"And if no is a lie you won't do it any more, will you, Zanny?" '

Zanny, totally confused, said she wouldn't.

"Then say three Hail Marys, child, and bless you."

"Is that all?" Zanny in her most pessimistic moments had imagined herself being drowned in holy water or burnt at the stake.

"Yes," Father Donovan said cheerfully, "that's all, unless you'd like to say a little prayer for me."

It was when she was in bed that night that Zanny began taking apart the puzzle and putting it together again in a way that made some sort of sense. Detective Inspector Humphreys had given her a bag of sweets for killing little Willie. Father Donovan had given her three Hail Marys for killing little Willie and Evans the Bread. Three Hail Marys was a penance - not a very big penance -- but a sign of disapproval for all that. It was wrong to kill, but not very wrong. You were completely forgiven for one death. You were mildly reprimanded for two. Provided you didn't exceed a reasonable quota, you weren't likely to get into serious trouble. Three Hail Marys equalled two deaths. Three Hail Marys equalled one lie (Dolly's). At first she had looked at Dolly with considerable curiosity. Had Dolly killed anyone? When had she had the chance - and who? It had become increasingly obvious that Dolly would have liked to dispose of Sister Philomena, but Sister Philomena was still around. And on being questioned Dolly had vigorously denied killing anyone. She had told a lie, she said; if she hadn't she'd have been stuck in the box with Father. Donovan until they both dropped dead. Daft place -- this. You had to go around committing sins just so as to please Father Donovan. .

It hadn't seemed fair to Dolly that Zanny's horrific crimes should have been treated so leniently. The fact that Zanny was posh might have something to do with it. If she, Dolly, had made that sort of confession she would be in gaol this minute, being tortured. Sister Philomena was perhaps not such an enemy after all. Being polished up was a heck of a nuisance, but if you confessed your crimes in a prissy voice - like a blooming nightingale - then you got off. So, on her next visit to Sister Philomena, she was unusually compliant. "Progress, dear child," Sister Philomena said, delighted, "is being made."

Progress in the next two years continued to be made. Dolly, on the surface, appeared acceptably middle-cla.s.s. She even invented a nanny who had cared for her in her pre-kindergarten days. Those who didn't know her origins believed her. It amused her to speak of her dead parents as darling mummy and dearest daddy. Grandma Morton was: my wonderful grandmamma, now with G.o.d. And after two years' silence she probably was. Dolly still occasionally thought about her and grieved a little. In lonely moments she hugged her pillow in bed and buried her nose in it and tried to conjure up the smell of Grandma Morton - a normal smell of sweat and gin and a kind of distilled essence of affection. Birmingham had been real. Most of the time nastily real. The reality of the convent was less uncomfortable, but here you cried sometimes without knowing why. You wanted something, you didn't know what. A good biff across the ear-hole given by Grandma Morton or her mum and dad in the days of long ago had been a sign of caring. They might hate you like h.e.l.l when they biffed you and you hated them back, but the emotion had its positive side, too. Here they liked you -mildly - or disliked you - mildly - and there wasn't any depth of feeling about any of it.

Zanny, too, was going through a pa.s.sionless phase. Nothing here upset her very much. She couldn't do her sums, but could usually crib them from someone else. Had she been in the same cla.s.s as Dolly she might have been jealous of Dolly's ability, but a good brain is not a commodity that can be wrenched from its owner. Dolly was able to keep her head and its contents in perfect safety.

Clare, who had aroused the nuns' ire for not having Dolly home for the holidays, began wondering if she might risk having her for a few days at a time. On the whole -- better not. She was keeping her part of the bargain by paying her fees and buying her clothes and giving her presents on her birthday and at Christmas. If none of the children stayed in the convent during the holidays she would have been forced to take the risk, but several children spent the vacations there. For excellent reasons, Mother Benedicta had implied censoriously. My reason, Clare thought, is excellent plus. All the same, a day spent shopping in the county town with the two little girls could probably be accomplished safely. And the gesture would appease the nuns. Zanny would be aware of maternal affection that continued throughout term-time as well as during the holidays well, dash it all, she did love her, didn't she?), and Dolly wouldn't feel too bereft. (A pity her grandmother hadn't Turned up, but even if she did now it would, in the nature of things, be h.e.l.lo and goodbye.) The day's outing pa.s.sed without incident, apart from the air-raid sounding. They took refuge in a book shop because it happened to be handy and Clare gave them money to buy a book each. They both bought a film annual and in a rare moment of complicity a.s.sured Clare that the nuns wouldn't mind a bit. They were nice pictures. Tarzan was like a nature story -- look at all those trees. Clare, looking at Johnny Weismuller's torso, wasn't deceived, but it was nice to see them grinning together. They seemed to be getting to like each other. Anyway the books were innocent. She began thinking of Peter. He was even less of a Tarzan than Graham. The war was going on too long. Graham was getting it somewhere, no doubt, or did constant carnage destroy the urge? If it didn't destroy the urge and you couldn't get it in the normal way - did you get it the other way? When Johnny came marching home would he have another Johnny in tow? It wasn't a pleasant thought. She repressed it.

It would have been wiser if Sister Clemence had repressed a similar thought about her female charges. She was a forty-year-old French woman, ripely bosomed, who wore her nun's garb with fort.i.tude rather than with enthusiasm. She intensely disliked dormitory duty but nevertheless approached it with unnecessary zeal. Which was how she did everything. Instead of walking through the dormitory saying her rosary quietly to herself, or musing with sweet nostalgia about the days of her youth -- long before Hitler and the war - her thoughts stayed firmly in the present. She did her duty to the letter and beyond. Lights went out at nine. Anyone having a late bath or a nocturnal visit to the lavatory had to get back into bed as best she could. 'For ches were not allowed. Whispered conversations over the white-boarded part.i.tions of the cubicles were definitely not allowed. Clothes had to be folded neatly and placed on the chair at the bedside. Photographs of relatives - close relatives - might be displayed on the shelf by the wardrobe. Photographs of anyone else were prohibited. Clive Brook and Clark Gable appearing temporarily, and hopefully, as Daddy before he went to war might deceive some of her more naive sisters in Christ, but not her. When Sister Clemence was on duty, pin-ups went under the mattress. Pages from Zanny's and Dolly's film books, torn out and exchanged for sweets, went under cover like the French resistance and travelled with some hazard from cubicle to cubicle. As the pages were limited in quant.i.ty, the girls travelled even more hazardously and viewed them under the blankets two to a bed. In the male-denuded landscape you protected your Franchot Tone and Melvyn Douglas from the eyes of malevolent authority by pushing them down to the bottom of the bed when Sister Clemence prowled by. If you were the visitor you took the torch with you and lay hopefully out of sight whilst the rightful owner of the cubicle feigned innocent sleep in full view of her prying eyes. After she had pa.s.sed by you both got under the bed-clothes with your torch and your film star and your world was full of men, beautiful men.

What was a Lesbian?

Why was Sister Clemence going up the creek?

Even the older girls thought her reaction to the crime was verging on paranoia. They were being sent to Ma Mere - for what? They were likely to be expelled - for what? Talking together in the dark? It didn't occur to them that the production of the pictures might put everything in a different light.

Sister Clemence shaking with emotion herded a dozen of them in their dressing-gowns down to Mother Benedicta's study and then went in search of higher authority.

Zanny and Dolly, the two youngest, looked at each other, bleary-eyed. What was she on about? They had been counting the remaining pictures and working out how many sweets they were worth. Their dressing-gown pockets were full of them. As vendors of the pictures they had been made much of by the older girls -and now thunder was breaking over their heads.

Mother Benedicta arrived in a fury and sent them all back to bed. She would see them in the morning, she said. She was a well-balanced woman who knew very well that Sister Clemence was not. If there was an explanation -- not necessarily Sister Clemence's explanation -- it would be found in the light of day.

She saw the girls, two by two. Lesbian partnerships, Sister Clemence called them. Mother Benedicta did not.

She began with the older ones and saw mystification rather than l.u.s.t. If there was guilt, it wasn't guilt of the flesh. By the time she arrived at Zanny and Dolly she put the questions she had put to the others, but out of a sense of fairness and duty rather than of conviction.

"Zanny and Dolly, you were in bed together -- why?"

"For company," said Dolly, who was the quick thinker.

"What were you doing?"

"Just lying there," said Dolly.

"And now, you answer me, Zanny -- what were you doing?"

"Just lying there," said Zanny, taking her cue.

"Were you touching each other?"

How could you lie there in a three foot bed without touching?

"Yes," they chorused.

"Where did you touch?"

They both knew instinctively that they should not have touched. They didn't know why.

"Zanny's toe," Dolly said, "touched my toe."

"Dolly's left arm," said Zanny, "was squashed up against my neck."

"You didn't touch anywhere else?"

By the tone of the question it was highly undesirable to have touched anywhere else. What was she talking about?

This time they both chorused, "No."

She told them severely that it was a sin to break the school rules. The rule was that once you were in your own bed you stayed in it. You didn't leave your bed and get into another girl's bed for any reason at all. When they went to confession they would remember what they had done and tell Father Donovan.

On the whole, Dolly and Zanny decided, it would be better to tell Father Donovan that they had got in bed together to kiss. A kiss was the lightest of touches and quite obviously the sin was touching. The lie about kissing could be held over until the next confession as a handy sin in reserve.

He listened to them a little shaken - all the other confessions had been fleshless in implication - and told them to say the rosary through twice. And let the good Lord sort that one out, he thought. Mother Benedicta's cross, according to Mother Benedicta, was Sister Clemence and he was beginning to understand why. Individual sins confessed by the nuns and pupils linked up together like a mosaic and that way you saw the convent as a whole. It was normal. It was human. He was glad the Man Up There was the final arbiter. He, Father Donovan, as the channel, was frequently relieved that the buck could be pa.s.sed. Indeed there were times, such as now, when he couldn't get rid of it quickly enough.

To say the rosary through, twice implied a sin of some magnitude and once again Zanny's search for some sort of moral guide was brought up short. Who planned all these penances? Did Father Donovan have a book on it? If she had put a pillow on Dolly's face and sat on it would the penance have been three Hail Marys again -- or maybe four - or maybe five? Some sins were called mortal and some were called venial. You went to h.e.l.l for the first lot. All her sins so far had been venial - and murder was more venial than most. Murder didn't seem to matter. Touching did. Her memory of little Willie and the breadman was fading away like a lurid sunset into the tender greyness of forgetfulness. Dolly, who was pretending to say her rosary, dug Zanny with her elbow and reverting to strong Midland for the sheer h.e.l.l of it said the whole set-up here was bleedin' daft. "Aint no reason in any of it."

Zanny agreed.

From that moment she vowed never to look for a reason again. There was no guide except the guide in your own head. Sin was just a blob of quicksilver which took on odd shapes and couldn't be pinned down. So get rid of the concept. Chuck it out. Live. Her own words to herself were simpler -- for the most part she used no words at all. She imagined herself sitting on a beach, naked. The sun shone. There was no clutter. No fuss. Her mind was like the inside of a sh.e.l.l. A mother-of-pearl sh.e.l.l, pink and pretty, growing beautiful Zanny pearls.

In 1945 on the day the war ended, Zanny had her first period. The convent bells rang and the town bells rang and streamers were thrown and everyone embraced everyone else with impunity. Zanny felt the warm wetness between her legs and shouted out with some astonishment and a degree of fright that she was a woman. Everyone was too pleased that Hitler's nose had been finally ground into the mud to take any notice. She fixed herself up with one of the sanitary towels that Mummy had provided and then lay on the bed waiting for momentous things to happen to her. It was an odd feeling being grown up (well, nearly eleven). There was a griping pain in her stomach and she seemed to be bleeding slowly to death. If this went on once a month until she was forty then somebody had it in for women. The extreme unfairness of it affronted her. Men should bleed, too. Daddy would be coming home soon. He hadn't bled at all. Not superficially, nor from any orifices. She was beginning to forget what he looked like.

Graham, who remembered Zanny as small, plump and lethal, was delighted with what he saw now. She'd be a corker one day when the puppy fat had fined down-- it was already fining down around her waist. Her stomach no longer stuck out and she had little b.r.e.a.s.t.s which showed under her school blouse like inverted saucers. Not only was she a potential beauty, she was also good. The nuns had worked wonders with her. She hadn't killed anyone for years.

Unlike many of his compatriots he didn't find it at all difficult to settle down into family life again. His marriage wouldn't go bust. He took Clare to bed with the eagerness of a new lover and she received him with enthusiasm. Peter had become boring routine. Graham had new games to play. My cup, Clare thought, runneth over. The dark days have gone. Life, at last, is normal. Even normal enough to have Dolly to stay for a few days in the summer holidays. (Just a few days -- don't push it.) Graham, not over intelligent, was aware of Dolly's intelligence without fully appreciating it. Her metamorphosis from a slum child into a well-spoken, perfectly acceptable young adolescent, took some getting used to. He even called her Dorothy once or twice. She was small, thin and gawky, not at all pretty. But her eyes were good - they reminded him of the deep murky brown of desert oases. If her eyelashes were real (well, of course they were real), they were the best he'd seen for a long time. She'd make play with those one day.

But she didn't compare with Zanny. Fair, beautiful, loving Zanny. There was no competing for affection. Dolly, deliberately gauche at times, made sure of that. She got asked out on holiday to several homes these days and knew how to adapt. In the other homes she adapted without any stress. Daddy -- a major in the REs - had been killed in El Alamein - one of Monty's lot. That sort of thing. Occasionally he was a submarine commander and had gone down at Dunkirk. Mummy, a Wren officer - or a worker in Intelligence (I'm sorry I don't know the details) -- had either received a direct hit or been liquidated. Her hosts, impressed or sceptical, were polite and kind.

Here there was no fun or make-believe. Here there was just a rather cautious present. She was grateful that Zanny's parents were sufficiently guilt-ridden to pay her fees and to look after her needs. She was wise enough not to mention the reason - ever. The goldfish pond had been filled in and made into a rockery full of alpines. Grandma Morton wouldn't have approved of those either. They should have been cabbages.

The convent garden, patriotically full of cabbages, turnips and potatoes, had been tended during the war by the nuns themselves, mostly by the lay sisters who, with no money to bring into the Order, brought their domestic and gardening skills while their better-heeled, better-educated sisters brought their academic abilities and their cash. All toil was offered to the greater glory of G.o.d - be it hoeing around the beetroot, doing the laundry, scrubbing floors, or teaching matriculation subjects to the sixth form.

With the ending of the war, the intake of pupils began to grow. During the following three years numbers rose to eighty. There was money enough now to refurbish the gardener's cottage and to employ a full-time gardener. Local gardeners, mostly ex-army, came and went. They were Welsh. They were not Catholics. The convent was a stop-gap. They put up with it - temporarily - as Mother Benedicta put up with them.

If she hadn't had to do so much putting-up she would have been wise enough not to have employed Murphy. Murphy, even in Mother Benedicta's convent-veiled eyes, was an extremely masculine animal. He was thirty years old. Irish. A Catholic. Extremely suitable apart from one thing - his overt masculinity. He wore an old flannel shirt and thick dirty corduroys and his body, thickset and muscular, shone through the lot like a promise of joy.

Clutching at straws, Mother Benedicta asked him if he were married - or likely to be married soon. He told her he wasn't and then grinned disarmingly and said that sure he'd had it in his thoughts, that he wasn't one of them quare ones, but he wasn't in any hurry to be rushing into marriage. If the nuns could be putting up with him -- a single man -- then he'd do the job just fine. He'd even raise rabbits for the convent table - there was room for hutches in the cottage back yard - and if he cleared the corner by the potting shed there'd be room for hens. The shed itself could house them. His enthusiasm was boundless. He had a tooth missing, top front left, and it was that rather than his zeal that won Mother Benedicta. He was flawed. Not much, but perhaps enough. Out of working hours, she told him, he would stay within the confines of his cottage and its garden. It had its own gate to the road. He wouldn't use the convent's main gates or take a short cut across the playing fields. For her part, she would see that the children didn't bother him. His cottage garden would be put out of bounds. If any of the girls played too close, or made a nuisance of themselves - by retrieving a ball, perhaps -- he would send them packing immediately and report the incident to her.