The Anchoress of Shere, page 17
“Read God’s word, not the manifestos of Satan,” he said. He also called newspapers “the Devil’s dung,” and she wondered whether he had ever been the target of a press investigation.
Initially he left her grille open and passed through an electric extension cable for a one-bar electric heater. Five or six hours’ warmth helped. In the long hours of darkness, however, the cold stone soon stole away the heat. When the electric heater was removed, sometimes abruptly because of some theological mistake she had apparently made, she shivered beneath her blanket. She would construct a little tent and hide inside, helplessly smelling her body odour and her unwashed clothes.
She tried harder in her studies, and was allowed a change of clothes: fresh underwear and a clean habit. She wondered if the dead girls had worn them. Probably, but she had no choice if she wanted to live. Without them she would die of cold. After what she estimated to be five weeks, Duval gave her a small paraffin heater. It made the cell smell like a garage, but it gave her warmth.
Sometimes she received two full meals a day. The meals were eccentric mixtures, often heavily spiced and containing tastes and foods she could not identify, but generally the end result was palatable. Occasionally she would get only bread and water, as punishment for offences she could not fathom. Duval sometimes explained her alleged transgressions; at other times he would simply tell her to pray for understanding.
Yes, she prayed. Duval explained how to use a rosary, and she prayed to God with a will, fingering the beads he gave her. Some of her newfound faith was a disguise donned for Duval; part of it was to relieve the boredom. A little of it, she half-understood, was real. To avoid growing to hate herself, to hate the animal locked in a dark cage, she decided to search for God, or at least to try to comprehend what God’s love might mean. She suspected that religious mania could result from long solitary confinement, but she reasoned that a measure of real faith would help her. Total immersion in religion was madness, his madness.
She began to realise that he was also a prisoner-of his own perniciously distorted vision-but in the darkness something had to fill the vacuum. After prayer, God seemed in fleeting moments to be a presence, not just a set of ancient beliefs. She understood the hypocrisy impelling her search for religion, but time hung around her neck like an albatross, and the possibility of God, the possibility of His intervention, might help to lighten her burden. She remembered her brother saying: “There weren’t many atheists in fox-holes in the Great War.” Now she, too, was at war-with the evil that lived upstairs.
When things went well, Duval would empty her portable toilet every day, but sometimes he would refuse for a few days. Occasionally her requests for food or an extra blanket were met with polite agreement; at other times they seemed to anger her captor. She could never work out whether it was simply the moods of a deranged man or some genuine “fault” on her part. She did realise that she was being manipulated into his version of submission, so she would simulate her version of meekness.
She tried to adjust to his Jekyll and Hyde personality. At times he was polite, almost shy, and very controlled, but he was also subject to fits of intense anger. She wondered if Duval contrived the fits to frighten her into submission. Was there a conscious split between a volcanic core and the role-playing of the outwardly charming persona? At times he seemed possessed with almost medieval religious passions, and then in a second or so he would assume the mantle of a harmless country cleric.
She tried to appease his various moods, and to keep her requests to the minimum necessary for survival. Sometimes he offered her something she had not asked for. An exercise book was her first such gift. She started to keep a diary, secreting a few pages at a time in the small air vent above her bench. The diary was her only psychological contact with the outside world. Sometimes she wrote brief notes to her friend Jenny, sometimes to her mother, and occasionally to Mark. She had not corresponded regularly with him before, and she regretted that bitterly.
She pleaded with Duval, on one of the few occasions she had really begged, to phone her parents to say she was alive. But he ignored her request.
Later she asked whether she could write a note to them. She explained that he could post it anywhere in Britain, just a note saying, “I am alive. Please remember I’ll always love you.” She knew that her parents would be enduring mental agony, not knowing whether she was alive or dead. When she tried to insist, he kept the light off for two days.
She half-consoled herself by thinking that he could have agreed and simply burnt the letter.
She tried to find some meaning in her imprisonment: “At least I am learning something new-I didn’t know my Bible at all before,” she kept repeating to herself. Now she had read almost half of it. She tried to maintain some dignity, some independence, even though her whole world was controlled by that “pious, hypocritical maniac,” as she dubbed him in her first diary entry.
She tried to understand him, but he was so reserved, so secretive. On matters religious or historical he would hold forth, but he wouldn’t say anything about himself, and was even evasive if she enquired about his dog. She asked whether the dog could come down to spend a few hours with her in the cellar, and also mentioned that she could baby-sit Bobby if he went away. She genuinely wanted the dog’s company, but also wanted to guarantee that Duval would return to her cell. She had panic attacks when she thought that he would just leave her, forget her, punish her, as he had Denise. She reckoned that he would not starve the dog as well as her. She tried not to think of the fate of her predecessors, forced to fast to death.
Whatever happened she would live. She would make herself interesting to him: a good pupil, lively and, given the circumstances, fun. He would be interested in keeping her alive. But the trouble was her sense of fun did not match his. He had a twisted sense of humour. He liked intellectual jokes, but sometimes her half-intellectual ones backfired. She was always dancing on theological eggshells.
She tried to engage him by preparing a written question: “If Christ did die for our sins, dare we make His martyrdom meaningless by not committing those sins ourselves?” It was half a question and half an attempt at a witticism, but it angered him.
He ignored the requests regarding the dog, but once or twice, when Marda had really worked at her lessons, Duval brought Bobby down to the cellar for a while. The sheer touch of another creature brought her unimaginable joy. And Bobby made such a fuss of her; he seemed to empathise with her plight. Dogs knew about these things, she told herself.
She couldn’t understand why Duval never touched her. She didn’t want him to, dreading it as loathsome, but the fact that he seemed to go out of his way to avoid any physical contact made her wonder whether he was sexually repressed. She laughed when she first thought of this. “Of course he’s repressed-he’s a Catholic priest,” she said to herself in a loud whisper.
He needed order, and seemed strict and harsh about minor things. He was offended by the smell in the cell, and she wanted more than anything to have a bath, but this he would not allow, even though he himself seemed obsessed with bathing. She could hear the water running from his bath sometimes five or six times a day, because the waste and overflow pipes from the bathroom ran somewhere along the cellar corridor. So he was pernickety, to put it mildly. And although Marda did not have the intellectual background to apply Freudian insights or terminology, her shrewd instinct told her that, besides order and cleanliness, he demanded control. His fear of touch implied fear of love. Perhaps he could love only when he had total control and power over the object of his love. No, she decided, he cannot love; he can only control.
She tried to understand his mentality, because this knowledge might keep her alive that little bit longer. Celibacy could never be easy, but perhaps it had been easier when sex in public was taboo; now it was everywhere. Sex seemed to have been discovered in the 1960s, so maybe now it was that much harder for him. Perhaps he was a homosexual who, unlike some of his fellow priests, intended to remain chaste.
“Keeping women in bondage must be his kick” were the blunt words she entrusted to her diary. Duval’s earnestness in his religious instruction seemed either to contradict or to confirm that; she wasn’t sure which. On some days he spent three or four hours talking, teaching, instructing her in theology, and she had learned a great deal. Her rationale was straightforward: the more she learned, the more Duval would be losing if he let her die. Religion was her investment in her own future.
Perhaps she was going insane, but she also took some pleasure in acquiring new knowledge about a world she had never thought about before. She was an eager student because she had no distractions, except constant fear, and cold and hunger on occasion. The utter and comprehensive boredom of total darkness was a powerful incentive.
When she had started working in France, she had wondered what it would have been like to go to university. She often thought about it. And Duval may have been a killer, but as a teacher he was good. She started talking aloud to herself: “Good? A good teacher? Am I going mad? I’m captive to a monster. I’m not a student. I’m studying to fill my time. To keep my sanity.”
Yet, despite herself, she started to enjoy learning. It was her only contact with the outside world. The Holy Land was a lot more rewarding than the dank nothingness of her cell. Her studies allowed her to escape from her fears for a while. And Christ’s thoughts were usually healthier than her own morbid ones.
For the first lessons he spoke through the grille. Not only did this feel awkward, but the lessons were short. The longer the lesson, the more warmth, food and light. He seemed to want to be invited in. Marda sensed that she was not facing an immediate physical threat from him, not unless she really upset him by trying to escape, perhaps. She also wanted him to appreciate the discomfort of her cell, if he could be moved by such things.
She said, “Michael, why don’t you come in and we can speak face to face? I would prefer to sit upstairs, but until you trust me can’t we at least try to be civilised down here?”
She was trying to exercise some control over him. He understood that, but he accepted her co-operation. “All right, Marda,” Duval said gently, “but we will go through the handcuff procedure, at least for a while.”
Reluctantly, Marda agreed. She sat on the bench with her left hand cuffed, while he sat on the single chair that he had placed as far away from her as possible.
“Mmm. It is chilly in here,” he said, as if he was reading an actor’s line. “Do you mind if I turn up the heater a little?” He seemed shy, almost nervous. “I shall get you some more paraffin tonight…You have no objections to my smoking a pipe?”
“No.”
“I do not approve of women smoking cigarettes. You smoke those French cigarettes, if I remember correctly.”
Her eyes twinkled. “I do like to smoke Gitanes. My brother used to tease me, and said I was going all Brigitte Bardot on him. Is there…is there any chance of a pack or two? It might help to relieve my…my tension. And help me concentrate on my studies, of course,” she said almost coquettishly.
“I will consider it,” he said, lighting his pipe. The aromatic Dutch tobacco filled the room, and she noticed that he had a habit of breaking his matches in two and then putting the pieces back in the matchbox.
“I like that tobacco, Michael, and not just because it smothers some of the paraffin smell.”
He ignored her small talk. “All right, Marda, let’s discuss your knowledge of the Catechism again. I have mentioned that once you know enough, we could start the process of your confirmation. We’ll have to adapt a bit because I cannot really ask the bishop to come here.”
Marda almost said, “Can I go to the bishop, then?” But she knew well enough by now that he didn’t like what she would call “smart-aleck” comments. She sometimes overreached herself in her attempts to spar with Duval, to keep lively a conversation with someone she knew to be far better educated than herself. It was very hard.
“Let us run through some of the basics,” he said slightly impatiently. “What is faith?”
She replied eagerly: “Faith is a supernatural gift of God, which enables us to believe without doubting whatever God has revealed.”
“Good. That is word perfect. How are you to know what God has revealed?”
“I am to know…to know…what God has revealed by the testimony, er, teaching, and authority of the Catholic Church.” Marda looked a little embarrassed by her hesitation.
“There is no problem with a stumble. It is knowing and understanding. That is what counts. This is not an elocution lesson.”
“Michael, may I interrupt? You have a wonderful voice. Did you learn to speak that way or was it something God-given?” Marda would never have used that adjective before. She did it unconsciously. With a start, she realised her vocabulary was altering.
“I was born with it.”
“Where?”
He seemed reluctant to concede further information, then suddenly blurted out, “Not far from here…” And then again, he said, “Not far from here. Not far from here…”
A curtain descended and blanked out his motor functions and his speech; his eyes were glazed. Marda remained absolutely still, while Duval, triggered by some past trauma, explored his inner being.
Although he tended to live in the past, both professionally and personally, Duval did not talk about his own history. To anyone. He didn’t even like thinking about his upbringing. At first he had tried to forget the whole business, then he attempted to change reality: Duval rejected, then falsified, most of the emotional experiences of his childhood. And he had eventually come to believe these lies as fact.
Especially, Duval tried not to think about his father, who was cold and authoritarian towards him when he was young. He had been attached to his mother, and had some fond memories of his childhood before the tragedy of his sister’s mental illness and eventual suicide. After that he grew away from his mother. His conversion to Catholicism caused the final break in an already emotionally estranged family. The Church became his mother, yet although he loved Catholicism, he also hated parts of it.
Duval recovered almost immediately from his brief reverie, but even if it had lasted for eternity, he would never have fully recognised the element of destructiveness in his complex Oedipal relationship with his Church, which to him was both a protective and persecuting goddess.
Duval seemed not to notice that both he and Marda had been silent for over a minute. She had learned to remain very still and quiet when occasionally he slipped into these almost catatonic states.
“But enough of me. Let us get on,” he said in a normal voice, as though he were in the middle of an Oxbridge tutorial.
Silence again ensued as he fiddled with his pipe for a few seconds.
“I will ask you a personal question before we carry on. You have an unusual name. What does it mean?”
“Oh, Michael, you don’t want to know…”
“Yes, I do. Please tell me.”
“Well, it’s the name of a mountain pass in Somalia. My father served there during the war and he just liked the sound of it.”
“How very noble of him.” Duval smiled. “Yes, it’s a pretty name, and it sounds like ‘martyr.’ That’s what I thought when I first heard it…‘And the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.’ Isaiah, chapter thirty-five, verse one.”
He stopped himself and his voice became a fraction sterner: “Now the Apostles’ creed. How does mortal sin kill the soul?”
Marda was disconcerted by his gloss on her name, but she could not allow herself to be side-tracked; she had to be ready: “Mortal sin kills the soul by depriving it of sanctifying grace, which is the supernatural life of the soul.”
Marda did not want to ponder on mortal sins like murder and possibly get lost in a blind alley where she would have to confront him. “And of course a venial sin is an offence,” she said, “which does not kill the soul, yet displeases God and often leads to mortal sin…”
She looked up at him. “You have told me a lot about the soul, Michael.”
She tried to use his name often; it bred a familiarity, a touch of friendship. You don’t kill your friends, Marda thought. Did the others try to be friends, too? Or were they all too “difficult,” as he put it? Was she less brave than the rest or simply wiser? Or nicer? She kept wondering.
“If the soul’s immortal, Michael, how can sin kill it?”
He answered the question, not very satisfactorily thought Marda, but she wouldn’t dare say so. He also tried to explain that the invisible part of the human being, the soul, was not restrained by Einstein’s laws of space and time. But he did respond eagerly and in depth, so Marda assumed that it was a good question. The longer the answer, the better the question was her rule of thumb. She had learned that without going to university.
He asked her to define “hope”; then she was asked to explain “prayer.”
Marda replied quickly. “Prayer is the raising up of the mind and heart to God…is that right?”
Duval sucked on his pipe and nodded.
Marda was sincere in wanting to learn all about prayer. There was no dissimulation here. Duval seemed to know most of the time if she was acting, so she was always trying to play double bluff, and therefore sometimes not even admitting things to herself in his presence.
“Good, good. Now the Ten Commandments.”
Marda rattled them off. She slowed on “Honour thy father and thy mother” but only slightly, and then only marginally speeded up on “Thou shalt not kill.” She was learning as much about diplomacy as theology.
“Are you saying grace before your food?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. She risked direct lies occasionally.
“Another aspect of the Christian’s daily exercise, then. How should you begin your day?”
She scratched her ribs and wondered if she had lice, but no emotion showed in her reply: “I should begin the day by making the sign of the Cross as I wake up in the morning and by saying some kind of short prayer, for example, ‘O my God, I offer my heart and soul to You.’”
