The Spiral Staircase

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There was another, deeper reason for this. These frightening incidents were changing me. I now knew that at any second, the pleasant, innocent-seeming surface of normality could split apart, and this knowledge infected everything. I knew that other people had been to this dark place. I could see it in Van Gogh’s tormented, writhing olive trees and swirling starry skies. It was in the infernal visions of Bosch; it was the heart of darkness evoked by Joseph Conrad. It didn’t matter how often I told myself that these experiences had no substantive reality. However you accounted for them, this was a region of the human mind. And because I had visited it, I felt set apart. I was surrounded by girls whose existence was beginning to blossom. Most of them were hopeful, cheerful and excited by their unfolding lives, but I could no longer share this instinctive optimism. I was now doubly out of place among my fellow-students, as though I were the wicked fairy in the story, brooding balefully over the party.

Increasingly I felt as though I were witnessing everything at one remove. As time went on, solid physical objects appeared ephemeral, and people seemed like ghosts, with no clearly defined identity. When your surroundings can so suddenly take on a frightening aspect, you start to experience them as fluid, unreliable and without inherent integrity. Things seemed to flow into one another; a kind face could rapidly become menacing, a pleasant landscape take on a malign aspect. Sometimes I felt as though I were looking at reality through a sheet of glass. If I put my hand out to touch an object. I often expected to feel this barrier; sounds seemed faint and dim. This happened so gradually and became so habitual that, after a time, I ceased to remark upon it. It became the norm, the element in which I lived. I was rather like the little fish in the Sufi parable, who asks his mother about this stuff called water that he hears everybody discussing but which he has never seen. It is not until the condition lifts that you realize that it was abnormal. At the time, it simply seemed that the world from which I had retreated had now begun to recede from me.

This made it even more difficult to relate to other people. When you feel that you are talking to somebody through a plate-glass window, it is hard to make real contact. I also found it impossible to feel strongly about current events, which seemed somehow vague and remote. During the spring of 1970, when I read about the fighting between Israelis and Syrians on the Golan Heights, looked at a newspaper photograph of a despairing child in Biafra, or watched television footage of the Viet Cong offensive in Laos, I could not feel anything at all. In May, the anti-Vietnam War rally in Washington DC, which delighted so many of my fellow-students at St Anne’s, seemed like something you might see in a surrealist dream, weird and insubstantial. I viewed these distant crises as through the wrong end of a telescope. They might as well be taking place on another planet that I would never visit.

Yet again, work became my refuge, because it made me feel relatively normal. If I could write good, competent essays about Chaucer or Shakespeare, my mind might not be irretrievably damaged. I could still think logically and coherently, if not originally. The more I read and studied, the more competent work I produced, the easier it was to believe that I was not completely mad and that one day I might be able to make my way in the world as an ordinary person. If I could stay for ever in the nice secure realm of scholarship, doing a little teaching, or writing the occasional article on Emily Brontë or Wordsworth, I might be able to keep my demons at bay.

Besides turning me into a solitary, these attacks of fear dealt yet another blow to my already wavering faith. No, I did not imagine that I had seen Satan during these visitations and knew very well that the evil I sensed had no metaphysical existence but was simply the product of my own mind. But these ‘visions’ got me thinking. In an age that was less scientific than our own, it would surely have been natural to conclude that the ghostly, senile presence that I sensed with hallucinatory intensity was a real diabolic personality. Poets and mystics had often spoken of the foul stench of hell. Almost certainly, hell was simply the creation of infirm minds like my own. There was no objective evidence to support such a belief. That was a wonderful and liberating thought, but what if God was also a mental aberration? The ecstatic, celestial visions of the saints could be just as fantastic as my own infernal sensations. What we called God could also be a disease, the invention of a mind that had momentarily lost its bearings. I was slightly dismayed to find that this idea did not trouble me overmuch. If there were no God, then much of my life had been nonsense, and I should, surely, have felt more upset. But then, God had never been a real presence to me. He had been so consistently absent that he might just as well not exist. Perhaps I should just leave the Church and have done with it.

Father Geoffrey Preston, a benign Dominican at Blackfriars in St Giles urged me not to make too hasty a decision. I had started to attend mass at Blackfriars at the suggestion of one of my tutors, who was also recovering from an unhappy Catholic past, and sometimes looked as though she had barely survived the struggle. She had recommended the family mass on Sunday mornings, and I found that it was indeed a cheerful, imaginative liturgy, geared to the needs of children who could crawl or run around the church freely and, within reason, make as much noise as they liked. My tutor also advised me to talk to Geoffrey.

He was clearly a kind man, but seemed faintly ill at ease, and I suspected that, like many priests, he had ambivalent feelings about nuns. ‘I hope you’re not feeling guilty about all this.’ He shifted his massive girth uncomfortably around on the formal parlour chair. ‘I know nuns tend to trade on guilt. I expect you had to count up your faults on a special string of beads and write them down in a little book,’ he chuckled, inviting me to share what he clearly assumed was a joke.

‘Yes, we did, actually,’ I said.

Geoffrey’s head snapped to attention, his eyes startled. ‘You’re not serious, are you?’ I nodded. ‘Good God.’ He gazed, lost for words for a moment, at the ceiling. ‘We always thought that was a silly fantasy – one of the absurd stories that people tell about nuns. I had no idea that they actually did it.’

‘You’ve had a sheltered life, Geoffrey.’ I stood up and started putting on my coat. ‘If you’re not careful, I’ll tell you the whole story one day.’

‘I’m not sure that I could take it.’ Geoffrey was smiling but I could sense his real distaste. ‘I suppose that’s women for you,’ he said reflectively as we walked down the cloister. ‘We always said in the army that they were no good at community life. They seem to get bogged down in petty rules and regulations – can’t see the wood for the trees.’

Perhaps, I thought, as I headed back to college. But I also knew enough about the Church to know that it was men who had made the rules in the first place.

I had mixed feelings as the train thrust its way through the lush Sussex countryside. In one sense, I was going home, going back to the convent where I had spent the first three years of my religious life. I had received a letter from Sister Rebecca, asking me if I could come to see her. This in itself was surprising. Visitors were generally discouraged and I could scarcely be considered a suitable companion for Rebecca. Things had obviously changed during the fourteen months that I had been away. But I had some misgivings about my own reactions. I had no idea how it would feel to be in a convent atmosphere once more.

Sister Rebecca had been two years ahead of me. When I had been a postulant, she had been a second-year novice, and we had all seen her as the perfect young nun. She had the serene face of a Botticelli Madonna, her habit was never creased, her eyes were modestly cast down, and she spoke always in a quiet, dispassionate tone, just above a whisper. Most of us forgot how to be nuns from time to time. We would run upstairs, burst into loud laughter or answer back when reprimanded, but not Sister Rebecca. She was always controlled, composed and peaceful. When I had arrived at Oxford in the autumn of 1967, she was in her final year at St Anne’s, reading French and Italian, and because we were the only two student nuns in the community, we were thrown much together. We went to the convent chapel together after lunch every afternoon to perform all our spiritual duties, one after the other, in a soulless marathon of examination of conscience, rosary, spiritual reading and thirty minutes of mental prayer. The idea was that we should get these ‘out of the way’, so that we could spend the evening studying. When we had finished praying, we took a forty-five minute walk. And we talked.

Although we were not supposed to form friendships, Rebecca and I were so isolated from the other students and from the rest of the community that inevitably a relationship developed. We both loved our work but had nobody else to discuss it with. I would tell her all about Milton, and she would impart to me her latest discoveries about Dante or Proust. But the conversation did not always remain on such an exalted level. I was beginning to rebel. The Oxford community was not an easy one. Most of the nuns there were adamantly opposed to the reforms, about which both Rebecca and I were excited. The evening recreation would often consist of long communal lamentations about the abolition of the old ways, and Rebecca and I would exchange sardonic looks. I discovered that beneath her apparently perfect exterior, Rebecca had quite a sharp tongue and a salty turn of phrase, though she was unfailingly sweet to the older nuns and never showed her irritation, as I so frequently did.

During our walks, Rebecca had listened to my growing saga of frustration with the religious life. She had been a lifeline in that last difficult year, but she had not shared my disenchantment. Why had she summoned me? I wondered, as we pulled into the station. Was she in trouble? We had arranged that she would meet my train with the convent car, but I did not see her on the platform; nor was she in the entrance hall after I had handed in my ticket. Then, suddenly, I caught sight of a nun standing beneath the old-fashioned wall-clock, wearing one of those modern habits that gave her the appearance of an Edwardian nurse. There was something familiar about her but she was far, far too thin. That could not be Rebecca. I looked around again, but found my gaze drawn back to that modest figure, whose eyes were meekly cast down on the tiled floor. The nun looked up, and her face brightened with delighted recognition, as she gave me a small, discreet wave. And for a moment, my heart stopped.

Gone was the serene Madonna. This nun looked as though she had just been released from a concentration camp or was in the final stages of cancer. Her face had shrunk, so that she looked all eyes, which now seemed huge and protuberant. There were cavernous hollows beneath her sharply-etched cheekbones. As she crossed the hall towards me, I was appalled to see how skeletal her legs were. She was about five foot ten inches, and could not have weighed more than eighty pounds. But when she spoke, her voice was the same and I had to face it. This was indeed Rebecca, but dreadfully, frighteningly altered. Quickly, I pulled my own face into what I hoped was an answering smile. ‘I didn’t recognize you for a moment in your new habit,’ I murmured, as we exchanged the nun-like kiss, pressing each other’s cheeks smartly, one after the other. I kept smiling. ‘It’s lovely to see you.’

‘And so good of you to come.’ Together we crossed the station forecourt and got into the car.

‘This is a first,’ I said, in what I hoped was a cheery tone of voice. ‘How long have you been allowed to drive? We could have done with this car in Oxford. Think of the lovely trips we could have taken!’

‘To the Cotswolds … Blenheim … how is it all? I do miss it.’ Rebecca inched through the traffic and we started the forty-minute drive to the convent.

‘Oh, it’s all much the same,’ I replied. ‘Though, of course, it isn’t the same being “outside”.’

‘You sound as though you’ve just got out of prison!’ We laughed uneasily, our eyes firmly fixed on the road ahead. ‘But it’s all so different “inside” these days,’ she continued. ‘The car, the habit – those are the most obvious changes, and we have more baths, more talking. We can make our cells into bed-sitting-rooms and give each other cups of Nescafe. It’s probably a bit like St Anne’s – lots of girlish laughter; intense discussions and pop psychology. We all sit around talking about how damaged we are.’

There we were; we had arrived at the heart of what was uppermost in both our minds. There was silence, and then Rebecca said quietly: ‘Karen, thank you for not saying anything.’

‘About your weight.’ It was not a question. I forced myself to turn and look directly at her. ‘When did it happen?’

‘Very quickly.’ Rebecca sighed. ‘In London, while I was doing the Certificate of Education. I hated it, hated teaching – and I just got thinner and thinner.’

‘But what is it?’

‘Anorexia nervosa, the eating disease.’ I nodded. Besides Charlotte, a number of other girls in college had it. ‘At first the doctors thought that I might just have an over-active thyroid. Everybody was very keen on that – anything so long as I wasn’t suffering from a mental illness, an emotional disorder. Some of the community still refuse to accept it.’ Again I nodded wordlessly. I could imagine that all too well.

‘But what are they going to do about it?’ I demanded. An eating disorder required hospitalization, special programmes and expert help. It could, in extreme cases, even be fatal.

‘Nothing,’ Rebecca said flatly.

‘But you need a doctor!’ I persisted. ‘You can’t teach looking like that.’

‘Oh yes, I can,’ Rebecca spoke grimly, and I was beginning to sense that underneath the studied calm she was very, very angry. ‘I’m teaching French in the school here, and Reverend Mother Provincial says that she cannot find a replacement at the moment. And then,’ her voice took on a real edge, ‘in a few years, I am to be the next headmistress.’