The Abbess of Crewe Read online

  The plainchant of Compline floats sweetly over from the chapel where Alexandra stands in her stall nearly opposite Felicity. Walburga’s place is empty, Mildred’s place is empty. In the Abbess’s chair, not quite an emptiness as yet, but the absence of Hildegarde.

  The voices ripple like a brook:

  Hear, O God, my supplication:

  be attentive to my prayers.

  From the ends of the earth I cry to thee:

  when my heart fails me.

  Thou wilt set me high upon a rock, thou wilt

  give me rest:

  thou art my fortress, a tower of strength against

  the face of the enemy.

  And Alexandra’s eyes grieve, her lips recite:

  For I am homesick after mine own kind

  And ordinary people touch me not.

  And I’m homesick

  After my own kind…

  Winifrede, taking over Mildred’s duty, is chanting in true tones the short lesson to Felicity’s clear responses:

  Sisters: Be sober and vigilant:

  for thy enemy the devil, as a raging lion, goeth about seeking whom he may devour. Him do thou resist …

  ‘Aye, I am wistful for my kin of the spirit’; softly flows the English verse beloved of Alexandra:

  Well then, so call they, the swirlers out of the mist of my

  soul,

  They that come stewards, bearing old magic.

  But far all that, I am homesick after mine own kind …

  Chapter 3

  FELICITY’S work-box is known as Felicity’s only because she brought it to the convent as part of her dowry. It is no mean box, being set on fine tapered legs with castors, standing two and a half feet high. The box is inlaid with mother-of-pearl and inside it has three tiers neatly set out with needles, scissors, cottons and silks in perfect compartments. Beneath all these is a false bottom lined with red watered silk, for love-letters. Many a time has Alexandra stood gazing at this box with that certain wonder of the aristocrat at the treasured toys of the bourgeoisie. ‘I fail to see what mitigation soever can be offered for that box,’ she remarked one day, in Felicity’s hearing, to the late Abbess Hildegarde who happened to be inspecting the sewing-room. Hildegarde made no immediate reply, but once outside the room she said, ‘It is in poison-bad taste, but we are obliged by our vows to accept mortifications. And, after all, everything is hidden here. Nobody but ourselves can see what is beautiful and what is not.’

  Hildegarde’s dark eyes, now closed in death, gazed at Alexandra. ‘Even our beauty,’ she said, ‘may not be thought of.’

  ‘What should we care,’ said Alexandra, ‘about our beauty, since we are beautiful, you and I, whether we care or not?’

  Meanwhile Felicity, aggrieved, regarded her work-box and opened it to see that all was in order. So she does every morning and by custom, now, she once more strokes the elaborate shining top after the Hour of Prime while the ordinary nuns, grown despicable by profession, file in to the sewing-room and take their places.

  Felicity opens the box. She surveys the neat compartments, the reels and the skeins, the needles and the little hooks. Suddenly she gives a short scream and with her tiny bad-tempered face looking round the room at everybody she says, ‘Who has touched my work-box?’

  There is no answer. The nuns have come all unprepared for a burst of anger. The day of the election is not far off. The nuns have come in full expectance of Felicity’s revelations about the meaningful life of love as it should be lived on the verge of the long walk lined with poplars.

  Felicity now speaks with a low and strained voice. ‘My box is disarranged. My thimble is missing.’ Slowly she lifts the top layer and surveys the second. ‘It has been touched,’ she says. She raises the lowest recess and looks inside. She decides, then, to empty the work-box the better to examine the contents of its secret compartment.

  ‘Sisters,’ she says, ‘I think my letters have been discovered.’

  It is like a wind rushing over a lake with a shudder of birds and reeds. Felicity counts the letters. ‘They are all here,’ she says, ‘but they have been looked at. My thimble is lost. I can’t find it.’

  Everyone looks for Felicity’s thimble. Nobody finds it. The bell goes for the Hour of Terce. The first part of the morning has been a sheer waste of sensation and the nuns file out to their prayers, displaying, in their discontent, a trace of individualism at long last.

  How gentle is Alexandra when she hears of Felicity’s distress! ‘Be gentle with her,’ she tells the senior nuns. ‘Plainly she is undergoing a nervous crisis. A thimble after all — a thimble. I wouldn’t be surprised if she has not herself, in a moment of unconscious desire to pitch all her obsessive needlework to hell and run away with her lover, mislaid the ridiculous thimble. Be gentle. It is beautiful to be gentle with those who suffer. There is no beauty in the world so great as beauty of action. It stands, contained in its own moment, from everlasting to everlasting.’

  Winifrede, cloudily recognizing the very truth of Alexandra’s words, is yet uncertain what reason Alexandra might have for uttering them at this moment Walburga and Mildred stand silently in the contemplative hush while Alexandra leaves them to continue their contemplations. For certainly Alexandra means what she says, not wishing her spirit to lose serenity before God nor her destiny to be the Abbess of Crewe. Very soon the whole community has been informed of these thoughts of the noble Alexandra and marvel a little that, with the election so close at hand, she exhorts gentleness towards her militant rival.

  Felicity’s rage all the next day shakes her little body to shrieking point. There is a plot, there is a plot, against me, is the main theme of all she says to her sewing companions between the Hours of Lauds and Prime, Prime and Terce, Terce and Sext. In the afternoon, she takes to her bed, while her bewildered friends hunt the thimble and are well overheard in the control room in all their various exchanges and conjectures.

  Towards evening Walburga reports to Alexandra, ‘Her supporters are wavering. The nasty little bitch can’t stand our gentleness.’

  ‘You know, Walburga,’ Alexandra muses, ‘from this moment on, you may not report such things to me. Everything now is in your hands and those of Sister Mildred; you are together with Fathers Baudouin and Maximilian, and you are with the aid of Winifrede. I must remain in the region of unknowing. Proceed but don’t tell me. I refuse to be told, such knowledge would not become me; I am to be the Abbess of Crewe, not a programmed computer.’

  Felicity lies on her hard bed and at the midnight bell she rises for Matins. My God, there is a moving light in the sewing-room window! Felicity slips out of the file of black-cloaked nuns who make their hushed progress to the chapel. Alexandra leads. Walburga and Mildred are absent. There is a light in the sewing-room, moving as if someone is holding an electric torch.

  The nuns are assembled in the chapel but Felicity stands on the lawn, gazing upward, and eventually she creeps back to the house and up the stairs.

  So it is that she comes upon the two young men rifling her work-box. They have found the secret compartment. One of the young men holds in his hand Felicity’s love-letters. Screaming, Felicity retreats, locks the door with the intruders inside, runs to the telephone and calls the police.

  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:

  He turned rivers into a desert:

  and springs of water into parched ground,

  A fruitful land into a salt waste:

  because of the wickedness of those who

  dwelt therein.

  He turned a desert into a pool of water:

  and an arid land into
springs of water.

  And there he settled the hungry:

  and they founded a city to dwell in.

  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.