Quiet as a Nun Read Online Free PDF Page B

doing anything. She was simply being a good nun. And putting her signature to a piece of paper which should have been over and done with years ago. And then she became ill.' 'And everything changed.'
    'She changed. Nothing round her changed in the slightest.' Mother Ancilla began to speak more rapidly. 'It was after she saw your programme on television. She was convalescing at the time. She wanted to give it to the poor. Not just any poor, Jemima, but those poor people in the demolished houses of Powers Square. The Powers Projectors they call themselves. She talked of the rich man and the needle's eye. But she was, alas, mad. We know that now - too late. I thought she wrote to you. I thought she must have written to you. But somehow she got in touch with that man, the leader of the demonstrators or the residents' association or whatever they were called. She wrote to him. She offered him our lands. She said they were hers to give. Alexander Skarbek his name was.'
    Alexander Skarbek. The man I had secretly found more sympathetic than the directors of MGV . Secretly and not only because of my job but because he was Tom's bete noire. Tom once said Alexander Skarbek existed to give good causes a bad name. A man without scruple, at least in Tom's opinion: it depended of course upon what your own scruples were. A man who certainly possessed qualities of decision and leadership. A man, a fanatic, sufficiently convinced of the rightness of his cause, who would not have hesitated to accept such an offer, even made by a half-crazy nun. A man who would also have understood exactly how to beat the Powerstock family lawyers at their own game. Had he not defeated the combined efforts of the Ministry and local Council in his efforts over the Greatpark Housing Estate?
    Jemima knows: but I had known nothing of this, even if my programme had been responsible for touching it all off.
    'She talked of Christ's poverty. How she would settle at our gates like Lazarus and teach us the true meaning of the Christian message.'
    I could see that Mother Ancilla in her capacity as Dives, would scarcely welcome such a Lazarus as Alexander Skarbek at her gates.
    'But in the event, Mother Ancilla, it didn't happen,' I heard myself say in my best unemotional manner. 'For I gather she never changed her will. Blessed Eleanor's inherited everything she still possessed.' The old nun shook her head. 'So the community has - forgive me for putting it so bluntly - by the untimely death of Sister Miriam Powerstock acquired the lands for itself.' I almost said: 'Timely death.'
    Mother Ancilla did not seem to notice. She merely nodded. Behind her head there was a reproduction picture of the Virgin and Child in a bevelled burnished gilt frame. By Lippo Lippi. That had not changed since my day. But then Lippo Lippi could hardly be said to date. The Virgin looked infinitely sorrowful. But detached. As though she knew that all the concern she felt for the pitiful human scene taking place beneath her calm sad gaze could not alter the course of the stream of human passion by one iota. Her high round brow, the tendrils of her perfectly delineated golden hair, gave her an implacable beauty.
    Mother Ancilla's brow on the other hand was not visible beneath the white band of her wimple, and no tendrils escaped from this prison. Any hair that did show would be grey and wispy, if not white. Nuns' hair had been a preoccupation when we were at school. The delicious thrill of shock when Sister Thomas, a young nun, had appeared in class with a distinct curl of brown hair showing. She must have dressed in a hurry, poor child. As nuns were not allowed to look in mirrors, she was probably unaware of her solecism. Another delicious thrill at the idea of Mother Ancilla's tart regret when the offending wisp was glimpsed. It all added up to the fact that nuns were not bald and did not shave their heads; they simply cut their hair conveniently short.
    Gazing at Mother Ancilla now beneath the