Le Temps des Cerises (20 page)

Yes, that was it! To disappear like a cloud into the velvet of the night. Like a ghost, a will o' the wisp, leaving no trace but a pair of black stock­ings and a worn-out cassock. They would grumble, curse, lament his depart­ure but at least he would have followed the dictates of his conscience. Or would he? A nagging little voice told him he was a casuist of the first and worst order, that he must brave it out with the Mother Superior and face the consequences of his actions. Yes he must! No he mustn't! Yes he must! No he mustn't! He swung like a pendulum between a rock and a hard place. If he stayed what would they do to him? If he went where would he go? It was all very well disappearing into the velvet of the night but where did it take you? He'd gone astray once already in the velvet of the night and look what had come of that! He'd better just stay and face it out. An image of the Gentle Terror's face swum into his head, red and whispering. No he hadn't! He should go – sharpish! Why should he tell her anything? She only kept him here out of charity because nobody else would have him. His existence here was merely one of a Silent Reproach.

He threw himself into the armchair and flung his apron over his head, revealing a pair of black trousers patched in green at the knee. His existence had always been one of a Silent Reproach, ever since his days at the monastery or even before when his mother had washed her hands of him. Oh, she'd spun him a story! She'd even climbed into the monastery orchard and adorned the trees with sugared almonds and fruit, marzipan and candies to persuade him that it yielded good and sweetly things. He'd thought, at the age of ten, that he was entering the gates of heaven. Tennis and lotto in the sand, boules and skittles. His fall from grace had come in the end of year report when the Brothers had written: ‘Little Michael has proved himself to be a proficient player of boules but is not at all useful in the classroom.' Not at all useful in the classroom. The words still stung him after all these years.

‘Oh woe is me,' he spluttered, quite overcome with self pity. ‘Why me? Why me? Why doesn't life go and tweak somebody else's nose for a change?' It had been tweaking his for as long as he could remember, which he believed accounted for its extraordinary shape and colour. Life had a nasty habit of coming up and tweaking you by the nose like a cheeky little prankster just as you were going along fine and dandy. In the end he'd tried to beat it at its own game, tweak life in the nose for a change and look what had come of that! He had better just go, like a will o' the wisp, a shade, a ghost, like a cloud into the velvet of the night.

‘
Oh nomine Patris
!' he groaned with the apron over his head. ‘
Oh nomine Patris
!' he gulped, desperately trying to bring up the words like a cat straining to regurgitate a hairball.

Bernadine's eyelids drooped with fatigue as she listened to the comforting sound of little Aggie suckling at the young woman's breast and the not-so-comforting sound of the coffin maker up above tip-tapping his nails into soft, yielding wood, smooth and regular as the ticking of old clocks. Nailing time down for an eternity. His business was thriving, the young woman had told her, for typhoid was spreading like wildfire with all the unfiltered water from the Seine. Bernadine knew she was risking the baby by bringing her to such a place but what else could she do? She had no milk of her own to give her and no other means of getting it. And she had thanked her lucky stars and God when she'd come across the young woman, after a seemingly endless search, in the poorest, most dilapidated, inhospitable part of Montmartre.

Even now she couldn't believe it. Couldn't believe she was sitting here in a room no bigger that a nun's cell with almost as little furniture. A chair, bed, stove, the rest gone for food or firewood. It would satisfy the ascetic soul of even the most perfect of nuns. Not a sniff of indulgence to tempt the heart away from virtue. Small, bleak, clean and bare – except on the outside. The outside had filled her with terror when she'd first come upon it. A monstrous ogre of a building towering above her, five storeys high with fifteen blackly discoloured shutters and three disused shops on the ground floor. An old haberdasher's with an ancient umbrella still propped in the window like the broken wings of some enormous old crow, a coal merchant ransacked and ruined and a greasy eating house filled with sticky dust and grime instead of sticky buns and dumplings. She'd wanted to turn and flee back through the courtyard over the puddles, stinking heaps of rubbish, nappies and clothes plastered with filth. But something had made her go in, go on, up and up the staircases, round and round the corridors until she felt quite faint. They were narrow and gloomy and lit by a sputtering oil lamp or smoking candle now and again, like a star at the end of one's destination; but more often than not she got herself lost and had to retrace her steps past doors that were shut, blackened at the lock from the dirt of hands, and doors that were open and offering glimpses into lives that were strange and bizarre to her. Lives that made her squirm, turn red, avert her eyes or quicken her step. A woman in spangly garters lolling lazily on a bed with a man in nothing but his shirt­
sleeves; a tall girl with a pail of water in front of a row of tow-headed children; a card game; a full scale beating; shoutings, coughs, mutterings, moans; a little old crone as yellow as wax, singing to herself and a couple of toy dolls; and the undertaker with a face like a Gruyère cheese, all dressed in black, grinning and tip-tapping at his wood. And then at last at the end of a seemingly endless corridor she'd found Anna. Anna sitting in her armchair and wringing her hands, her infinitely sad eyes fixed intently on the open doorway as though she'd been expecting her. As though she'd been expecting a strange nun to walk in carrying a hungry baby in her arms.

Bernadine smiled as the girl rocked and crooned little Aggie, putting her to the other breast with large and skilful hands. She was growing more attached to the baby each day – Bernadine could see that and it worried her a little. Sometimes when she sat cross-legged on the floor, almost invisible in the shadows, she tortured herself with the thought that she ought to just go, get up and leave the baby right here in this small bare, bleak room and large warm, comforting hands. But she knew she couldn't do it. She just couldn't. She'd made a promise to Agnes and to herself, and even if it had been the best alternative for the child she knew she still wouldn't have been able to do it. The emotions that had sprung to life since Agnes' death and little Aggie's birth were almost unstoppable. Like weeds that flourish when a stone is lifted from them. They choked everything in their path, every act of discipline she'd ever imposed upon herself, every rule, order, prayer, vow. She'd thought those emotions were long dead and forgotten but they'd simply been hibernating along with the snowdrops and primroses. Waiting for spring and the stone to be lifted from them. Waiting for time to start ticking again.

Tip tap, went the undertaker up above, his smallpox-ravaged face like a Gruyère cheese. Nobody can look at him, the young woman had told her, because his face reminds them of Gruyère cheese and it makes them feel too hungry. Bernadine strained her ears to the unfamiliar sounds of the building: the creaks, groans, mutterings and rumblings; the gurgling of little Aggie, the undertaker's tapping. One life ended; another just begun. In the street down below a drunkard was sobbing his heart out and the raised but muffled voice of the concierge was berating him soundly. And in the far distance she could hear a violin playing a quadrille for some revellers, clear and thin like the sound of a harmonica. She still couldn't get used to the noise, the chaos, the confusion. She'd skulked in the shadows of the convent too long, fearing the intoxication of full sunlight, steeling herself to take one step beyond its walls, its confines. Now she was out she felt smaller than an insect and more anonymous; cut off from the run of ordinary existence with its laughter, hope, tears… She'd seen the same look in the eyes of the poor or those who had suffered too much to find their way back to their place in the world. A little afraid, a little detached; wanting to join in but not knowing how. Or in the most extreme of cases they looked through you, past you, beyond you, liberated from the trials and tribulations, storms and vain delights. They simply awaited sleep. Awaited the tip tapping.

Anna's husband barged in then, brandishing a kitchen knife; and following closely after came a little blonde girl with her pinafore stuffed full of twigs and old leaves.

‘They felled the old oak on St Michel,' she chirruped in front of her mother. ‘The one we used to play hide and seek in. Papa dug out the roots and I took all the twigs I could see before anyone else could get them.'

Anna patted the girl on the head and exclaimed over the pinafore while her husband went to see what the nun had brought in exchange for his wife's precious milk. Bernadine thanked God that Brother Michael had provided her with a bunch of decent carrots and a few coins.

‘Ten francs,' the man said, biting into a coin, ‘would barely get you a cabbage these days.'

‘Papa, Papa,' cried the little girl, tugging at his shirt which he was now wearing inside out to save on the washing. ‘Shall I make the fire?'

‘Hush Lalie,' Anna scolded lazily and pleasantly. ‘Give your father a chance to catch his breath.'

The little girl went over to the fireplace and, kneeling down on the cold hearth, she emptied out her wooden treasure and began dividing it into piles of roots, twigs and leaves. It was obviously her usual job for she started singing a merry little tune as she did it and Bernadine's heart went out to her with her angelic face and her fierce little spirit.

‘Has Gruyère got another?' the man enquired, sitting himself down cross-legged on the bed and tilting his head up to the ceiling.

‘Three,' replied the young woman despairingly, tears springing into her eyes. ‘Old ma Bru, little Emily on staircase B and Tisha who takes…who took in the ironing.'

‘May they rest in peace,' said the man with a dull snigger, cleaning the blade of the kitchen knife with his handkerchief. ‘Our father and all that…'

‘Hush!' cried Anna with a fearful glance at Bernadine.

He held the knife up to the candlelight, twisting it this way and that then spitting on it to bring it up to a really good shine.

‘Shall I blaze it up, Papa?' Lalie said softly from the hearth, almost to herself. ‘Shall I blaze it up?'

‘Don't you think,' the woman asked then, holding little Aggie up for her husband to see, ‘that she has a look of Louis when she sleeps?'

The man's mouth tightened and he spat fiercely on the blade again without looking up. ‘No I don't. And stop mooning over her, woman.'

Bernadine decided it was time to go and she got up with great difficulty, her legs all pins and needly from sitting so long on the floor.

‘The nun wants to go,' the man announced rudely from the bed. ‘Give the baby up to her Anna or I shall have to start upping the price of your useless milk.'

The woman smiled at Bernadine, her eyes big and pleading. ‘Why don't you leave her here for the night. It will save you a journey,' she babbled. ‘And it can't be good for her this late and so cold. And I can do the night feeds – you know how she hates the bottle.'

‘Thank you,' said Bernadine firmly but with a rising sense of panic. ‘But I must take her.' And she almost grabbed Aggie from the woman's arms and placed her hurriedly in the cotton shoulder sling she had devised for carrying. She didn't dare look at the woman for she knew the pain she would see; and she felt a little ashamed of what she was doing. She was almost doing to her what others had done to herself. But she had no intention of giving up Aggie. No intention at all. ‘Here, take this,' she said guiltily, yanking the gold cross from her neck and holding it out as if it were some sort of compensation – though she knew only too well that it wasn't.

‘I… I couldn't,' cried the woman, almost shrinking back from the object in alarm. But her husband had already leapt from the bed and was padding over in his holey socks, his churlish face almost smiling. ‘That's more like the price of milk,' he muttered, taking the chain from Bernadine and holding it up to the light. ‘You're welcome anytime, Sister.'

Bernadine nodded curtly and almost ran for the door, desperate to leave the scene behind her. She felt sorry for the woman and the child and even the man but she didn't know what else to do about it. And she wondered if she could risk coming here again.

‘If I blaze it up really hard,' Lalie was asking sadly from the cold hearth, ‘will it warm little Louis up in heaven, Papa?'

Bernadine bowed her head and scuttled down the corridor, almost fearing the man might come after her, brandishing his knife; and not daring to look through the open doors to the rooms that were full and teeming with life – though she caught a glimpse of the woman in garters yawning lazily in bed and the man in shirtsleeves pouring coffee. She felt suddenly old and tired with an accumulated fatigue of years and years and she wished she might bump into old Gruyère so he could measure up a coffin for her that very instant. And then, feeling the comforting weight of Aggie in her shoulder sling, she got a grip of herself. She had a baby to care for now. What else mattered?

She sped down the stairs as quickly and safely as she could and out into the courtyard. The moon was veiled in cloud like an old woman in mourn­ing and the drains stank worse than ever in the stillness, black and profound. Clutching Aggie to her chest, she leapt over puddles which the lamp from the concierge lit with bright new stars. Strange and unfamiliar stars.