But still nothing happened. Nothing changed. No one came and his mother did not get up.

Thirty

Jane Fitzroy drove slowly up the long drive between the rows of swaying poplars whose leaves lay in soft golden heaps on the grass. The convent buildings had not yet come into view. There were just the mown fields on either side, and the trees of the park. The trees, of course, had grown and been cut down and others planted and matured, but in the same places, so that the parkland could not have changed much since the eighteenth century when it was laid out. The main house and a hundred or so acres had been bestowed on the abbey fifty years later and was theirs in perpetuity. Which in itself was a worry, Jane had found out within a short time of arriving there. Once there had been 120 nuns in the community. Even thirty years ago there had been over seventy. Now there were twenty-two and more than half of them well into their eighties. New postulants arrived occasionally and a few made their vows and remained. But, in ten years, there would not be enough nuns to justify the upkeep of the house and grounds. There probably were not enough now but they had a generous benefactor. When she died, no one knew what would happen to the abbey or the nuns.

Jane stopped the car and got out and the amazing silence washed over her. There was a ripple of sound from the breeze in the poplar branches and a slight rustle as it shifted the piles of leaves, but otherwise, nothing. Silence. The most astonishing, palpable silence she had ever known. It filled her with a sense of calm now, as it had done every day of the six months she had spent here. The silence had become part of her for that time, had lodged inside her, and something of it had remained for her to draw on even after she had left. Now, as she breathed it in and let it fill her again, she felt that she was topping up her inner store, to see her through the next few months. If it had only been a question of simply living with this silence, she would be here still.

It was ten past eleven. The abbey would be at work. She got back in her car, drove up to the side of the building, parked and wandered back into the grounds. No one was about. Deer grazed in the distance. A squirrel raced up a tree trunk and peered down at her. Jane walked on, to the oak with the bench around its base where she had sat so many times, reading, thinking, saying the office. And struggling with herself. Now it felt pleasant to sit here free of the struggle, decision made. It had been painful and messy but she knew now that however happy she was to be back as a visitor she had been right to leave.

Life had been a confusion of plans made and unmade, sadness and above all restlessness—for over two years, she realised now. It had begun when she’d gone to Lafferton, which had turned out to be the wrong place for her in some senses, the right in others. But in Lafferton things had been frightening and unsettled. She had been naïve, she had antagonised some people, not given others a chance. Even before she had been ordained as a priest she was fascinated by the monastic ideal, had read extensively about it in the past and present and some part of her longed for the cloister. She had come to the abbey in an emotionally vulnerable and fragmented state and her time here had given her healing and a measure of peace. It had restored her to herself, put many things into perspective and, in a strange way, helped her to finish whatever growing up she had had to do. She had been content and the time had been satisfying and absorbing. But from the first week, although she had clung to her dreams, and known that she was gaining a great deal from this place and the people in it, she had also known that the life was not for her. Not permanently. The reality, she saw now, was not so much too rarefied as too mundane, and what had unsettled her most had been the claustrophobia of living with a small group of other women in confined circumstances. Because the convent routine was utterly confining, in spite of the house being huge and the park and gardens being free and available, Jane had missed the outside world. She realised she had romanticised monasticism and mistaken her own capacity to live it. The truth had come as a shock and a lesson in humility. She had been ashamed and crestfallen, but the other nuns had treated her with admirable and exceptional kindness and common sense. “You’re not the first and you won’t be the last,” the abbess had said. Sister Catherine was a realist.

Jane got up and wandered back and entered the paddock where the chickens were pecking about the grass around their wooden coops. There was the sound of a machine. She went through the gate. The last runner beans had been harvested. One of the sisters, wearing boots and ear-muffs, habit carefully tucked up, was going over a large strip of ground with a rotavator. Jane watched until she reached the far end, turned expertly and came towards her, glanced up and then began to wave madly. The nun stopped the machine. There was a rich smell of freshly dug soil.

“Jane! I’d have known that hair anywhere! How lovely to see you. Have you come to stay? Have you come for lunch?” Sister Thomas opened her arms and wrapped Jane in a warm hug, then held her at arm’s length, smiling. “You look so well. The world suits you. You’d grown peaky in here, you know, and look at you now. No one told me you were coming. Look, when you left I was sowing and now we’ve harvested almost everything and I’m turning the ground for the autumn broad beans and the sprouts are well on. Come on up to the house, does the abbess know you’re here, she’ll be thrilled, everyone will be pleased to see you and looking so well, the world suits you, did I say that? Yes, well it’s true and we miss you but I think it was for the best, looking at you now, Jane, you were needed elsewhere. Tell me now, where are you, what have you been up to?”

Sister Thomas, kind-hearted and enthusiastic, had always chattered nineteen to the dozen during the periods when they were not in silence, as if everything was pent up in her for hours and came pouring out when the stopper was removed. Others spoke little at any time, as if they had forgotten how to, had lost words, so locked were they in their world of silence and contemplation.

All nuns were allowed to speak freely to visitors at any time. Hospitality and making guests feel at ease came first. It was a civilised rule. A lot of what was here at the abbey Jane had found far more civilised than she had expected. It was one of the things she missed, this and the habitual, mutual courtesy and consideration. Here, people automatically put others first. It was a way of life. The contrast with the outside world was brutal. Most of the nuns, who had not been beyond the abbey walls since their first admittance, would not survive outside. The abbess went out. She knew exactly what the world was like and was remark ably unfazed by it. But then, the abbess was an exceptional woman.

They went towards the back door where Sister Thomas shed her boots, and then on into the house. “You won’t mind coming this way, Jane, I know, otherwise we have to go all the way round, and look, we’ve mended that window there at last and this corridor has been painted freshly, you can probably still smell it.”

They went from the domestic regions down the newly painted corridor and then they were in the more formal part of the abbey. The smell of the paint was submerged in the smell that struck Jane again as her most vivid memory of the place—that and the abbey sounds, of bells and of footsteps pattering along corridors in sequence as the nuns went swiftly and silently to chapel.

The smell was the smell of boarding school as well as convent—floor polish with undernotes of cooking.