Nuns and Soldiers by Iris Murdoch

know that Anne was there, captive, waiting, in reserve. Sometimes they sat separately in the house for long times. There were special periods when Gertrude sat with Guy. Anne did not see Guy, did not even know whether he was aware of her presence in the house. Gertrude and Anne went to bed early. Anne missed the hooting of the owls at night which she had heard for so many years at the convent. She still always woke up at five.
    It was afternoon, already dark. The Day Nurse had brought her some tea and smiled her lipless selfless smile. Anne felt an affinity with the Day Nurse and wondered if the nurse felt it too. Gertrude was with Guy. The flat was silent. The day had been yellow, a dark yellow London winter day, never really light at all. The snow had gone, succeeded by rain, now by this quiet murky pall. Anne had been reading Little Dorrit , it was amazing, it was so crammed and chaotic, and yet so touching, a kind of miracle, a strangely naked display of feeling, and full of profound ideas, yet one felt it was all true! How transmuted her life had been. She looked round the warm pleasant room at the ‘things’ on which she had commented to Gertrude. Gertrude wanted her to make the room her own, to colonize it, to adorn it with treasures from elsewhere in the flat, to let Gertrude buy this or buy that to make her more comfortable. Anne could not be interested, said the room was lovely as it was. The silky striped curtains had been smoothly pulled together by their strings. The mantelpiece had blue Chinese dogs, a snuff box. There was an embroidered fire screen representing a blackbird on a branch. An American patchwork counterpane which she was rumpling by sitting on. A mirror with a marble base upon the dressing table. Victorian family silhouettes upon the wall. A smell of furniture polish and continuity and well-being. Anne looked at her watch. In the dark cold chapel the nuns were singing like birds. And I am here , she thought, and they are there.
    Anne’s conversion had been a flight to innocence. Her Anglican Christianity, though not deep, had come with her a long way. Later she remembered the unformed unmarked faces of girls at her boarding school, and kneeling on lisle-stockinged knees on a rough wooden floor for evening prayers. The day thou gavest, Lord, is ended. Now close thine eyes in peace and sleep secure. She apprehended the innocence of childhood, saw it almost as her teachers perpetually saw it. The idea of a clear conscience had affected her, even as a child, as a primary moral concept. She had a happy childhood, she loved her parents and her brother. Her father was a doctor, an upright diligent conscientious man. It had seemed to her that life was and ought to be simple. Terrible things happened when she was a sixth-former. Her mother died, her brother was killed in a climbing accident. It seemed that this affliction was setting a seal upon some deep resolve. Her father died later. He had hoped that she would be a doctor. He did not want her to become a nun, but he understood.
    When Anne went up to Cambridge secrecy entered her life. Her open communication with her father came to an end. She went home for vacations, was talkative and cheerful, but never now spoke about what concerned her most. After the quietness of home and school, Cambridge had been for Anne a carnival, a maelstrom, a festival of popularity and personality and sex. She was astounded by her success. She worked hard and obtained a first-class degree in history. But most of her time and energy and thought and feeling was devoted to love affairs, to an extent which she felt bound to conceal even from her women friends. There were so many jostling men, they impeded each other, offering so many dazzling choices, so many flattering vistas. Anne, offered everything, wanted everything. She became skilful at conducting two, even three, affairs at the same time, keeping the victims happy by lying. She did not quite feel that this was wrong,