The White Garden (13 page)

On Sunday morning, 20 November, we went to Mass in the
Chapel of the Sovereign Pontiff at eight o’clock. When I heard
the words of the Gospel I was filled with new confidence for the
words were: ‘Do not be afraid, you, my little flock. Your father
has determined to give you His kingdom.’ I knew that God
had spoken to me, and that my petition would be heard and
granted.

The Holy Father sat on a dais dressed in a white cape and
cassock. He was grand and beautiful and shone with the light
of angels. One by one each pilgrim would advance and kneel
before him, kiss first his foot and then his hand, and receive his
blessing. At a touch from two of the Noble Guard each pilgrim
was to rise and move on, going out into another room. The
Vicar-General said in a loud voice to us that it was absolutely
forbidden to speak to the Holy Father. My heart was beating
madly. I looked at Celine and she whispered to me, ’Speak!’

Papa had already gone. I was next.

A moment later I was kneeling before the Pope. I kissed his
slipper and he offered me his hand. My eyes were wet with tears

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and I looked up at him and then I said, ‘Most Holy Father, I
have a great favour to ask.’

The Pope leant forward until his face almost touched mine,
and I felt his dark, searching eyes would pierce the depths of
my soul.

‘Most Holy Father, to mark your jubilee, allow me to enter
Carmel at fifteen.’

The Vicar-General of Bayeux looked very astonished and
angry and he said, ‘Most Holy Father, she is a child who wants
to be a Carmelite, and the authorities are now looking into the
matter.’

‘Very well, my child, do whatever they say.’

Clasping my hands and resting them on the Pope’s knee, I
made a final effort, ‘O most Holy Father, if you say yes, everybody will be only too willing.’

He looked at me steadily and said in a clear voice, stressing
every syllable, ‘Come, come, you will enter if God wills.’

I was about to speak again, but two Noble Guards urged me
to rise. They had to take me by the arms, and the Vicar-General
helped them to get me to my feet. As I was being taken away,
the Holy Father placed his fingers on my lips, and then he
raised them in a gesture of blessing me. He gazed after me as I
left his presence.

I felt a great peace deep within me, in spite of the tears I
shed. The rain poured down on all the hills of Rome as I wept.

The whole point of my journey to Rome had been destroyed.

The doctor and Therese and all the Violettas will go out on Sunday walks, and on visits to museums, concert halls, opera, the ballet. They will spend long holidays in London, Paris and Rome, and even New York and Acapulco. Their life together is
sensational
. In summer they walk on the pier, parade in the botanical gardens, are the toast of the town. In a velvet gown she’s the toast of the town. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily

— life is butter-dream.

For some time I had been accustomed to offer myself as a
plaything to Jesus. I told him to treat me as a cheap little ball
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which he could fling on the ground or kick or pierce — or leave
neglected in a corner. Or press to his heart if it gave him pleasure. I longed to amuse the little Jesus and to offer myself to his
childish whims. I saw in Rome that Jesus had taken me at my
word, for here he pierced his little toy with a sharp and terrible
point. He wanted to see what was inside me, and then, having
seen, he let his little toy drop, and he went off to sleep.

I am a toy, a porcelain doll, the plaything of my sisters. They curl my hair and tie it up with satin ribbons, and they dress me in soft creamy lace and frothy snowy tulle. I have a straw bonnet with blue flowers on it. They put me in the dolls’ pram and wheel me round the streets and tell me to pretend that I am dumb. I am supposed to be their poor little dumb sister called Daphne. The lady in the witch’s house round the corner looks into the pram and says ‘Hello Daphne’ to me and I am not allowed to speak and when we are out of sight my sisters dissolve into squeals of hysterical laughter. ‘She said it, she said it. Hello Daphne. Hello Daphne. We are the Gillis girls with our poor little deaf and dumb sister Daphne. Daffy-Down-Dilly the Downs Syndrome Girl.’ And they gave me a licorice allsort.

They trundled me round the street in the squeaky little pram

— Daphne the deaf and dumb Downs Syndrome sister — and they dressed me and undressed me. One day they took off my underpants and held me on a cold iron bar until I screamed, and then they comforted me. ‘What good girls they are,’ my grandmother said. ‘They won’t let that little one cry for even a minute.’ I was the plaything, but I loved them too, and when we went to the beach I ran on the sand with them and we swam in the sea. And I was pierced by a sharp and terrible point, slashed between the legs. Enter the doctor! Just like in a play. And the doctor enters. He enters the girl who lies drugged on the bed in the Sleeping Beauty Chamber. What a beauty! Look at this sleeping beauty. Will you just look!

The hotels we stayed in throughout the journey were all fit for a
king. But wealth and luxury do not bring happiness. I was shut
out of the one place I longed to be.

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Where your treasure is there will your heart be also.

My heart is in my mouth. On my sleeve. In my mouth on my sleeve. The dark purple piece of marble is under my tongue, as the apple of an eye in the shadow of my wing. I suck from the marble a marvellous syrup that stops my heart and fills my mind with light. This is my treasure, my heart, my dark purple girlfriend. Light-hearted, light-footed, light-fingered. Light as a feather she came and alighted on my tongue and I speak with the tongues of men and of angels. The tongues of angels lick me and flick up inside me and the lips of angels kiss me and caress me and suck me and I am licked by the tongues of men, particularly men.

Then, when we were in Assisi, I had an adventure. After we
had visited the places blessed by the holiness of St Francis
and St Clare, I found I had lost the buckle of my belt in the
monastery, and I had to go back for it. As a result, I was late for
the train, and I had to sit in the carriage with the Vicar-General
of Bayeux himself. I was embarrassed and so was he. I felt like a
fish out of water surrounded by all these important people. But
the Vicar-General was charming, and he spoke to me and said
he would do everything he could from now on to help me fulfil
my ambition and follow my vocation. I thanked him with all my
heart, and yet I wished silently that he had done more for me in
Rome.

With a lighter heart I went to Florence, and there in the
choir of the Carmelites I had a great privilege. The body of
St Magdalene of Pazzi lies there enclosed by a grille. All the
pilgrims wished to touch the tomb with their rosaries to obtain
the saint’s blessing, but only my hand was small enough to
pass through the bars. It took a long time for me to complete
this honourable task, but I was very proud to do so. I sensed
that God was demonstrating the significance of my littleness
in giving me this task. And once before, something similar had
happened. It was in Rome when we venerated some fragments
of the True Cross, two thorns and one of the sacred nails. When
the monk in charge of the relics came to restore them to the altar, I asked him if I could touch them. He gave me permission to
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do so, but I believe he thought I would be unable to reach them.

However I pushed my little finger into a hole in the reliquary
and I was just able to touch the precious nail stained by the
blood of Jesus. I always behaved towards Jesus like a child who
thinks she’s allowed to do anything for love, and who regards
her father’s treasures as her own.

I pushed my little finger in the hole.

And so our journey homeward continued. We returned to
France by a most beautiful way, running sometimes alongside
the ocean. I would gaze out at the great vast waters. We travelled through groves of oranges and olives and past avenues of
gracious palm trees.

At last we returned to Lisieux, to the little flowers beside the
paths at Les Buissonnets, to father’s faithful clocks ticking their
steady heartbeats in the parlour and the hall.

I wrote a letter to the Bishop reminding him of his promise
to tell me his decision. Christmas came and went and I still
had not heard from him. Snow, my beloved snow, lay in a deep
white sheet over the sad world. Then a letter came from Mother
Marie of Gonzaga at the convent to say that she had received
the Bishop’s permission to admit me, but that I should wait
until Easter.

With a light heart I went to Florence where I climbed to the roof of the marzipan cathedral and heard the church bells and felt the vibrations and the ding-dong bell of time. Ripe for love I loved the open sky above me, the blushing blue of the arching heavens. But the truth is, I have never been to Florence except in my dreams, my daydreams and my wandering wishes. I would fly with the wings of an angel, hand in hand, wing in glove — with Violetta, my Italian girl. I would go to Tuscany, to any part of Italy you can think of. I walked with Violetta (and this is the truth) — we were wearing our school pinafores with the angels’ wings at the back — hand in hand softly up the path to my grandmother’s house, for we had been summoned. Now my grandmother’s name is Florence, and she is known for her

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piety and brutality. Children, in her presence, are not heard, neither are they seen. She is far from deaf and blind, since she has the ears of a bat and the eyes of a soaring eagle. But with Violetta I arrived at my grandmother’s dark front door and together we pulled the brass knob and together we heard the bell go tinkle tinkle tinkle high up in the hallway. And before any time at all had passed — or time stood still, or our hearts stood still in our mouths — my grandmother stood in the open doorway and without seeing us or hearing us she swept us both inside to the music room and showed us to her visitors — a priest and a coven of well-dressed women drinking tea — and we were described as angels, given a plate of cakes and sent into the garden never to be seen or heard again. ‘Behave yourselves,’

my grandmother said as she shut us out. Much later, when I was older and alone, I stole from my grandmother’s sewing machine the
Imitation
that sits in the palm of my hand, waiting for an eagle to swoop.

Somebody, that day at Florence’s house, somebody broke the mechanism of the mermaid wall-clock. Wrecked it so that it could not be fixed. The clock became an object, a reminder of the past, a statement of a moment when time stood still forever.

Since Violetta and I were in the garden busy with a plate of cakes, we were assumed to be innocent, although suspicion forever cast its wondering shadow across us, wrinkled its brow and glanced sideways and long at us. Had we seen anybody, heard anything. Foolish questions. We were, of course, guilty.

We wore our innocence with a touching sadness. The dear old clock was broken. Oh what a pity.

When the afternoon tea in the music room was progressing with its Lapsang Souchong and a little Schubert, we tiptoed in the side door and Violetta stood on the chair beneath the clock. She looked closely at the cherubs painted on the face, and slowly ran her fingers over the two wooden mermaids, their faces resembling washerwomen, that decorated the sides of the clock. Ticking its steady little heartbeats, the mermaid clock faced Violetta. ‘It’s been in our family for centuries,’ I said. Then Violetta said she had always wanted to make time go backwards, and her fingers traced a path to the centre of
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the clockface, and I watched as she pushed the minute hand anticlockwise. Round and round it went, slowly at first, then faster, and when it seemed to be whirling I looked away and watched Violetta in the mirror on the opposite wall. Her image moved the hand of the clock forward. I could see the great blue and white wings on the straps at the back of her pinafore, the huge bow at her waist a crisp and open butterfly. Butterflies are deaf. Part angel, part insect, part Italian, the back of Violetta was a sweet image of concentration as she twirled the hand on the mermaid clock — backwards or forwards or backwards. Round and round and round it went, the slim brass hand of the clock, and I looked back at Violetta’s own true face and it was smiling and I was staring and at last there was a tiny twang — it was almost imperceptible — and a faint, faint grinding sound. And that was all.