Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys [13]
‘That must be seen to,’ she said. ‘I will write to your aunt. Now Mother St Justine will be waiting for you. I have sent for a girl who has been with us for nearly a year. Her name is Louise – Louise de Plana. If you feel strange, she will explain everything.’
Louise and I walked along a paved path to the classroom. There was grass on each side of the path and trees and shadows of trees and sometimes a bright bush of flowers. She was very pretty and when she smiled at me I could scarcely believe I had ever been miserable. She said, ‘We always call Mother St Justine, Mother Juice of a Lime. She is not very intelligent, poor woman. You will see.
Quickly, while I can, I must remember to hot classroom. The hot classroom, the pitchpine desks, the heat of the bench striking up through my body, along my arms and hands. But outside I could see cool, blue shadow on a white wall. My needle is sticky, and creaks as it goes in and out of the canvas. ‘My needle is swearing,’ I whispered to Louise, who sits next to me. We are cross-stitching silk roses on a pale background. We can colour the roses as we choose and mine are green, blue and purple. Underneath, I will write my name in fire red, Antoinette Mason, née Cosway, Mount Calvary Convent, Spanish Town, Jamaica, 1839.
As we work, Mother St Justine read us stories from the lives of the Saints, St Rose, St Barbara, St Agnes. But we have our own Saint, the skeleton of a girl of fourteen under the altar of the convent chapel. The Relics. But how did the nuns get them out here, I ask myself? In a cabin trunk? Specially packed for the hold? How? But here she is, and St Innocenzia is her name. We do not know her story, she is not in the book. The saints we hear about were all very beautiful and wealthy. All were loved by rich and handsome young me.
‘… more lovely and more richly dressed than he had ever seen her in life,’ drones Mother St Justine. ‘She smiled and said, “Here Theophilus is a rose from the garden of my Spouse, in whom you did not believe.” The rose he found by his side when he awoke has never faded. It still exists.’ (Oh, but where? Where?) ‘And Theophilus was converted to Christianity,’ says Mother St Justine, reading very rapidly now, ‘and became one of the Holy Martyrs.’ She shuts the book with a clap and talks about pushing down the cuticles of our nails when we wash our hands. Cleanliness, good manners and kindness to God’s poor. A flow of words. (‘It is her time of life,’ said Hélène de Plana, ‘she cannot help it, poor old Justine.’) ‘When you insult or injure the unfortunate or the unhappy, you insult Christ Himself and He will not forget, for they are His chosen ones.’ This remark is made in a casual and perfunctory voice and she slides on to order and chastity, that flawless crystal that, once broken, can never be mended. Also deportment. Like everyone else, she has fallen under the spell of the de Plana sisters and holds them up as an example to the class. I admire them. They sit so poised and imperturbable while she points out the excellence of Miss Hélène’s coiffure, achieved without a looking-glass.
‘Please, Hélène, tell me how you do your hair, because when I grow up I want mine to look like yours.’
‘It’s very easy. You comb it upwards, like this and then push it a little forward, like that, and then you pin it here and here. Never too many pins.’
‘Yes, but Hélène, mine does not look like yours, whatever I do.’
Her eyelashes flickered, she turned away, too polite to say the obvious thing. We have no looking-glass in the dormitory, once I saw the new young nun from Ireland looking at herself in a cask of water, smiling to see if her dimples were still there. When she noticed me, she blushed and I thought, now she will always dislike me.
Sometimes it was Miss Hélène hair