Three Brothers Page 5

  He took off the jacket and put on a striped apron and white hat. The changing room was beside the ventilation system for the dairy counter. It smelled faintly of cheese or curdled milk, a disquieting and even depressing smell. “Sam? Is that your name?” He nodded. He was being addressed by a young woman with pale prominent eyes; her flaxen hair was tied back, and Sam tried not to notice the pimples on her face. She looked vulnerable, as if a layer of skin had been stripped from her. “I’ve got to get you started,” she said. He felt uncomfortable in the presence of females, and had not mastered the art of talking to them. “There’s nothing to it, really.” She put out her hand, as if it belonged to someone else, and placed it limply in his. “This is cheese. This is milk. This is butter.” He could see what they were. “You don’t have much to say for yourself, do you? Well. Keep smiling. It won’t be as bad as all that.”

  He learned how to unpack the goods, and arrange them on the shelves. He sized and sorted the various bottles, tins, packets and boxes; he carried in the fruit and vegetables; he replaced the cheese, the milk and the butter. The girl with the flaxen hair sometimes watched him. “Worse things happen at sea,” she said.

  His ordeal started when he was asked to stand by the till and pack the bags of the customers. Each face became a terror. He was being judged. When he was slow, or clumsy, he blushed. He realised that people were cruel because they were unhappy. He thought he saw lines of suffering humanity, shuffling towards him with their wire baskets or trolleys. He detested the children looking up at him with blank incurious eyes. If somebody complained, he insisted on explaining himself. He would look at them quietly and attentively before answering them in a low voice. He outlined in detail the proper way of filling a shopping bag, with bulky dry goods at the bottom and perishable goods at the top. So the days passed, one like another. It was as if he were living in a cave. If nothing mattered, then he could exist like this.

  He did not eat in the canteen. He disliked the smell of beef and custard and tomato sauce. He bought a chocolate bar, instead, and sat in a bus shelter on the high street. So he remained apart from the rest of the staff. They were not malicious, but they were not particularly friendly. They would grow impatient with his long explanations. They greeted him hurriedly, and walked on. He knew all these things; but he never took offence.

  One Saturday morning he was standing by the till, as usual, packing the bags. He glanced down the waiting line of customers. There was a middle-aged woman standing at the end of the queue. He looked at her a second time. She was wearing a blue cardigan and white blouse. He knew that face. It was her. It was his mother. She became aware of him in the instant that he recognised her. They gazed at each other. In his consternation he bowed over the counter and, when he looked up again, she was gone.

  “What’s the matter with you?” A man, harsh and impatient, was standing in front of him. “You don’t know how to do this, do you?” Without any thought, Sam lashed out at him. The woman on the till moaned, with a sort of pleasure, when the man fell to the floor. There was general uproar and Sam was hauled away by the manager before being dismissed from the staff. It happened within an hour. And in that hour Sam’s life changed.

  He vowed that he would never work again. He had no plan of action, no goal, but the very act of working seemed to him to be a form of death. He could live off the food in the house, purchased by his father; his father had a habit of leaving his wallet on the mantelpiece, when he returned from his long hours of driving, and Sam took small sums. He did not tell anyone that he had been fired. He left the house at the same time each morning, and returned at the same time each evening. He wore the same grey suit. He wandered.

  One late afternoon he was walking along one of the paths in the local park, not far from the café where Harry and Hilda and Daniel had drunk tea beneath the trees. There was a young man sitting, slumped, upon a wooden bench. His clothes were old and soiled; he looked weary, his face hollowed by exhaustion or want. He was sighing, or groaning, it was hard to say which; he was trembling, slightly, as if he were trying to ward off pain. His eyes were closed, and there was spittle at the corners of his mouth. Sam sat down quietly beside him. He stared straight ahead, frowning slightly, and from time to time he would glance at this fellow on the bench. The young man opened his eyes and stared at him. Sam said nothing, and looked ahead once more. He could have sat there indefinitely. He had no reason to move on. One place was as good as another. But a sudden thought struck him. “Are you hungry?” he asked him. The young man did not reply. “Hang on,” he said. “I’ll be back in a minute.” After a few minutes he returned with two packets of crisps and a bottle of Tizer. The young man took them without a word. From that day forward, at the same time, Sam always brought two packets of crisps and a bottle of Tizer to the bench where the young man was waiting for him.

  Now that he had lost his job, Sam also seemed to become part of a floating world. There was, for example, the matter of the stone post. It stood at the corner of Lowin Street and the high street. Its function was obscure, and Sam had no idea of its age. It was a weather-beaten piece of old stone that may have been on that spot since the building of Camden Town; it may even have stood there in an earlier period. Who could tell? Now, from across the street, Sam had the time to observe it. A young boy came up to it, placed his hands upon it, and began to beat it like a drum; he seemed to derive enormous pleasure from this. Someone called him, and he ran off. Sam continued to stand and watch. He noticed a curious fact or coincidence—most of those who passed the post put out a hand and touched it. It was an unwitting, and perhaps even an unconscious, gesture. Yet the stone post was being endlessly patted and felt.

  As he continued watching the stone, it seemed to become aware of his presence. Sam was astonished when the stone rose several feet into the air; as it hovered there several ribs and pillars of stone, several arches and mouldings, began to exfoliate from it, creating an intricate shrine or shelter of stone. He thought he could hear the sound of hammering, of banging, of the labour of construction. Then it began to fade into the air. The stone post, once more a solitary presence, hovered above the ground before descending and resuming its original position. All this may have been the work of a moment. Or it may have taken many centuries.

  If he had shouted aloud, he would have drawn attention to himself. He wanted to find somewhere in seclusion, somewhere he might sit and think. There was such a place. The church of Our Lady of Sorrows, the church where Harry had thwarted the arsonist, was only a few hundred yards away from this corner of the high street. Sam had passed it many times.

  He bowed his head as he went into the porch, struck suddenly by the coolness of the air. The church itself was empty. He walked down the aisle, and then hesitated. Above the altar was a cross on which hung the figure of the suffering Jesus—this was not what he had come for. But then he saw the lady, smiling, with her right hand raised in greeting or in blessing. She was dressed in blue and white. Sam crossed the aisle and walked over to the Lady Chapel.

  He sat down on the narrow wooden pew and bowed his head. Then, after a long silence, he began to speak to her. “Do you mind if I talk to you? I have no friends, you see. I have no one to tell. I could have gone home, and forgotten all about it, but that would have been wrong. That would mean nothing had happened. But everything has happened.” He spoke in a slow, soft voice. “But now I have been chosen. I have been chosen to experience—well, you can call it a miracle if you like. I think it was a miracle. What do you think?” He looked up at her, wondering, enquiring, reflecting. She regarded him with pity, and put her finger to her lips.

  He sat in silence once more. He felt secure here, as safe as if he were in his own room at home—no, safer, because he was under the protection of the lady. He was suffused with warmth, although he could not tell whether it came from within or without. Who was that standing a short distance away? An old nun had come up to the altar with lilies in her hands; she crossed herself before the statue,
and then changed the flowers in the silver vases to either side of it. She had noticed Sam but she seemed to pay him no attention. She crossed herself again, and left the chapel as quietly as she had entered it.

  After she had gone Sam looked up again at the lady. “She has offered you something,” he said. “I have nothing to give you. Do you need anything from me?” She did not reply. “Probably not. But I promise you this. When I see a person in trouble, I will try to help.” He thought of the young vagrant on the park bench. “That will be helping you, I hope.” He stayed there a little longer, until with a sigh he got up from the pew and left the church.

  He came back to the chapel on the following morning. He sat in the same place, and gazed impassively at the statue of the lady. He noticed now that she had blue eyes, and that three tears ran down her right cheek. Perhaps she had wept last night. He wondered what had caused this. Did she know already of the young man? “Don’t worry,” he said. “Everything will be all right.”

  He came each day, and soon realised that three or four different nuns in turn changed the flowers and the altar cloth. He knew them all by sight, but they had not broken their silence. Then one of them surprised him. It was the oldest of them, the one he had seen on his first visit to the chapel. She was about to withdraw, having completed her ministrations, when she turned and walked over to him. It seemed to be a sudden decision.

  “Are you troubled, son?”

  “No. I’m happy. I think I’m happy.”

  “You pray to Our Lady?”

  “I speak to her.”

  “Do you?”

  “On the first day she put her finger to her lips.”

  She made the sign of the cross, and walked away.

  The nuns began to pay more attention to Sam. They smiled at him as they dusted the altar and polished the rails; they would walk down the aisle and nod as they passed him. One of them left a missal in his accustomed seat and then, a week later, he found a rosary there. He did not know what to do with it. He put it in the pocket of his trousers, and would sometimes slide his fingers through the hard wooden beads.

  He washed his clothes in the kitchen sink at home, and dried them in the garden, but of course he became more shabby. There came a morning when one of the nuns approached him. “Do you know anything about gardening?” she asked him. He shook his head. “Well, you can learn. You’re strong, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “We need a handyman. Mother Placentia thought of you.”

  Of Mother Placentia, he knew nothing. He had vowed never to work again, but he was drawn to the company of these women. “I can do that,” he said.

  “Good. Come into the sacristy.”

  He had not known that there was a convent attached to the church of Our Lady of Sorrows. This small establishment lay behind the church, surrounded by a high red-brick wall. If you had asked any of the local residents about the nuns, they would not have known how to answer. No one knew when, or from where, they had come. They had always seemed to be part of the neighbourhood. But they were rarely seen. They stayed behind the high walls.

  Sam entered through the gate of the convent in the company of Sister Eugenia, the nun who had come up to him in the church. They crossed a courtyard, with the basin of a dried fountain in the middle where fallen leaves rustled in the dust. There was a sundial in the corner of the lawn, its gnomon broken. A bird was perched on the stone rim of the basin of the fountain, singing its eternal song; yet it seemed to Sam that it sang more slowly than any bird he had ever heard.

  Sister Eugenia led him down a corridor, on the walls of which were hanging woodcuts and engravings of sacred scenes. The sister approached a door at the end of the corridor, and knocked upon it gently. “Who is knocking?” asked someone within.

  “Eugenia, Mother.”

  “Enter in God’s name, Eugenia.”

  She opened the door, and asked Sam to go in before her. “It is the young man,” she said.

  “Is it you? You are younger than I expected.” Mother Placentia was a small, plump woman with an expression of brutal amiability; her head was shaken by a slight but continual tremor. On the wall above her was a portrait of the Virgin, hands clasped in prayer or pity, her outline traced in blue and gold. “How old are you?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “So you are the young man who sees visions in the heart of London.” He said nothing but continued to look steadily at her. “You are as still as a lamb. That is good. Do you know the saying, ‘rise up west wind and refresh my garden’?” He shook his head. “You must be our wind. You must refresh our garden. Can you do that?”

  “I hope so.”

  “What is your name, young man?”

  “Sam. Sam Hanway.”

  “Hanway?” She seemed momentarily distracted. “A good name. An old name.”

  “We may be old without being good,” he said.

  She burst into laughter which ended with a fit of coughing. “The Lord has given you wit,” she said.

  The garden smelled sweetly of several herbs, but there was little for Sam to do. One of the nuns, Sister Idonea, tended the sage and the thyme and the rue. He was there to remove the weeds, water the lawns and beds, and burn the dead leaves of autumn. He also performed the tasks that the nuns could not; he built shelves, he painted doors and fences, he restored the stone paths that crossed the courtyard. Yet it seemed that the nuns simply wanted him to be part of their community; he had been given a sign by the Virgin, and they wanted to see what might happen to him.

  He came to know the sisters very well. Mother Placentia ruled over them with the same forceful amiability she had displayed to him. She was massively calm, she was dispassionate, she was obdurate. Sister Delecta and Sister Prudentia, for example, had been involved in an argument over the number of wax candles needed for the vigil of the Assumption of Our Lady. Their quarrel had been loud, and had reached the ears of Sister Idonea. She had stopped shelling peas and listened to them with great eagerness, registering the use of such words as “pitiful” and “ridiculous.” She repeated the conversation, with some exaggeration, to Sister Clarice who was known to be a particular favourite of Mother. The abbess called in the two offending sisters. As soon as they had entered her office she rose up from her chair and slapped them both on the right cheek.

  Sister Idonea was listening at the door, and later gave an exultant report to anyone who cared to listen. “Ave genetrix,” Mother Placentia had said. “You give birth to quarrels and dissensions, do you? You fight like sows in a sty?”

  “No, madame,” Sister Delecta replied. She was the youngest, and supposedly the demurest, of the nuns. “We had a difference of opinion.”

  “There will be no differences in this place. All are one. On your knees.”

  They fell to their knees as Mother Placentia, standing before the portrait of the Virgin, began to pray in a loud voice. “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women.” The two nuns joined in the prayer, murmuring in low voices. When it was complete she turned to them. “Leave this place on your knees and creep to the cross in the chapel. There you will prostrate yourselves for an hour, before rising and resuming your duties in a cheerful spirit.” So the nuns painfully and slowly made their way towards the chapel in another part of the building. Sam had seen them. He had entered the chapel in order to mend a broken transom light, when he glimpsed them lying on the chilly tiled floor. He backed out of the door. He gathered later that there had been much recrimination between Sister Idonea and Sister Prudentia, conducted in frowns and grimaces rather than words. The whole convent had taken sides. Salt and pepper were not being passed down the table; bread was in short supply for one or two nuns; there was much coughing and clearing of throats whenever certain nuns sang the divine office.

  Yet the days passed tranquilly for Sam. He would arrive at the convent early in the morning, and would begin work at once; he hardly spoke to anyone in the course of the day, and would eat whatev
er food Sister Idonea had left him for lunch. In the evening he visited the young man in the park; he rarely spoke to him but gave him the crisps and sweet drink, which he could afford from the small wage the convent paid him.

  It came to the attention of Mother Placentia that there were what she called “poor men and women” in the vicinity of the convent; she said that they were drawn to the place as to a shelter. If she could not accommodate them, she could at least nourish them. So she instituted an afternoon meal to be distributed at the gate of the convent. Sam volunteered to hand out the bread and soup or stew. He felt at ease in the company of tramps and wanderers. He was even comforted by their presence. He was not shy, or awkward, with them. They had looked with mild curiosity at this young man among the nuns, but soon he was expected. That is what he had always wanted—acceptance. He did not want to be singled out, to be looked on with pity or condescension.

  He soon learned that no one vagrant was like another. They were all in one sense touched by misery, but it manifested itself in different ways. In some of them it was not manifest at all. These were the cheerful ones who, in the extremity of failure or distress, still laughed at the absurdity of the world. One of them wore an old and heavy coat, in the pockets of which he kept a surprising variety of objects. He would pull out a trowel, or a chipped cup, with all the delight of a conjuror successfully performing a trick. One old woman, the creases of her hands and face lined with dirt, would sometimes dance in the middle of the road. She called Sam “sweetheart.” Yet others remained gloomy and silent. These were the ones who most interested Sam. He tried to speak to one middle-aged man, whose head was always covered by a hood, but the man had merely sighed and walked off.

  Some kept themselves apart. Where the others would form groups, or pairs, they would sit by themselves on the pavement—their backs against the convent wall—or stand alone a little way off. The reason for this solitariness was clear to Sam. He had experienced it himself. It was the fruit of pride and introspection. Pride is possible even in misery. In his own misery, Sam had not wanted anyone to come too close. So he respected those who stayed aloof. He glanced at them quickly, when he handed them the food, and then looked away.