CONSTANCE AND THE NUN

A Chapter by Peter Rogerson

There were these three nuns in a library....

It was heartbreaking.

Constance had watched the trio of black-clad nuns as they had almost floated into the library through the door that an old man was holding open for them. She had shaken her head as she had seen the way they had ignored their voluntary door porter and breezed to a table they occupied every time they came in. The trio consisted, Constance knew from experience, of Sister Martha, much younger than Sisters Ermine and the oldest, Sister Mona.

She knew they were the last remnants of St Philippa’s Convent on the Swanspottle road. Once it had been a hive of industry with nuns here, there and everywhere but as the years had passed it had become more like a deserted ruin than a place of song and worship. Now there were only three and they had about them an air of dust and wind-blown debris being driven not to where they wanted to go but to where the inexorable pressure of time and history was taking them. To Constance they were very much like human tumbleweeds.

But that wasn’t what was heartbreaking because although Constance had no idea what motivated young women to grow old in an ancient and increasingly derelict monastic building when they could be young and free and one with humanity away from that dread place, she knew that wasn’t a problem in their eyes.

No. What was heartbreaking was the way one of them was shuddering with tears, her whole body shaking as giant sobs wracked through her. The other two nuns sat, one on each side of her, not speaking, not making any sign that they had noticed the distress of their companion, just sitting serenely with a book open in front of them as if the world and nothing in it concerned them at all.

In the end Constance could stand it no longer. She knew, from a long distant memory, what it’s like to be distressed to the point of tears and this nun was much more distracted than that. But her memory also told her that when a person is distraught then human comfort is probably what they most needed. This nun seemed to be considerably more than distraught, but her serene companions were studiously failing to even notice her misery when probably a kindly word from them would help her.

So Constance breezed from her station towards the nuns, quietly and calmly.

“Is something wrong? Can I be of any assistance?” she asked.

One of the reading nuns, a wizened creature known as Sister Ermine and even older than she looked to be from a distance, turned her head and two beady eyes towards Constance and after the fingers of one hand towards her.

“All is well,” she said as though Constance’s enquiry had been of her.

“I meant your companion,” replied Constance, knowing precisely what she had meant and not liking the way her enquiry had been intercepted. “When a person is filled with grief they sometimes need a little human compassion,” she added, bravely.

“She is well,” repeated the nun, a fierce light seeming to shine behind what might otherwise have been dull eyes.

“I… I’m n-not well,” stammered the weeping woman.

“She is well, and if she’s to benefit from any compassion it won’t be of the human kind!” snapped the severe Sister Ermine, scowling at Constance in a way designed to make her leave them in peace. “The compassion she needs is God’s, and it isn’t forthcoming because of her sin!” she added in the sort of tone that must have meant the conversation, brief as it was, had ended.

The eyes of the distressed and much younger Sister Martha were red with weeping and her face pale and wan.

“I’m … alright,” she managed to stammer out, and then turned back and from the heaving of her shoulders Constance could tell she was shedding yet more tears.

“Now go away, woman!” hacked the ancient Sister Mona in a quavering voice, “this is a private, God-given affair and nothing to do with a woman of the streets and her dirty ways!”

Constance was more than offended, she was truly mortified. A woman of the streets, indeed! And dirty ways! Her! She hadn’t been so insulted since on here twelfth birthday when a ginger boy had told the entire class at school that he had a pair of her knickers in his pocket and anyone could see them for a five pence. They hadn’t been hers, but however hard she protested it was the ginger boy who had been believed, and several fives pences were produced, and even ten pences for a sniff of the masquerading intimate garment. This nun brought memories of how she had felt back then back to the front of her mind and forced her to retaliate.

“My dear woman,” she said to the nun, knowing that one thing these nuns least liked was a recognition of their gender in terms less prosaic than bride of Christ. “My dear woman,” she repeated for effect, “Rather than being what you call a woman of the streets I am responsible for this library and the people in it. It’s my job and I get paid modestly enough for it, and if a fellow human being is distressed I am obliged to see if I can be of any assistance, and it is so rare that anyone sheds a tear within these walls that I assume the woman who, at this moment is crying her eyes out, is distressed, and I know my duty!”

The offending nun stood up. She was a slight woman and obviously well into her seventies, but in Constance’s eyes her age made the matter worse rather than better, for a young woman might have had the excuse of inexperience, and this person certainly didn’t.

“We are of the convent with holy thoughts all around us,” she said harshly, holding Constance with steel-grey unblinking eyes, eyes behind which the librarian could see little more than vacancy, “and as such are not subject to human rules. If we choose to weep loud and long we will, if we choose to gnash our teeth and scratch out own eyes out, there is none on this Earth who will stop us, for we are subject to the whims of our Lord Jesus Christ, may He be praised!”

“Leave me alone!” snapped Sister Martha, not addressing herself to Constance but to Sister Mona who had been defending her right to use antisocial behaviour, “I don’t want to be here! I never wanted to be here! I just want to be … normal!”

“She doesn’t know what she’s saying!” put in Sister Ermine, “we all have moments of doubt, moments when we need to seek the help and succour of the Lord, and we get over them after a period of prolonged prayer.”

“Are you saying you are a prisoner?” asked Constance, ignoring the other two nuns. “Are you being held against your will? Are you being enslaved?”

Before the unhappy woman could reply Sister Mona spat at Constance. “Can’t you see the truth?” she asked harshly, “can’t you see that there are but the three of us?”

“Yes,” supported Sister Ermine, “And don’t you know that if our number falls below three then the convent and all the magic and history within its walls will be taken by the church authorities and sold as a bingo hall or whorehouse? Sister Martha cannot be allowed to leave, for if she does our world will dissolve away and all the good we have done with it!”

Having detected that she had support in the shape of the librarian, the unhappy Sister Martha found renewed strength.

“All the good?” she asked, “All the good? Why, going to the dark continent of Africa and ordering the people who live there to desert their gods and their ways and, on fear of awful reprisals and punishment, follow an impossible god? Is that good? And now they want me to swear a terrible vow on pain of excommunication!”

“Hush, child!” remonstrated the first nun, “our secrets are ours and ours alone, and have no place in the baser world outside our order!”

“We are all good and Holy and need … need ….” almost carolled a meaningless Sister Mona, unable to finish her sentence and waving one arm vaguely in the air.

“They want me to swear, on pain of excommunication, that as soon as one of us passes away at the end of our lives I will administer a toxic beverage to the remaining two, and it is certain because of my relative youth that I will be one of them. They want me to commit a mortal sin, one from which there can never be any forgiveness, and so spend my own eternity in hell.”

“That’s terrible!” gasped an astounded Constance, “the most terrible thing I have ever heard!”

“It will preserve the good name of St Philippa’s,” said Sister Mona, “and as it is certain that I will be the first of the three of us to do, for I have little time left to me according to the doctors, my eternity is safe! So I’m all right, Jack!”

Constance could barely believe her ears. “I doubt it,” she whispered, “I doubt it very much, for if your god exists, which is doubtful, but if he does then I fear he has heard your confession, the one you just made before me, and knows your mind, then I suspect that you are already condemned to an unpleasant hereafter!”

“I’ve heard enough!” snapped the first nun, “I’m returning to the convent, and you,” here she tried to grab hold of sister Martha, “are coming with me, child!”

But her fingers failed to grip and when she stormed out it was on her own, followed by a rather confused second nun who was certainly unsure, among other things, what day it was.

“Oh dear,” muttered Sister Martha, “I was afraid, but what could I do?”

“You’d be better off out of it,” Constance assured her, not sure what to say.

“I’ll go back to the convent, but there’ll be no toxic beverage,” decided Martha slowly, “and then I think, when I’m the only one left, that I’ll find my mother. She’s still alive. Maybe she’ll want to see me again...”

“I’m sure she will,” murmured Constance.

prev chapter

next chapter

© 2018 Peter Rogerson

My Review

Would you like to review this Chapter?
Login | Register

Reviews

Coyote Poetry

A wonderful and worthwhile story shared. I liked the characters and the situation. You made the story come alive in thought and in vision because of the honest and true conversation. Thank you Peter for sharing the outstanding story.
Coyote