The convent was situated half a kilometre from the Priory. The orphanage had long since closed and the school buildings were now a diocesan youth centre. Anselm had seen it all before. Hordes of champing, over-sexed youths arriving in transit vans, closely supervised by impossibly confident chaplains and teachers, all of whom deserved the Croix de Guerre.
Mere Hermance had worked in the laundry during the war. She was lodged upon a wicker chair in the convent gift shop, recalling the good old days when religious life was hard. Anselm had to drag her towards the subject of his visit.
‘Oh, yes, Father, it was a terrible time, terrible. I saw poor Prior Morel fall like a rag doll. I waited for him to get up. There were three children hiding in the orphanage.’ She smiled, as only the very old can; intimating an acceptance of things that once could not be accepted.
‘Do you remember the two men who stayed at the Abbey in 1944?’ asked Anselm gently
‘I do, yes, but not much. In those days religious life was lived as it should be. You didn’t talk to men unless you had to.’
Anselm nodded in firm agreement.
‘I never spoke to either of them,’ she said. ‘We were told it was as secret as the confessional. We were used to that sort of thing. But I do remember one thing, Father-’
Mere Hermance broke off to answer the phone. The shop was open from three to five… the biscuits were handmade… by the young ones with nothing better to do… fifty francs… very well worth it… goodbye. She put the phone down arid carried on as if no interruption had occurred: ‘When I came here as a novice in 1937 there were thirty-nine sisters. The Prioress at the time was a dragon. Her father had been in the army and…’
Anselm listened patiently for ten minutes or so before he cracked and reminded her of what she had been about to say.
‘Oh yes, that’s right. He came to the orphanage almost every day’
‘Who did?’ pressed Anselm.
‘One of the young men we were hiding. He talked and played with four or five little German boys and girls. Those were the last Jewish children to come here. Their parents had fled Germany to France, only to be hunted all over again. They saved their children and then perished. He was a good fellow to visit those poor dears. One of them never spoke and had the deepest brown eyes you have ever seen.
‘Do you remember which one came?’
The phone rang again. The nun listened distractedly, once more delivering pat lines on the quality of biscuits and the weakness of the young. She put the receiver down. ‘As I was saying, the Prioress was a dragon-’
‘Mere Hermance, the young man, do you recall which one?’
She looked darkly into the past, into the presence of a banished fear. ‘I think it was the German.’
Unfolding a large starched handkerchief, she wiped her eyes. ‘It was a terrible time, Father, a terrible, terrible time.’