Women in the Wall

by O'Faolain, Julia

  “It’s all around. Everywhere. Accept it. Then deal with it. You aimed too high, Agnes.”

  “Radegunda …”

  “She’s out of the ordinary. A touch mad. That’s sanctity. It’s not for everyone.”

  “Your poem …”

  “It’s a poem: a construct. Myth. Heady. Useful. Edifying. Forget it.”

  “I must go. Let me.”

  “Shush!” He held a hand over her mouth. The two novices had come out of the bakehouse and were walking past, two rows of kale away, talking in their impenetrable Frankish. Their pale skirts swept the earth, visible on ground-level under the hedges where the thick, jointed kale stems were bare of foliage. Their voices rose and clashed excitedly and their skirts paused as they grew absorbed in their conversation just a yard from the abbess whose own skirt was now bundled, thick as a wheel, round the axle of her waist. Fortunatus put his other hand between her legs and applied rhythmic pressure. The voices floated in nervous indignation over the kaletips and Agnes, hearing her own name, shuddered convulsively and felt wetness on Fortunatus’s fingers. One of the novices laughed and the skirts moved out of sight. Agnes got his hand off her mouth.

  “I must go … go … Fortunatus.”

  “Not now,” he whispered. “We may as well finish.”

  “No, no!”

  “Yes,” he was panting. “As well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. Sin is sin.”

  “Oh,” Agnes began to scream and he put his two hands over her mouth this time, almost choking her.

  “It’ll be all right,” he reassured. “Let me … once … then …”

  She lay back, arched on the thick bundle of clothes gathered in a wad under her backbone, stared at the sky and felt a quick, confused sensation of pain, heat, tension and release. The sky was like the neck of a pigeon. Fortunatus removed his hands. “Don’t cry,” he whispered. “It’s the same thing Radegunda feels. Just the very same only she reaches it by different ways. The followers of Dionysius felt it too.”

  Agnes wept. “Sacrilege …”

  “We can repent.”

  “Do you?” She seized his hand, staring anxiously.

  “Not yet.”

  “With who else …?”

  “Nobody. Nobody here.”

  “Fortunatus …”

  “Agnes.”

  “Would anyone have done or did you especially … want me?”

  He kissed her. “Agnes,” he whispered, “this is the real sin: passion of the heart, of the mind. The body is unimportant. Your mind should be God’s.”

  “God’s too,” she said. “God’s finally since he made us both. But first I want us to love each other. If not, this is—lechery.”

  He kissed her several times, then: “Lechery is a lesser sin.”

  “But a meaner one. Will we love each other?”

  “How can we?” Still kissing her, quick dry little kisses now.

  “Oh,” she turned from him. “You don’t.”

  “Haven’t I always?” He tried to put his arms around her. “Weren’t we friends?”

  “Now it must be different. Look,” she whispered. “I know this can’t go on. Some day, perhaps soon, very soon, we must repent, stop, ask for forgiveness, but not yet. Not until we have known each other: made a sort of communion out of our love. Else what good was it? You said human love led to God.”

  “And away from him.”

  “Fortunatus, shall we break off now?”

  “No!” he seized her.

  She pushed him off her. “Is it lechery?”

  “It’s everything.” He buried his face in her neck. “Everything.” He bit her. “Good and bad.”

  “Can we be happy for a while?”

  “Yes,” he whispered. “At least for a while. For a dangerous while.”

  “Love?” she wondered.

  “Yes,” he promised, “my love.”

  “Oh God,” Agnes whispered. “Thank you.”

  Chapter Seven

  [A.D. 569]

  Radegunda was tried by doubts.

  When the Bridegroom was away—what lover stays constantly with his beloved?—they came. Her choice of convent life had sprung from love—but of what? God? Self? Peace? Privacy? She had no belief in mixed motives. Neither she nor her spiritual advisers saw morality in shades of grey. In arid moods, she threw a blighting glance at a past suddenly rotten. Her youth stank and the stench was tonic, rousing her to furnish fresh efforts.

  What did demoralize was ambiguity. She could not cope with good in evil, mixed like light dappled in a forest. Animals—Clotair—pursuing their inevitable appetites for flesh and blood were most troubling. All dealings with him were open to doubt. In his boiling animality, in the sparky splendour of his youth, Clotair had shown no signs of having the ability to reason. He had cunning, but so has a fox and if his reason reached no higher than a fox’s, how could he be held responsible?

  And if he couldn’t, mustn’t she?

  In memory, old encounters turned turtle, like capsized boats. Where once she had seen moral triumphs, she was now less sure. Tilted, a knife blade will blaze brighter than captured light, then return at a twitch to leaden grey.

  Which was true? Which? She maddened. Had she been right before? Or now? And why was she unsure? Was God tempering her? Lucifer, the lightbearer, flashed his trick mirrors in her mind’s eye. There was no criterion.

  *

  [A.D. 559]

  She was remembering a turning-point in her life: the second time Clotair came to try and get her back. Ten years ago almost to the day. It had been spring but an earlier spring than now. Irises in the convent garden were blooming. Their blue and purple were a luminous counterpart to the Lenten veils in the convent chapel. Radegunda was in that chapel when a nun came to tell her Clotair was in the garden. Waiting.

  “In the convent garden!” exclaimed Radegunda. “Who let him in?”

  “The abbess, mother. She could hardly refuse.”

  “I suppose not.”

  Clotair, since his brothers’ death, was king of all Gaul. Besides, who else had endowed the convent and brought pressure on the local duke and bishop without whom the buildings could never have risen so fast nor on so grand a scale? But Radegunda was resentful. He had been magnanimous. He had let her go. Why did he have to turn up with memories of their married years? To contaminate her new life? She walked reluctantly to the garden.

  The sight of him was a shock. It was seven years since she had left him and although he had tried once to get her back, she had been preserved by a miracle from even having to see him. She thought of the miracle with satisfaction. It ratified what she had done and become.

  He turned his head. He looked—was it possible?—pitiable. Red-flecked eyes, face a sunburst of broken veins, bright, pitted, shiny, as though some of the blood he had shed had spattered back on him. Maybe it had! He had murdered his own son and infant grandson the year before. He was, Radegunda remembered, prone to rages of regret.

  “Radegunda!”

  She saw him quiver, repressing an urge to embrace her. He would have wanted to. Hugs, punches, slaps and kisses were his language. Squeezes, grabs, bites and tickles. Even inanimate things had to be touched. He was always testing the blades of weapons, fondling a stone, crushing a leaf, trailing a finger along a girl’s or a horse’s neck, dipping it in the juice oozing from a roast or a goblet of wine and sucking it dry. Now she felt his planned embrace reverberate off herself. His hand hung unhappily. He was afraid of her. Awed. Memory of the miracle shielded her still. Charitably, she held out her hands.

  “My poor lord! The world has not been using you well.”

  She felt a shudder stiffen him. Unused to pity. Then the hands in hers went limp.

  “No,” he acquiesced. “The last few years have been … unlucky. How long is it since I came to see you?”

  “Seven years.”

  “So long.”

  It had been at her villa—a villa he had given her—at Saix. She had
gone there on leaving him and turned it into an alms-house. Thirteen months later, she heard he was in the district. He was staying at a local estate of his with his court, using up the accumulated produce which it was more practical to consume on the spot than transport to another villa. So there he was with his household, hunting in the surrounding forests, liable, at any moment, to turn up. He had no particular woman at the moment, might even, people guessed, be thinking of claiming her back. She was not young, no longer in the bloom of her beauty but he had been attached to her and besides, having been publicly rejected, might choose for that reason alone to assert his will. Also, wasn’t he reaching an age when the sexual impulse grows slack and memory of successful sex better perhaps than fresh adventurings? He might want her as a mnemonic. Radegunda was aghast. Local people agog. News, echoing from mouth to mouth, reached her in the high colour of folk-tale. She bargained with God, knelt all night on stone floors, caught chills, had nightmares and turned to the bishop for comfort. She was a deaconess, wasn’t she? Mustn’t the Church protect her? But the bishop—not Medardus but a local one—was unimpressed. Orders? No woman could be in orders. She was perhaps a nun, he supposed. At most. But of what order? Answerable to whom? It was all irregular. Clotair was his temporal lord and he was just as pleased to keep this Latinized German woman at bay. He was an outdoor man, an administrator, of Gallo-Roman stock, with little taste for excess. Clotair, for all he cared, could claim her and good luck to him. “Render unto Caesar,” he quoted glibly. “Your body belongs to your husband.” At this news, her body ceased functioning completely.

  Rumours of Clotair’s coming were so frequent that she had to ignore them. When one proved true there was no time to hide. Frantic, her bowels turning over, she stumbled with Agnes and a girl called Disciola through the kitchen-garden and along the edge of a ploughed strip behind the villa. It was March. Trees were skeletons and offered no cover. A farmer was sowing grain on the bare strip of field. He had already sown half of it and must have been working since dawn. Radegunda, tripping on her mud-heavy hem, shrieked into the wind to him:

  “Friend, for God’s love, if anyone comes by and asks have you seen us, say no one passed since you started sowing your oats!”

  The man shouted back that he would do that.

  “How close is he?” Radegunda asked Disciola. She was panting, and drawing breath pained her.

  “The portress”, began Disciola, “told me to run. That she’d keep him talking, then send him the wrong way, but … Look!” She pointed across the narrow strip of ploughed field.

  He was there. Not three perches off. Looking at them: gash of teeth, eyeballs straining like arrow-heads at the ready. As though she had eaten henbane, Radegunda’s eyesight distorted the distance, magnifying him until he filled her field of vision. A great blur of silver-stubbled skin and flame-blue eye descended on her. His long apricot hair flaring in the diffuse sunlight dazzled as she folded at the knees. The wind flung itself about her, pricking her with rain-spittles, rousing her denying flesh until her body tides drew away, congesting like a fist, tightening on her heart until it threatened to explode. The tension jammed her mind. Her pulse stopped. Clotair hovered. The air was turbulent, Radegunda blind. Gradually, she became aware of a release. The humours of her body were flowing back, with a keen and horrid pleasure, to where they belonged.

  She opened her eyes and saw a green wave of oat-stalks rising in front of them. The oats had grown, miraculously—how else?—from the farmer’s seed to conceal her. Tall as spears, metallic then green according as the wind moved them, they rose sheerly up to foam at their summit in a lacy crest of quivering panicles.

  Radegunda reared to her knees. “God has intervened,” she cried. “Christ, my Lover, has claimed me! See!” She drew a hand along the harp of stalks, “the farmer’s seed,” she insisted to Agnes and Disciola.

  They were looking at her a little wildly.

  “Radegunda, stay calm …. Maybe he only wants … Radegunda, are you all right? Oh, Blessed Angels, help us!”

  “Kneel down,” she commanded. “We must give thanks. Don’t you see?” For they didn’t seem to, were still rearing fearfully backwards, staring with far-focusing eyes as though the oat-wall had been transparent. “We’ve been saved!” she explained.

  They had. Clotair understood that heaven had spoken, or so one must presume, since he rode away and did not try to see her again.

  Until now.

  “Clotair,” she said, “that last time, I … you won’t believe me but it pained me that you … had to go as you did. Without our even having a chance to forgive each other. I had been terrified just before the …” She refrained from using the proud word ‘miracle’. “Even now, this time, when just a while ago they came to tell me you were here, I was afraid. Your name aroused old terrors. I was shaking.”

  “Shaking!” His blue eye focusing on her like a nail. “You! You, Radegunda were the toughest opponent I ever met! Tough … Ah God!” He laughed.

  “I used to shake,” she insisted. “Secretly. Then nerve myself to seem tough so you would never know how hard it was. I had to resist—in so many ways. You wouldn’t have an inkling.”

  “How did you know about what inklings I had?”

  Still staring at her with a twitch of a smile. Bitter though.

  “Let’s sit,” she said socially. They did. She looked at him with confidence, managing calm, even grace. This was easier in that he was looking old. His animal pride, that exuberance that used to act like rubbed amber, magnetizing, drawing her to him when she least wanted to be drawn—was gone. Even his eyes had lost their blue, insolent flame. His once red-and-gold hair was cobwebbed with grey and the rest of it as dull as winter bracken.

  “You’re not afraid of me now,” he said flatly. “I don’t rouse you any more. Ah, you were a sexy piece, Radegunda, juicy as an apple or a hunk of fresh beef: all squirty and warm and ready as a mare with her tail up. You couldn’t help it and you didn’t want to. You pulled away from me as a puppy pulls a stick—so I’d pull you back. I could play you as my harpist plays his harp. But I’ve lost my touch. I can feel that. I’m not surprised. The spirit—some of it—has been knocked out of me. I wouldn’t say this to anyone but you. I, too, have to seem tough, you know. Well you do know, don’t you? I suppose you get news here? You hear what’s going on?”

  “Yes,” she said coldly. “We get news. I heard”, she said, “of your marriage to Vuldetrada.”

  “Did you hear that the bishops made me break it up? She’s married now to Garivald of Bavaria. I gave her to him. That caused me no heartbreak. It was a marriage of … policy. She was my grand-nephew’s widow, you see, too young for me maybe, but as I was getting his lands, it seemed …” Clotair shrugged. “An insipid little thing. She didn’t interest me. Not that my interest isn’t as lively as ever, if properly roused.” He grinned, his foxy grin. His teeth were yellow like old mushrooms. “You wouldn’t want to think otherwise, would you? You wouldn’t enjoy resisting a eunuch. Where would be the glory? You like a fight, Radegunda, even if it’s only with yourself! Ha, I know you! Knew you since you were twelve years old, remember? I was your guardian, remember?”

  “My captor.”

  “That too. I had you educated, turned you into a Roman lady and a Christian. If there’s something you’ve learned that I don’t know, well you’ve got me to thank, right? You can’t deny that, can you? I can say I created you as much as any human being can create another. I spared your life. I was a second father to you, and lover. Do you remember our marriage night?”

  “No.”

  “You do. So do I. Ah God, how odd it is! I’m exciting myself. I am. I’m all randy and ready and there’s nothing to do with it—where can I put it? Nothing but nuns around me. That’s a joke, if you like! Do you know I could hardly get it up for Vuldetrada and here you are, thirty-eight years old and not well preserved either. I’m not reproaching you. I know how you live. Whip marks on that white flesh I’ll bet.
Is it still white? Have you ruined and tanned it like a slave’s backside? And yet you excite me! Well, it’s better to have an appetite you can’t satisfy than have the satisfaction waiting and no appetite. I know that. I’ve experienced that. I was lying before when I said I had no troubles with the flesh. I have and that’s a bad thing for a man like me: that’s death. That frightens you, sends a breath of the tomb through your vitals. Death’s a finicky glutton. He takes his first bite of a man’s most pivotal part. Well, I’m grateful to you for beating him back a bit for me. I feel less afraid of him now I know he hasn’t got any hold on me yet.” He was laughing, holding his private parts in his huge hands, lazily, affectionately, as though he held a puppy cupped in his lap.

  “Clotair …”

  “Talk about something else? Yes. Yes, you’re right. Better for us both. Did you hear I was back in your country a while ago? In Thuringia.”

  “Burning, pillaging, murdering—I heard.”

  “You’ve no relatives there now, Radegunda! What are the Thuringians to you—ah God, I shouldn’t have said that, should I? Considering how … Yes. Radegunda, I’m sorry. My tongue is like an ill-trained hound. It runs on and scares the game away. Have I done that, now? Have I lost you, turned you against me? Listen.” He jumped up, strode away, then back. “I’m going to tell you something you may not believe: I didn’t want another war with the Germans! I was all against it, but I had no choice. That surprises you, doesn’t it, that I don’t always get my way? You won’t have heard what happened when I marched against the Saxons? No? No.” He turned his back on her and said nothing for so long that she began to wonder was he sick. He was still a big man with no droop to him and his carcass was well padded out. His belly was flat from days in the saddle. Only his rear had spread. It was true, it occurred to her suddenly, that she didn’t want to see Clotair humbled physically. The physical world was his domain. He had been a splendid animal in his prime: one of God’s successes. Yes, why despise the physical? One could renounce it without despising it.