The Abbess of Crewe (7 page)

In the control room, Mildred and Walburga are tuned in to the dim-lit closed-circuit
television. ‘Come quickly,’ says Walburga to Mildred, ‘follow me to
the chapel. We must be seen at Matins.’ Mildred trembles. Walburga walks
firmly.

The bell clangs at the gate, but the nuns chant steadily. The police sirens sound in the
drive, their car having been admitted by Felicity, but the Sisters continue the
night’s devotions:

Alexandra hears the clamour outside.

Sisters, be sober, be vigilant, for the devil as a raging lion
…

The nuns file up to bed, anxiously whispering.
Their heads bend meekly but their eyes have slid to right and to left where in the great
hall the policemen stand with the two young men, dressed roughly, who have been caught
in the convent. Felicity’s voice comes in spasmodic gasps. She is recounting her
story while her closest friend Bathildis holds her shaking body. Down upon them bear
Walburga and Alexandra, swishing their habits with authority. Mildred motions the nuns
upward and upward to their cells out of sight, far out of sight. Alexandra can be heard:
‘Come into the parlour, sirs. Sister Felicity, be still, be sober.’

‘Pull yourself together, Felicity,’ Walburga says.

As the last nun reaches the last flight of stairs Winifrede in her handsome stupor comes
out of the dark cupboard in the sewing-room and descends.

And, as it comes to pass, these men are discovered to be young Jesuit novices. In the
parlour, they admit as much, and the police take notes.

‘Officer,’ says Walburga. ‘I think this is merely a case of high
spirits.’

‘Some kind of a lark,’ Alexandra says with an exalted and careless air.
‘We have no charge to bring against them. We don’t want a
scandal.’

‘Leave it to us,’ says Walburga. ‘We shall speak to their Jesuit
superiors. No doubt they will be expelled from their Order.’

Sister Felicity screams, ‘I bring a charge. They were here last night and they
stole my thimble.’

‘Well, Sister … ’ says the officer in charge, and gives a little
grunt.

‘It was a theft,’ says Felicity.

The officer says, ‘A thimble, ma’am, isn’t much of a crime. Maybe you
just mislaid it.’ And he looks wistfully into the mother-of-pearl face of
Alexandra, hoping for her support. These policemen, three of them, are very uneasy.

Young Bathildis says, ‘It isn’t only her thimble. They wanted some documents
belonging to Sister Felicity.’

‘In this covent we have no private property,’ Walburga says. I am the
Prioress, officer. So far as I’m concerned the incident is closed, and we’re
sorry you’ve been troubled.’

Felicity weeps loudly and is led from the room by Bathildis, who says vulgarly, ‘It
was a put-up job.’

In this way the incident is closed, and the two Jesuit novices cautioned, and the police
implored by lovely Alexandra to respect the holiness of the nuns’ cloistered lives
by refraining from making a scandal. Respectfully the policemen withdraw, standing by
with due reverence while Walburga, Alexandra and Mildred lead the way from the
parlour.

Outside the door stands Winifrede. ‘What a bungle!’ she says.

‘Nonsense,’ says Walburga quickly. ‘Our good friends, these officers
here, have bungled nothing. They understand perfectly.’

‘Young people these days, Sisters…’ says the elder policeman.

They put the two young Jesuits in a police car to take them back to their seminary. As
quietly as they can possibly go, they go.

Only a small piece appears in one of the daily
papers, and then only in the first edition. Even so, Alexandra‘s cousins,
Walburga’s sisters and Mildred’s considerable family connections, without
the slightest prompting, and not even troubling to question the fact, weigh in with
quiet ferocity to protect their injured family nuns. First on the telephone and then,
softly, mildly, in the seclusion of a men’s club and the demure drawing-room of a
great house these staunch families privately and potently object to the little newspaper
story which is entitled ‘Jesuit Novices on the Spree’. A Catholic spokesman
is fabricated from the clouds of nowhere to be quoted by all to the effect that the
story is a gross exaggeration, that it is ungallant, that it bears the heavy mark of
religious prejudice and that really these sweet nuns should not be maligned. These nuns,
it is pointed out, after all do not have the right of reply, and this claim, never
demonstrated, is the most effective of all arguments. Anyway, the story fades into
almost nothing; it is only a newspaper clipping lying on Alexandra’s little desk.
‘Jesuit Novices on the Spree’, and a few merry paragraphs of how two student
Jesuits gatecrashed the enclosed Abbey of Crewe and stole a nun’s thimble.
‘They did it for a bet,’ explained Father Baudouin, assistant head of the
Jesuit College. Denying that the police were involved, Father Baudouin stated that the
incident was closed.

‘Why in hell,’ demands Alexandra, in the presence of Winifrede, Walburga and
Mildred, ‘did they take her thimble?’

‘They broke in twice,’ Winifrede says in her monotone of lament. ‘The
night before they were caught and the night they were caught. They came first to survey
the scene and test the facility of entry, and they took the thimble as a proof
they’d done so. Fathers Baudouin and Maximilian were satisfied and therefore they
came next night for the love-letters. It was —’

‘Winifrede, let’s hear no more,’ Walburga says. ‘Alexandra is to
be innocent of the details. No specific items, please.’

‘Well,’ says obstinate Winifrede, ‘she was just asking why the hell
—’

‘Alexandra has said no such thing,’ Walburga menaces. ‘She said nothing
of the kind,’ Mildred agrees.

Alexandra sits at her little desk and smiles. ‘Alexandra, I heard it with my own
ears. You were inquiring as to the thimble.’

‘If you believe your own ears more than you believe us, Winifrede,’ says
Alexandra, ‘then perhaps it is time for us to part. It may be you have lost your
religious vocation, and we shall all quite understand if you decide to return to the
world quietly, before the election.’

Dawn breaks for a moment through the terribly bad weather of Winifrede’s
understanding. She says, ‘Sister Alexandra, you asked me for no explanation
whatsoever, and I have furnished none.’

‘Excellent,’ says Alexandra. ‘I love you so dearly, Winifrede, that I
could eat you were it not for the fact that I can’t bear suet pudding. Would you
mind going away now and start giving all the nuns a piece of your mind. They are
whispering and carrying on about the episode. Put Felicity under a three days’
silence. Give her a new thimble and ten yards of poplin to hem.’

‘Felicity is in the orchard with Thomas,’ states Winifrede.

‘Alexandra has a bad cold and her hearing is affected,’ Walburga observes,
looking at her pretty fingernails.

‘Clear off,’ says Mildred, which Winifrede does, and faithfully, meanwhile,
the little cylindrical ears in the walls transmit the encounter; the tape-recorder
receives it in the control room where spools, spools and spools twirl obediently for
hours and many hours.

When Winifrede has gone, the three Sisters sit for a moment in silence, Alexandra
regarding the press cutting, Walburga and Mildred regarding Alexandra.

‘Felicity is in the orchard with Thomas,’ Alexandra says, ‘and she
hopes to be Abbess of Crewe.’

‘We have no video connection with the orchard,’ says Mildred, ‘not as
yet.’

‘Gertrude,’ says Alexandra on the green telephone,
‘we have news that you’ve crossed the Himalayas and are preaching
birth-control. The Bishops are demanding an explanation. We’ll be in trouble with
Rome, Gertrude, my dear, and it’s very embarrassing with the election so
near.’

‘I was only preaching to the birds like St Francis,’ Gertrude says.

‘Gertrude, where are you speaking from?’

‘It’s unpronounceable and they’re changing the name of the town
tomorrow to something equally unpronounceable.’

‘We’ve had our difficulties here at Crewe,’ says Alexandra. ‘You
had better come home, Gertrude, and assist with the election.’

‘One may not canvass the election of an Abbess,’ Gertrude says in her deepest
voice. ‘Each vote is a matter of conscience. Winifrede is to vote for me by
proxy.’

‘A couple of Jesuit novices broke into the convent during Compline and Felicity is
going round the house saying they were looking for evidence against her. They took her
thimble. She’s behaving in a most menopausal way, and she claims there’s a
plot against her to prevent her being elected Abbess. Of course, it’s a lot of
nonsense. Why don’t you come home, Gertrude, and make a speech about
it?’

‘I wasn’t there at the time,’ Gertrude says. ‘I was
here.’

‘Have you got bronchitis, Gertrude?’

‘No,’ says Gertrude, ‘you’d better make a speech yourself. Be
careful not to canvass for votes.’

‘Gertrude, my love, how do I go about appealing to these nuns’ higher
instincts? Felicity has disrupted their minds.’

‘Appeal to their lower instincts,’ Gertrude says, ‘within the walls of
the convent. It’s only when exhorting the strangers outside that one appeals to
the higher. I hear a bell at your end, Alexandra. I hear a lovable bell.’

‘It’s the bell for Terce,’ Alexandra says. ‘Are you not homesick,
Gertrude, after your own kind?’

But Gertrude has rung off.

The nuns are assembled in the great chapter hall
and the Prioress Walburga addresses them. The nuns are arranged in semicircles according
to their degree, with the older nuns at the back, the lesser and more despised in the
middle rows and the novices in the front. Walburga stands on a dais at a table facing
them, with the most senior nuns on either side of her. These comprise Felicity,
Winifrede, Mildred and Alexandra.

‘Sisters, be still, be sober,’ says Walburga.

The nuns are fidgeting, however, in a way that has never happened before. The faces
glance and the eyes dart as if they were at the theatre waiting for the curtain to go
up, having paid for their tickets. Outside the rain pelts down on the green, on the
gravel, on the spreading leaves; and inside the nuns rustle as if a small tempest were
swelling up amongst them.

‘Be sober, be vigilant,’ says Walburga the Prioress, ‘for I have asked
Sister Alexandra to speak to you on the subject of our recent disturbances.’

Alexandra rises and bows to Walburga. She stands like a lightning-conductor, elegant in
her black robes, so soon to be more radiant in white. ‘Sisters, be still. I have
first a message from our esteemed Sister Gertrude. Sister Gertrude is at present
settling a dispute between two sects who reside beyond the Himalayas. The dispute is on
a point of doctrine which apparently has arisen from a mere spelling mistake in English.
True to her bold custom, Sister Gertrude has refused to furnish Rome with the tiresome
details of the squabble and bloodshed in that area and she is settling it herself out of
court. In the midst of these pressing affairs Sister Gertrude has found time to think of
our recent trifling upset here at cosy Crewe, and she begs us to appeal to your higher
instincts and wider vision, which is what I am about to do.’

The nuns are already sobered and made vigilant by the invocation of famous Gertrude, but
Felicity on the dais causes a nervous distraction by bringing out from some big pocket
under her black scapular a little embroidery frame. Felicity’s fingers busy
themselves with some extra flourish while Alexandra, having swept her eyes upon this
frail exhibition, proceeds.

‘Sisters,’ she says, ‘let me do as Sister Gertrude wishes; let me
appeal to your higher instincts. We had the extraordinary experience, last week, of an
intrusion into our midst, at midnight, of two young ruffians. It’s natural that
you should be distressed, and we know that you have been induced to gossip amongst
yourselves about the incident, stories of which have been circulated outside the convent
walls.’

Felicity’s fingers fly to and fro; her eyes are downcast with pale, devout lashes,
and she holds her sewing well up to meet them.

‘Now,’ says Alexandra, ‘I am not here before you to speak of the
ephemera of every day or of things that are of no account, material things that will
pass and will become, as the poet says,

I call rather to the attention of your higher
instincts the enduring tradition of one belonging to my own ancestral lineage,
Marguerite Marie Alacoque of the seventeenth century, my illustrious aunt, founder of
the great Abbeys of the Sacré Coeur. Let me remind you now of your good fortune,
for in those days, you must know, the nuns were rigidly divided in two parts, the
soeurs nobles
and the
soeurs bourgeoises.
Apart from this
distinction between the nobility and the bourgeoisie, there was of course a third
section of the convent comprising the lay sisters who hardly count. Indeed, well into
this century the Abbey schools of the Continent were divided; the
filles
nobles
were taught by nuns of noble lineage while
soeurs bourgeoises
taught the daughters of the
vils métiers,
which is to say the
tradesmen.’

Winifrede’s eyes, like the wheels of a toy motorcar, have been staring eagerly from
her healthy fair face; her father is the rich and capable proprietor and president of a
porcelain factory, and has a knighthood.