is not the word.’ One of the good things that I had learned from my superiors was that guilt could be pure self-indulgence, a wallowing in the ego. Guilt, I was told, usually sprang from misplaced pride; it might simply be chagrin that you were not as wonderful as you hoped. ‘I feel sad,’ I went on, ‘a failure, in some ways. But not guilty exactly.’
‘God, you are lucky!’ Jane flung herself down in my armchair. ‘I feel endlessly, endlessly guilty about sleeping with Mark. It means that I can’t go to mass, communion or confession, because I don’t have a “firm purpose of amendment”, as they say. I’m not going to stop doing it, so I haven’t truly repented. So now I’m that dreadful thing called a lapsed Catholic.’
‘Do you miss it?’ I asked, and then surprised myself by adding, ‘Do you care?’ I noticed how far I had moved in the last few months. This time last year, I could not have imagined living outside the Catholic Church, but now I wasn’t so sure. Did God really care so much about Jane’s sexual life? Was sleeping with her fiancé as bad as telling lies or being unkind, sins which didn’t debar anybody from the sacraments?
Jane sat quite still for a moment and then shrugged. ‘In some ways, no – of course, I don’t care. I can’t believe that God – if there is a God, I must say I do wonder sometimes – is really a narrow-minded prude. And I know that lots of people right here in college just carry on going to communion, no matter what they do. But I can’t manage that. It seems dishonest …’ she tailed off.
‘But do you miss it?’ I probed. Jane seemed so much at ease with the world and so bracingly positive, that it was hard to imagine her style cramped by a disapproving Church.
‘Oh, heavens, yes!’ she breathed. ‘I used to love the liturgy at school. Last Christmas, Mark and I were in Paris and went to Midnight Mass in Notre Dame. You can imagine … Mark couldn’t believe that I had been able to give all that up. “You’re a heroine,” he said. Though I can’t say I believe in much of it any more, frankly.’
I wondered how much of a Catholic I really was. No one would ever have admitted to doubts in the convent, and it was somehow liberating to have Jane do it for me. ‘But that’s enough about me!’ Jane got up and reached for her books. ‘I’m going to get the college nurse to have a look at you … I know, I know, she really is perfectly awful, but I promised Mr Jones. And it is sensible, you must admit, even if it is all due to stress. Mr Jones was right. That really was a very long faint.’
Before she left, Jane looked around the room. A typically modern box: shiny cork flooring, matching orange curtains and bedspread, desk and dressing-table combined. ‘You ought to try to put your own stamp on this,’ she said appraisingly. ‘It looks anonymous. Have some of your own things around. Whoops!’ she laughed. ‘You probably haven’t got any things. Well, you’d better acquire some. You’re not a nun now. No more holy poverty for you. What about a record player? You like music and you won the Violet Vaughan Morgan last year. You must have some of that prize money stashed away in the bank. Go on, treat yourself.’
‘Yes,’ I replied thoughtfully. ‘Perhaps I will.’
The college nurse was brisk and matter-of-fact. Yes, the fainting was almost certainly due to stress. I had had a confusing time and it was bound to take its toll. But worse things happened at sea. Mustn’t give in or feel sorry for yourself. Get back into the swing of things. Put your best foot forward. I listened to this string of clichés with mounting irritation. It was easy to be brisk and bracing about other people’s difficulties. I was quite aware that leaving a convent must rank very low on the scale of human suffering. Certainly, a bad divorce or bereavement must be even more painful, but, after all, it was not a competition. ‘Do make an appointment with your GP, however,’ the nurse concluded. ‘Always wise to get these things checked out, especially if it’s happened before.’
I promised that I would. It did seem a sensible precaution, and I was grateful for the concern that was so different from the icy response of my superiors. News of the faint travelled fast. People I scarcely knew stopped me in the corridor and asked how I was feeling. Pat and Fiona gave me a bunch of flowers and Rosemary had thoughtfully provided a little vase, realizing that I probably didn’t have one. Charlotte asked me quite a lot about the incident and we again silently sized each other up as fellow-neurotics.
Charlotte and I were no longer tutorial partners. Dr Brentwood Smyth had got rid of me fairly rapidly and passed me on to one of his graduate students. The college had responded indignantly. I was being groomed for a first-class degree and should not have been relegated to what they regarded as the scrap heap in this way. Now I was back with Mrs Bednarowska, who was quite happy with my intricate gothic essays and everybody seemed pleased with me. But I had not forgotten the emptiness I had encountered when I had had to rely on my own thoughts, and felt that Dr Brentwood Smyth had seen through my polished intellectual exterior to the vacuum at the core, as had Charlotte, though she knew too much about the numbing effects of shock to dismiss me as contemptuously as our tutor.
So some good had come out of that faint. I had become closer to Jane, let down my guard a little and allowed people to see that all was not well. And I decided to take Jane’s advice and buy myself a record player. As the new spirit of Vatican II slowly percolated through the convent, we had been encouraged to listen to music. A record player had appeared in the community room of the Scholasticate, and we were allowed to use it during the afternoon recreation hour. I discovered a new world. I remember walking into the room one day after doing the washing-up and being almost shocked by the beauty of the slow movement of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto. Now thanks to my simple little player, for which I paid the princely sum of twenty-five pounds, I could have this sublime treat any time I wanted. Jane introduced me to the late quartets of Beethoven and I would play these almost nightly. This, I was aware, was probably the kind of experience I had sought in religion. While I listened, I felt my spirit knitting together. Things began to make sense.
But one night, the world broke apart again. It was early evening and I was tired, having stayed up most of the previous night to write my essay. This weekly ‘essay crisis’, as we called it, was a feature of Oxford life. Throughout the college, lights burned all night as students scribbled earnestly, trying to get their piece finished in time. Since leaving the convent, I had fallen into this weekly ritual and in a perverse way quite enjoyed it. There was something rather magical about sitting alone in the lamplight, surrounded by darkness and absolute stillness. Occasionally there would be a gentle scratching on the door, and Rosemary or Charlotte, whose essay night coincided with my own, would peer cautiously round the door and we would have a midnight coffee-break before returning to our books. The next day I felt hollow and depleted, but triumphant, and I used to revel in the post-tutorial euphoria: essay done, duly praised, and a lovely fresh assignment beckoning me invitingly into the next week.
But on this particular occasion, my eyes prickled with fatigue. Suddenly I found myself invaded by the familiar stench, but this time it was different. My brain felt as though a cosmic potato masher was pounding it, reducing it to long worms of sensation like spaghetti, but spaghetti that was alive. I could hear a bell ringing mournfully in the distance and I was convinced that somebody was standing beside me. I could almost glimpse his face out of the corner of my eye. An aged, senile mask, with empty eyes. Some part of me knew that there was nobody there, and that if I reached out to touch him my hand would encounter empty air. And yet I could not connect this knowledge with the spectre because it had its own reality, its own absolutely commanding presence. I had no leisure to think about this, because I was gripped suddenly by a quite overwhelming fear. When I looked around me, the room was wholly unfamiliar, as though I had never seen any of these objects before. The world had become uncanny and horrifying. I did not know who, what or where I was, but was aware only of my extreme terror, a cold sickening dread that made everything around me seem brown, rotten and repulsive, because it had no meaning.
And
