Paul Moorcraft - The Anchoress of Shere

She tried to understand him, but he was so reserved, so secretive. On matters religious or historical he would hold forth, but he wouldn’t say anything about himself, and was even evasive if she enquired about his dog. She asked whether the dog could come down to spend a few hours with her in the cellar, and also mentioned that she could baby-sit Bobby if he went away. She genuinely wanted the dog’s company, but also wanted to guarantee that Duval would return to her cell. She had panic attacks when she thought that he would just leave her, forget her, punish her, as he had Denise. She reckoned that he would not starve the dog as well as her. She tried not to think of the fate of her predecessors, forced to fast to death.

Whatever happened she would live. She would make herself interesting to him: a good pupil, lively and, given the circumstances, fun. He would be interested in keeping her alive. But the trouble was her sense of fun did not match his. He had a twisted sense of humour. He liked intellectual jokes, but sometimes her half-intellectual ones backfired. She was always dancing on theological eggshells.

She tried to engage him by preparing a written question: “If Christ did die for our sins, dare we make His martyrdom meaningless by not committing those sins ourselves?” It was half a question and half an attempt at a witticism, but it angered him.

He ignored the requests regarding the dog, but once or twice, when Marda had really worked at her lessons, Duval brought Bobby down to the cellar for a while. The sheer touch of another creature brought her unimaginable joy. And Bobby made such a fuss of her; he seemed to empathise with her plight. Dogs knew about these things, she told herself.

She couldn’t understand why Duval never touched her. She didn’t want him to, dreading it as loathsome, but the fact that he seemed to go out of his way to avoid any physical contact made her wonder whether he was sexually repressed. She laughed when she first thought of this. “Of course he’s repressed-he’s a Catholic priest,” she said to herself in a loud whisper.

He needed order, and seemed strict and harsh about minor things. He was offended by the smell in the cell, and she wanted more than anything to have a bath, but this he would not allow, even though he himself seemed obsessed with bathing. She could hear the water running from his bath sometimes five or six times a day, because the waste and overflow pipes from the bathroom ran somewhere along the cellar corridor. So he was pernickety, to put it mildly. And although Marda did not have the intellectual background to apply Freudian insights or terminology, her shrewd instinct told her that, besides order and cleanliness, he demanded control. His fear of touch implied fear of love. Perhaps he could love only when he had total control and power over the object of his love. No, she decided, he cannot love; he can only control.

She tried to understand his mentality, because this knowledge might keep her alive that little bit longer. Celibacy could never be easy, but perhaps it had been easier when sex in public was taboo; now it was everywhere. Sex seemed to have been discovered in the 1960s, so maybe now it was that much harder for him. Perhaps he was a homosexual who, unlike some of his fellow priests, intended to remain chaste.

“Keeping women in bondage must be his kick” were the blunt words she entrusted to her diary. Duval’s earnestness in his religious instruction seemed either to contradict or to confirm that; she wasn’t sure which. On some days he spent three or four hours talking, teaching, instructing her in theology, and she had learned a great deal. Her rationale was straightforward: the more she learned, the more Duval would be losing if he let her die. Religion was her investment in her own future.

Perhaps she was going insane, but she also took some pleasure in acquiring new knowledge about a world she had never thought about before. She was an eager student because she had no distractions, except constant fear, and cold and hunger on occasion. The utter and comprehensive boredom of total darkness was a powerful incentive.

When she had started working in France, she had wondered what it would have been like to go to university. She often thought about it. And Duval may have been a killer, but as a teacher he was good. She started talking aloud to herself: “Good? A good teacher? Am I going mad? I’m captive to a monster. I’m not a student. I’m studying to fill my time. To keep my sanity.”

Yet, despite herself, she started to enjoy learning. It was her only contact with the outside world. The Holy Land was a lot more rewarding than the dank nothingness of her cell. Her studies allowed her to escape from her fears for a while. And Christ’s thoughts were usually healthier than her own morbid ones.

For the first lessons he spoke through the grille. Not only did this feel awkward, but the lessons were short. The longer the lesson, the more warmth, food and light. He seemed to want to be invited in. Marda sensed that she was not facing an immediate physical threat from him, not unless she really upset him by trying to escape, perhaps. She also wanted him to appreciate the discomfort of her cell, if he could be moved by such things.

She said, “Michael, why don’t you come in and we can speak face to face? I would prefer to sit upstairs, but until you trust me can’t we at least try to be civilised down here?”

She was trying to exercise some control over him. He understood that, but he accepted her co-operation. “All right, Marda,” Duval said gently, “but we will go through the handcuff procedure, at least for a while.”

Reluctantly, Marda agreed. She sat on the bench with her left hand cuffed, while he sat on the single chair that he had placed as far away from her as possible.

“Mmm. It is chilly in here,” he said, as if he was reading an actor’s line. “Do you mind if I turn up the heater a little?” He seemed shy, almost nervous. “I shall get you some more paraffin tonight…You have no objections to my smoking a pipe?”

“No.”

“I do not approve of women smoking cigarettes. You smoke those French cigarettes, if I remember correctly.”

Her eyes twinkled. “I do like to smoke Gitanes. My brother used to tease me, and said I was going all Brigitte Bardot on him. Is there…is there any chance of a pack or two? It might help to relieve my…my tension. And help me concentrate on my studies, of course,” she said almost coquettishly.

“I will consider it,” he said, lighting his pipe. The aromatic Dutch tobacco filled the room, and she noticed that he had a habit of breaking his matches in two and then putting the pieces back in the matchbox.

“I like that tobacco, Michael, and not just because it smothers some of the paraffin smell.”

He ignored her small talk. “All right, Marda, let’s discuss your knowledge of the Catechism again. I have mentioned that once you know enough, we could start the process of your confirmation. We’ll have to adapt a bit because I cannot really ask the bishop to come here.”

Marda almost said, “Can I go to the bishop, then?” But she knew well enough by now that he didn’t like what she would call “smart-aleck” comments. She sometimes overreached herself in her attempts to spar with Duval, to keep lively a conversation with someone she knew to be far better educated than herself. It was very hard.

“Let us run through some of the basics,” he said slightly impatiently. “What is faith?”

She replied eagerly: “Faith is a supernatural gift of God, which enables us to believe without doubting whatever God has revealed.”

“Good. That is word perfect. How are you to know what God has revealed?”

“I am to know…to know…what God has revealed by the testimony, er, teaching, and authority of the Catholic Church.” Marda looked a little embarrassed by her hesitation.