed by his pet, and I, for all my revulsion, was touched by his fondness for this animal. ‘How long have you had him?’
‘The cat brought him in. I fed him with a bottle. He was only this big.’ And he indicated a tiny ball with his hands. He had long curved, yellowish fingernails, not unlike the rabbit’s claws I thought.
‘The cat brought him in and he hopped behind the fridge. But he came out to me. With a carrot! It was Easter Saturday, so that’s when he has his birthday. He got a new collar this year, didn’t you, Francis? He hasn’t got used to the collar yet. Keeps shaking his head all the time. But he’s better today. His lead was Billie’s. We love that lead, don’t we?’ He bent down and picked the rabbit up.
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