by Tom Keneally
But four out of ten teachers in the schools run by the Order were in any case laywomen, with husbands and boyfriends and a social life. Though she did not desire to share their state, she was aware that in a way they humanised and diluted the old, intense atmosphere, and did not have quite the touchiness of some of the older nuns whose tempers verged on hair-trigger.
In her third year at university, her supervisor suggested she continue to an honours degree and thesis. Having graduated with a high distinction and two credits, she was the star of the group of novices, who were now about to take their vows before they were sent out into schools. But Constance felt there was no time for an honours thesis – not yet, anyhow. The Order had nurtured her and put her through her education, and she could not delay repaying them.
‘You’ll get the big one,’ Boniface told her, by which she meant the chief city school of the Order, their alma mater. ‘It’ll be Fourth Form somewhere else for me,’ Boniface insisted. It turned out as she had predicted: Sister Constance was assigned to the school where she had been a student. This return brought her close to ecstasy, as if she could remake her own girlhood through the students she taught. The priests in the presbytery who sometimes appeared in the high school or said Mass for the nuns were not Father Shannon, and thus had no intrusive reality for her. Father Shannon had been promoted and moved on.
Sister Constance was energetic. Girls liked being in her classes, and in her presence. She had the support and esteem of Mother Alphonsus, still in charge at the school, which caused resentment amongst some of her colleagues. But to be admired like Alphonsus suited Constance’s vanity, as did praise from the parents of her girls, who would say on parent–teacher nights how much their daughters got from her classes. She repented of this vanity and devoted all her successes to the honour of Christ and his Virgin Mother.
Occasionally there was an echo from the labyrinth of complex tunnels beneath the mountain of her career. A dream she had frequently was that she had somehow murdered a girl she could dimly remember, and the police knew it and had charged her with it, and Alphonsus knew it too, and all Constance could do was lie and lie, existing on the knife edge between what they knew of her guilt and what she knew but denied.
At the age of thirty she was made head of the English department, with four nuns and nine lay teachers under her administration. She suffered her periods with good grace, in the old-fashioned way – as an endured offering. She didn’t miss children. She had the ones she taught. She thought it a virtue at the time, that she so closely fitted her narrow condition and that she was able to suppress her more extravagant flashes of seemingly unrooted anger, and her brief spasms of discontent.
It was a parent-teacher night. She was thirty-three years old, confident, a near-legendary figure to her girls. By now the Order was dressing its nuns less traditionally – in a calf-length skirt, stockings, black shoes, a white blouse with its insignia on it, a blue cardigan and a blue veil. She acknowledged that the new garb made sense for a busy woman in a busy high school.
Genial Mother Alphonsus began these nights with a cocktail party, at which Constance talked to parents just a few years older than her, enjoyed their conversations, soothed their anxieties about the academic and social futures of their daughters. She got into conversation with one father about the Australian poet Les Murray and the Irish bard Seamus Heaney. She thought both were demigods and she was disturbed and delighted by the world-weary way this man spoke of them, as if he were a pilgrim in a dark valley where those two voices gave him his direction. He was raffish, untidy, with a whimsical, reticent, growling voice – an interesting fellow indeed; a doctor, she believed. He looked weary, but as if substantial matters, not trivial duties, explained it. His name also had a raffish quality. Anton Spignelli.
Later, in a classroom, she spoke to him and his wife, a smartly dressed woman, about their daughter, who was clever and exemplary. Sister Constance noticed to her amazement that her exchanges were directed at the saturnine father more than the conventionally pretty wife. Thus he was the first male since Father Shannon whom she did not perceive as part of life’s crass undergrowth. This frightened her but also gave her unanticipated delight. She had lived in a neutral and untroubled condition, the one she had chosen, the condition of a bright child. Spignelli had ended that just by being in her classroom. She understood in an instant that she would see her life now from a new, anguished perspective. Yet she felt that if this was the price, it had to be met.
The couple got up to go. The wife was at the door when Spignelli took Constance’s hand and muttered something about a hard-beaked rock and Sweeney being seasoned and scraggy. She recognised it: ‘Sweeney’s Lament on Ailsa Craig’. Just two apparently innocent lines he uttered with knowingness. He nodded and slouched out like a hero from a Graham Greene novel. The lines he left unsaid she remembered: ‘We mated like a couple / Of hard-shanked cranes.’
Two days later, after carrying the image of hard-shanked cranes in her head every hour, she received a letter. It was from Spignelli. A more traditional Mother Superior than Alphonsus would have read it before passing it on, but it came to Constance apparently unintercepted. ‘Why would I refer you to such an offputting image?’ wrote Spignelli in apology. ‘I did not escape the baleful influence of Catholicism. But we are not cranes. We are not hard-shanked. We are angels.’
The following evening she was told there was a telephone call for her. The convent had reached an age of liberalism when it was considered unexceptional for a nun to take a call. Anton Spignelli was on the line.
‘Sister Constance?’ he asked.
He had barely introduced himself before he said, ‘You know why I’m calling.’
Sarah knew. She had spent the days since meeting the Spignellis in a frenzy of sensual feeling – there was no higher quality to it. She allowed herself now to acknowledge that a definite and profound lust had settled on her. It was as if she were inhabiting a different country with an unknown but turbulent climate. She had never felt anything approaching this, certainly not for Father Shannon – of whom she thought for a mere nauseous instant, only long enough to realise that in his case all her favours had been duties of her body accompanied with pleasure as an occasional guilty side effect. The compass of her flesh had not turned in his direction. It was, however, now turning in the direction of Anton Spignelli.
‘I know what you are,’ he said. ‘A good woman. But these things are impossible … I saw it all happen to you too. The awareness. What happened to me.’
‘I think I know what you mean,’ she struggled to say, yet she felt unabashed. Without any warning, almost twenty years of her careful, invulnerable life was being consumed in a day’s hunger.
‘Tell me,’ said Spignelli, ‘what can you do? By way of seeing me, that is.’
‘I can be at the State Library tomorrow,’ she said. It was reasonable enough that she should be there: she had used it to introduce girls to research methods, and had prevailed on the archivists to show them special documents, convict records, the logbook of the Bounty, the Old Bailey papers.
‘Good,’ he said. He seemed to feel an imperative that allowed only for the simplest discourse. There was no poetry in it, nor did she seek poetry. She was agape to meet him. ‘Where in the library?’ he asked.
‘The manuscript reading room,’ she said. ‘I have a ticket. I’ll watch for you to arrive.’
‘I’ll appear at the door at a quarter to five,’ he told her. ‘I’ll make contact, then turn away. Follow me to the car park on Hospital Road.’
‘All right,’ she said.
The certainty of seeing him, the certainty of animality, caused her to teach in a detached, automatic way – canny on Shakespeare, wise on Judith Wright: the curriculum had grown so enlightened that even the sublimely erotic ‘Woman to Man’ was available for study.
This is no child with a child’s face;
this has no name to name it by;
yet you and I have known it we
ll.
This is our hunter and our chase,
the third who lay in our embrace …
She caught the bus to the State Library and was in the manuscript reading room when Spignelli, his clothes hanging with a loose, unstriven-for style from his bones, his head topped with a thick silver mat of hair, raised his chin beyond the glass, ventured into the archivist’s desk and looked down the angle of his face at Sister Constance. She gathered up her notebook and left the microfilm machine on which she had been following the correspondence of a colonial governor named Belmore, and his relationship to anti-Irish hysteria after the assassination attempt on Queen Victoria’s son, Prince Alfred, on a beach in Sydney Harbour. She followed Spignelli downstairs, out of the front door, down more steps, and along the street behind the library. Opposite lay the expanse of the Domain and the great Moreton Bay fig tree under which state politicians traditionally stood in front of television cameras to deliver their pronouncements. She entered the grounds of Sydney Hospital and turned to the car park. There Spignelli held the lift door open for her. There were no other occupants. As they descended he spoke.
‘What were you reading in there?’
She filled him in. ‘Research for a possible honours thesis,’ she said. ‘On the Irish in the 1860s.’
It seemed as remote from her as was last week.
‘I believe you women have short hair now, since Vatican II. Baldness is no longer de rigueur.’
‘No. You’re right,’ she said, foolishly short of breath.
‘Take off your veil, then. For the drive. We’re going for a drive.’
‘It might look a bit scraggy by modern standards,’ she said. She realised she was speaking like an asthmatic, with gaps between words for breath.
He put his hand on hers.
‘Don’t be stressed,’ he said.
‘Why do you send your daughter to a Catholic school?’ she asked.
‘Tradition. Her mother went there.’
‘And are you a believer?’ Indeed, she suddenly wondered in panic, was she?
‘I’m observant,’ he said. ‘You are if you come from a big enough Catholic family. Weddings, baptisms, funerals come round so often that they make you a regular churchgoer.’
She did not feel she had a tormented exclusive right to him as she had had with Father Shannon. She began to work on the pins that held her veil in place. ‘I’ll still look weird,’ she said. ‘The rest of me’s not fashionable either.’
Yet she was blazing and ecstatic and ready. She wanted to put her hand on his upper leg, purely as an opening bid. A Vietnamese at the gate waved through Spignelli and the woman with tousled brunette hair. She hoped he was a Buddhist rather than a Catholic.
‘Are you a doctor?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Ear, nose and throat.’
He spoke in bulletins.
‘And have you ordered other nuns of the Order into cars?’
‘Only Mother Alphonsus,’ he said, with a crooked half-smile.
Did he utter the name of her superior, her headmistress, as a test of her humour? She was willing to tolerate it. Nothing was as large as her want.
The drive was short. At Potts Point he turned into an underground car park. There were still many perils of being seen, but she was willing to risk them. As Spignelli parked, an elderly woman decanted grocery bags from her car, a task that claimed all her attention or perhaps all her eyesight. Constance felt the contempt of the soon-to-be-sated for this mere consumer, this customer.
In the lift he took her to him; he had Satanic luck, which she shared, their madness unobserved. The floor they reached had only three doors; Spignelli led her to the nearest and deftly unlocked it, and then they were inside and the madness could run.
The flat was art deco – glitteringly restored, a balcony beyond it looking up harbour. A thick-walled flat, she thought. She was sure about how things would go. She imagined herself yelling with satiety. He asked, would she like to use the facilities first? If she did, she could use his bathrobe, he said.
A first minute quantity of reluctance entered her.
‘I’ll go in myself for a second,’ said Spignelli.
‘I’ll sit here,’ she said, taking a chair that showed her the view and gave no hint of neighbours.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It is very beautiful.’ He placed a hand on the nape of her neck. ‘Like you.’
She liked his hand and the words. But she didn’t know where to look. She thought it best to tell him. ‘I’ll help,’ he said softly. ‘Tell me, do you want to go back?’
‘No.’ It came from an emphatic quarter of her soul.
‘All right,’ he said. He went into the bathroom of the flat and she waited in a sort of static, avid confusion.
After a considerable time she heard him come out again and could hear as well his breath and, as if by the displacement it caused in the air, his solid body.
Since she did not fully look at him as he presented himself to her, she saw him in fragmentary ways. He was well built, though there were some marks of negligence and coming age in his abdomen, a struggle between athleticism and a modest paunch. He leaned down and kissed her and she did not resist that, forming a devouring mouth. There was some ravenous clawing at each other, though he left her clothes alone for a time, as if, with residual Catholic suspicion, he thought they possessed an inviolable holiness. But then he unbuttoned the neck of her blouse and slid his hand down to envelop her left breast.
‘Very handsome,’ he said. ‘Come to bed.’
Before they went she began with a hectic alacrity to remove her cardigan, the blouse, the sexless spencer beneath that. The chaste bra, already partially dislodged, she unhooked. Where did this willingness, the urge to expose herself, come from? ‘I am managing this,’ she thought, with a joy that ran beyond the bounds of all theology, and of the careful years. ‘Where have I been?’ she came close to asking herself aloud.
‘What is under that long, long skirt?’ he asked.
‘Long, long, sturdy underwear,’ she said. ‘A slip.’
‘Fear not,’ he said. ‘I am not a man for glamorous lingerie.’
Her uncertainty returned, though, the instant she unhooked the skirt and sat down on the bed in her slip.
‘Would you leave all that ugly underwear to me?’ he asked. Indeed, she felt too weak to assert herself further. She could not think of what to abandon next. She had taken herself as far as her self-counsels could run. She lay back on the bed while he kissed her breasts, a wonderful yet strangely familiar sensation, as if a faint memory was stirring within her, despite the years of abstinence.
His towel had come off as he half-knelt on the bed in front of her. She was obliquely aware of it but she felt she could not look at or assess anything. He sought her right hand and he placed his penis in it. There was an instantaneous reversal of the world as it had been to that second, and she was revealed to herself in her ridiculous posture, in her fatuous half-nakedness, in her absurd Virgin-blue slip. Her mouth flooded with bile. She heaved herself from the bed and careened into the bathroom, slamming the door behind her. She began vomiting in spasms too violent for her to ensure that all of it got into the bowl.
When the chief gush had ended, she stayed on her knees panting, and found he was standing behind her in the doorway.
‘Oh my God, I’m sorry. How can I help you?’
He was in his way a decent man. He was not as conceited, as self-regarding as Father Shannon.
She said nothing.
He said, ‘I can see now how presumptuous …’
But she put her hand up. She did not want to hear any eloquent confession.
‘I completely misread the signs,’ he said. ‘Sometimes innocence is so profound it can look like worldliness. I’m so sorry.’
‘I know you have a wife,’ she said.
‘Is that what made you ill?’
‘No. But you have a wife. And a daughter.’
He helped her up and t
ook her into the small kitchen. He found a bottle of whisky and gave them both a short measure. He was firmly wrapped in his dressing gown. She had, in the sitting room corner, gratefully reassumed the neutrality of her clothing.
‘I must have been crazy,’ he said dolefully. ‘Absolutely crazy.’
‘Not just you,’ she said. She was absorbing a revelation. She knew now that she could never marry or be a lover. It was an important revelation. The fact that she was a professed nun had not meant that her capacity for marriage was lacking. That it was there as an unlikely and undesired option created a degree of meaningful tension in her life, as it did in the lives of the other women of her Order. She had thought, therefore, that she was an orb of choices, that she occupied poles of choice. But no. Nun or not, she could never marry or be a lover.
‘You have given up the normal life of women,’ a retreat master, any retreat master, all the retreat masters had told them. But she had given up nothing. Her range was straitened. She began to rearrange her clothing and told Spignelli she must catch a bus home. He’d only be a second, he assured her. He would drive her. She could tell Mother Alphonsus he had recognised Sister Constance at a bus stop and given her a lift.
She let him take her back to the convent – they might have been a nun and her brother. But she knew now she no more belonged there than she did in the street, or as a wraith under that tree in the Domain. She felt terrifying doubt in her own existence. The core had evaporated into some other soul. She had no home and she dwelt nowhere. This was a genuine terror in knowing that if she could not find at least an ounce of solidity at the centre of her being, she must kill herself. Everything was so suddenly gone, all certainty, all haven.
She did not speak to Spignelli during the journey or when she left him. She told him where she wanted to be dropped, walked into the convent and made her excuses to the cook and Mother Alphonsus, feeling neither guilt nor rededication – not anything. Migraine, she said.