Not quite. But her face was lovely.
We filed out of the school hall, each one of us dropping a curtsey to Mother Katherine as we passed the dais.
“Fancy that!” I whispered to my friend Diana. It seemed a terrible fate.
“More fool her!” Diana replied. “I can’t think of anything worse, can you?”
I shook my head.
“And never getting married!” Diana sounded aghast. “Imagine—actually choosing not to get married and not to have children. I’m going to get married as soon as I leave this dump!” She looked contemptuously at the cream walls of the corridor, punctuated here and there with bulletin boards. “And I’m going to have masses of children—seven at least. Aren’t you?”
I nodded. I had always assumed that I’d get married. After all, everybody did. But suddenly getting married seemed rather less attractive. It was so predictable. We entered the classroom and began scrabbling in our desks for our French textbooks.
“Still,” Diana went on, “I don’t suppose Miss Jackson would ever have gotten married, do you? She was pretty ugly, really. And old.”
“No,” I agreed with Diana, “I don’t suppose anyone would have married her.”
“Well, then, it’s probably all for the best. Anything’s better than being an old maid. I’d die if I wasn’t married before I was twenty. It’d be so embarrassing!”
During the morning I forgot about Miss Jackson. During the lunch hour, however, I noticed a photograph on the bulletin board that hadn’t been there that morning. It was, I realized with a shock, Miss Jackson. I looked closely at it. She was wearing a long black dress, a little cape, and a short, floppy white veil. Her hair was drawn back tightly from her face and she looked out at the camera with an expression of—what was it?—yes, surprise. Even Diana was impressed.
“I wonder what it’s like,” she muttered. “Golly! Doesn’t she look ghastly!”
We both involuntarily looked down the corridor to the baize door that separated the school from the enclosure where the nuns ate, slept, and prayed. We were never allowed to go through that door.
“She’ll know now what they do all the time,” I said, staring at the photograph, fascinated.
I remained at the bulletin board, studying Miss Jackson’s expression. What had she seen to make her look so surprised? It was an intriguing thought. I looked at her face. She seemed so ordinary. But, really, I thought, she couldn’t have been ordinary at all.
“You seem very interested in that photograph, Karen.” I spun on my heel and found myself looking up at Mother Katherine. I was in awe of her. She swept round the school, remote in her exalted position. But when you had a chance to talk to her on her own, it was easy. She was smiling now, looking down at me questioningly.
“Yes, Mother,” I said feebly. It was that kind of obvious statement that grown-ups often made, expecting you to reply significantly. I could never think how to go on.
“What does it make you think?”
“Well, Mother, why she did it! I just can’t think why anyone would want to be a nun!”
“Why not?”
“Well, it must be terrible!” I said and then blushed. That wasn’t very polite of me. “I’m sorry,” I said hastily, “I don’t mean to be rude, but …”
“What seems to you to be the hardest thing about it?”
I thought. There were so many horrors. But then I thought of the happiest moments of my life—the holidays. The first day of the holidays filled me with a pleasure that almost hurt.
“Well, never being able to do what you want to do. I’d hate not to have some time to myself when I’m free to do whatever I want. You know, sleep late, read—and be able to go on reading all day if I want to!”
“You mean freedom?” Mother Katherine said. She smiled. “But no one is really free much of the time, Karen. Think of your mother, any mother of a family. She’s not really free to do what she wants either.”
I was silenced. It was absolutely true. I thought of my mother endlessly running from chore to chore—shopping, cleaning, cooking, mending, washing, ironing.
“But my mother has fun sometimes,” I said. “A nun can’t really enjoy herself, can she? It must be like Lent all the year round.”
Mother Katherine laughed. “Well,” she said, “a nun doesn’t enjoy herself in quite the same way as people in the world do. Of course not. But that doesn’t mean she isn’t happy.”
“Happy?” I wrinkled my nose.
“Have you ever seen an unhappy nun?”
Again I was silent. No. I thought of the nuns’ smiling faces, unlined and peaceful. I looked up at Mother Katherine. Her eyes were smiling at me and behind the smile there was a peace and a stability. When she was talking to me, she wasn’t like other grown-ups I knew. Their minds weren’t ever with me one hundred per cent. The anxious lines around their mouths, the flickering moments of worry in their eyes showed that their minds were teeming with a dozen preoccupations. But Mother Katherine’s mind was uncluttered.
“No, you all seem happy enough,” I said grudgingly.
“Why do you say it like that?”
“Well, Mother, I can’t really imagine how God can make you happy. Really happy, that is. I know He ought to, but it’s very difficult to believe.”
“Why?” Mother Katherine spoke quietly as though she were thinking over something precious and secret. Nuns often did that, I noticed. They smiled with amusement when you talked to them about God as though they knew something nice that you didn’t.
“Well, it’s hard sometimes to believe that God is a real person.”
“Of course He is,” she laughed.
“But what about other people!” I said, rather dismayed. “Don’t you ever get lonely? Or fed up with having a hard life? You know, not going to the theatre or watching television.”
She gave me a long look. “When you’re in love the things you do with the person you love are always exciting and wonderful—even when they’re difficult.”
“And are you in love with God?” I said, amazed. “Love” was a fairly abstract idea for me, but I knew what being “in love” was. It made the heroines in films and plays rush about, sing, do incredibly difficult dances, surmount all kinds of difficulties. “Are you in love?” I asked again.
Mother Katherine nodded. “Yes,” she said very quietly. “There’s the bell! You’d better hurry along to class.” She turned on her heel and started off down the corridor. She never really walked anywhere, I realized; she seemed to swoop and float—not so difficult from those film stars after all, perhaps. As she reached the foot of the stairs leading to her room she turned round.
“Come and talk to me about this again, won’t you, Karen?”
I was reminded sharply of Miss Jackson a few weeks later on my grandfather’s birthday. It was 20 October 1956, a cold autumn day, and the family, gathered together for a celebration, were sitting together round the fire, which as usual was banked up far too high and roared dangerously up the chimney.
“Good God, Madge,” said my father irritably, “that fire’s positively lethal!” Whenever we got together like this with my grandparents there was tension, I thought. Why? I followed my father’s eyes and looked at Granny, standing by the window pouring