easier to tell lies.
They were one dimensional and uncomplicated.
“I’m fine… Everything’s fine… I like waiting here… Rupert’s been very supportive over All… We went our separate ways amicably…” It was the tangled web of truth, woven deep into the fragile stuff of character, that made life difficult. She wasn’t even sure now what was true and what wasn’t. Had she really hated Rupert that much? She couldn’t imagine where she had found the energy. All she could really remember was how stifling the last twelve months had been.
“I’m completely infatuated,” she went on wildly as if that explained anything, ‘but I’ve no idea if what I feel is genuine or just pie in the sky hoping.” She shook her head.
“I suppose one never really knows.”
“Oh, my dear,” said Sister Bridget, ‘do be careful. Infatuation is a very poor substitute for love. It withers as easily as it flourishes.
Love real love takes time to grow, and how can it do that in an atmosphere of brutality?”
“That’s hardly his fault. I could have run away, I suppose, but I’m glad I didn’t. I’m sure they’d have killed him if he’d been alone.”
Sister Bridget sighed.
“We seem to be talking at cross purposes. Do I gather the ape is not the man you’re infatuated with?”
With streaming eyes, Roz wondered if there was any truth in the phrase to die laughing.
“You’re very brave,” said Sister Bridget.
“I’d have assumed he was up to no good and run a mile.”
“Perhaps he is. I’m a very poor judge of character, you know.”
Sister Bridget laughed to herself.
“Well, it all sounds very exciting,” she said with a twinge of envy, taking Roz’s dress from the tumble-drier and laying it on the ironing board.
“The only man who ever showed any interest in me was a bank clerk who lived three doors away from my parents. He was skin and bone, poor chap, with an enormous Adam’s apple that crawled about his throat like a large pink beetle. I simply couldn’t bear him. The Church was far more attractive.” She wet her finger and tapped it against the iron.
Roz, wrapped in an old flannelette nightie, smiled.
“And is it still?”
“Not always. But I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t have regrets.”
“Have you ever been in love?”
“Good Heavens, yes. More often than you have, I expect.
Purely platonically, of course. I meet some very attractive fathers in my job.”
Roz chuckled.
“What sort of fathers? The cassocked variety or the ones in trousers?”
Sister Bridget’s eyes danced wickedly.
“All I will say, as long as you promise not to quote me, is that I’ve always found cassocks a little off-putting and, with all the divorces there are these days, I spend more time talking to single men than, frankly, is good for a nun.”
“If things ever work out,” said Roz wistfully, ‘and I have another daughter, I’ll put her in your school so fast you won’t know what hit you.”
“I shall look forward to it.”
“No. I don’t believe in miracles. I did once.”
“I’ll pray for you,” said Sister Bridget.
“It’s time I had something to get my teeth into. I prayed for Olive and look what God sent me.”
“Now you’re going to make me cry.”
She woke in the morning with brilliant sunlight bathing her face through a gap in Sister Bridget’s spare-room curtains. It was too bright to look at so she cuddled down into the warmth of the duvet and listened instead. Ripples of birdsong swelled in glorious chorus from tiny feathered throats in the garden, and somewhere a radio murmured the news, but too low for her to make out the words. The smell of grilled bacon drifted tantalisingly from the kitchen downstairs, urging her to get up.
She tingled with half-remembered vitality and wondered why she had allowed herself to stumble for so long through the blind fog of her depression. Life, she thought, was fabulous and the desire to live it too insistent to be ignored.
She waved goodbye to Sister Bridget pointed the car towards the Poacher and switched on her stereo, feeding in Pavarotti. It was a very deliberate laying of a ghost. The rich voice surged in the speakers and she listened to it without regret.
The restaurant was deserted, no answer front or back to her knocking.
She drove to the payphone she had used the night before and dialled the number, letting it ring for a long time in case Hal was asleep. When he didn’t reply, she replaced the receiver and returned to her car. She wasn’t concerned frankly, Hal could look after himself rather better than any other man she had known and she had more
