The Abbess of Crewe (4 page)

‘What did you confess?’ he asked Mildred. ‘What did you say to that
young priest? What are your sins?’

‘It’s between myself and God. It is a secret.’

‘And the priest? What did you tell that young confessor of your secrets?’

‘All my heart. It’s necessary.’

He was jealous but he lost. Whatever Mildred’s deeply concealed dreams might be,
they ran far ahead of the Jesuit, far beyond him. He began at last to hate Mildred and
took up with Felicity.

Alexandra, who brought to the community no dowry but her noble birth and shrewd spirit,
is to be Abbess now that Hildegarde lies buried in the chapel. And the wonder is that
she bothers, or even her favourite nuns are concerned, now, a few weeks before the
election, that Felicity causes a slight stir amongst the forty nuns who are eligible to
vote. Felicity has new and wild ideas and is becoming popular.

Under the late Abbess Hildegarde this quaint convent, quasi-Benedictine, quasi-Jesuit,
has already discarded its quasi-natures. It is a mutation and an established fact. The
Lady Abbess Hildegarde, enamoured of Alexandra as she was, came close to expelling
Felicity from the Abbey in the days before she died. Alexandra alone possesses the
authority and the means to rule. When it comes to the vote it needs must be
Alexandra.

They pace the dark cloisters in such an evident happiness of shared anxiety that they
seem not to recognize the pleasure at all.

Walburga says, ‘We must do something. Felicity could create a crisis of leadership
in the Abbey.’

‘A crisis of leadership,’ Mildred says, as one who enjoys both the phrase and
the anguish of the idea. ‘The community must be kept under the Rule, which is to
say, Alexandra.’

Alexandra says, ‘Keep watch on the popularity chart. Sisters, I am consumed by the
Divine Discontent. We are made a little lower than the angels. This weighs upon me,
because I am a true believer.’

‘I too,’ says Walburga. ‘My faith remains firm.’

‘And mine,’ Mildred says. ‘There was a time I greatly desired not to
believe, but I found myself at last unable not to believe.’

Walburga says, ‘And Felicity, your enemy, Ma’am? How is Felicity’s
faith. Does she really believe one damn thing about the Catholic faith?’

‘She claims a special enlightenment,’ says Alexandra the Abbess-to-be.
‘Felicity wants everyone to be liberated by her vision and to acknowledge it. She
wants a stamped receipt from Almighty God for every word she spends, every action, as if
she can later deduct it from her income-tax returns. Felicity will never see the point
of faith unless it visibly benefits mankind.’

‘She is so bent on helping lame dogs over stiles,’ Walburga says. ‘Then
they can’t get back over again to limp home.’

‘So it is with the Jesuit. Felicity is helping Thomas, she would say. I’m
sure of it,’ Mildred says. ‘That was clear from the way he offered to help
me.’

The Sisters walk hand in hand and they laugh, now, together in the dark night of the
Abbey cloisters. Alexandra, between the two, skips as she walks and laughs at the idea
that one of them might need help of the Jesuit.

The night-watch nun crosses the courtyard to ring the bell for Lauds. The three nuns
enter the house. In the great hall a pillar seems to stir. It is Winifrede come to join
them, with her round face in the moonlight, herself a zone of near-darkness knowing only
that she has a serviceable place in the Abbey’s hierarchy.

‘Winifrede,
Benedicite
,’ Alexandra says.

‘Deo Gratias,
Alexandra.’

‘After Lauds we meet in the parlour,’ Alexandra says.

‘I’ve got news,’ says Winifrede.

‘Later, in the parlour,’ says Walburga. And Mildred says, ‘Not here,
Winifrede!’

But Winifrede proceeds like beer from an un-stoppered barrel. ‘Felicity is lurking
somewhere in the avenue. She was with Thomas the Jesuit. I have them on tape and on
video-tape from the closed-circuit.’

Alexandra says, loud and clear, ‘I don’t know what rubbish you are
talking.’ And motions with her eyes to the four walls. Mildred whispers low to
Winifrede, ‘Nothing must be said in the hall. How many times have we told
you?’

‘Ah,’ breathes Winifrede, aghast at her mistake. ‘I forgot you’ve
just bugged the hall.’

So swiftly to her forehead in despair goes the hand of Mildred, so swivelled to heaven
are Walburga’s eyes in the exasperation of the swifter mind with the slow. But
Alexandra is calm. ‘Order will come out of chaos,’ she says, ‘as it
always has done. Sisters, be still, be sober.’

Walburga the Prioress turns to her: ‘Alexandra, you are calm, so calm …
’

‘There is a proverb: Beware the ire of the calm,’ says Alexandra.

Quietly the congregation of nuns descends the great staircase and is assembled. Walburga
the Prioress now leads, Alexandra follows, and all the community after them, to sing the
Hour.

It is the Hour of None, three in the afternoon,
when Sister Felicity slips sleepily into the chapel. She is a tiny nun, small as a
schoolgirl, not at all like what one would have imagined from all the talk about her.
Her complexion looks as if her hair, sprouting under her veil, would be reddish. Nobody
knows where Felicity has been all day and half the night, for she was not present at
Matins at midnight nor Lauds at three in the morning, nor at breakfast at five, Prime at
six, Terce at nine; nor was she present in the refectory at eleven for lunch, which
comprised barley broth and a perfectly nourishing and tasty, although uncommon, dish of
something unnamed on toast, that something being in fact a cat-food by the name of Mew,
bought cheaply and in bulk. Felicity was not there to partake of it, nor was she in the
chapel singing the Hour of Sext at noon. Nor between these occasions was she anywhere in
the convent, not in her cell nor in the sewing-room embroidering the purses, the
vestments and the altar-cloths; nor was she in the electronics laboratory which was set
up by the great nuns Alexandra, Walburga and Mildred under the late Abbess
Hildegarde’s very nose and carefully unregarding eyes. Felicity has been absent
since after Vespers the previous day, and now she slips into her stall in the chapel at
None, yawning at three in the afternoon.

Walburga, the Prioress, temporarily head of the convent, turns her head very slightly as
Felicity takes her place, and turns away again. The community vibrates like an
evanescent shadow that quickly fades out of sight, and continues fervently to sing. Puny
Felicity, who knows the psalter by heart, takes up the chant but not her Office
book:

They have spoken to me with a lying tongue and have compassed
me about with words of hatred:

And have fought against me without cause.

Instead of making me a return of love, they slandered me:

but I gave myself to prayer.

And they repaid evil for good:

and hatred for my love.

The high throne of the Abbess is empty. Felicity’s eyes,
pink-rimmed with sleeplessness, turn towards it as she chants, thinking, maybe, of the
dead, aloof Abbess Hildegarde who lately sat propped in that place, or maybe how well
she could occupy it herself, little as she is, a life-force of new ideas, a quivering
streak of light set in that gloomy chair. The late Hildegarde tolerated Felicity only
because she considered her to be a common little thing, and it befitted a Christian to
tolerate.

‘She constitutes a reliable something for us to practise benevolence upon,’
the late Hildegarde formerly said of Felicity, confiding this to Alexandra, Walburga and
Mildred one summer afternoon between the Hours of Sext and None.

Felicity now looks away from the vacant throne and, intoning her responses, peers at
Alexandra where she stands mightily in her stall. Alexandra’s lips move with the
incantation:

Felicity, putting the finishing touches on an altar-cloth, is
sewing a phrase into the inside corner. She is doing it in the tiniest and neatest
possible satin-stitch, white upon white, having traced the words with her fine pencil:
‘
Opus Anglicanum
’. Her little frail fingers move securely and
her silver thimble flashes.

The other sewing nuns are grouped around her, each busy with embroidery but none so
clever at her work as Felicity.

‘You know, Sisters,’ Felicity says, ‘our embroidery room is becoming
known as a hotbed of sedition.’

The other nuns, eighteen in all, murmur solemnly. Felicity does not permit laughter. It
is written in the Rule that laughter is unseemly. ‘What are the tools of Good
Works?’ says the Rule, and the answers include, ‘Not to say what is idle or
causes laughter.’ Of all the clauses of the Rule this is the one that Felicity
decrees to be the least outmoded, the most adapted to the urgency of our times.

‘Love,’ says Felicity softly, plying her little fingers to her satin-stitch,
‘is lacking in our Community. We are full of prosperity. We prosper. We are
materialistic. May God have mercy on our late Lady Abbess Hildegarde.’

‘Amen,’ say the other eighteen, and the sun of high summer dances on their
thimbles through the window panes.

‘Sometimes,’ Felicity says, ‘I think we should tend more towards the
teachings of St Francis of Assisi, who understood total dispossession and
love.’

One of her nuns, a certain Sister Bathildis, answers, her eyes still bent on her
beautiful embroidery, ‘But Sister Alexandra doesn’t care for St Francis of
Assisi.’

‘Alexandra,’ says Felicity ‘has actually said, “To hell with St
Francis of Assisi. I prefer Sextus Propertius who belongs also to Assisi, a contemporary
of Jesus and a spiritual forerunner of Hamlet, Werther, Rousseau and Kierkegaard.”
According to Alexandra these fellows are far more interesting neurotics than St Francis.
Have you ever heard of such names or such a doctrine?’

‘Never,’ murmur the nuns in unison, laying their work on their laps the
easier to cross themselves.

‘Love,’ says Felicity as they all take up their work again, ‘and
love-making are very liberating experiences, very. If I were the Abbess of Crewe, we
should have a love-Abbey. I would destroy that ungodly electronics laboratory and
install a love-nest right in the heart of this Abbey, right in the heart of
England.’ Her busy little fingers fly with the tiny needle in and out of the stuff
she is sewing.

‘What do you make of that?’ says
Alexandra, switching off the closed-circuit television where she and her two trusted
nuns have just witnessed the scene in the sewing-room, recorded on video and sound
tape.

‘It’s the same old song,’ Walburga says. ‘It goes on all the
time. More and more nuns are taking up embroidery of their own free will, and fewer and
fewer remain with us. Since the Abbess died there is no more authority in the
convent.’

‘All that will be changed now,’ Alexandra says, ‘after the
election.’

‘It could be changed now,’ Mildred says. ‘Walburga is Prioress and has
the authority.’

Walburga says, ‘I thought better than to confront Felicity with her escapade last
night and half of the day. I thought better of it, and I think better of preventing the
nuns from joining the sewing-room faction. It might provoke Felicity to lead a
rebellion.’

‘Oh, do you think the deserters can have discovered that the convent is
bugged?’ says Mildred.

‘Not on your life,’ says Alexandra. ‘The laboratory nuns are far too
stupid to do anything but wire wires and screw screws. They have no idea at all what
their work adds up to.’

They are sitting at the bare metal table in the private control room which was set up in
the room adjoining the late Abbess’s parlour shortly before her death. The parlour
itself remains as it was when Hildegarde died although within a few weeks it will be
changed to suit Alexandra’s taste. For certainly Alexandra is to be Abbess of
Crewe. And as surely, at this moment, the matter has been thrown into doubt by Sister
Felicity’s glamorous campaign.

‘She is bored,’ says the destined Abbess. ‘That is the trouble. She
provides an unwholesome distraction for the nuns for a while, and after a while they
will find her as boring as she actually is.’

‘Gertrude,’ says Alexandra into the
green telephone. ‘Gertrude, my dear, are you not returning to your convent for the
election?’

‘Impossible,’ says Gertrude, who has been called on the new green line at the
capital city nearest to that uncharted spot in the Andes where she has lately posted
herself. ‘I’m at a very delicate point in my negotiations between the
cannibal tribe and that vegetarian sect on the other side of the mountain.’

‘But, Gertrude, we’re having a lot of trouble with Felicity. The life of the
Abbey of Crewe is at stake, Gertrude.’

‘The salvation of souls comes first,’ says Gertrude’s husky voice.
‘The cannibals are to be converted to the faith with dietary concessions and the
excessive zeal of the vegetarian heretics suppressed.’

‘What puzzles me so much, Gertrude, my love, is how the cannibals will fare on the
Day of Judgment,’ Alexandra says cosily. ‘Remember, Gertrude, that friendly
little verse of our childhood:

And it seems to me, Gertrude, that you are going
to have a problem with those cannibals on the Latter Day when the trumpet shall sound.
It’s a question of which man shall rise in the Resurrection, for certainly those
that are eaten have long since become the consumers from generation to generation. It is
a problem, Gertrude, my most clever angel, that vexes my noon’s repose and I do
urge you to leave well alone in that field. You should come back at once to Crewe and
help us in our time of need.’