The Abbess of Crewe: A Modern Morality Tale

  MURIEL

  SPARK

  THE ABBESS

  OF CREWE

  A NEW DIRECTIONS

  Contents

  The Abbess of Crewe

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Copyright

  THE ABBESS OF

  CREWE

  Come let us mock at the great

  That had such burdens on the mind

  And toiled so hard and late

  To leave some monument behind,

  Nor thought of the levelling wind …

  Mock mockers after that

  That would not lift a hand maybe

  To help good, wise or great

  To bar that foul storm out, for we

  Traffic in mockery.

  From W.B. Yeats,

  ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’

  Chapter 1

  ‘WHAT is wrong, Sister Winifrede,’ says the Abbess, clear and loud to the receptive air, ‘with the traditional keyhole method?’

  Sister Winifrede says, in her whine of bewilderment, that voice of the very stupid, the mind where no dawn breaks, ‘But, Lady Abbess, we discussed right from the start —’

  ‘Silence!’ says the Abbess. ‘We observe silence, now, and meditate.’ She looks at the tall poplars of the avenue where they walk, as if the trees are listening. The poplars cast their shadows in the autumn afternoon’s end, and the shadows lie in regular still file across the pathway like a congregation of prostrate nuns of the Old Order. The Abbess of Crewe, soaring in her slender height, a very Lombardy poplar herself, moving by Sister Winifrede’s side, turns her pale eyes to the gravel walk where their four black shoes tread, tread and tread, two at a time, till they come to the end of this corridor of meditation lined by the secret police of poplars.

  Out in the clear, on the open lawn, two men in dark police uniform pass them, with two Alsatian dogs pulling at their short leads. The men look straight ahead as the nuns go by with equal disregard.

  After a while, out there on the open lawn, the Abbess speaks again. Her face is a white-skinned English skull, beautiful in the frame of her white nun’s coif. She is forty-two in her own age with fourteen generations of pale and ruling ancestors of England, and ten before them of France, carved also into the bones of her wonderful head. ‘Sister Winifrede,’ she now says, ‘whatever is spoken in the avenue of meditation goes on the record. You’ve been told several times. Won’t you ever learn?’

  Sister Winifrede stops walking and tries to think. She strokes her black habit and clutches the rosary beads that hang from her girdle. Strangely, she is as tall as the Abbess, but never will she be a steeple or a tower, but a British matron in spite of her coif and her vows, and that great carnal chastity which fills her passing days. She stops walking, there on the lawn; Winifrede, land of the midnight sun, looks at the Abbess, and presently that little sun, the disc of light and its aurora, appears in her brain like a miracle. ‘You mean, Lady Abbess,’ she says, ‘that you’ve even bugged the poplars?’

  ‘The trees of course are bugged,’ says the Abbess. ‘How else can we operate now that the scandal rages outside the walls? And now that you know this you do not know it so to speak. We have our security to consider, and I’m the only arbiter of what it consists of, witness the Rule of St Benedict. I’m your conscience and your authority. You perform my will and finish.’

  ‘But we’re something rather more than merely Benedictines, though, aren’t we? says Sister Winifrede in dark naivety. ‘The Jesuits —’

  ‘Sister Winifrede,’ says the Abbess in her tone of lofty calm, ‘there’s a scandal going on, and you’re in it up to the neck whether you like it or not. The Ancient Rule obtains when I say it does. The Jesuits are for Jesuitry when I say it is so.’

  A bell rings from the chapel ahead. It is six o’clock of the sweet autumnal evening. ‘In we go to Vespers whether you like it or whether you don’t. ’

  ‘But I love the Office of Vespers. I love all the Hours of the Divine Office,’ Winifrede says in her blurting voice, indignant as any common Christian’s, a singsong lament of total misunderstanding.

  The ladies walk, stately and tall, but the Abbess like a tower of ivory, Winifrede like a handsome hostess oar businessman’s wife and a fair week-end tennis player, given the chance.

  ‘The chapel has not been bugged,’ remarks the Lady Abbess as they walk. ‘And the confessionals, never. Strange as it may seem, I thought well to omit any arrangement for the confessionals, at least, so far.’

  The Lady Abbess is robed in white, Winifrede in black. The other black-habited sisters file into the chapel behind them, and the Office of Vespers begins.

  The Abbess stands in her high place in the choir, white among the black. Twice a day she changes her habit. What a piece of work is her convent, how distant its newness from all the orthodoxies of the past, how far removed in its antiquities from those of the present! ‘It’s the only way,’ she once said, this Alexandra, the noble Lady Abbess, ‘to find an answer always ready to hand for any adverse criticism whatsoever.’

  As for the Jesuits, there is no Order of women Jesuits. There is nothing at all on paper to reveal the mighty pact between the Abbey of Crewe and the Jesuit hierarchy, the overriding and most profitable pact. What Jesuits know of it but the few?

  As for the Benedictines, so closely does the Abbess follow and insist upon the ancient and rigid Rule that the Benedictines proper have watched with amazement, too ladylike, both monks and nuns, to protest how the Lady Abbess ignores the latest reforms, rules her house as if the Vatican Council had never been; and yet have marvelled that such a great and so Benedictine a lady should have brought her strictly enclosed establishment to the point of an international newspaper scandal. How did it start off without so much as a hint of that old cause, sexual impropriety, but merely from the little misplacement, or at most the theft, of Sister Felicity’s silver thimble? How will it all end?

  ‘In these days,’ the Abbess had said to her closest nuns, ‘we must form new monastic combines. The ages of the Father and of the Son are past. We have entered the age of the Holy Ghost. The wind bloweth where it listeth and it listeth most certainly on the Abbey of Crewe. I am a Benedictine with the Benedictines, a Jesuit with the Jesuits. I was elected Abbess and I stay the Abbess and I move as the Spirit moves me.’

  Stretching out like the sea, the voices chant the Gregorian rhythm of the Vespers. Behind the Abbess, the stained-glass window darkens with a shadow, and the outline of a man climbing up to the window from the outside forms against the blue and the yellow of the glass. What does it matter, another reporter trying to find his way into the convent or another photographer as it might be? By now the scandal occupies the whole of the outside world, and the people of the press, after all, have to make a living. Anyway, he will not get into the chapel. The nuns continue their solemn chant while a faint grumble of voices outside the window faintly penetrates the chapel for a few moments. The police dogs start to bark, one picking up from the other in a loud litany of their own. Presently their noises stop and evidently the guards have appeared to investigate the intruder. The shadow behind the window disappears hastily.

  These nuns sing loudly their versicles and responses, their antiphons:

  Tremble, O earth, at the presence of the Lord;

  at the presence of the God of Jacob

  Who turned the rock into pools of water:

  and the strong hills into fountains of water.

  Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to thy name, give

  glory: bec
ause of thy mercy and thy faithfulness.

  But the Abbess is known to prefer the Latin. It is said that she sometimes sings the Latin version at the same time as the congregation chants the new reformed English. Her high place is too far from the choir for the nuns to hear her voice except when she sings a solo part. This evening at Vespers her lips move with the others but discernibly at variance. The Lady Abbess, it is assumed, prays her canticles in Latin tonight.

  She sits apart, facing the nuns, white before the altar. Stretching before her footstool are the green marble slabs, the grey slabs of the sisters buried there. Hildegarde lies there; Ignatia lies there; who will be next?

  The Abbess moves her lips in song. In reality she is chanting English, not Latin; she is singing her own canticle, not the vespers for Sunday. She looks at the file of tombs and, thinking of who knows which occupant, past or to come, she softly chants:

  Thy beauty shall no more be found,

  Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound

  My echoing song; then worms shall try

  That long-preserved virginity …

  The cloud of nuns lift their white faces to record before the angels the final antiphon:

  But our God is in heaven:

  he has done all that he wished.

  ‘Amen,’ responds the Abbess, clear as light.

  Outside in the grounds the dogs prowl and the guards patrol silently. The Abbess leads the way from the chapel to the house in the blue dusk. The nuns, high nuns, low nuns, choir nuns, novices and nobodies, fifty in all, follow two by two in hierarchical order, the Prioress and the Novice Mistress at the heels of the Abbess and at the end of the faceless line the meek novices.

  ‘Walburga,’ says the Abbess, half-turning towards the Prioress who walks behind her right arm; ‘Mildred,’ she says, turning to the Novice Mistress on her left, ‘go and rest now because I have to see you both together between the Offices of Matins and Lauds.’

  Matins is sung at midnight. The Office of Lauds, which few convents now continue to celebrate at three in the morning, is none the less observed at the Abbey of Crewe at that old traditional time. Between Matins and Lauds falls the favourite time for the Abbess to confer with her nearest nuns. Walburga and Mildred murmur their assent to the late-night appointment, bowing low to the lofty Abbess, tall spire that she is.

  The congregation is at supper. Again the dogs are howling outside. The seven o’clock news is on throughout the kingdom and if only the ordinary nuns had a wireless or a television set they would be hearing the latest developments in the Crewe Abbey scandal. As it is, these nuns who have never left the Abbey of Crewe since the day they entered it are silent with their fìsh pie at the refectory table while a senior nun stands at the corner lectern reading aloud to them. Her voice is nasal, with a haughty twang of the hunting country stock from which she and her high-coloured complexion have at one time disengaged themselves. She stands stockily, remote from the words as she half-intones them. She is reading from the great and ancient Rule of St Benedict, enumerating the instruments of good works:

  To fear the day of judgement.

  To be in dread of hell.

  To yearn for eternal life with all the longing of our soul

  To keep the possibility of death every day before our eyes.

  To keep a continual watch on what we are doing with our life.

  In every place to know for certain that God is looking at us.

  When evil thoughts come into our head, to dash them at once on Christ, and open them up to our spiritual father.

  To keep our mouth from bad and low talk.

  Not to be fond of talking.

  Not to say what is idle or causes laughter.

  Not to be fond of frequent or boisterous laughter.

  To listen willingly to holy reading.

  The forks make tiny clinks on the plates moving bits of fish pie into the mouths of the community at the table. The reader toils on …

  Not to gratify the desires of the flesh.

  To hate our own will.

  To obey the commands of the Abbess in everything, even though she herself should unfortunately act otherwise, remembering the Lord’s command: ‘Practise and observe what they tell you, but not what they do.’ — Gospel of St Matthew, 23.

  At the table the low nuns, high nuns and novices alike raise water to their lips and so does the reader. She replaces her glass …

  Where there has been a quarrel, to make peace before sunset.

  Quietly, the reader closes the book on the lectern and opens another that is set by its side. She continues her incantations:

  A frequency is the number of times a periodic phenomenon repeats itself in unit time.

  For electromagnetic waves the frequency is expressed in cycles per second or, for the higher frequencies, in kilocycles per second or megacycles per second.

  A frequency deviation is the difference between the maximum instantaneous frequency and the constant carrier frequency of a frequency-modulated radio transmission.

  Systems of recording sound come in the form of variations of magnetization along a continuous tape of, or coated with, or impregnated with, ferro-magnetic material.

  In recording, the tape is drawn at constant speed through the airgap of an electromagnet energized by the audiofrequency current derived from a microphone.

  Here endeth the reading. Deo gratias.

  ‘Amen,’ responds the refectory of nuns.

  ‘Sisters, be sober, be vigilant, for the Devil goes about as a raging lion, seeking whom he may devour.’

  ‘Amen.’

  The Abbess of Crewe’s parlour glows with bright ornaments and brightest of all is a two-foot statue of the Infant of Prague. The Infant is adorned with its traditional robes, the episcopal crown and vestments embedded with such large and so many rich and gleaming jewels it would seem they could not possibly be real. However, they are real.

  The Sisters, Mildred the Novice Mistress and Walburga the Prioress, sit with the Abbess. It is one o’clock in the morning. Lauds will be sung at three, when the congregation arises from sleep, as in the very old days, to observe the three-hourly ritual.

  ‘Of course it’s out of date,’ the Abbess had said to her two senior nuns when she began to reform the Abbey with the winsome approval of the late Abbess Hildegarde. ‘It is absurd in modern times that the nuns should have to get up twice in the middle of the night to sing the Matins and the Lauds. But modern times come into a historical context, and as far as I’m concerned history doesn’t work. Here, in the Abbey of Crewe, we have discarded history. We have entered the sphere, dear Sisters, of mythology. My nuns love it. Who doesn’t yearn to be part of a myth at whatever the price in comfort? The monastic system is in revolt throughout the rest of the world, thanks to historical development. Here, within the ambience of mythology, we have consummate satisfaction, we have peace.’

  More than two years have passed since this state of peace was proclaimed. The Abbess sits in her silk-covered chair, now, between Matins and Lauds, having freshly changed her white robes. Before her sit the two black senior sisters while she speaks of what she has just seen on the television, tonight’s news, and of that Sister Felicity we have all heard about, who has lately fled the Abbey of Crewe to join her Jesuit lover and to tell her familiar story to the entranced world.

  ‘Felicity,’ says the Abbess to her two faithful nuns, ‘has now publicly announced her conviction that we have eavesdropping devices planted throughout our property. She’s demanding a commission of inquiry by Scotland Yard.’

  ‘She was on the television again tonight?’ says Mildred.

  ‘Yes, with her insufferable charisma. She said she forgives us all, every one, but still she considers as a matter of principle that there should be a police inquiry.’

  ‘But she has no proof,’ says Walburga the Prioress. ‘Someone leaked the story to the evening papers,’ says the Abbess, ‘and they immediately got Felicity on the television.’

 
‘Who could have leaked it? ’ says Walburga, her hands folded on her lap, immovable.

  ‘Her lax and leaky Jesuit, I dare say,’ the Abbess says, the skin of her face gleaming like a pearl, and her fresh, white robes falling about her to the floor. That Thomas,’ says the Abbess, ‘who tumbles Felicity.’

  ‘Well, someone leaked it to Thomas,’ says Mildred, ‘and that could only be one of the three of us here, or Sister Winifrede. I suggest it must be Winifrede, the benighted clot, who’s been talking.’

  ‘Undoubtedly,’ says Walburga, ‘but why?’

  ‘“Why?” is a fastidious question at any time,’ says the Abbess. ‘When applied to any action of Winifrede’s the word “why” is the inscrutable ingredient of a brown stew. I have plans for Winifrede.’

  ‘She was certainly instructed in the doctrine and official version that our electronic arrangements are merely laboratorial equipment for the training of our novices and nuns to meet the challenge of modern times,’ Sister Mildred says.

  ‘The late Abbess Hildegarde, may she rest in peace,’ says Walburga, ‘was out of her mind to admit Winifrede as a postulant, far less admit her to the veil.’

  But the living Abbess of Crewe is saying, ‘Be that as it may, Winifrede is in it up to the neck, and the scandal stops at Winifrede.’

  ‘Amen’ say the two black nuns. The Abbess reaches out to the Infant of Prague and touches with the tip of her finger a ruby embedded in its vestments. After a space she speaks: ‘The motorway from London to Crewe is jammed with reporters, according to the news. The A51 is a solid mass of vehicles. In the midst of the strikes and the oil crises.’

  ‘I hope the police are in force at the gates,’ Mildred says.

  ‘The police are in force,’ the Abbess says. ‘I was firm with the Home Office.’

  ‘There are long articles in this week’s Time and Newsweek,’ Walburga says. ‘They give four pages apiece to Britain’s national scandal of the nuns. They print Felicity’s picture.’