Chance Developments Read Online Free

thought; might conceal their origins, or embroider a modest past, could even deny their parents and family. She had heard people talk about instances of that and had shared their distaste for such behaviour. She would not seek to disguise the fact that she had been a nun; indeed, in the circles in which she was planning to move, such a past might even seem exotic, might be an advantage.
This is Flora—she was a nun, would you believe it? Yes, a nun!
It would be like having served in the Foreign Legion or having lived somewhere remote and romantic. Who was that man, the father of one of her past Senior Four girls, who had been pointed out to her by Sister Frances at some school function? Who was said by Sister Frances to have lived in Biarritz? Biarritz—people must live in Biarritz, but what an aura it gave them. They must live ordinary lives at one level; they must get colds and go to the shops and do the laundry and so on, but then all of this happened in
Biarritz
, and that somehow transformed it.
    She reached the steps and started her climb up to Princes Street. A man brushed past her; he is in a hurry to get to the office, she thought, and he must be forgiven if he fails to apologise, as I am making my way up these steps far too slowly—in these heels—and he has somebody waiting for him at the other end, waiting and looking at his watch; but then the man stopped and raised his hat to her. He said, “I’m sorry—I wasn’t looking where I was going.” He spoke quietly, in what her mother would have described as an educated voice, and he smiled at her, revealing that one of his front teeth had been capped in gold—
educated teeth
, she thought, and returned his smile. But then he was gone, and she didn’t have the opportunity to follow up their brief encounter with some further remark, such as: “Yes, of course, we are all in a hurry these days, aren’t we?”
As if we had not been in such a hurry in
1959
or
1960
…
To say we were all in a hurry was a simple comment, but it conveyed so much, including regret at having spent ten years teaching Senior Four mathematics and trying to stop them thinking about boys all the time. Mind you, she thought, Senior Four could do to contemplate the folly of spending a whole year—admittedly not ten, but still a whole year—thinking about boys.
    5
    Opposite the monument to Sir Walter Scott stood Jenners, the finest department store that Edinburgh could muster, as confident in itself as any such store could be, as all-encompassing, as tempting. She took a deep breath as she entered its front door, reminding herself that she was as entitled as anybody to shop in this place—more so, perhaps, as she had in her purse slightly over two hundred pounds in crisp Bank of Scotland notes: the balance of the float that Mr. O’Malley had left with the aunt. It was a vast sum, she felt—thirty pounds would have more than done, but she had decided that after ten years of spending nothing she could perhaps indulge herself. It occurred to her now that nobody else in Jenners would have two hundred pounds in her purse, and that she could hold her head high amongst any grand Edinburgh ladies. She immediately thought:
Pride!
and made a conscious effort to exclude such thoughts. She would, as penance, send a cheque for twenty pounds to the St. Vincent de Paul Society once her cheque book arrived; that was the least she could do.
Penance
:
Would that notion remain with her for life—even if she became a Protestant? The thought brought a moment of gloom:
You can take the girl out of the Church but you can’t take the Church out of the girl.
They used to say that when they discussed girls who had strayed, and now she found herself applying the adage to herself. She swallowed hard. I am
not
Sister Flora, she muttered. I am no longer that person.
    She stopped at the perfume counter, where a woman in a black wool dress with a white lace collar showed her the latest offering from Paris. She