Sorry this has taken a while. I've done a lot of rewriting of this section and I'm very nervous about posting it. I've changed the rating as well, although this is as T as it's going to get. I really hope everyone doesn't feel it's out of place and let down, as I value the reviews, PMs and general support more than I can say. On a lighter note, apologies if it gets a bit Scottish in places!
"Chummy, you're a genius!" declared Trixie.
"You really think it will do?"
From where she was perched on a chair at the end of the table, Trixie nodded, blowing smoke into the air. Cynthia, Jane and Jenny were still fingering the dress, letting its waves sweep over their hands. It was not finished: buttons still needed to be affixed, edges sewn up. But there was something magical in the pale cloth and as Jenny held it up against herself, smoothing the skirt down, the room filled with appreciative murmurs.
"It's beautiful, Chummy," said Jenny. "How on earth did you manage it from just some photographs from a magazine?"
Chummy adjusted her glasses, fidgeting modestly. "Much easier than it looks really. There's not really very much of Shelagh and she's got an awfully good figure. It's not like making clothes for a great galumphing carthorse like me. The basic design's quite simple and then it's just a matter of making the two layers. It's the cloth that really that made it. That lace is extraordinary."
Jenny slipped her hand under the top layer, feeling the run of the silk she had discovered under her palm, while snowflakes of lace teased above. "I wonder where Sister Monica Joan got it from," she said.
"I wonder if it's legal! Can you imagine a wedding if the police had to come rushing in and confiscate the bride's dress?" joked Trixie.
She cocked an eyebrow provocatively at a sighing Cynthia; however the next voice was not Cynthia berating her, but Jane illuminating them. "I think it was from her family. She said she remembered her mother with it and it was in a drawer with other things from them." Once again all eyes returned to the dress. The latticework of the outer layer was delicate and ageless, a heavy cream but yet unyellowed. Chummy wondered whether the lace had been intended for another wedding gown, perhaps even further back part of a dress in which a girl would be presented as a debutante. Then it had lain unused for decades, next to a bright turquoise brocade, now resurrected and proudly hung in her own wardrobe upstairs, renounced along with the glittering world by a woman drawn by God to filthy streets.
"It's really lovely," said Cynthia. It hung lightly over the thin silk, veiling it, apart from the sleeves where it alone would cling and hint, tapering to buttoned cuffs around slim wrists. "Do you think she'll mind? About the sleeves?"
Chummy looked troubled. "Yes, I wondered about that. The lace is fairly thick though. You don't think it's over-revealing or 'Look at me now', do you?"
"Don't be absurd, Chummy. She'd hardly be marrying him if she still wanted to dress like a nun and it's not as though you've proposed she wiggles down the aisle like Marilyn Monroe in some slinky Parisian negligée! Sister Evangelina on the scooter's more provocative. She does show her ankles off, after all!" Trixie added, with naughty satisfaction. "It's positively sultry!"
Cynthia and Jane giggled, while Chummy began to chuckle. Jenny, however, was quiet, absorbed by a vivid memory. It was Chummy who noticed.
"Do you disagree, Jenny? Do you think she won't like them?"
Jenny shook her head. "No, I don't think she won't like them." She remembered what she thought she had seen. "I think she might like them more than we think she will."
She had not meant to say anything, but Trixie was cannier. "What do you mean?"
"Nothing."
Trixie peeked mischievously at her. "You know something, Jenny Lee, something you're not telling us." As Jenny started to colour, she gave a high burst of laughter. "You do! Spill the beans."
"I can't."
"Oh!" she sighed in exasperation. "Stop being boring. We're all exhausted, Chummy's been working herself to a shadow,"
"Steady on!" put in Chummy.
"Well, almost a shadow, producing this fashion masterpiece and I might be called out at any moment. What is it? It can't be that terrible given who we're talking about."
It was tempting to tell, maybe to find a way into the answers to questions she had asked herself repeatedly long before a glimpse at a piece of clothing disturbed her. "No, not terrible, of course not," said Jenny. She wished she were in her room, perhaps in her dressing gown. Then it would feel less like cheaply picking over the secrets of others; only a confidence being shared, followed by a question both naïve and born of bitter experience. They were all watching her, avidly: Trixie bright-eyed in excitement, Jane caught between attention and dreaminess, Chummy pensive now. Cynthia, refilling her mug, she could not see. She started slowly. "Do you remember how I helped Shelagh unpack her suitcase last week?"
"Yes, what about it?" asked Cynthia, sitting down in between her and Trixie. In her face Jenny read apprehension.
"We were hanging up some clothes she didn't want to take to Scotland. They were mostly old, awful looking things she must've had before she joined the Order, apart from one skirt, which was incredibly pretty. I started suggesting different looks she could try with it. But there was another piece of clothing in the suitcase and while I was talking, she hid it in a drawer in the wardrobe."
"Hid it?" Cynthia frowned.
"Not hid, I suppose. She didn't want me to see it though. Except I had already, not completely, but a little bit, because I dislodged it when I was taking out the skirt."
"What was it? Did you see?" asked Trixie, gleefully.
Jenny looked around the room. "Are any of the nuns around?"
"No, of course not," encouraged Trixie. "Sister Julienne's on a call and the others have gone to bed. What was it?"
Jenny stopped and clung to her mug with both hands, looking down at the table. It felt hideously like gossip. "I think it was a nightgown. I didn't see it properly," she began, halting, "but it was silky and it wasn't provocative as such, but almost." She was awkward at what she was insinuating. "I think she'd bought it for her wedding night." Uncomfortably she looked up; Cynthia had looked down now, but Jane and Chummy were still watching her. In neither face was shock, only mild uncertainty. At what, she could not tell.
"And?" Trixie shrugged. "Good for her!"
"Trixie!"
"Honestly Jenny, what do you think they're going to do on their wedding night? Gaze into each other's eyes and discuss the new autoclave while playing a game of Scrabble?"
"But he's Dr. Turner!" She looked at the blank faces around the table, concerned only by her bemusement. She didn't know how to explain what it was that disconcerted her about them and which she could not unravel. "He's – They've known each other so long and she's given up her whole life and he's just Dr. Turner." It was not entirely what she intended and she felt its cruel injustice even before an outcry arose around the table. "I don't mean that. He's kind and pleasant and a very good doctor, but – ."
"Don't be horrid, Jenny!" interrupted Trixie. "I think Dr. Turner looks quite dashing when he's scrubbed up, like he has been so much more in the past month," she added with a twinkle. "Older men are much more polished and intriguing."
Jenny thought of Gerald and the dust of her lost years, her heart wasting itself on an intrigue which caused nothing but pain and which still reached out to tangle her, while Jimmy waited and waited until it was too late. And she said nothing.
"Chaps, should we really be talking about this?" questioned Chummy, uneasily.
Cynthia's hand covered Jenny's. "That's not quite what you meant, is it Jenny?" Jenny shook her head. "What then?"
"He's Dr. Turner and she's Sister Bernadette!"
"Shelagh," interrupted Trixie.
"She used to be Sister Bernadette though."
"You don't think it's wrong, do you?" said Cynthia, troubled.
"No," replied Jenny, quickly. "No, not that at all. They'd never do anything wrong. I think it's beautiful and it's so romantic and they look so happy together."
"It seems natural, doesn't it? She looks so well and he looks so much younger. The first time I saw them together after Sister Julienne told us it seemed obvious. I wondered how I'd never noticed it before," said Cynthia kindly.
"But that's what I don't understand," Jenny burst out, passionately. "There wasn't anything to notice before and it wasn't always like that! How does it change? How can she go from being a nun and his colleague and friend for all these years and then suddenly not be? How does he go from treating her like a nun to seeing her as something so different?"
"I always thought it would be easier that way," replied Cynthia quietly, "with someone who was a friend and you knew really well and were comfortable with already, not a person you'd only just met and didn't really know, or who you might think was lovely but was horrible underneath."
Trixie had opened her mouth at the same time as Cynthia, only fractionally beaten to responding. However, at this observation she retreated into herself.
"I don't think it was sudden," said Jane. "Not for her. I just think the illness changed things and made it different."
"Do you remember months and months ago," began Cynthia, "almost a year ago, how Dr. Turner lost a button from his clinical coat?" Jenny and Chummy nodded. "I mentioned it at lunch and a few days later it had been replaced. I thought then it was probably Sister Bernadette. I asked her a couple of weeks ago and she admitted it was her."
"I remember that lunch. She jumped down my throat when I made some comment about whatsisname, Timothy," added Trixie. In hindsight they all had stories like that.
They were recalling them as Chummy folded up the dress, wrapping it protectively so only one sleeve was left exposed. Chummy alone remembered another story and another woman as she threaded her needle and started to attach the first of three small buttons to the sleeve. It was tender to her; even in her openness, she had never shared it before. Her voice was low as she gently started. "The day my mother came to visit us in Poplar, Peter told me he wanted to marry me and I was afraid and told him I wanted to end it. I didn't want to but I didn't know what to do and it was easier to hide and pretend.
"Do you remember Cathy Powell?"
"She was the northerner who had triplets, didn't she?" asked Jenny.
"Yes, wonderful girl. She wasn't married to the father and had come to Poplar to see him, except he was at sea. In the end she gave birth in this ghastly little place miles away from home, without any electricity and crawling in filth, and she said she didn't regret anything because he had given her the happiest moment of her life and she had grabbed at it." She peered up from the sleeve at the intent faces. "She had such marvellous courage and made me realise what a bally coward I was and how I was making myself and Peter terribly, terribly unhappy. After the delivery was over, I went straight to the police station and turned myself in to Peter for 'criminal cowardice'."
There was a titter of affectionate laughter. "Gave you a bit of a shove, then?" said Trixie.
"Yes and I needed it. It was terribly hard, as hard as going to Africa. I don't know if I would have done it if it hadn't been for Cathy."
Life was precarious, thought Chummy. She had thought that then and frequently in Sierra Leone. A day ago she had thought it again when Hugh had telephoned with information he had uncovered much faster than she expected. Aided by a school friend who was a civil servant, he had obtained the name and work address of Patrick Turner's superior officer at Dunkirk, but the line of enquiry Chummy and Peter had hoped to pursue, the former colleague of David Watson who could be leant on by that old acquaintance, was cold; for Richard Forbes had died of peritonitis in 1948, only a few months after finishing work at the London. Blasted by fury for six years of war, he had survived only to succumb to an infection three years later in his mid-thirties. It was cruel and arbitrary. Cathy, and Dr. Turner and Shelagh, were right to seize life.
They sat and sipped their drinks, not needing to ask what occurrence had been the instigation for Patrick's or Shelagh's leap of faith. Trixie looked at Cynthia, wondering if she too was remembering the moment when Sister Julienne told them of the diagnosis, how they dissolved in shock and tears while Sister Evangelina's face noiselessly contorted and petrified. She had clenched her shuddering fist and held it against her mouth, as if to force words not to come out, then excused herself and gone straight to the chapel.
"It's slightly different though, isn't it? You knew Peter loved you, Chummy. I still don't understand how they changed things so they knew," Jenny mused. It was more to herself by the end. She had felt herself in love and breaking that hold had taken all the courage which she had. But a love which seethed without expression and could only be experienced at all after every vulnerability was rawly exposed to potential pain was an unfathomable mystery to her.
Chummy, however, answered her. She saw Jenny's confusion at the deeper truths of love, while the secrets she and Peter had become privy to in the last few weeks had only deepened her fondness for the man who had always shown such belief in her. It was wrong to call him 'just Dr. Turner' and her protectiveness rose. "I think it was Dr. Turner. He wrote to her when she was ill, which is rather marvellous courage too, really. He never went to see her and she didn't write back, but when she was discharged, she telephoned him to tell him she was going to come back to Poplar and leave the Order and he went to collect her."
"How do you know? Did she tell you?" gasped Trixie.
"No," she said, shaking her head. "Timothy did. There's something he's working on for the wedding which Peter's helping him with. I think it was terribly difficult for Dr. Turner, chaps. Timothy said that while Shelagh was in the sanatorium his father was very similar to how he was after his wife died."
The room fell completely silent as Cynthia glanced at Trixie, the only other who could make the comparison. "I didn't notice," she said. "We should have, shouldn't we? We were around him all the time and we never noticed he was unhappy."
Trixie lent her head on Cynthia's shoulder, her hands curling around one of Cynthia's arms, blinking sharply. She was still thinking of the night when the diagnosis was revealed. She had pitied Sister Evangelina then, perhaps for the first time, and even more so Sister Julienne, who looked as though a knife was twisting in her heart. But she had never considered the doctor, whose pain, they now realised, had been the agony of the damned. "We didn't bother to look. I think Shelagh tried to ask me about him once, but I just made silly comments about her coming home and everything being like 'old times'."
"How do you find the courage to do what she did and give up everything for him? I don't think I could ever do that," said Cynthia, softly, bringing her own head to rest against her friend's. They were so different, Trixie and she, their dreams of love opposites; but here their awed incomprehension was exactly the same.
Prayer, thought Chummy. The only certainty she had was that Shelagh would have prayed, endlessly, just as she had. For ease and solace, for wisdom. For endurance if the pain could not be cured, for guidance if the pain became unbearable. Because you pray and God gives you strength, she thought, and then you learn that what you gain is immeasurable against what you give up.
Jane thought of what she had once been called by a man while she was breathless from running to him and diffidently began to speak. "I think you could. I think if it was the right man you would have courage, because he'd make you feel you did. He'll make you feel different about yourself and even if nobody else thinks you're something and you're not able to be it with anyone else, you can still be like that for him." She waited for the flippant remark, perhaps an enquiry into the Reverend's health.
It did not come. "Be like what?" asked Jenny.
"Brave," said Jane quietly at almost the same moment that Chummy, equally quietly, said "Small".
As she lay in bed, before she put out the light, Jenny brooded over the conversation. She thought of Gerald, asking and demanding as he made passionate promises which were written in water, thrusting into her life, even into the sanctuary where she had fled from him. His glamour had dazzled her and she had fed her sickness, but never truly lost the shadow of self-loathing. She thought of Jimmy, young and lively, of sincere, impulsive declarations of love made both before and after his indiscretion. Then she thought of Dr. Turner, worn and shabby, patiently waiting for an answer to a letter in an impassive world which knew nothing of his suffering, standing on the fringe of Shelagh's life until she decided and allowed him to join her; and Sister Bernadette, allowed by him to make the choice and, having made it, blossoming into Shelagh, a woman richly beloved and loving. No glamour here, yet a more enduring passion, a deeper love more worth the having. And finally, she thought of another man, also tall and dark, who had pursued her but still waited until she came to him, then sat and smiled beside her in the freezing air, pointing at the stars.