You call that doing good?
The voice inside my head was Sister Clare’s.
So much for going it alone, she hissed.
The next day was Good Friday. When I opened the door of the boathouse, I could smell the salty tang of the sea carried on the breeze blowing in from the southwest. I stood for a while, watching the white-capped waves and listening to the fluting cries of the oystercatchers. I remembered something I’d once read about the wind affecting people’s moods: how a dry wind from the mountains made people clear sighted and logical, but a damp sea wind turned human minds mystical and sensuous. I wondered if my own mind had been affected by the sea voyage that had brought me here, whether that longing to break free had come not from God but from something elemental. And whether living in this place, just yards from the water’s edge, might lure a person to a different, more primitive kind of spirituality.
The thought of that unsettled me. My life was too new and too uncertain; I wasn’t prepared to give up everything. I had to hold on to some of the old assurances as I had clung to the wooden table that had saved me from drowning. I said the rosary before setting off for the farm, using the mussel shell Ned had given me and some fragments of sea glass I’d collected, to work my way through the sorrowful mysteries.
Jack had left a fresh loaf of bread for me, but I couldn’t decide whether to have any breakfast. At the convent, this would have been a day of fasting. I wondered if I’d be able to get through the morning ahead on an empty stomach. I needed the stamina to do my share of work. Fasting would help no one—and yet breaking the Lenten rule felt wrong. In the end I tucked a slice into the pocket of my dungarees.
I made my way up the valley on my own. The sun hadn’t yet appeared over the top of the hill. In the dark green shadows of the arching tree ferns and bamboo thickets, birds were singing their hearts out. I stopped for a moment, just to listen. There was something supernatural about it: blackbirds, thrushes, wrens, robins—a dozen songs, all different, that somehow harmonized. It had the same ethereal quality as the plainsong chants that had marked dawn and dusk at the chapel in Africa. Singing in the choir was something that had made my heart soar, however difficult the day had been.
I walked on, wistful at the memory of that singing—and mortified by the realization that, apart from my nursing, this was the only thing I really missed about being a nun.
I paused again when I passed the graveyard that bordered the little woodland church. I had a sudden urge to climb over the wall and see if the door was unlocked. But I was already late for my shift at the milking shed.
As I made my way through the walled garden, I tried to prepare myself mentally for more questions from the Land Girls about Jack. But the yard outside the milking shed was strangely silent. No muffled giggles or cackled obscenities. All I could hear was the rhythmic squirting of milk into buckets.
“Good morning!”
It was Merle, peering round the tail end of a cow.
“Good morning,” I called back. “Where are the Land Girls?”
“They’ve got Easter weekend off, to go and see their families.”
“So, it’s just you and me, is it?”
“No—we’re helping.” Merle’s eldest child, Danielle, popped out from behind one of the other animals. The grinning face of Louis, her brother, appeared from under the flank of the cow in the next stall over.
“They like it much better than going to school,” Merle said, ducking as a tail swished over her head.
The children were much more skilled at milking cows than I was. I thought I’d remember how to do it, but my technique produced nothing but a dribble. Danielle came to give me a quick lesson.
“How old were you when you learnt how to do this?” I asked.
“Quite little,” she replied. “There were cows at the farm next door on Guernsey. Me and my dad used to go and help the old man who lived there.” She was looking down at the udders, not at me, so I couldn’t see her face, but I caught a small sigh at the end of what she said. I wondered how she coped with not seeing her father—not even being able to write to him or speak on the telephone.
My mother had died when I was five, a bit younger than Danielle would have been when she left Guernsey. All I could remember about that time was asking why she wasn’t coming to tuck me up in bed and read me a story. I couldn’t grasp the fact that she only existed as a memory. I thought about how hard it must be for Merle, trying to explain their situation to her children.
I couldn’t think of anything to say about the life they’d left behind that wouldn’t sound trite. Instead I asked Danielle what the other children were doing while she and Louis were milking.