Hilary Mantel

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Seeing her in the tiled corridor, the first thing I noticed was her pallor; the change wrought by two years in England. That was odd, because I am not good at noticing things like that, and the most obvious difference was that they had changed her tropical habit for a curious hybrid outfit, a semi-laicized garb that bore no resemblance to anything that had ever been in fashion or ever would be. The cheap navy material sagged and crumpled; against it, the wooden cross looked like something she had picked up in the street. As she turned to lead me into her office, I saw for the first time the backs of her legs in their support stockings, veined like those of a woman who has endured many pregnancies.

It was a cramped little room, box-flies and buff envelopes threatening to overwhelm her. She plugged in the electric kettle and took carefully from a cupboard two china cups and saucers. ‘It’s powdered milk,’ she said, ‘but I know you’re used to that. And sugar, if I remember, you don’t take.’ I looked around. ‘Oh, take those letters off the armchair,’ she said, ‘put them any old place.’ She smiled. ‘Can you believe it, they said it was for my organising ability they were putting me here. After twenty years running the Mission school, they said, you ought to be up to keeping a few medical records straight.’

I would hardly have thought it was the same, I said: this sort of work. Oh, you know (she unbent a paperclip) that was the old way, if you have to undertake a special task you pray to the Lord and he’ll give you the grace to tackle it. It’s funny, she said, that’s what Mother Provincial said to me when I first went out there, and now I come back after all this time and they’re saying the same old thing.

But changes, I suggested, surely you find a lot of changes? Oh yes; and as if apologising, her red hands pulled and smoothed her habit over her knees. ‘But my papers at the Mission, well, it hardly mattered, sometimes the boy would light the fire with them, and sometimes the ants … well, here there’s nothing to eat them away. More’s the pity.’

And have you come to see me when you’ve just landed? Yes, just landed, I said, just got into this filthy weather. To prove it, I pulled up my sleeve and showed her a raised red bump on my arm. ‘Oh, the mosquitoes.’ She began to laugh, and her pale blue eyes, which seemed worn out from all the years of dazzling sunlight, filled up with merriment. ‘Oh, here I am, forgetting to count my blessings. Oh, the mosquitoes, the mosquitoes.’

Like many nuns, she was a great talker; a chatterbox, she would have said. It was important, she had always told me, to keep cheerful in any adversity; the platitudes that sustained her had curiously little to do with any religion. And here we had a challenge enough to cheeriness, sitting in an office in a Hospice for the Dying; she called it by that blunt name. Her voice with its trite and homely expressions ran on; the grey drizzle outside soaked the outskirts of the city, and I remembered our first meeting.

*

The feel of her chapped hand shaking mine, briskly. Apologetically: this is all we have, I’m afraid. I looked at the low thatched huts made of red mud, at the scrawny chickens scratching up a corner of the compound. The sun was blinding me that day, I was pallid and dripping with sweat. She looked at me with anxious sympathy. Her blue eyes seemed deeply embedded then in her baby-pink face, because of the way she screwed up her forehead against the glare. As I followed her into the classroom, I noticed that her trailing white habit was dusty to the knees.

Then I remembered the smells; the coarse perfume of the insecticides, the bitter smell of ink and scholarship hard-ground into alien skulls; the desperate smell of the dust at the end of the dry season. ‘We are all praying for rain,’ she had told me that day. She appalled me: was this enlightenment? I had the same feeling inside the little tin shack that served as a church, when I saw the mealie-stalks bunched in a jar before the Virgin’s statue; fertility rites, I thought in disgust. She read my expression. ‘Oh, you think,’ she said gently, ‘that you send aeroplanes up to make punctures in the clouds. But there are no clouds.’ The lead-blue sky above us was like the lid of a coffin. Turning, she appraised me, a laywoman; the T-shirt and dungarees I had thought would be so practical. My shoulders were raw already from the sun, and for a moment I envied her, sewn away inside her scapular and veil. You are here, the worn face said, for better or worse. She knew I would learn soon enough to pray for rain.

‘It is a very different life,’ she said, for the third time. ‘Care of the dying… yes, it is rewarding work. We make the place comfortable, homely, you see, not like a hospital. When you know there’s nothing more to be done… the relatives can come and go at all hours, there are no restrictions.’ Sometimes I do feel, she said, that the Order are very wise in sending me here. They know, she said, that I hardly belong in England now and… suddenly her face sobered, set into despairing lines of realisation. ‘The dying,’ she said, ‘inhabit another country too.’

*

We had joined battle within a week. We fought inch by inch over the syllabus, which I knew to be twenty years out of date. Enraged, I picked up the yellowing readers held together by a few canvas threads. ‘Is this what you’re offering?’ I shook it at her. ‘Is this what you have to offer them to oppose to the National Liberation Front?’ Choking with wrath I read to her:

‘Emily and Nanny have their tea in a teashop. Emily has a nice pink bun.’

Turning away, she muttered her usual answer; it is all we have. ‘Then get more!’ I bawled at her. I slammed the book down on the desk, and the back flew off entirely. ‘Tell the fucking Order to send you some money to get more.’

*

‘Of course,’ (she was reminiscing) ‘the place was nothing, when I first went out. Just a couple of trading stores, and the railway. First of all there was the language, and that was uphill work, I can tell you.’ Yes, I remembered, the sniggers and the rolling of the eyes whenever you mispronounced; all the soft-palate subtleties that seemed to come so easily to the Dutch aid-teams when they moved in. ‘I used to say to myself, at first, when I was so homesick, they are not a pleasant people. But I thought, well, Sister Agnes, here you are among them for God knows how many years, you’d better learn to like them, hadn’t you? As for the language, you just persist. Here you are, you aren’t going anywhere.’ (And every evening, the melancholy call of the train whistle, hauling away from Bulawayo to the Cape.) ‘And now tell me,’ she said, ‘how is everybody, how are they all?’

Families, she wanted to know about. The expatriate families whom the Government housed around the Mission compound, mining people and water people and agriculture people, who knew how to fill the parched fields with crops and fatten the scrawny chickens in the compound; babies, she wanted to know about, and how Mrs McCormick’s health was holding up, whether the Henshaws were still there, and whether Jenny and Mike had taken the children all the way to Durban again this year. I searched my mind for the scraps of news that would be agreeable to her, the more innocuous bits of gossip; for it is not malaria that is endemic in our community, it is adultery. And how we had struggled during those boom years, when the settlement grew into a sizeable town, to keep the truth from her, to keep everything pure and holy and nice. New families arrived every week; we were bored, we were enervated by the climate, we saw our liberal tolerance rendered down by the sun. Gradually we became harder people, with standards of our own, and our own hard amusements; she saw us go forth and multiply, but we hoped she never knew quite how. When my flow of information ceased, she leaned forward with the question that was of real moment to her: ‘How is the water holding out this year? Have you had a bit of rain?’

*

‘Look at this,’ I said to her. ‘If a Cox’s apple costs 1d, how much will a dozen cost? Look, Look,’ I said, shaking the primer in passion, ‘what do they know about a Cox’s apple? When did a Cox’s apple cost 1d? We don’t have them any more.’

‘What?’ she said, her innocent face falling. ‘You don’t have Cox’s apples? Oh, and how I’d looked forward to… I suppose,’ she said, ‘it must be the Common Market.’

‘No,’ I said, almost weeping with frustration, ‘no, it’s halfpennies that we don’t have.’

In the evenings, while great speckled moths fussed around our gas lamp, I taught her the New Maths; we had no electricity until last year. Once a week I dutifully tore myself away from the bar at the Club, and we played Scrabble together, giggling and fighting over the dictionary. The African night twittered and chirped, the heat locked us into our patch of light, away from the small bloodiness of the bush; the little predators rustled and squealed. In their dormitory the children sang, their voices rising in perfect and spontaneous harmony. In the morning they rubbed their eyes over Emily and her nice pink bun, scuffled their feet under the desks, yawned. Yes, Sister Agnes, they said, no, Sister Agnes. She smiled at them, appeal in her face, appeal that they would better themselves and be good children. Mothusi coloured in a scene of a London street; he coloured the pavement brown like beaten earth, and in a flight of ignorant fancy he made the London bus a bright emerald green. Whenever I felt close to them, I would remember that emerald bus, and say to myself, I am abroad, I am in a very strange country. No, she said, smiling, what’s strange about it? And yet I knew it was becoming stranger and stranger to her.

Scandinavia discovered us: wan unwashed girls came with peace in their hearts and hypodermics in their hands, with trailing cotton skirts and bare feet and more money than the Mission had seen in the whole of its existence. Self-help was all the talk, and urbanisation, and culture-shock, and the price of copper. The children dug into their exercise books with their stubs of pencils; a new generation followed her amazedly with dark round eyes. I pleaded with her for contraception for our adolescent girls; she broke down and wept. Dragging her without ceremony by the elbow, I hustled her into the compound, to point up to the low brown hill where rat-infested slums climbed to meet the edge of the sky; that, I said, that township there is tougher than Harlem, more dangerous than Central Park in the dark. What do you pray for, I demanded, what do you ask for in those hours spent on your knees in that tin shack in front of those gimcrack images of yours? Do you pray for the past to come back?

*

‘You’ll have another cup,’ she said. I didn’t really want it. I hated the powdered milk, but I didn’t like to tell her that out there we had a proper dairy now, with safe fresh milk every day. ‘Yes,’ (she was talking of present life now) ‘we try to ease their passage. It never ceases to amaze me, the fortitude people find at the end. Really in most cases we do very little. It’s as if they talk direct to God.’ She put down the teapot in her in-tray. How old she had become, I thought, as she raised her head. There was a kind of bleakness in her eyes, as if talking to God was something she did not do now; as if her long dialogue had come to an end.

*

Ours had continued. After a while we took off our velvet gloves. We became friends, or the closest of enemies. Drowsy in the stifling afternoons we nodded together and recalled misty English twilights, spoke of our longing for some fresh fish and a look at television. Accidentally I pulled out of my tote-bag a copy of the Zimbabwe Peoples’ Voice, and she tore it out of my hands and shredded it onto the floor, stamping and crying out in her distress. At Christmas the First Form did a nativity play. We rehearsed them together, bawling in frustration through the somnolent afternoons. When the night came, the hall was crowded with the families of the day-scholars, their faces eager; a slow perfume rolled over us, of sacking and mud and bricks, of cattle and earth. Afterwards, in the muggy heat of the hour before midnight, we walked around the school buildings, mulling over the triumphs and disasters. One by one the lights went out in the teachers’ houses. We could hear the bursar beating his wife. Dogs slept on back stoeps, and burglars roamed. In those days we made our own entertainment. But now, since last year, there is a cinema.

*

‘A hard life,’ she said. She met my eyes. She was talking of her present life, not of her old one. ‘Still, we don’t complain. There is a great need to be met in this kind of work. I sometimes wish… well, I looked forward to coming home, you know, you’ll remember how we used to talk it over, what it would be like. The Order isn’t what it was, we’re a dying breed. There’s no security anywhere, is there?’ she asked me softly. ‘By the way,’ she said, ‘I forgot to ask, how’s your Geoff keeping?’ Oh, that simple little adjective of possession; the married man I had been sleeping with for the last year before she came home.

‘I didn’t know you knew,’ I said. She flushed, her hands smoothing again the skirt over her knees. Well, she said, I hope something will work out for you, if it has to be a divorce, well, I suppose it has to be. Oh no, I said, we find it quite possible to go on. I suppose, she said, I suppose you do.

We were silent for a moment. I reached into my bag for some cigarettes. I flipped the packet towards her, out of old usage. She shook her head, her smile a little grim. Not for her now the tiny consolations of the missionary life. I have matches somewhere, she said, scrabbling through the top drawer of her desk. For lighting your candles? I asked. The smoke drifted up blue in the blue afternoon; would that be Rhodesian tobacco? she said. Zimbabwe, I said. Of course, I’ve just got off the plane, what other kind would I have? Outside, the rain was slackening off. Gravel walks and dark shrubberies loomed out of the mist. ‘I can’t tell you how I miss the sun,’ she said.

‘You don’t have to. I can tell by the colour of your face.’

‘I wonder,’ she said, ‘would they ever let me go back for a holiday, just for a month or two, when I’m done here and before they pension me off to our house in Scarborough… we have this place, you know, by the sea, where we go when we aren’t a lot of use any more. I know the air-fare’s a big item, but you can save if you book through three months in advance, it makes it quite reasonable.’ She had thought it out, I could tell, planned it, tiptoeing by night through the sickrooms with their smell of flowers and terminal pain. ‘I could take any flight, it wouldn’t matter to me. If I could just get out there for a month, to see how things are going…’ Her voice died from lack of conviction. Across her muddled desk top our eyes met, and I could feel her read the message from mine: there is nothing for you to go back to. I looked at my watch. I had a train to catch. She leaned forward as if to add something, then suddenly her face crumpled. She put her elbows on the desk and let her round coiffed head sag onto them; her tears fell hard and fast and bitter onto the buff envelopes and the old typewriter and the cracked saucer of rubber bands. ‘Oh what right have they,’ she said, ‘what right have they, to take me away and shut me up in a home for the dying; how could they fasten me in with these rotting bodies to break me at last?’ I moved to the edge of my chair, helpless and appalled. Her arms locked across her body, she rocked herself like a child. ‘Oh my chickens,’ she said, ‘and my lemon tree. Oh, the mosquitoes. Oh my chickens and my dog and my lemon tree, and my children, all my children.’ Above our heads a bell shrilled. Gasping, her chest heaving, she got to her feet, scrubbing at her scarlet cheeks with the back of her hand. ‘I’m wanted,’ she murmured. ‘That’s for me.’

‘I’ll have to go,’ I said. ‘The train –’

‘Goodbye again and enjoy your leave – excuse me, God bless.’ And she was off down the corridor, almost running; I stood at the door of the office and watched her go, her head crouched forward on her shoulders like an animal trained to obedience by blows, her body hunched and wary like the body of a refugee. I dropped the packet of cigarettes onto her desk, picked up my umbrella, and went out, into England.

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Hilary Mantel was a British writer whose historical fiction novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, were awarded the Booker Prize in 2009 and 2012 respectively.

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