In the convent, by contrast, Christmas celebrations were chastely observed, secretly enjoyed but publicly moderated. They had a special dinner, certainly. But the length of the prayers said beforehand meant that the food was always cold when they finally started to eat. With their slim pantry budget, special treats had to be made from cheap ingredients; apples dipped in toffee syrup and left to dry on racks were an annual tradition. Decorations were frowned upon. The only festive spirits were found among the girls who boarded at the school, whose excitement at finishing another year and being allowed to return home drove them to make paper crafts and daisy chains. Mother Superior chose to overlook these small reminders of the season.
‘That all sounds rather sad,’ Tansy said, swirling the last of her tea in her cup.
‘It was certainly an adjustment. But it wasn’t all bad: it brought new traditions too. My tastes have changed over the years and I have less of the sweet tooth my mother instilled in me. And until I went to the convent at age sixteen, I’d never eaten an olive. I’ve been making up for that ever since.’
‘What was it like living with the other nuns? Were they mean?’
Maria hesitated. This was heading into trickier territory. To begin talking about the other sisters would lead to the priest . . . and that day. The day her life changed.
‘Is something wrong?’ Tansy asked.
‘Oh.’ Maria cleared her throat and forced a smile. ‘Nothing. It’s just old age,’ she said lightly.
‘Pft. Nonsense.’
‘Well, I’ll start at the top then, with Mother Superior.’
Mother Veronica was quite young compared to most in her position, not much younger than Maria’s own mother. Originally from Ireland, she had been imported into Australia by the church in the fifties and established in the Brisbane convent specifically with the intention that she would take over from the previous mother, who was ailing and not expected to live much longer. This caused quite a stir in the convent, so Maria had intuited, because Sister Pauline had been expected to take the top job. As a result, Veronica had spent a good deal of time asserting her authority through lengthy and arduous punishments for minor indiscretions. But there was more to Veronica than discipline.
Not long after Maria had first walked through those tall iron gates and into the draughty halls of the convent, she’d fallen ill. Confined to her narrow bed, she had been utterly miserable, missing her mother terribly, imagining possible ways to escape this place in which she’d found herself. One late afternoon when Maria was alone and crying, Mother Veronica had visited her. Feeling like a silly child, Maria confessed that she was yearning for her mother.
‘And what would your mother do for you?’ Veronica had asked in her southern Irish brogue, the gold cross at her neck reflecting the setting sun’s light filtering through the tall window by the bed.
‘She’d bring me cheese and vegemite sandwiches on white bread,’ said Maria, sniffing into a handkerchief.
Veronica didn’t answer but said some prayers over Maria, then pulled the cotton cover up around her shoulders and tucked it in tightly with swift, strong moves. But later that evening, Sister Felicia brought a plate of fluffy white triangles, with a double layer of cheese and salty vegemite spread right to the edges of the bread.
There were lots of sisters, many that came and didn’t last, and there was the natural cycle of new sisters arriving and the aged passing on. But sisters were also moved around from time to time, depending on what was going on in their life. Sometimes, it was to avoid a scandal. Sisters were women, and they fell in love. It happened between sisters and laity, between sisters and priests, and sometimes, though rarely, between sisters. It was always the sisters who were moved on, never the men. Men had different urges and needs, they said. It was the woman’s holy responsibility to guard her body and to protect the man from his own desires.
‘Crikey,’ Tansy said. ‘What bloody hypocrites. So, you were right at the bottom of the church hierarchy, but somehow you were supposed to be more responsible than the ones at the top?’
Maria bit down fury. ‘Yes. More than that, though, sisters weren’t even considered part of the church hierarchy. We were merely members of the laity who had taken special orders. We hovered in an uncertain space where we weren’t exactly part of the general faithful but we weren’t part of the church proper either. We took our orders from Rome, but it was only our complete devotion to our faith that kept us there in the mother house, believing we were doing the work of God, serving the established order of the community.’
‘Like the bees,’ Tansy said.
‘Yes, just like the bees.’
‘Who was your favourite fellow worker bee?’
Of course, Sarah was her true favourite, but Sarah’s story was still coming. If she had to pick one for now, it would have been Sister Celine, who’d come to the convent at eighteen years of age, much later than Maria, by a good fifteen years if her memory served her correctly. Celine was like a breath of fresh air, and it was well known—though now that she thought about it she couldn’t quite remember how it was known—that Celine had sought refuge in the convent to escape a ‘troubled home’, which in those days was a euphemism for sordid behaviours covered up by shame and silence. Probably because of this background, Celine’s often not-quite-right demeanour was tacitly accepted by the other sisters.
‘You eat pineapple, right?’ Celine said the first time Maria met her. The younger woman was then a postulant, not yet a nun, and Maria had found her in the garden, among the pineapples, touching their saw-toothed edges reverently. ‘Pineapples are everything to me.’
That’s what she said to Maria, completely out of nowhere. It was such a strange declaration that Maria simply said yes, she ate pineapples, before Celine continued with another obscure statement, about mice. She hated them, apparently, unlike her beloved pineapples.
At first Celine had been assigned to help in the kitchen. But she only knew how to make one dish—salmon mousse, set in an enormous fish shape. Nobody liked it. It tasted like emulsified canned salmon, which it was. But given the innocent joy it brought the fragile girl to create it, no one was game to say so. She was relocated to the garden instead, but she lacked focus and neglected most things in favour of showering love on the spiky pineapples.
Eventually, she was given the responsibility of polishing the chapel organs and tending to the felt and leather details. She was fiercely protective of them, like an alsatian, and wouldn’t let anyone else touch them, other than the organ player and the professional tuner. She also paid ardent attention to pest control, seeking ways to destroy and deter moths, woodworms and mice, all of which could damage the precious instruments of God. Her only other job was to serve tea to visitors. She could boil water to make tea easily enough, and place some biscuits or slices of cake on a plate.
‘What happened to her?’ Tansy asked, leaning forward to rest her chin on her hand.
‘I’m not sure, actually. She was still there when I left the order, and I never looked back. I never talked to any of them again.’
‘Why?’
It was a natural question. She should just answer it outright. But today wasn’t the day. Maria stood up, straightened her knees and stretched her back. She checked the time. They’d been sitting here now for an hour. She had to get moving; she had lunch to prepare for the guests and this soap wasn’t going to make itself. She liked to give it a few days’ curing time before the markets, if the weather was fine, longer if it was raining outside. It wasn’t an exact science and she needed some leeway to be responsive to how well the soap was setting.
‘I think we might have run out of time,’ she said, looking out the window and watching the kids tumbling on the lawn and the carers kicking balloons in a gentle form of soccer. ‘I need to go and help Petrice get lunch ready.’
Tansy groaned with disappointment and checked the time on her phone. ‘I suppose I should get going too. I do have work to do myself. But talking with yo
u has been delightful, thank you.’ She considered her next words before continuing. ‘I know you’ve put a lot of effort into living a life largely unconnected with other people. So I appreciate your letting me in, just a bit. Your life is fascinating, Maria.’
Fascinating? Treacherous, perhaps.
‘Can I come back tomorrow?’ Tansy asked, wrapping her in a hug.
‘I don’t think I could stop you if I wanted to,’ Maria said affectionately. Tansy was relentless, but rather like a funny Staffordshire bull-terrier intent on sitting on your lap: all teeth and smiles and promises of friendship. She was hard to resist. Maria would tell her everything, bit by bit, and maybe—maybe—her niece would understand.
She pulled away and pointed to the fortune cookies. ‘Do you want to try your luck now and see what you get?’
‘Oh, what the hell. It’s only a fortune cookie.’
Tansy reached into the box, waved her hand over the contents as if trying to feel which one would give her a positive result, and picked the one in the furthest corner. She bit into it to crack it open, loudly crunching the pieces, and pulled out the prediction inside.
The road ahead is bumpy.
‘Great,’ she lamented.
On the way home, Tansy pulled over on the wide grass verge, checked to make sure she had reception, and then called her father. She needed to tell him about Dougal’s impending departure but also to find out what he was thinking and feeling with Enid staying at her house.
‘Hello?’
Tansy was surprised he answered; he almost never had his phone on him. ‘Hi, Papa Bear. Where are you?’
‘Hello, Daughter Number Two. I’m at Bunnings getting supplies for the leaking pipe under the sink.’ He sounded rather cheery and not at all as she’d expected him to sound. Then again, he was always a doer and never one for moping.
‘Oh. Do you have a few minutes to talk about what’s going on with you and Mum?’
‘Just a minute.’ There were some rattling sounds, and then some swishy-swashy noises she assumed were the mobile phone rubbing against his clothes, and then he was back. ‘Okay, I’m in a quiet aisle now.’
‘Good. So, you know Mum is staying with me, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Sorry I didn’t call on Sunday. A work emergency came up and I’ve been run off my feet.’
‘It’s okay.’
‘No, it’s not. Mum says she’s left you.’
‘Has she?’
‘Well . . .’ Tansy thought back over the conversations they’d had so far. ‘Actually, no. She said you were on a break.’
Her father paused a moment and Tansy could hear a salesman’s voice in the background directing someone to aisle twenty-three.
‘Are you going to be able to work things out?’ she asked. ‘Or is this it?’
‘From my perspective, I think we should be alright.’
‘And from Mum’s perspective?’
‘Enid’s her own person,’ he said gently. ‘I can’t make her change her mind. She needs to decide what’s more important to her—being married to me or going to church with me even if I hate it.’
His words baffled Tansy. ‘You hate it?’
‘I do.’
‘How long have you felt like this?’
‘About fifteen years. I came to the conclusion a long time ago that there’s more to the story than what religion and the Bible say. It’s not the end of knowledge, just one part.’ His voice took on the energy of passionate debate. ‘And look at all the abuse stories in the news. All this time they were feeding us a pack of lies. And I think that at seventy-two I’m old enough to make up my own mind about whether or not I want to be fed lies and whether or not I want to go to church.’ He finished decisively, and Tansy suspected that this was a well-worn speech he’d delivered to Enid on more than one occasion.
She took a deep breath. Her parents were at a stalemate, just like her and Dougal. ‘So how do you move forward from here?’ she asked, hopeful that her dad might have the answer to her own problem, too.
‘Well, I might not have faith in the church anymore,’ he said, his words slightly muffled as if he was rubbing his hand across his chin, as he often did when thinking. ‘But I still have faith in my marriage. So I’m holding onto that.’
Tansy made one more stop on the way home, pulling over at Kunara, the huge organic superstore at Forest Glen, to buy Dougal some things to take on the plane with him. He wasn’t a good traveller, getting dizzy, nauseous, sweaty and pale in anything beyond a car. So she stocked up on a ‘travel blend’ of bush flower essences, some acupressure wristbands, ginger tablets and peppermint lollies. Dougal would scoff and say they were all useless in practicality, but she knew he’d also be touched and would use them once he was in the air, just like he had when they’d gone to New Zealand. He hadn’t wasted any time breaking them out when the sweating began on the runway.
The gifts were for him, but also for her. She wanted to feel as though she was nurturing him, particularly after their rift. The last thing she wanted was for him to leave the country feeling unloved. Because he wasn’t. He was very, very loved.
Tears pricked her eyes. She still had faith in her marriage too.
She got a power protein smoothie while she was there and then resumed her trip home, ready to start anew with her husband, at least a little bit. At least for today.
She found Dougal in their bedroom, supposedly working from home today but instead pulling out clothes and making lists in the notes application on his phone. He began asking her questions the second she came into the room, wanting to know where his favourite wool jumper was and why he only seemed to have five pairs of socks to his name.
She ignored all of that, shut the bedroom door, closed the blinds. He looked up, caught the look in her eye, returned her smile. And they found peace in each other once more.
As they held each other in the falling light, Dougal stroking her hair, he said, ‘I got you a present today.’
‘Did you?’ she asked, surprised that he’d had time and touched by the gesture.
He rolled over and reached under the bed. She pulled herself up on her side and leaned over his body as he withdrew something from a small paper bag. ‘I saw these and thought of you,’ he said.
They were black and yellow earbuds in the shape of bumblebees.
‘They’re so cute.’
‘They just jumped out at me. You’ve got bees on my mind with your visits to your aunt. I thought you might like them for when you’re jogging.’
‘I love them,’ she said, and kissed him, then kissed him some more.
And while she was busy kissing her husband, she missed the phone calls from Rose, who rang twice but didn’t leave a message either time.
18
The group of kids and their carers was leaving this afternoon, and there was much whooping and yelling and even some crying around the campsite as bags were packed and lost items located. Tulip had been to collect the beautiful fairy caravan; the children had waved goodbye as it rumbled down the hill, watching till it disappeared from view.
Maria wanted to be outside where she could keep a rough eye on what was going on, so she’d asked Tansy to help her change the water in the birdbaths and clean the marbles.
‘Why are there marbles in the water?’ Tansy asked, pouring out the green water from a large round terracotta bowl, the marbles thudding onto the grass.
‘The bees can rest on them while they drink so they don’t drown,’ Maria said, scrubbing scum off the base of an aged concrete trough.
‘What a fantastic idea.’ Tansy picked up another scrubbing brush and began to do the same.
‘It makes it safe for other insects too, like butterflies, and for birds. There’s nothing sadder than finding a bird drowned in a water trough,’ Maria said bitterly. ‘It’s just tragic.’
‘I never even considered that bees need to drink water,’ Tansy said thoughtfully.
‘They need quite a lot.
They’ll drink pool water but the chlorine’s bad for them and will end up in the honey too. You can also use floating corks in the water,’ Maria added as an afterthought.
‘Dougal and I could help with that. We open a bottle of wine most nights and we still buy a few brands with corks in them.’
‘What’s he doing today?’ Maria asked, turning her scrubbing brush to the marbles themselves. An errant pink balloon drifted past, and she snatched it and tied it down to dispose of later.
‘He’s in Brisbane in meetings. No rest for the wicked. They’re going to get as much flesh out of him as they can before he leaves. He’s only got a few days left.’
Tansy’s voice was flat. It seemed as good a time as any for Maria to resume her storytelling. But to confide in Tansy with the whole truth, she had to go back even further in time, to her early days in the convent and to her friendship with fellow postulant Sarah.
Sarah had come from the hot inland Queensland town of Roma to the cooler, leafier Brisbane convent at the age of eighteen. She’d always wanted to be a teacher and had prayed since she was a small girl to be able to do so as part of an order of sisters. Sarah’s mother, herself originally from the city before she’d married and moved hundreds of kilometres west with her husband, wanted a different life for her daughter. So, she bought Sarah’s placement in the Brisbane convent with a large donation from the family’s successful cattle station.
Maria and Sarah got on from the first moment they met, at the dinner table. Sarah was a strapping farm girl, with strong muscles from riding horses and wrangling cattle, and golden skin from the endless sunshine. She liked to eat, and her enthusiasm for food was frowned on by the nuns but brought indescribable glee to Maria, who’d remained melancholy since arriving at the convent. Sarah was like a big gust of jasmine-scented spring air in the echoing halls of St Lucy’s.
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