The Mandelbaum Gate Passage

Pages 159 - 160

From the floor above, where she had come from, a noise of running water and padding footsteps came in muffled spasm between the overwhelming attic snores; this was probably caused by one of the German women moving around in the night, having awakened either by habit or by the sound of Barbara’s packing and departure. A tinted glass window about the stair she had just come down let in the moonlight, but the next flight down to the front hall was in blackness by contrast to that dusky amber windowlight above. Barbara lingered on this landing, between the half-light and the pure dark, as if waiting for something. Along the corridor, where the Mother Superior slept, nothing stirred. Barbara did not know why it should. Almost disappointed, she moved to follow Freddy cautiously down the very dark staircase.

            Freddy half-way, came to a curve in the stair and bumped the suitcase loudly into the wall. Barbara halted on the third step and whispered down to him, ‘Are you all right?’ He did not reply but she could hear him continue to pick his step by muted step. She glanced behind and upward, and could not place her sense of something unaccomplished in the silence. The front door was unlocked and Freddy now held it open so that the moonlight flooded her last footsteps from the sleeping convent. They had got away.

            Immediately on passing into the night air she realized that she had almost hoped to be caught, it would have been a relief and a kind of triumph and justification. For there had been a decided element of false assumption in her reception at the convent the previous day, after they had inquired politely, and estimated her type. Of course she was an English Catholic convert. She was indeed the quiet type. But there was a lot more than met the eye, at least she hoped so. She had thought, as the Mother Superior made her benign speech of welcome, and the old novice-mistress hovered with an admiring smile, if only they knew.