Chance Developments Read Free

they chatted over a cup of tea, she thought,
Would it be better to get a flat before a husband, or get a husband first and then a flat?
She would have like to have asked them, but she could not, because neither knew the nature of her plans just yet, and she was eager not to play her hand too soon.
    3
    She might have continued as a teacher; she might have continued as a nun, if it had been possible to live with a less doctrinaire faith with conviction. But she could not see how that would work. As a nun she felt she had to adhere to the Church more strictly than a layperson, and she felt that doing this would be hypocritical on her part. So she would take a sabbatical from the Church. She might still go to Mass, but she would give even that a break for a while. She would explore other avenues. She would look at things critically. She would find God in places she had been afraid to look. And she would do all this without Father Sullivan or the bishop telling her what she could think and do. They are fine men, but I am my own person, she thought, I am entitled to look for God in this world in the way
I
choose to do…She paused. Goodness! I’m becoming a Protestant—or almost; she, from a family steeped in Catholicism, whose social life, whose very sense of identity was rooted in a tight, exclusive Catholic world—she was becoming, of all things, a Protestant.
    And why should she not take just a look at Protestantism and what it had to offer? She would not do anything immediately, but she would do it. It would shock her aunt and the few cousins she had on her mother’s side, for whom loyalty to Catholicism was a tribal matter and for whom the bonds that secured them to their religion were as hoops of steel. But it was her life she was thinking about, and she should be able to do with it what
she
wanted to do.
    “The dear sisters,” said the aunt, “have no clothes sense, do they, bless them.”
    She was surveying the beige bombazine with a bemused expression.
    “It’s actually a rather fine fabric,” said Flora, fingering the sleeve of the dress. “But it looks so old-fashioned, doesn’t it?”
    “I’m afraid it does,” agreed the aunt. “You can go shopping tomorrow. Mr. O’Malley has left some cash for you, to keep you going before the bank account is sorted out. I have my bridge club, if you don’t mind my not coming.”
    “I’ll be fine,” said Flora. “I have to start sometime.”
    “Start what?”
    “Start standing on my own two feet. You see, I can’t remember when I last bought something. It must have been years ago.”
    The aunt smiled. “You’ll find things are a bit more expensive, I’m afraid.”
    She wore the beige bombazine dress to go shopping. She took the train into Glasgow, relishing the novelty of travelling by herself and not in a group of nuns and schoolgirls, as she had done for the last ten years. It was a strange feeling—one of almost physical lightness. And in the shop she found herself overwhelmed by the choices available. In the convent one got by with very few things, and with virtually no choice. Now she was confronted with a bewildering range of outfits, the elegance of which only underlined the shabbiness of what she was wearing.
    Mr. O’Malley had left what struck her as a grossly excessive amount of money, but by lunchtime she had spent most of what was in her purse. Many of the items would be delivered later, but the bombazine dress was now safely folded away in a cardboard box and she was wearing a new bright red dress, a patterned coat, a hat with a side peak, and a pair of high-heeled shoes, her first pair of high heels since university days. She felt slightly insecure in them, and almost lost her balance when crossing a road, but she would persist, and she was already feeling more confident about them.
    Her aunt examined the new outfits and expressed pleasure.
    “Very elegant,” she said.
    “Good,” said Flora.
    “And what plans have you for tomorrow?”