Читать книгу Auto Da Fay - Fay Weldon - Страница 15

The main problem with the convent was that you never knew what would get you into trouble. It seemed to have so little to do with common sense. It shrieked at you out of a clear sky. If your mother made you meat sandwiches on a Friday there was terrible trouble, though it was not your fault. You would be lining up at playtime to go back into the classroom, jostling as ever, called into silence. ‘You are touching one another. Never, never touch another person if you can possibly help it!’ I stretched out my hand and touched the person in front of me, in defiance. I was seen. Deliberate disobedience! My punishment was the worst they could think of: I was not to be allowed to stand and clap and wave flags when the cardinal from Rome came to bless us, dressed in his scarlet robes with gold binding. I was to stay in and learn more spelling. I learned to spell ‘theatre’, I remember, though my mother had to explain to me what it was. I didn’t mind at all not seeing the cardinal, which merely proved to the nuns how hardened in sin I was. But things were getting worse: I could not explain it: limbo was creeping round the outskirts, with occasional glimpses of hell showing through.

The nuns liked Jane and she liked them. She was quiet and clever and good at art and never got her ears tweaked. She embroidered exquisite flowers and made a little cloth book to contain them: it had a white vellum cover, on which she painted bluebells: it seemed something out of the past, from long ago. If I tried to do anything like that it got covered with ink and was tatty within minutes. Jane also painted an entire set of the Tarot pack: small, fine, perfect replicas of those sinister cards. I don’t suppose she did this in the school art class, and where she got the originals or whose idea it was I do not know. My mother half admired them and half hated them. I thought they were very spooky, especially the one she did of the Tower, the edifice splitting apart beneath the black hammer blow of a bolt of lightning.

A nun slammed open a window in the gothic tower of the convent as I ran up and down shrieking and splashing in the mud and called out to the world that I was a wicked girl and a heathen and the ringleader, and she would let my form teacher know in the morning. I spent a night of terror so abject nothing has been as bad since, not even the night in the haunted house in Saffron Walden years later. Nameless horrors, scrabbling to get in, the worse for being un-named. In the morning nothing happened. There was no hammer blow. I did not tell my mother because her life was hard enough.

I got a bad sore throat and lay with my pecked ankles in bed and couldn’t go to school and was tremendously happy. The doctor came and said I might have scarlet fever and if so I would have to go to an isolation hospital. I prayed to God that I could go, and to the Cardinal in his wonderful sweeping scarlet gown, all the way from Rome, the Holy City, to intercede for me with God. My prayers were answered, which was gratifying. I had begun to doubt the deity. I thought it said in the Bible that if you threw your bread upon the water it would be returned threefold: I’d throw some of the stale biscuits into the Avon but nothing ever came back, though rather more ducks than usual would come by. The ducks seemed so happy and free, though sometimes they too would turn on one of their number, a Beverley duck, as it were, and peck it to bits.

I loved the fever hospital. The nurses were kind and the other children were friendly. My ankles healed and fears of limbo receded. My confidence in the deity was restored. Invalid food, the like of which is not known in today’s hospitals or sick-rooms, food to tempt the reluctant appetite, was cooked and served. A little pale and white, it’s true – clear beef broth, steamed fish and mashed potatoes, and vanilla blancmange – followed by hot sweet milk and white-iced biscuits – but every spoonful you got down you was applauded.

Anything parents brought in had to be sterilized in great steam cupboards, and if they visited us, which they were only allowed to do once a week, they had to sit the other side of a thick glass partition. I had a fit of neurosis which I remember to this day: a girl in the bed opposite had a bag of sweets: she threw me one and missed and it went under the bed, but I chose to believe she had not thrown it, and had treated me badly, and wept and wept until a nurse came to comfort me. I knew perfectly well it was an accident but preferred to be miserable, for the sheer drama of it. Later in life I would treat lovers and husbands in this way. Taking offence and suffering because of it, knowing in your heart they are not in the least to blame, you just want a drama, and your turn at being a victim.

One day unannounced, it was not my mother sitting the other side of the glass screen when I was led in for the family visit, but my father. At least that was what the nurse said he was, and I had no reason to mistrust the nurse. I didn’t know what to say to him. He seemed tall and handsome and I was immensely flattered that he had come to see me, and to think that I was his daughter, which gave me some kind of right to him. He talked about his plans: they did not seem to include living in the same house as us. That was fair enough, I could see he would hate the magpie. He gave me two shillings, and then he disappeared again.