Xanthe
St Helier, April 2019
It’s the kind of spring morning that inspires poets, and Xanthe can almost taste its bright freshness on her tongue. The tide is ebbing, revealing an ever-widening stretch of wet sand. She is waiting for the sea to recede so she can walk across the causeway to Elizabeth Castle, but as soon as she catches sight of Bill McAllister striding along Royal Square, she abandons her plan and runs across the road to catch up with him.
From the broad smile on his freckled face, it seems he is pleased to see her.
‘How are you enjoying your stay?’ he asks. ‘I’ve wrapped up my investigation, so I’ll be heading back to Sussex tomorrow.’
It looks as if this will be her last chance to ask the question that has niggled at her ever since she read Hugh’s last entry.
‘Those human bones you told me about, the ones that were found at the back of that old convent, did you find out whose they were? Were they really children’s bones?’
‘I’m ready for a cup of tea. Why don’t we sit down over there and I’ll tell you all about it,’ he suggests, pointing to the Regal Café on the corner.
A few minutes later they are sitting inside a café whose charmless interior belies its name. The waitress, in a black apron streaked with flour, clatters the cups and saucers as she sets them down, and Xanthe waits until she has disappeared into the curtained kitchen before speaking.
‘I’ve been curious about it. It sounded like something from a horror movie.’ She doesn’t tell him that her interest in this place has been aroused by a true story she has read in a wartime journal.
He chuckles. ‘So you’ll be disappointed that those bones were the remains of monks who used to live there.’
‘Monks? Wasn’t this a convent?’
‘I’m no’ a history buff, but I believe it was originally a monastery and became a convent much later. There were horror stories about this place a couple of years ago. The tabloids had a field day speculating about murdered babies buried in secret and that’s why I was sent here to investigate. It made news all over the world. Did you no’ hear about it in Australia?’
She shakes her head. ‘All I know is that it was once a home for unmarried girls. I heard that as soon as the babies were born, the nuns gave them to couples who wanted to adopt.’
He pours milk into his tea and takes a few sips before turning his gaze on her without giving away his thoughts. In the movies, it’s the way detectives survey suspects to give them time to keep talking and incriminate themselves.
Putting down his cup, he leans forward. ‘Tell me, do you have a personal interest in this place?’
Xanthe pauses before replying. ‘I recently read a story about a girl who had a baby there in the 1920s, and had it adopted. Do you know anything about what was going on at the convent at that time?’
He looks thoughtful. ‘The convent was closed down years ago and the nuns were probably relocated. I imagine that by then it wasn’t regarded as such a disgrace for unmarried girls to keep their wee bairns. But there was gossip about abused orphans.’
‘Really? Do you know anything about that?’
He scrolls through messages on his mobile before checking his watch. She notices that it’s a solid old-fashioned one with a leather strap that she imagines once belonged to his father.
‘As you’re so interested in the place, would you like to see it? I could take you there now if you have time.’
As they drive towards L’Abbaye, Xanthe can hardly contain her excitement. She is about to see the place where Aoife had her baby, and she racks her brains to recall what Aoife had told Hugh about it. She remembered that the kindness of one of the nuns had inspired her to become a nurse.
They are driving north, past furrowed brown potato fields and miles of greenhouses where the sought-after Jersey tomatoes are cultivated. There are few cars on the road, and horseback riders in jodhpurs and helmets canter past on country lanes.
Closer to the coast, terns and kittiwakes screech as they fly around nests clinging to the rugged cliffs that plunge into foaming waters below.
Xanthe thinks back to the first time she saw this landscape and recalls her delight at the island’s idyllic beauty, but driving towards L’Abbaye she wonders if she is about to glimpse its darkness.
From time to time Bill glances at her with concern, as if there’s something on his mind. Finally he says, ‘L’Abbaye is a strange place. A sensitive lassie like you might find it unsettling.’
He turns into a narrow lane lined with straight, dark poplars that almost touch the sky and cast long shadows on the path. The lane ends in a cul-de-sac and suddenly they are confronted by a gloomy building of dark stone with a large cross above the entrance.
Xanthe gets out of the car and walks towards it. It’s just an abandoned building, she tells herself, but her heart is beating against her ribs and her legs are unsteady. She knows it’s irrational, but an air of menace seems to emanate from its walls. Even the clump of daffodils growing on the small patch of grass to the left of the entrance looks contrived, as though it has been planted there to conceal its true nature.
Bill has been studying her in silence. ‘They held an inquiry into this place back in the 1990s.’
‘An inquiry? Why?’
He sits on a wooden bench beside the path, brushes aside some cobwebs, and motions for her to join him. ‘I have to warn you, it’s no’ a pretty story,’ he begins.
For the next half hour, she sits motionless as he describes the chilling testimony given by people who had suffered physical and sexual abuse as children at the hands of the nuns who ran this institution. At times she wants to block her ears, but she forces herself to listen to accounts of the cruelty these children were subjected to.
‘So this was an orphanage as well as a home for unmarried mothers,’ she says slowly.
‘They used the pregnant girls as servants and cleaners for the orphanage, and they used the orphans as sex slaves. They knew the children wouldn’t report the abuse, and even if they did, no-one would believe them, so they indulged their sexual fantasies with impunity.’
He looks at her white face and stops talking. ‘This is upsetting you.’
She can’t speak. Can’t find the words to express her horror at the depths of human depravity masquerading as religious benevolence he has described.
‘I had no idea. Was anyone charged?’
‘By the time the victims gathered enough courage to come forward, several decades had passed, and most of the nuns they accused of abusing them were dead. Except for Sister Cecilia, who was in her nineties by then and claimed to have Alzheimer’s. After protracted negotiations between the church authorities and the lawyers, the church ended up paying some compensation to the victims, but of course it came too late for those who had committed suicide or died from drug overdoses as a result of the trauma they’d suffered in there. I think the worst part was that they didn’t live long enough to hear that the crimes had finally been acknowledged, so they never had the satisfaction of being validated.’
Xanthe’s mind has stalled on something he said several minutes before. ‘Did you say Sister Cecilia? Are you sure that was her name?’
Bill nods. ‘The newspaper reports often mentioned her name because there was a lot of pressure from the victims’ lawyers to question her, but she died a few months later. Why do you ask?’
‘I was reading about a girl who had her baby there back in the 1920s, and I think that’s the name of the nun she mentioned. But she said Sister Cecilia had been good to her. Do you think it’s possible for a person to be cruel to some people, but compassionate to others?’
He looks down at his large freckled hands, and she senses that he is scrolling through a lifetime of cases, weighing up the proposition that good and evil can dwell inside the same person.
Because that’s what she is really asking. Could Sister Cecilia, who showed Aoife so much compassion that she inspired her to become a nurse, be the same Sister Cecilia who abused the helpless orphans in her care? And if it is, what does it say about our human condition?
Xanthe gets up and walks slowly towards the entrance. She thinks of fifteen-year-old Aoife coming through these doors alone, and of the orphans who could not have imagined the misery that awaited them at the soft hands of the nuns who professed to be dedicated to their God.
Peering through a grimy window, she sees dusty timber floors, and imagines them being scrubbed and polished by girls with swollen bellies who were probably told they were doing penance for their carnal transgressions. As they mopped the soapy water swirling over the wooden floor, did they grieve at the thought of giving away the babies they would never recognise even when they passed them in the street?
Or were they impatient to be rid of this evidence of their shame? But as soon as they saw their babies for the first and last time, did it feel as if their own flesh was being ripped away? She is thinking of Aoife, who has now, for the first time, emerged from the shadows of Hugh’s journal and assumed a life of her own. How ironic that being sent to this institution to hide her shameful pregnancy should have resulted in devoting her life to looking after pregnant women and their babies. Life seemed to lead us along strange paths to discover our strengths.
Xanthe opens a small side gate and follows a dirt path that leads to what was once a garden but is now overgrown with spindly grasses, thorny plants and straggly weeds. At the far end, a large patch of ground has been cordoned off with yellow tape. Spades, small brushes and trowels are piled in one corner, and she supposes they have been left here by the forensic scientists and anthropologists who had been excavating the remains.
The sky has been a flawless enamelled blue but now darkens and a wind gusts in from the sea. Xanthe pushes back the hair that has blown over her face.
She shivers, but it’s not from the wind. It’s something in the air that weighs her down like a heavy, damp blanket. She read once that the landscape is affected by the crimes committed on it, that events can pollute the soil below and the air above. The author of that article had maintained that in Polish forests, where deep pits were filled with the bodies of men, women and children machine-gunned or buried alive and sprinkled with quicklime, the earth covering them heaved for days, and for decades afterwards locals swore that the screams of the victims still hovered in the air, and their souls haunted passers-by.
Looking back at the dark building, Xanthe can almost hear the voices of the orphans who had been silenced for so many years. For the first time in several weeks, she thinks about the mysterious presence she sensed in Hugh’s house after she moved in.
Lost in thought, she walks slowly back to the bench where Bill McAllister is staring into the distance. He sees her and starts, as if he too were immersed in a reverie.
‘You look as if you’ve seen a ghost,’ he says as she joins him. ‘Are you okay?’
She sinks down beside him and nods.
‘I’ve been thinking about your question, and I canna come up with a simple answer,’ he says. ‘As you can imagine, I’ve seen the worst of human nature in my time, but I have rarely met criminals who are totally evil. You’re young, and young people tend to see things as black or white, but in my experience, most of us are a mixture of both.’
He turns to face her. ‘I’m sure you have a reason for asking this, so I’m sorry I canna give you a satisfactory answer. I think of us as jigsaw puzzles with pieces missing or ill-matched. That’s what makes it so difficult to sum people up.’
They are heading back to St Helier when her phone rings. It’s Oliver.
‘Hey sis. You never told me Jersey was such a wild place. You must be raging from morning till night and don’t have a minute to call.’
Although her brother is joking, she feels a pang of guilt. It’s hard to explain that she has been caught up in the dramas of the past.
‘Are you okay, Xan?’ Oliver says. Then he adds, ‘And that lawyer of yours, is he still interesting?’
She is laughing now. ‘He’s more interesting than ever. You’d like him.’
‘If he makes you happy, I’ll like him. Anyway, you sound good. When are you coming home?’
‘I think I’ll stay an extra week, Ollie. I want to be here for their Liberation Day on 9 May.’
She makes the decision at just that moment, but as soon as she says it, she knows it will be the right time to leave.
‘I thought you were already liberated,’ he says.
She pulls a face. Oliver can never resist teasing her. ‘And you? Everything okay?’
‘Same old same old. Mum keeps asking if I have a girlfriend yet. I think she’s worried it’s going to be a boyfriend. Maybe I should go to Jersey and meet someone interesting.’
‘Maybe you should,’ she laughs, and promises to keep in touch.
‘My brother,’ she explains to Bill. ‘He worries about me.’
The spires of St Helier appear in the distance and Bill asks, ‘Have you ever read Hemingway?’
She shakes her head and wonders where this is heading.
‘You should read For Whom the Bell Tolls. It’s about the Spanish Civil War. That’s where the hero asks his lover if the earth moved for her.’
Xanthe suppresses a smile. The last thing she expected to be discussing with him was romantic fiction.
‘I was thinking about Hemingway when you asked me that question about human nature,’ he says. ‘Now there was a man you couldn’t possibly sum up in a sentence. Fighter, writer, womaniser, drunkard, hero, philosopher, political activist, student of human nature.’ Bill warms to his theme. ‘He had a way of expressing things that you canna forget. He once wrote that life breaks us all, but afterwards we become stronger in the broken places.’
‘Do you believe that?’ she asks.
‘I believe that over time life disappoints us in some ways but most of us find hope in the future. From what I’ve seen, some people stay broken but others heal.’
In the long silence that follows, Xanthe reflects on this. She was almost broken by her hospital experience, but she senses she is becoming stronger. And what about Aoife? She was broken by the trauma she suffered, but she used it to build a fulfilling new life. As for Hugh, she doesn’t yet know how he coped with his lover’s traumatic past.
Lost in her thoughts, she looks up and realises that they are already back in St Helier.
As she gets out of the car, Bill shakes her hand, looks into her eyes, and says, ‘I believe you are one of the people who grow stronger. Don’t forget to read Hemingway.’
That evening, nestled against Daniel on the lounge room sofa, contented to feel the warmth of his body, she describes her visit to L’Abbaye.
He fills their glasses, and the early evening light shining through the French windows makes the wine glow like liquid rubies.
Sipping the wine, Xanthe tells him about her surprising conversation with Bill Mc Allister about Hemingway.
Daniel chuckles. ‘Hemingway said Life’s a bitch and then you die.’
Xanthe bristles. ‘Well, I prefer what he said about making love.’
He folds his arms tightly around her so she can feel his heart beating against hers, and murmurs. ‘So let’s go upstairs and see if we can make the earth move.’