In This House of Brede by Rumer Godden

Author:Rumer Godden
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781504040358
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2016-07-08T04:00:00+00:00

9

For a time the sun seemed to have disappeared in continual rain and the Abbey was dark and chill. Dame Agnes had turned the central heating off long ago – ‘Central heating in summer! Absurd!’ she pronounced. ‘It’s only early summer,’ said the Abbess – and everyone was cold; the black crocheted shoulder shawls the nuns wore in winter came out again and Dame Ursula had chilblains, ‘chilblains in May!’ ‘If we’re not careful we shall start on an epidemic of colds,’ warned Dame Joan. ‘There are far too many sneezing visitors in the parlours,’ but ‘Be brisk. Move about,’ was all Dame Agnes said, though her own nose was red at the tip.

Stefan Duranski was back to carve his panel and finish the statue. He at least was not cold; he was too busy and generated warmth and activity; the sound of his mallet and chisel and of his guitar were heard in the choir and Abbess Catherine dared not acknowledge even to herself how glad she was to see him. ‘What have you all been doing to yourselves?’ he asked. ‘You look pinched.’

‘I think we are all a little tired,’ she said, ‘after the fasts of Lent. In Holy Week and at Easter the choir work is heavy, we have had two Clothings’ – and Dame Agnes has been practising her economy, she could have said.

Dame Agnes was paring expenses so rigorously that the community was growing restless; almost every evening a thick anonymous soup appeared in the refectory for supper, soup that Sister Priscilla concocted from left-overs – it was being rumoured that she scraped the plates: impudent Sister Louise declared that in hers she had found the identical piece of gristle she had not been able to eat last Sunday and had left on her plated. The soup was served with dry bread.

The best of the garden produce went now to the shops in the town; the extern sisters had told Dame Agnes of a stall in the market that every Thursday sold flower bunches and Dame Mildred was made ‘to part with everything,’ she declared to the Abbess in dudgeon. The altar and the shrines suffered. Only the cracked and sub-standard eggs were kept; the new-laid dozens that were the pride of Sister Gabrielle’s heart were sent to market. Dame Agnes had stopped buying coffee – or sugar for the table, ‘sugarless tea except for the very old’. Even soap was rationed and tooth powder took the place of paste. ‘A tin should last you six months,’ said Dame Agnes to each recipient.

‘And the diets!’ she said to Abbess Catherine. ‘Did you know there are thirty nuns on thirty different diets? It’s enough to drive anybody mad. Do I really have to sanction extra eggs and extra meat for young Sister Louise?’

‘Sister Louise has diabetes, Dame. She must have protein because her carbohydrates are so limited.’

‘And meat twice a day for Dame Nichola, liver three times a week. It’s such a price.’

‘It’s what Doctor Avery ordered.

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