7

Soon it was quite natural to see Mr Dean in the Convent; soon he began to whistle and walk about in the house with his old hat on his head instead of in his hand, and it seemed no more strange than seeing the other workmen. There was one of them astride the sill in Sister Clodagh’s office as she worked; it had warped and he was planing it so that the window would shut; and there had been another moving a ladder from room to room for days, mending the ceiling, they were apt to forget about him perched up over their heads. Mr Dean was always there, showing them how to fit a bolt or measure a door or conferring with Pin Fong. He would flatten himself in a doorway to let a Sister pass, still holding the rule against it, shutting one eye to see if it were straight, never glancing at her; or kneel on the floor, testing the floor boards as their skirts swished by, without turning his head.

He came everywhere; into the office to get Sister Clodagh’s signature for a receipt, into the dispensary to mend a tap that Pin Fong did not understand; to the Lace School to explain to the carpenter about the rat that had died under the corner boards, into the school-room to ask if the blackboard were standing more steadily now. The sound of his whistle came from all quarters of the house and, quite often, the sound of his curses; and he would pull his shirt outside his shorts as he worked and leave it hanging there under his disreputable checked coat.

Now they all talked to him naturally, except Sister Ruth, whom he avoided, and Sister Honey who fluttered; she was no more capable of speaking naturally to a man than she was capable of beating Joseph. He knew it and teased her gently, making her blush and flutter more than ever.

It was miraculous how things improved. Pin Fong, the carpenter, was a tall sad Chinese; in his blue coat he looked like a drooping cornflower with a seeded yellow centre; he never seemed to speak, but his men knew what they had to do and worked quickly and well.

The back rooms were mended and divided into cubicles for the Sisters’ sleeping quarters, and the door leading to that part of the house was padded with baize to shut out the rest of it; a wall was knocked down between two small rooms to make a large Refectory and the salon was left as a reception room. They put the figure of the Sacred Heart there, where Mr Dean had made a wooden niche for it and painted it in gold. The schools were rising from the ruins on the west lawn and already the statues of St Elizabeth, St Catherine, St Teresa and St Helen were arranged along the corridor, while St Faith herself was opposite the porch.

‘There she is,’ said Mr Dean, who had lifted her into place for them. ‘She’s your patron or name saint or whatever you call her, isn’t she? Now the old Palace is a proper Convent.’

But it was not. Even with the alterations it was different from any Convent they had known.

Theirs was an Anglo-Catholic Order that had its headquarters at Canstead in Sussex. Many of them had been pupils at the school and had gone back there as postulants, Sister Clodagh and Sister Briony among them. They all knew the story of how Sister Clodagh had come there, all the way from Ireland as a very little girl, because her mother had been a pupil there before her.

The Order had spread to the East and sent a stream of Sisters to Egypt and Persia and India and China. In India Sister Clodagh had found the same brick buildings, the same green walls and echoing stone stairs; the same figures of saints in coloured plaster, the same close warm Convent smell, mixed with incense and wax polish. The reception room floor had even been laid in wood to match the parquet at home and the chapel had been copied exactly from the chapel at Canstead. The corridors were crowded with girls in neat blouses, the white figures of the Sisters were everywhere, and there was always a subdued busy bustle or else deliberate meditative silence.

Here the house was never still, it strained and spoke in the wind that broke all privacy. There was no such thing as privacy at Mopu, every sound was carried through the house and the rooms were built of windows opening on the endless corridors where the servants and workmen came walking by; and yet sometimes there was that sense of emptiness that was almost frightening, as if the house had swallowed everyone; you could walk in it for minutes and meet nobody. It was as if it had swallowed them up, they and the restraints they had brought to it; they were gone under the old familiarity, their saints tossed down like beads, the bell on its thread of sound snapped off.

The house would not conform; look at the way they tried to say St Faith’s and always said Mopu. The flimsy walls did not shut out the world but made a sounding box for it; through every crack the smell of the world crept in, the smell of rain and sun and earth and the deodar trees and a wind strangely scented with tea. Here the bell did not command, it sounded doubtful against the gulf; the wind took the notes away and yet it brought the sound of the bells at Goontu very strongly; pagan temple bells. And everywhere in front of them was that far horizon and the eagles in the gulf below the snows. ‘I think you can see too far,’ said Sister Philippa. ‘I look across there, and then I can’t see the potato I’m planting and it doesn’t seem to matter whether I plant it or not.’

Then there were the people, the servants and the patients and the children; they were disconcertingly outspoken and familiar; they had no manners at all, because their manners were such a part of them that they ceased to be manners. Mr Dean was like that, he was so like these people that he was almost of them; he had ‘gone native’ in a way that Father Roberts had not meant. ‘And not a bad way either,’ thought Sister Clodagh and caught herself up quickly.

At any rate, she told herself, the difference seemed to be stimulating. All the Sisters were living and working well, extraordinarily well; even Sister Ruth was giving no trouble, though sometimes she was pale and silent and had a way of staring resentfully with those green eyes that had such a peculiar glitter. There was fierce competition in the schools; since the first day Sister Honey longed to teach the children, and she would have left her threads and patterns and delicate weaving in a moment if Sister Ruth had given her the chance.

Sister Briony never had a second to spare, and her thoughts were all of the new dispensary that Mr Dean was building for her with such sense and economy; and Sister Philippa was beginning to take a real interest in the garden and had asked if she might borrow the book that Mr Dean said he would lend her on Himalayan plants.

But Sister Clodagh found it difficult to work herself. That first day in Mr Dean’s bungalow and in the orchard she had been reminded of Ireland – and of Con. Not reminded, there was nothing to remind her, but they were back again, she had to face that. She had started her old dreams and they were worse for all the years between, when she had not felt a tremor or a touch. She was afraid that she was going to be drawn into it again, but so far she had kept it down, except for the dreams. She tried not to worry, but to let herself drift on the days and be busy with all the work there was to be done.

She told Pin Fong that she wanted work to stop on Sundays; he smiled politely and came on Sunday with his men.

‘Why have you come, Mr Pin? It’s Sunday.’

‘I work all same, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday.’

‘But I don’t want you to.’

‘I want to. Gleat much work to be done.’

On Sundays now the Convent was not quiet, there was incessant tapping and hammering and sawing, and the noise of trowels spreading concrete and the comings and goings of ponies. There were the voices of the men and the voice of Mr Dean; his voice penetrated even to the chapel which was furthest away. Sister Clodagh had to ask him to come at more convenient times.

‘I come when there’s something that needs me,’ he said. ‘I’m a busy man, Sister Clodagh, and I can’t hang about waiting for this or that reason. Sunday is the day when I’m able to give most time to the work as the factory’s closed. Let’s get on and finish it and then you needn’t be bothered with us any more.’

‘You know it isn’t that. Sunday with us is a day of quiet,’ she said. ‘And we find it disturbing to hear you when we’re in chapel.’

‘In chapel you oughtn’t to hear me,’ he said gravely. ‘If you were truly in prayer nothing could disturb you.’

She stared at him in amazement and then left him and went back into the empty chapel.

How dared he answer her like that? She knelt staring at the mountain framed in the window. How dared he? She was too angry to pray and sat down with her hands in her lap trying to control herself. As she sat there her anger seemed to leave her tired and irritated. She looked at the narrow room; it had seemed peaceful, almost pretty, with its window hung with creepers, its shining benches and the altar bright with cosmos flowers; now she found herself thinking that if the mountain had a voice, it would be like Mr Dean’s, magnified a thousand times, disturbing the world instead of one small whitewashed room, and she found herself wishing that it could. She liked it, she gloried in it; she had lived too long with the delicate and small and petty.

Then she knelt down and pressed her fingers into her eyes, and her hands into the back of the bench in front of her and her knees into the floor. How could the years she had given to God be small and petty? She tried to think how, to Him, the mountain was as infinitesimal as the sparrows; instead she thought how the eagles, filled with His life, were beaten down before it.

It seemed to press through the window and fill her eyes with startling clearness like a railway poster, white painted with blue on a blue sky. She got up to look for Sister Briony.

‘We must fit curtains to the chapel window,’ she said. ‘The light is far too bright.’