Nuns and Soldiers by Iris Murdoch Page A

his death could be her death. How can I endure so much misery, she thought, without dying of it. She looked at her watch. It was still too dangerously early to go to bed.
    The telephone rang.
    She had muted the telephone so that it produced a faint buzz. She had asked her friends not to ring up in the late evening. Who could this be telephoning at ten o’clock? She lifted the receiver and uttered the number in the business-like way upon which Guy insisted.
    ‘Hello. Gertrude?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘This is Anne.’
    ‘What?’ said Gertrude, not understanding.
    ‘This is Anne. You know, Anne Cavidge.’
    Gertrude tried to adjust her mind to this amazing information. She felt utterly confused, baffled. ‘Anne?’
    ‘Yes!’
    ‘But - but surely you aren’t allowed to use the telephone -’
    There was a laugh at the other end. ‘As a matter of fact I’m in a telephone box near Victoria Station.’
    ‘Anne - you can’t be - what’s happened - ?’
    ‘I’m out.’
    ‘You mean out - out for good - ?’
    ‘Yes.’
    Anne, a member of an enclosed religious order, had been inside a convent for fifteen years.
    ‘You mean you’ve left the Church, left the order, come back into the world?’
    ‘Roughly yes.’
    ‘What does roughly yes mean?’
    ‘Look, Gertrude, I’m very sorry to ring you -’
    ‘Anne, what am I saying, come round here at once. Have you money, can you get a taxi?’
    ‘Yes, yes, but I must explain, I booked in a hotel, but they say they’re full up, and I tried several others and -’
    ‘Just come round here -’
    ‘Yes. OK. Thanks. But I can’t remember your number in the street.’
    Gertrude gave the number and put the telephone down and held her head. She had not reckoned with a surprise of this sort and she was not sure if she was pleased or not. Clever Anne Cavidge, her best friend at Cambridge, had shocked them all by becoming a Roman Catholic, after a series of wild love affairs, converted at Newnham before Gertrude’s horrified eyes. And then, as if that was not enough, she had promptly become a nun. Gertrude fought her, mourned her. Anne was gone, her Anne existed no more. One cannot communicate with a nun. In the strange rare atmosphere which now divided them, friendship could not live. Anne had become Mother something or other, Gertrude wrote to her occasionally, increasingly rarely, firmly addressing her communications to Miss Anne Cavidge. She received in reply brief hygienic communications written in Anne’s familiar writing, but devoid of any sharpness of personality. Out of an awful curiosity she went to see her twice and talked to her through a wooden grille: beautiful clever Anne Cavidge dressed up as a nun. Anne was cheerful, talkative, glad to see her. Gertrude was touched, appalled. When she emerged she sat in a pub and shuddered and thought, thank God I’m not in that prison! She joked about it afterwards with Guy, who had never met Anne.
    Gertrude now thought, oh if only things were different, if only they were, how glad I should be to see Anne, to get Anne back , to introduce her to Guy, how happy I should be, it would be a sort of triumph, a sort of renewal, the return of Anne from the dead.
    She thought, I must open the downstairs door, she may not find the right bell and Guy mustn’t be disturbed. She left the flat and went down to open the front door of the house, usually locked at this hour. Ebury Street, quiet now, glittered in the lamplight. The recent snow had covered the foot-prints on the pavement. The cold air bit Gertrude’s face and hands and she gasped.
    The taxi drew up and a woman got out and paid the driver. Two suitcases were dumped on the pavement. Gertrude came down the steps, the snow engulfing her light slippers. ‘Here, let me take this case.’
    Anne followed her into the house. In the hall Gertrude said, ‘Don’t make any noise, Guy’s asleep.’ They went up the stairs and into the flat. Anne saw the Night Nurse who had emerged from her