and those dragons pursued me over endless hills in my dreams.
In bed that night I thought I should be quite unable to sleep. “Dear God,” I prayed before getting into bed, “if you make Lindsey better I’ll always be nice to her.” Outside I could hear the specialist going downstairs to make a phone call. I heard the door closing behind him, and my ears strained in the darkness trying to catch a sound. Nothing. Death made everything fraught with anxiety. “Dear God,” I found myself continuing, “if Lindsey gets better I’ll think about being a nun.”
I listened to myself in astonishment. Why had I promised that? Never in my wildest moment had I ever considered being a nun. The thought of the renunciation involved took my breath away. I heard the surgeon padding quietly upstairs. I heard my mother’s voice, strained and anxious, talking about an ambulance. Just a word here and there. But I didn’t hear any tears. My mother despised tears. And then suddenly I dropped off to sleep.
In the morning Lindsey was better. She had had a huge inflammation in her throat, and the surgeon had been just about to perform a tracheotomy when the poisonous thing broke and she could breathe again. We could all breathe again, but now once more the world seemed ringed round with a threat. I had forgotten how insubstantial life really was; Caroline’s death had been so long ago. There would be many times in the next three or four years when I would forget this again, but Lindsey’s illness had scarred my trust in life, and from time to time I would taste again that frightening emptiness of the world I lived in.
I kept remembering the promise I’d made to God. It almost seemed as though someone else had made it for me while I was off guard. Who? God? Had He been trying to tell me something? I turned away from that idea; it was full of disturbing implications, but time and again in the years to come I would flinch at the memory uneasily. Now I tried to salve my conscience. I only said I’d think about it, I reassured myself. I didn’t say I’d actually do it.
“Children! I have something very wonderful to tell you!” Mother Katherine, my headmistress, stood on the raised dais in the school hall, presiding over the morning assembly. I was in the Senior School now and at twelve was still slightly in awe of the formality and the size of my new surroundings. We stood in alphabetical order in lines of classes. Mine, the First Form, by the wall. Mother’s eyes were shining with enthusiasm; her hands, draped in the long, black ceremonial sleeves, were clasped together with suppressed emotion.
I shifted from foot to foot uneasily. These ecstatic announcements were frequent and never seemed to me to occasion much rejoicing.
“You all know Miss Jackson,” she continued. “Some of you, the older girls, will know her very well indeed.” What can she have done? I thought to myself. Miss Jackson taught A-level physics to a handful of girls in the Sixth Form. She was a pale, colorless figure. Sometimes I glanced at her as she strode round the school with her white overall flapping round her short legs, her frizzy hair gripped back from a bony face. I glanced at her and mentally dismissed her. Perhaps she’s got married, I thought with a flicker of interest. Then I shrugged. Unlikely.
“Well, Miss Jackson has decided to give her life to God,” Mother Katherine’s deep voice rang out dramatically. “She has decided to become a nun.”
I gasped. I had always known in theory that nuns were ordinary people once, but in reality they had seemed a separate species. I looked at Mother Katherine with new eyes and for the first time noticed that she was a lovely looking woman. No, perhaps woman was the wrong word. I couldn’t imagine her in ordinary clothes, with hair and legs.
Not quite. But her face was lovely.
We filed out of the school hall, each one of us dropping a curtsey to Mother Katherine as we passed the dais.
“Fancy that!” I whispered to my friend Diana. It seemed a terrible fate.
“More fool her!” Diana replied. “I can’t think of anything worse, can you?”
I shook my head.
“And never getting married!” Diana sounded aghast. “Imagine—actually choosing not to get married and not to have children. I’m going to get married as soon as I leave this dump!” She looked contemptuously at the cream walls of the corridor, punctuated here and there with bulletin boards. “And I’m going to have masses of children—seven at least. Aren’t you?”
I nodded. I had always assumed that I’d get married. After all, everybody did. But suddenly getting married seemed rather less attractive. It was so predictable. We entered the classroom and began scrabbling in our desks for our French textbooks.
“Still,” Diana went on, “I don’t suppose Miss Jackson would ever have gotten married, do you? She was pretty ugly, really. And old.”
“No,” I agreed with Diana, “I don’t suppose anyone would have married her.”
“Well, then, it’s probably all for the best. Anything’s better than being an old maid. I’d die if I wasn’t married before I was twenty. It’d be so embarrassing!”
During the morning I forgot about Miss Jackson. During the lunch hour, however, I noticed a photograph on the bulletin board that hadn’t been there that morning. It was, I realized with a shock, Miss Jackson. I looked closely at it. She was wearing a long black dress, a little cape, and a short, floppy white veil. Her hair was drawn back tightly from her face and she looked out at the camera with an expression of—what was it?—yes, surprise. Even Diana was impressed.
“I wonder what it’s like,” she muttered. “Golly! Doesn’t she look ghastly!”
We both involuntarily looked down the corridor to the baize door that separated the school from the enclosure where the nuns ate, slept, and prayed. We were never allowed to go through that door.
“She’ll know now what they do all the time,” I said, staring at the photograph, fascinated.
I remained at the bulletin board, studying Miss Jackson’s expression. What had she seen to make her look so surprised? It was an intriguing thought. I looked at her face. She seemed so ordinary. But, really, I thought, she couldn’t have been ordinary at all.
“You seem very interested in that photograph, Karen.” I spun on my heel and found myself looking up at Mother Katherine. I was in awe of her. She swept round the school, remote in her exalted position. But when you had a chance to talk to her on her own, it was easy. She was smiling now, looking down at me questioningly.
“Yes, Mother,” I said feebly. It was that kind of obvious statement that grown-ups often made, expecting you to reply significantly. I could never think how to go on.
“What does it make you think?”
“Well, Mother, why she did it! I just can’t think why anyone would want to be a nun!”
“Why not?”
“Well, it must be terrible!” I said and then blushed. That wasn’t very polite of me. “I’m sorry,” I said hastily, “I don’t mean to be rude, but …”
“What seems to you to be the hardest thing about it?”
I thought. There were so many
