The other looked at her watch.
“Come into my office. I have Some parents to see in half an hour, but I’m happy to give you general information until then.
This way.” She opened the secretary’s door and ushered Roz through to an adjoining office.
“Sit down, do. Coffee?”
“Please.” Roz took the chair indicated and watched her busy herself with a kettle and some cups.
“Are you the headmistress?”
“I am.”
“They were always nuns in my day.”
“So you’re a convent girl. I thought you might be. Milk?”
“Black and no sugar, please.”
She placed a steaming cup on the desk in front of Roz and sat down opposite her.
“In fact I am a nun. Sister Bridget. My order gave up wearing the habit quite some time ago. We found it tended to create an artificial barrier between us and the rest of society.” She chuckled.
“I don’t know what it is about religious uniforms, but people try to avoid you if they can. I suppose they feel they have to be on their best behaviour. It’s very frustrating.
The conversation is often so stilted.”
Roz crossed her legs and relaxed into the chair. She was unaware of it but her eyes betrayed her. They brimmed with all the warmth and humour that, a year ago, had been the outward expression of her personality.
Bitterness, it seemed, could only corrode so far.
“It’s probably guilt,” she said.
“We have to guard our tongues in case we provoke the sermon we know we deserve.” She sipped the coffee.
“What made you think I was a convent girl?”
“Your book. You get very hot under the collar about established religions. I guessed you were either a lapsed Jew or a lapsed Catholic. The Protestant yoke is easier to discard, being far less oppressive in the first place.”
“In fact I wasn’t a lapsed anything when I wrote Through the Looking Glass,” said Roz mildly.
“I was a good Catholic still.”
Sister Bridget interpreted the cynicism in her voice.
“But not now.”
“No. God died on me.” She smiled slightly at the look of understanding on the other woman’s face.
“You read about it, I suppose. I can’t applaud your taste in newspapers.”
“I’m an educator, my dear. We take the tabloids here as well as the broad sheets She didn’t drop her gaze or show embarrassment, for which Roz was grateful.
“Yes, I read about it and I would have punished God, too. It was very cruel of Him.”
Roz nodded.
“If I remember right,” she said, reverting to her book, ‘religion is confined to only one chapter of my book.
Why did you find my conclusions so hard to agree with?”
“Because they are all drawn from a single pre miss As I can’t accept the pre miss then I can’t agree with the conclusions.”
Roz wrinkled her brow.
“Which pre miss “That beauty is only skin deep.”
Roz was surprised.
“And you don’t think that’s true?”
“No, not as a general rule.”
“I’m speechless. And you a nun!”
“Being a nun has nothing to do with it. I’m streetwise.”
It was an unconscious echo of Olive.
“You really believe that beautiful people are beautiful all the way through? I can’t accept that. By the same token ugly people are ugly all the way through.”
“You’re putting words into my mouth, my dear.” Sister Bridget was amused.
“I am simply questioning the idea that beauty is a surface quality.”
She cradled her coffee cup in her hands.
“It’s a comfortable thought, of course it means we can all feel good abouj ourselves but beauty, like wealth, is
