Symposium (10 page)

Luke
was puzzled at first, but remarkably quick to perceive the point. He loaded his
tray with champagne and orange juice, ready to circulate with it outside the
marquee. He looked at his fellow-labourer and cast a glance round the hundreds
of guests. ‘The moneyed class,’ murmured Luke. ‘That’s right,’ said his
companion behind the white cloth-covered table. He was there to serve special
requests. ‘Whisky and soda, sir? Of course. Which brand?’

At the
end of that long Saturday of the country wedding, Luke went back up to London
by car with his new friend who asked to be called Garnet. They went to a club
to eat and relax. And there Luke learned of the exact prices to be gained by
anyone with a list of good names, or even one name, present at a party and
therefore away from home. Luke and Garnet, who also boasted a few more reliable
members of his team, were assured of their pay whether the names were useful or
not, as Garnet pointed out. ‘More often than not’, confided Garnet, ‘it’s too
risky. Servants, guards, in the house. Dogs. Sophisticated alarms. They’re
alarms that go off at the police station but not in the house, so the police
have time to come and catch the fools. All that is no concern of us. Sometimes
the people don’t go to the dinner or whatever at the last minute. Not our
fault. No concern of us. We give the list and take the money. It could be done
by word of mouth, no proof. As I say, a list like the wedding today would be
worth a lot. Somebody else no doubt provided one. But, as I say, even if it’s a
duplicate a list is a list and the principals pay. They like to encourage.
They’re generous, as I say.’

As
Garnet said they would be, they had been generous with Luke. He had been far
enough away from any field of action not to feel any guilt. Ella and Ernst
would have said they could trust Luke with their lives. They wouldn’t ever need
to lock anything up with Luke in the house. They were right. They had no idea
how greatly Luke prospered.

‘Luke,
I have a friend, the artist Hurley Reed and his life-companion, extremely
charming Chris Donovan. They’re giving a party. We’ll be there. Will you give
them an evening of your time to help with the serving?’

‘I
think so,’ said Luke. ‘Hopefully I’ll be free.’ To Ella this meant he would
certainly take on the job. She had never known him refuse.

It was
only the matter of the very expensive watch that gave them to think, and then
they thought wrongly, both arriving at the immediate conclusion that Luke had
received this many-thousand-dollar treasure in return for sexual favours.

Helen Suzy was writing to
her friend, Brian Suzy’s daughter.

Dear Pearl,

I suppose Brian wrote and told you about our robbery.
You can imagine he was very upset, in fact a bit too upset in my humble
opinion. I know you warned me he’s another generation, they think of their
goods and chattels. You can’t take it with you. Pearl, I think sometimes I’m
going crazy. He says he’s been raped, how would he know about rape? In fact in
a funny psychological way he wants to be raped, they say we all do!!! I feel I
sympathize with your Mother when she was married to him. But it’s still another
generation. I was truly sorry our stuff was stolen, and that they urinated all
over. We had to get the walls done anyway. I never liked those chair covers.
Now we hear the gang is operating outside London, a house in Dulwich and a big
house in Wembley. The people were out but they wounded a servant who is still
in hospital. The police say it’s the same gang as came to us. They seem to
know. We were in bed. We could have been killed. They seem to have found out in
the other cases when people were out to dinner or the theatre. The big thing as
Brian will have told you was they left the Picture on the wall by Francis
Bacon, very costly. Now he’s cutting down on the phone etc. to make up for our
losses, so I didn’t ring you up. In my humble opinion we should spend more to
cheer ourselves up like a trip to Venice. Brian says maybe yes, a trip to
Venice, so I put an idea in his head perhaps. We have a couple of dinner
parties then we could go off. He has a burglar alarm put in the corner of the
rooms that blinks electronically, but not in the bedroom. I put my foot down at
that. You can imagine!

What happened about that boy, the one you met at the
Poetry reading at the Y? Did he leave for London? He hasn’t shown up. You
couldn’t come before Christmas I suppose? There can’t be much on at the UN, so
much is happening this end. Get me one jar Rennett’s Formula Twenty-three from
Saks if it is still going. Charge it on card. I wish you could come soon.
Beatrice, the first Lady Suzy before your Mother’s turn rang up very
officiously about the robbery when she read of it in the papers, telling me
what to do. All the china and so on was really hers. I said it was a bit late
in the day to say all this, she’d better write to Brian or his solicitor. She
can drop dead, with his china and her glassware. I didn’t tell Brian she rang.
Why upset him more?

Tons of love. Do write.

Helen

THE
little through-street off the Gray’s Inn Road, in the area of St
Pancras in London, was not very active at two in the afternoon. A three-storey
nineteenth-century house was the modest Anglican convent of Mary of Good Hope.
The street, only a few yards long, and narrow, was closed to traffic. Its usual
pedestrians were lawyers and office workers taking a short cut. Margaret
Murchie, however, arrived on her motor-bike, parked on the pavement and pressed
the bell. She had an appointment to be interviewed as a novice. A minister of
an Episcopalian church in Scotland had made this arrangement.

It was
shortly after the death by murder of her grandmother at the Calton Nursing Home
in Edinburgh that Margaret had gone into a silence; she was also thinner and
paler. The public fuss had died down, Margaret’s aunts had made off with their
loot, and her father had made himself comfortable with his mother’s fortune.
But nothing would induce Margaret to benefit from the money. She made this well
known. Her family and their friends were impressed by her attitude. Her sad
pallor and silence were deeply felt, too, by Margaret’s fellow-workers in the
ceramics studio in Glasgow. It came about, now, that everyone was sorry for
Margaret. Even her sisters, in their different ways, expressed pity for her
suffering and the wrong that everyone had done her in their secret thoughts.
Only Dan Murchie, passionate and bemused by his daughter, could not prevent himself
from half-wondering what she was up to, without fully realizing that he was
wondering at all.

‘I
always said,’ wrote Flora to her mother, ‘that one thing had nothing to do with
another. And now you can see that Margaret had nothing to do with the
unfortunate incident. Must close now as it’s bed time and I have to run my
bath.’ Eunice wrote: ‘It was a great relief to Peter and I that nothing came of
the scandal after all. It would have been so bad for me in my condition. Poor
Margaret was questioned much too long by the police and too often. And now as
you say she looks ill. I’m not surprised. It was hard enough on Peter and I.’

Margaret’s
ring at the bell brought a nun to the door, a young woman in a pale grey dress
of a modern length and with a grey and white veil on her head.

‘I have
an appointment,’ said Margaret, ‘with Sister Lorne.’

‘She’s
expecting you. If that’s your bike would you mind bringing it into the
courtyard? Just a minute and I’ll get the key.’

She
shut the front door again completely, but after a few moments appeared again
with a large key with which she opened a side-door. Margaret wheeled her
motor-cycle into the courtyard which was bare except for a six-passenger panel
van. ‘You can come up this way, Miss Murphy,’ said the girl.

‘Murchie,’
said Margaret.

‘Oh,
sorry, I heard “Murphy”. This way.’

Beeswax
was the smell Margaret had always heard that convents smelled of. She saw that
the wooden banisters and the stairs were brightly polished and felt that the
rather musky fragrance in the air must be beeswax. In fact it was an aerosol
spray but that did not detract from the austere clean conventual atmosphere of
the house. Plain cord matting formed the stair carpet. Margaret was shown in to
a small sitting-room with elephant-grey plastic-seated chairs, a round table with
a lace centrepiece on which stood a vase of coloured glass flowers and a desk
on which were piled some brown cardboard folders containing ragged papers, a
four-part London telephone directory and a black telephone. There were plain
nylon curtains in the two windows, which had long curtains at each side made of
some homespun green and brown stuff.

Margaret
draped herself as far as that was possible on one of the chairs, her head to
one side with an arm resting on the chair-back. In came a middle-aged woman
dressed in her short grey habit and floating veil. She breathed heavily as if
with a chest complaint. ‘Miss Murchie?’ she said. ‘I’m Sister Lorne, the deputy
Superior. Our Reverend Mother is in bed, not well at all. We all have to look
after her.’ She paused for breath, put her hand to her chest. ‘To tell you the
truth,’ she said, ‘I smoke too much.’

‘Is
that allowed in a convent?’ Margaret said.

‘Oh,
goodness, yes. We’re a very modern order, you know. Few people realize how the
C of E has marched on. They think the old-fashioned dogmas still prevail; they
think the repressive colonial missionary system of the upper classes can bring
our message of Good Hope to the Third World. Have they read Marx? — No. Would
they under-stand —under — stand with a hyphen — his message to the toiling
masses? — No. We of the Order of Good Hope —’

‘Can I
help you? — A glass of water?’ said Margaret springing up from her chair, since
the emphysemic nun at this point had broken down into a distressing condition
of wheeze and puff. Sister Lorne waved Margaret’s offer away while she clung to
the edge of the table, recovering.

She
recovered eventually. ‘Thank you,’ she said to Margaret. ‘It shows a good
spirit to make a gesture of help. I had a letter from the Reverend Mr Wise and
of course he explained your case. I read it to our sisters after prayers last
night. There are only nine of us including our sick Superior. We all agreed to
pray that you would suit us as a novice. There are few real vocations in these
days of yuppies and murky capitalism. I hope you have one. You were
sent.
I
can only say you were sent.’

‘I feel
sent,’ said Margaret. ‘It is a most extraordinary feeling.’

It is sad to observe that
of those nine nuns of St Pancras only three were of vital interest, and that
those three were fairly unprincipled. The remaining six were devout and
dutiful, and two of them very sweet and trusting, but all those six were as
dreary as hell.

Margaret
made great progress as a novice at the Convent of Good Hope. Their mission was
largely in social work, and as they had a small community and limited funds,
this was mainly confined to hospital visiting. The liturgy of the morning consisted
of a psalm and prayers. They busied themselves about the housekeeping, the
shopping and the cooking all morning. After lunch, which was very simple and
served with hot water to drink, they set forth on their visits to elderly
patients who had no friends or relatives to visit them.

Margaret
made herself useful as a frugal shopper. On her motor-bike she would go to buy
their daily rations at Clerkenwell and Finsbury where the food shops were
cheaper and the wares not much inferior.

Dear Dad,

It is quite a good life, and I believe I have a
vocation. It is all a question of thinking of
les autres.
Of course,
yes, you can come and visit. But not just yet.

Sister Lorne is standing in for the Mother Superior.
She is a leftie, as you would call it, but that’s the result of thinking of
les
autres.
The old men and the old women in those hospital wards would make
you left wing if you could see them.

Sister Marrow has a big say in running the convent.
She’s the Novice Mistress. She has a wild artistic temperament, sometimes
breaking the glasses set out on the table in the refectory. We get hot water to
drink, a drop of sherry on Sunday with the vicar after the service. Well, to
get back to Sister Marrow she is known as the four-letter nun. She makes Sister
Lorne laugh and I see why. Sister Rooke is a master plumber, you wouldn’t
believe how much in demand. She was sent for by the Bishop as he couldn’t get a
plumber in the whole of London, at least not one who understood those antique
drains. The other nuns I’m afraid are lacking in a bit of IQ, at least so it
seems to me. But they go forth with their little basket of goodies over their
arm like little Red Riding Hood to visit the sick, except of course their capes
are grey like we all wear. Sister Rooke doesn’t use four-letter words, she says
you’re more of a plumber if you use the words that stretch to five, six, seven
letters.