9

‘You've come at the right time,’ says Sister Petra Clare. ‘I've just put the kettle on.’

A place is laid on the plain deal table, with a water jug and a glass. Sister lives frugally. We have coffee and she offers dry bread from a bowl.

Her face is pale, the skin translucent and a little waxy like alabaster, which suggests too much time spent indoors. A web of tiny wrinkles fans from the corners of her eyes when she smiles. A girlish smile. She wears a light blue top over a white smock. Under the skirts, I notice thick grey socks and trainers.

Propped against the wall is a large icon of the virgin and child against a background of gold lustre. Bare toes peep from under her purple robe and her hands are open as though offering the child for adoration as he floats free before her breast. The Madonna's nose is long and thin, with a bump in it. (I think of the poet Edith Sitwell, pictured in the biography I'm reading.) Under the straight line of her eyebrows, her eyes are brown.

Brown eyes? Do we know this? Is it biblical?

‘Well,’ says Sister, ‘brown eyes seem to be right for the Middle East. But let's be honest, brown or blue, who knows?’

She invites me to see her workroom. This is a privilege since it's in the quarters reserved for female retreat and normally out of bounds to men.

On a bench, laid out like an alchemist's stall, is her collection of pigments in bottles and boxes containing brightly coloured powders, some ground from rock or clay, others reduced from metals and many scarce and difficult to get – in some cases because of health and safety regulations. One box contains a powder of viridian brightness called Moscow green, precious because it's no longer to be had.

Next door is her work in progress – a series of panels commissioned to celebrate the return of the Carmelite order to Britain after many years in exile. Under a golden sky, a mitred ecclesiastical figure – the patriarch of Jerusalem – sits on a throne with a tip of crimson cushion peeping from under his bottom. He's presenting a scroll to the leader of the newly founded order of Carmelite monks who kneels at his feet.

The patriarch wears a white gown embroidered with pale blue crosses, while the Carmelite is more humbly dressed in a woolly garment hooped bee-like in bands of white and brown. This two-tone fashion, says Sister, caused a stir. The Carmelites were mocked as the ‘pied’ brotherhood – pied as in magpies and other birds of variegated plumage – as a result of which they changed into habits in a less flamboyant style. Also in the frame is the prophet Elijah, by virtue of the time he spent as a hermit on Mount Carmel, and a number of brothers busy at various tasks. Some chop logs for firewood, one carries freshly baked loaves from the oven, another washes his pied habit in a tub and yet another scans an illustrated text. A group of monks appears to be just gossiping, passing the time of day.

Sister explains that the Carmelites owe their origin to the decision of certain crusading knights to opt out of their mission to kill infidels, seeking salvation instead on Mount Carmel, Elijah's former retreat in the Holy Land. ‘I think of them as the first conscientious objectors,’ she says. ‘I'm not sure whether it was the third or fourth crusade. The third was Richard the Lionheart. The fourth was the sack of Constantinople – if so, they were well out of it.’

Every year Byzantium renews itself in Marydale, a little. Here Sister Petra Clare runs a class in icon making (‘You don't call it painting,’ she explains. ‘Technically, you write an icon.’)

She extends an invitation: ‘Come and see us.’ So I shall.