“Yes, if she’s free. If not, I can make an appointment and come back later.”
The woman took the card and read it closely.
“May I ask what you want to talk about?”
Roz shrugged.
“Just some general information about the school and the sort of girls who come here.”
“Would you be the Rosalind Leigh who wrote Through the Looking Glass by any chance?”
Roz nodded. Through the Looking Glass, her last book and her best, had sold well and won some excellent reviews. A study of the changing perceptions of female beauty down the ages, she wondered now how she had ever managed to summon the energy to write it. A labour of love, she thought, because the subject had fascinated her.
“I’ve read it.” The other smiled.
“I agreed with very few of your conclusions but it was extremely thought-provoking none the less. You write lovely prose, but I’m sure you know that.”
Roz laughed. She felt an immediate liking for the woman.
“At least you’re honest.”
The other looked at her watch.
“Come into my office. I have Some parents to see in half an hour, but I’m happy to give you general information until then.
This way.” She opened the secretary’s door and ushered Roz through to an adjoining office.
“Sit down, do. Coffee?”
“Please.” Roz took the chair indicated and watched her busy herself with a kettle and some cups.
“Are you the headmistress?”
“I am.”
“They were always nuns in my day.”
“So you’re a convent girl. I thought you might be. Milk?”
“Black and no sugar, please.”
She placed a steaming cup on the desk in front of Roz and sat down opposite her.
“In fact I am a nun. Sister Bridget. My order gave up wearing the habit quite some time ago. We found it tended to create an artificial barrier between us and the rest of society.” She chuckled.
“I don’t know what it is about religious uniforms, but people try to avoid you if they can. I suppose they feel they have to be on their best behaviour. It’s very frustrating.
The conversation is often so stilted.”
Roz crossed her legs and relaxed into the chair. She was unaware of it but her eyes betrayed her. They brimmed with all the warmth and humour that, a year ago, had been the outward expression of her personality.
Bitterness, it seemed, could only corrode so far.
“It’s probably guilt,” she said.
“We have to guard our tongues in case we provoke the sermon we know we deserve.” She sipped the coffee.
“What made you think I was a convent girl?”
“Your book. You get very hot under the collar about established religions. I guessed you were either a lapsed Jew or a lapsed Catholic. The Protestant yoke is easier to discard, being far less oppressive in the first place.”
“In fact I wasn’t a lapsed anything when I wrote Through the Looking Glass,” said Roz mildly.
“I was a good Catholic still.”
Sister Bridget interpreted the cynicism in her voice.
“But not now.”
“No. God died on me.” She smiled slightly at the look of understanding on the other woman’s face.
“You read about it, I suppose. I can’t applaud your taste in newspapers.”
“I’m an educator, my dear. We take the tabloids here as well as the broad sheets She didn’t drop her gaze or show embarrassment, for which Roz was grateful.
“Yes, I read about it and I would have punished God, too. It was very cruel of Him.”
Roz nodded.
“If I remember right,” she said, reverting to her book, ‘religion is confined to only one chapter of my book.
Why did you find my conclusions so hard to agree with?”
“Because they are all drawn from a single pre miss As I can’t accept the pre miss then I can’t agree with the conclusions.”
Roz wrinkled her brow.
“Which pre miss “That beauty is only skin deep.”
Roz was surprised.
“And you don’t think that’s true?”
“No, not as a general rule.”
“I’m speechless. And you a nun!”
“Being a nun has nothing to do with it. I’m streetwise.”
It was an unconscious echo of Olive.
“You really believe that beautiful people are beautiful all the way through? I can’t accept that. By the same token ugly people are ugly all the way through.”
“You’re putting words into my mouth, my dear.” Sister Bridget was amused.
“I am simply questioning the idea that beauty is a surface quality.”
She cradled her coffee cup in her hands.
“It’s a comfortable thought, of course it means we can all feel good abouj ourselves but beauty, like wealth, is a moral asset. The wealthy can afford to be law abiding, generous and kind. The very poor cannot.
Even kindness is a struggle when you don’t know where your next penny is coming from.”
She gave a quirky smile.
“Poverty is only uplifting when you can choose it.”
“I wouldn’t disagree with that, but I don’t see the connection between beauty and wealth.”
“Beauty cushions you against the negative emotions that loneliness and rejection inspire. Beautiful people are prized they always have been, you made that point yourself so they have less reason to be spiteful, less reason to be jealous, less reason to covet what they can’t have.
They tend to be the focus of all those emotions, rarely the instigators of them.” She shrugged.
“You will always have exceptions most of them you uncovered in your book but, in my experience, if a person is attractive then that attractiveness runs deep. You can argue which comes first, the inner beauty or the outer, but they do tend to walk together.”
“So if you’re rich and beautiful the pearly gates will swing open for you?” She smiled cynically.
“That’s a somewhat radical philosophy for a Christian, isn’t it? I thought Jesus preached the exact opposite. Something like it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.”
Sister Bridget laughed good-humouredly.
“Yours was obviously an excellent convent.” She stirred her coffee absentmindedly with a biro.
“Yes, He did say that but, if you put it in context, it supports my view, I think, rather than detracts from it.
If you remember, a wealthy young man asked Him how he could have eternal life. Jesus said: keep the commandments. The youth answered: I have kept them, since childhood, but what more can I do. If you want to be perfect, said Jesus and I emphasise the perfect sell all you have and give it to the poor, then follow me. The young man went away sorrowing because he had many possessions and could not bring himself to sell them. It was then Jesus made the reference to the camel and the eye of the needle.
He was, you see, talking about perfection, not goodness.” She sucked the end of her biro.
“In fairness to the young man, I have always assumed that to sell his possessions would have meant selling houses and businesses with tenants and employees in them, so the moral dilemma would have been a difficult one.
But what I think Jesus was saying was this: so far you have been a goodman, but to test how good you really are, reduce yourself to abject poverty. Perfection is to follow me and keep the commandments when you are so poor that stealing and lying are a way of life if you want to be sure of waking up the next morning. An impossible goal.” She sipped her coffee.
“I could be wrong, of course.” There was a twinkle in her eye.
“Well, I’m not going to argue the toss with you on that,” said Roz bluntly.
“I suspect I’d be on a hiding to nothing. But I reckon you’re on very bumpy ground with your beauty is a moral asset argument. What about the pitfalls of vanity and arrogance? And how do you explain that some of the nicest people I know are, by no stretch of the imagination, beautiful?”
Sister Bridget laughed again, a happy sound.
“You keep twisting my words. I have never said that to be nice you have to be beautiful. I merely dispute your assertion that beautiful people are not nice. My observation is that very often they are. At the risk of labouring the point, they can afford to be.”