Читать книгу Auto Da Fay - Fay Weldon - Страница 14

The Convent was a tall building with gothic towers. Behind barred windows lived scores of women who wore black robes and white wimples. When they were angry, which they often were, they were like the magpie; they’d come screeching at you in a flurry of black and white, though rapping your knuckles or pinching you instead of pecking your ankles, and much more painfully. Fortunately most of them stayed in their cells in the towers: just a handful came out to teach in the school wing. Mother Teresa was nice and motherly, and would hug you and give you sticky sweets: all the others, from Sister Katherine to Sister Dorothy, ruled by sarcasm and violence. I liked their names, but that was about all.

The children, all Catholic except for a handful of heathen, which group included Jane and I, were on the whole cowed and snivelly. Their noses tended to run. I was a worse case of pious dereliction than Jane, who had at least been christened, albeit as a Protestant not a Catholic, but I had not even been that. My parents were freethinkers, rationalists, humanists – which was why I was spared Arthur Machen’s blessing. Jane was allowed to stay in the classroom while the rest of the class said their prayers and told their rosaries – some six times a day – but I had to leave the room, and stand outside the door with my spelling book, and learn the hard words. I became very good at spelling. I did not mind the exclusion much: prayers were boring and rosaries were peculiar, but I could see it was more comfortable to belong. But belonging was already beginning to seem unlikely. I was a homie, I spoke with a fancy accent, lived in a boarding-house and not a bungalow, didn’t get pocket money, and my mother put on airs. I was the youngest in my class by more than a year. I struggled to keep up.

The nuns decided that I had to be baptized. Otherwise, being unchristened, my fate was to go to limbo when I died. Limbo was the place, in their rather primitive theology, where all those born after Jesus’s time but who weren’t Catholics were doomed to go. It was a flat, featureless, grey landscape where nothing ever happened. The face of the Lord had been turned away. In retrospect it seems a fair description of a depression, and perhaps that’s all depression is, limbo leaked over in life: but the prospect certainly terrified me. There was no getting out of it: limbo was everlasting, and my certain fate, so I had better start learning my catechism and sign up for baptism now.

I asked my mother if I could be christened as a Catholic but she said certainly not. She did not seem to realize the full implications of what she had said or what she was letting me in for. I could see that the only way I would ever be able to save myself was if she were dead – but that would be bad for her because she would be going to purgatory, and I was ashamed of myself for wishing it. Purgatory was where she and Jane were going: they had been christened but didn’t go to Mass, so they would be put into this kind of holding pen for heaven and tortured there until they were purified. If people prayed for you after you were dead you could sometimes get out early. Then the gates of heaven would open and you would spend your time praising God.

I told them at school I wasn’t allowed to be a Catholic and they were shocked at a mother who would condemn her own daughter to limbo. It was probably a mortal sin. If you committed a mortal sin you went to hell. I could see the only thing to do was to stay alive, and when my mother died of old age, I would be free to be a Catholic.

I sat next to an etching of St Anthony being tortured in hell by demons, and tried to concentrate on mental arithmetic, and pronouns. I could not get the knack of the latter, so in a test I copied the answers of the girl in front of me, taking care to change one so as not to be charged with the sin. That was the only one I got right. I realized the imprudence of copying. Better to rely on yourself than others. I had my knuckles rapped for doing so badly in the test. A nun seized your hand, turned it over and banged your knuckles sharply against the desk. For some reason the girl I had copied from did not get her knuckles rapped, but then she was a devout girl who even at the age of seven wanted to be a nun. Knucklerapping hurt: anything to get out of it, but I did not want to join the magpies in their high tower, or even promise to. How they lied and swore and cheated, all the little convent girls, to get out of trouble or make money. I had never known anything like it.

My friend Colleen borrowed twopence from the newsagent telling him her father had just died. Then she went into the butcher and borrowed threepence saying she had to take it back to her father or he’d beat her terribly. Then she went to the newsagent and spent the lot on colour balls which she shared with me. I thought I ought to refuse but the sweets changed colour as you rolled them round in your mouth and I couldn’t resist. You had to keep taking them out of your mouth to see whether the pink had turned to violet, the magenta to mauve. It was a sticky process and the dye stayed round your mouth for days.

I was hungry most of the time. The boarding-house breakfast was meagre and my mother gave Jane and me sixpence between us to buy lunch every day. You could have a small hot meat pie or a cold apple pie or half a pound of broken biscuits from the biscuit factory down the road. The meat pie was nicest but it was also smallest. The biscuits were dry and dusty and hard to swallow. Drink came from the water tap.

There was a girl in my class called Beverley whom everyone hated. She had cross-eyes and spots, and was smelly. She crouched in a corner and whimpered, and the more they bullied the more bulliable she became. I thought it was outrageous. I played with her on principle: if I played with her the others would. I made her wash out her knickers. If her mother didn’t she’d have to do it herself. She cheered up a bit. Presently the other children asked to join in: Colleen, Mary, Teresa, Marjorie, all the big wild popular girls.

The nuns were firm creationists: I was taught that the world began with the Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve. I was annoyed to discover that Eve was created out of Adam’s rib as an afterthought, because God thought Adam needed company, and puzzled as to how Cain and Abel managed to have children without marrying their own sisters, which I knew was forbidden. My mother said that Genesis was not necessarily the only truth, but I knew her witness was not sound.

I took to reading the psalms in bed at night under the bedclothes. The nuns did not encourage us to read the Bible: on the contrary, they thought it should be mediated through a priest. It has always been my impulse to read what I am not meant to read and not to read what I am encouraged to. I fell in love with language, in what I can now see was in itself a kind of sub-erotic experience. I wrestled with the notion of the hills lifting themselves up and the valleys being exalted, and like Daniel wrestling with the lion, I won. If I could not understand, I osmosed. I do not think the Good News Bible could ever have done as well as this little, leather-bound, thin-papered Authorised Version we happened to have in the house. I wrestled with Ecclesiastes and the Book of Job, and came to the conclusion that the nuns were only telling half the story.

What the nuns gave us to read was Little Lives of All the Saints, a Victorian tract describing the tortures that young women of long ago endured preserving their virtue in the name of Jesus. Their breasts were chopped off, bits of them sliced up and fried, but they would not give up their virginity. They were beautiful and they were good, and pain was their reward. I was fascinated and horrified: I knew there was something wrong in my response but not quite what. Tremors, halfway between pain and pleasure, affected me as I read. Sex was a mystery to me, let alone the finer pleasures of masochism. I had no idea what virginity was, or what men did, or how babies were conceived. No one talked about these things at the convent for fear of knuckle-rapping or ear-tweaking: nuns slid about the corridors overhearing what was said, invisible until suddenly you saw them. All you knew about sex was that it was exciting and forbidden, and very secret.

On the way home from school one day a little boy with no clothes on ran out of his house. When I got home I asked my mother if there was something wrong with him, since he had this little bit hanging out in front. She said no but was too embarrassed to elaborate. I thought he was probably malformed.