The Vows of Silence (14 page)

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.

The door of the sewing room was open and an electric machine whirred. From an office came the soft tap of fingers on a keyboard. Jane’s rubber-soled driving shoes squeaked on the tiles as they rounded the corner, past the chapel, past the double doors to the refectory, round a second corner beside a tall clear window flooding sunlight through onto a silver vase of lemon-coloured chrysanthemums before a wooden cross.

When Jane had begun to doubt if the religious life was for her, Sister Catherine had listened, made an occasional remark, but never pressured her to decide either way or to rush her decision.

“You are welcome to stay here as long as you need to,” she had said. “Give it time. No one is going to ask you to leave until you are ready to go. Or to stay.”

Jane had felt better at once. The abbey was a different place from the one she had expected and thought that she wanted. Life was routine and, in many senses, dull routine. She had loved the silence and the stillness, the measured, calm way in which the women went
about their daily business. But she had missed the stimulation and challenges of the outside world. Not the buzz, not the rush, but the novelty of every day. Here, novelty was almost entirely absent. That was part of the point and she was surprised how much she missed it.

The prayer life was not a problem to her, even though she found it easier to say her own office than to take part in the communal services, easier to spend time praying alone in the chapel of her room. Her room. She had laughed at herself. Her room had been one of the major problems—and how ridiculous that sounded. But it was true.

Her room was more like the uninteresting and functional one in a B & B than a monastic cell. It was sparsely furnished but not uncomfortable. It looked over the side garden. It was dull and it had never felt hers and never had any atmosphere whatsoever. A single bed with a pale blue cover, a light wood wardrobe, 1930s style, a small desk with a dark wood chair—and somehow the clash irritated her; a plain dark wood dressing table without a mirror. An armchair upholstered in beige moquette of the sort common in old people’s homes. An anglepoise lamp which kept falling apart. A crucifix on the desk. A reproduction of a Renaissance painting of
The Banishment from Eden
on the wall. A miasma of depression had fallen on her when she had first entered the room and had never left but fallen again and again every time she returned to it. A hermit’s cell carved out of a rock or one with whitewashed stone walls in a medieval monastery, with its
own strip of garden, a high wall round it, a straw mattress on the floor. Had these been what she had craved? She had faced her own false and laughable expectations almost with embarrassment.

On the day before her departure, she had shared a simple supper on a table by the window, organised by the abbess, who believed firmly in one-to-one encounters and conversations over food and drink as the way to sort out many problems and difficulties within her community. It had been pleasant and the talk had roved over a wide variety of topics—world affairs and politics, the plight of the Third World, the place of the monastic life in modern society, education, the role of women in the Church. The abbess was not a priest. None of the nuns was ordained, and Jane had been touched by the respect for her status shown by the older and more senior woman.

When coffee had been brought by the sister in attendance, they had moved to the pair of armchairs set by the open window overlooking the park and Jane had said, “I don’t belong here. I didn’t belong at home. I didn’t belong in Lafferton. I’m afraid I will never belong anywhere, Sister.”

“‘Our hearts are restless till they find their rest in Thee.’ That means something to you, Jane, unless I have got you very wrong. You’ve not found what you are looking for here but the reasons have nothing to do with lack of faith or loss of it indeed.”

“No. Being here has confirmed my faith. I’m sure of that if I’m sure of nothing else.”

“I’m glad. But inner tranquillity and assurance are so valuable that if you have faith, as you do, finding your real place in life isn’t going to be difficult.”

“No?”

“No. It may be time-consuming. You may go in several different directions—but those will all add to your experience. If I know anything, I know nothing is wasted. Not ultimately.”

“Yes. But what direction now?”

“When you came here, one of the things you mentioned was the desire to go back to some sort of academic work. I know you spent a lot of time in the library here. Has that been helpful?”

“Oh, yes. I loved it.”

As well as reading and studying and thinking on her own there, she had been put to work in the library, and her time spent there was among the best she had known during her stay. Her other work had been in the laundry, which she had also rather enjoyed, and the sewing room which she had hated with all the passion of her teenage years in needlework lessons.

Now, the smiling abbess got up from the desk and came towards her, both hands outstretched to take Jane’s.

“Jane, what a pleasure! How very good to see you.”

“It’s good to be back.”

She meant it. It was good to know that this place was always here. She knew that she would always be able to come back if she needed a place of prayer and quietness, even though she also knew, as she had
walked in through the door again, that she would never want to stay.

“Do you feel like a walk, Jane? I could do with stretching my legs and a change of scene.”

They made their way towards one of the iron benches. The deer were further off now, grazing in their herd towards the sloping banks of the river, a section of which wound through the park. The gnats jazzed in the air.

“Unseasonable,” Sister Catherine said, “but welcome. It’s a long winter.”

Jane glanced at her. She was a handsome woman, probably in her fifties, and she had spoken with the faintest touch of—melancholy? Wistfulness? How difficult would it be if you doubted your vocation or even your faith, or were simply weary of convent life, and yet were head of your community? The temptation to do nothing, stay quiet, not admit any of it even to yourself, to live out your life in a not-unhappy routine, would be considerable.

Doubt was not a subject Jane could raise with the abbess.

“So Jane—you look very well and you have a more settled air. From our point of view I’m sorry to say it because we so wanted you to come to us—but I’m very glad you obviously made the right decision. In fact, I never doubted it, you know.”

“You mean you didn’t think I’d be a success here?”

“Oh, what is “success”? No, I simply mean I always knew it wasn’t right for you.”

They sat in silence for some time, a companionable silence. The sun slanted through the autumn trees and the deer wandered towards them. Jane was in no hurry. She was driving straight from here to Cambridge, a journey of a little over an hour and she had no appointments for the rest of the day, just her own work. She had a job as an assistant chaplain at a hospital in Cambridge, another as a locum chaplain at St Stephen Martyr’s College, filling in for someone who had gone to do missionary work. She was also working on a PhD in medieval monasticism. The abbess had roared with laughter when she had been told. “That’ll suit you far better, Jane,” she had said. “You’ll enjoy the privations of twelfth-century northern England, when monasteries were really monasteries!” Ruefully, Jane had agreed.

The abbess got up. “I must get on,” she said, “but do go and see the others, everyone will be so pleased, and Sister Thomas will have the coffee pot on.”

But on the way into the house, they met Sister Monica, bustling out of her office, spectacles swinging from the cord round her neck.

“My dear Jane, what an extraordinary thing. Ten minutes ago I took a call asking for your whereabouts and I was just wondering if we had a current address when I looked up and there you were. I couldn’t believe my eyes!”