Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys [13]
‘… more lovely and more richly dressed than he had ever seen her in life,’ drones Mother St Justine. ‘She smiled and said, “Here Theophilus is a rose from the garden of my Spouse, in whom you did not believe.” The rose he found by his side when he awoke has never faded. It still exists.’ (Oh, but where? Where?) ‘And Theophilus was converted to Christianity,’ says Mother St Justine, reading very rapidly now, ‘and became one of the Holy Martyrs.’ She shuts the book with a clap and talks about pushing down the cuticles of our nails when we wash our hands. Cleanliness, good manners and kindness to God’s poor. A flow of words. (‘It is her time of life,’ said Hélène de Plana, ‘she cannot help it, poor old Justine.’) ‘When you insult or injure the unfortunate or the unhappy, you insult Christ Himself and He will not forget, for they are His chosen ones.’ This remark is made in a casual and perfunctory voice and she slides on to order and chastity, that flawless crystal that, once broken, can never be mended. Also deportment. Like everyone else, she has fallen under the spell of the de Plana sisters and holds them up as an example to the class. I admire them. They sit so poised and imperturbable while she points out the excellence of Miss Hélène’s coiffure, achieved without a looking-glass.
‘Please, Hélène, tell me how you do your hair, because when I grow up I want mine to look like yours.’
‘It’s very easy. You comb it upwards, like this and then push it a little forward, like that, and then you pin it here and here. Never too many pins.’
‘Yes, but Hélène, mine does not look like yours, whatever I do.’
Her eyelashes flickered, she turned away, too polite to say the obvious thing. We have no looking-glass in the dormitory, once I saw the new young nun from Ireland looking at herself in a cask of water, smiling to see if her dimples were still there. When she noticed me, she blushed and I thought, now she will always dislike me.
Sometimes it was Miss Hélène hair and sometimes Miss Germaine’s impeccable deportment, and sometimes it was the care Miss Louise took of her beautiful teeth. And if we were never envious, they never seemed vain. Hélène and Germaine, a little disdainful, aloof perhaps, but Louise, not even that. She took no part in it – as if she knew that she was born for other things. Hélène’s brown eyes could snap, Germaine’s grey eyes were beautiful, soft and cow-like, she spoke slowly and, like most Creole girls, was very even-tempered. It is easy to imagine what happened to those two, bar accidents. Ah but Louise! Her small waist, her thin brown hands, her black curls which smelled of vetiver, her high sweet voice, singing so carelessly in Chapel about death. Like a bird would sing. Anything might have happened to you, Louise, anything at all, and I wouldn’t be surprised.
Then there was another saint, said Mother St Justine, she lived later on but still in Italy, or it was in Spain. Italy is white pillars and green water. Spain is hot sun on stones, France is a lady with black hair wearing a white dress because Louise was born in France fifteen years ago, and my mother, whom I must forget and pray for as though she were dead, though she is living, liked to dress in white.
No one spoke of her now that Christophine had left us to live with her son. I seldom saw my stepfather. He seemed to dislike Jamaica, Spanish Town in particular, and was often away for months.
One hot afternoon in July my aunt told me that she was going to England for a year. Her health was not good and she needed a change. As she talked she was working at a patchwork counterpane. The diamond-shaped pieces of silk melted one into the other, red, blue, purple, green, yellow, all one shimmering colour. Hours and hours she had spent on it and it was nearly finished. Would I be lonely? she asked me and I said ‘No’, looking at the colours. Hours and hours and hours I thought.
This convent was my refuge, a place of sunshine and of death where very early in the morning the clap of a wooden signal woke the nine of us who slept in the long dormitory. We woke to see Sister Marie Augustine sitting, serene and neat, bolt upright in a wooden chair. The long brown room was full of gold sunlight and shadows of trees moving quietly. I learnt to say very quickly as the others did,