The Abbess of Crewe (3 page)

‘Then why ask her advice?’ says Walburga.

‘Because we are in danger. Dangerous people understand well how to avoid
it.’

‘She’s in a very wild area just now, reconciling the witch doctors’
rituals with a specially adapted rite of the Mass,’ Mildred says, ‘and
moving the old missionaries out of that zone into another zone where they are sure to be
opposed, probably massacred. However, this will be an appropriate reason for reinstating
the orthodox Mass in the first zone, thus modifying the witch doctors’
bone-throwing practices. At least, that’s how I see it.’

‘I can’t keep up with Gertrude,’ says the Abbess. ‘How she is so
popular I really don’t know. But even by her build one can foresee her stone
statue in every village square: Blessed Mother Gertrude.’

‘Gertrude should have been a man,’ says Walburga. ‘With her moustache,
you can see that.’

‘Bursting with male hormones,’ the Abbess says as she rises from her silk
seat the better to adjust the gleaming robes of the Infant of Prague. ‘And
now,’ says the Abbess, ‘we wait here for Gertrude to call us. Why
can’t she be where we can call her?’

The telephone in the adjoining room rings so suddenly that surely, if it is Gertrude, she
must have sensed her sisters’ want from the other field of the earth. Mildred
treads softly over the green carpet to the adjoining room and answers the phone. It is
Gertrude.

‘Amazing,’ says Walburga. ‘Dear Gertrude has an uncanny knowledge of
what is needed where and when.’

The Abbess moves in her fresh white robes to the next room, followed by Walburga.
Electronics control-room as it is, here, too, everything gleams. The Abbess sits at a
long steel desk and takes the telephone.

‘Gertrude,’ says the Abbess, ‘the Abbess of Crewe has been discussing
you with her Sisters Walburga and Mildred. We don’t know what to make of you. How
should we think?’

‘I’m not a philosopher,’ says Gertrude’s deep voice,
philosophically.

‘Dear Gertrude, are you well?’

‘Yes,’ says Gertrude.

‘You sound like bronchitis,’ says the Abbess.

‘Well, I’m not bronchitis.’

‘Gertrude,’ says the Abbess, ‘Sister Gertrude has charmed all the
kingdom with her dangerous exploits, while the Abbess of Crewe continues to perform her
part in the drama of
The Abbess of Crewe.
The world is having fun and waiting
for the catharsis. Is this my destiny?’

‘It’s your calling,’ says Gertrude, philosophically.

‘Gertrude, my excellent nun, my learned Hun, we have a problem and we don’t
know what to do with it.’

‘A problem you solve,’ says Gertrude.

‘Gertrude,’ wheedles the Abbess, ‘we’re in trouble with Rome. The
Congregation of Religious has started to probe. They have written delicately to inquire
how we reconcile our adherence to the Ancient Rule, which as you know they find suspect,
with the laboratory and the courses we are giving the nuns in modern electronics, which,
as you know, they find suspect.’

‘That isn’t a problem,’ says Gertrude. ‘It’s a
paradox.’

‘Have you time for a very short seminar, Gertrude, on how one treats of a
paradox?’

‘A paradox you live with,’ says Gertrude, and hangs up.

The Abbess leads the way from this room of many shining square boxes, many lights and
levers, many activating knobs, press-buttons and slide-buttons and devices fearfully and
wonderfully beyond the reach of a humane vocabulary. She leads the way back to the
Infant of Prague, decked as it is with the glistening fruits of the nuns’ dowries.
The Abbess sits at her little desk with the Sisters Walburga and Mildred silently
composed beside her. She takes the grand writing-paper of the Abbey of Crewe and places
it before her. She takes her pen from its gleaming holder and writes:

‘Your Very Reverend Eminence,

Your Eminence does me the honour to address me, and I humbly thank Your Eminence.

I have the honour to reply to Your Eminence, to submit that his sources of information
are poisoned, his wells are impure. From there arise the rumours concerning my House,
and I beg to write no more on that subject.

Your Eminence does me the honour to inquire of our activities, how we confront what Your
Eminence does us the honour to call the problem of reconciling our activities in the
field of technological surveillance with the principles of the traditional life and
devotions to which we adhere.

I have the honour to reply to Your Eminence. I will humbly divide Your Eminence’s
question into two parts. That we practise the activities described by Your Eminence I
agree; that they present a problem I deny, and I will take the liberty to explain my
distinction, and I hold:

That Religion is founded on principles of Paradox.

That Paradox is to be accepted and presents no Problem.

That electronic surveillance (even if a convent were one day to practise it) does not
differ from any other type of watchfulness, the which is a necessity of a Religious
Community; we are told in the Scriptures “to watch and to pray”, which is
itself a paradox since the two activities cannot effectively be practised together
except in the paradoxical sense.’

‘You may see what I have written so far,’ says the
Abbess to her nuns. ‘How does it strike you? Will it succeed in getting them
muddled up for a while?’

The black bodies lean over her, the white coifs meet above the pages of the letter.

‘I see a difficulty,’ says Walburga. ‘They could object that
telephone-tapping and bugging are not simply an extension of listening to hearsay and
inviting confidences, the steaming open of letters and the regulation search of the
novices’ closets. They might well say that we have entered a state where a
difference of degree implies a difference in kind.’

‘I thought of that,’ says the Abbess. ‘But the fact that we have
thought of it rather tends to exclude than presume that they in Rome will think of it.
Their minds are set to liquidate the convent, not to maintain a courtly correspondence
with us.’ The Abbess lifts her pen and continues:

‘Finally, Your Eminence, I take upon myself the honour to
indicate to Your Eminence the fine flower and consummation of our holy and paradoxical
establishment, our beloved and renowned Sister Gertrude whom we have sent out from our
midst to labour for the ecumenical Faith. By river, by helicopter, by jet and by camel,
Sister Gertrude covers the crust of the earth, followed as she is by photographers and
reporters. Paradoxically it was our enclosed community who sent her out.’

‘Gertrude,’ says Mildred, ‘would be furious at
that. She went off by herself.’

‘Gertrude must put up with it. She fits the rhetoric of the occasion,’ says
the Abbess. She bends once more over her work. But the bell for Lauds chimes from the
chapel. It is three in the morning. Faithful to the Rule, the Abbess immediately puts
down her pen. One white swan, two black, they file from the room and down to the waiting
hall. The whole congregation is assembled in steady composure. One by one they take
their cloaks and follow the Abbess to the chapel, so softly ill-lit for Lauds. The nuns
in their choirs chant and reply, with wakeful voices at three in the morning:

The Abbess from her high seat looks with a kind of wonder at her
shadowy chapel of nuns, she listens with a fine joy to the keen plainchant, as if upon a
certain newly created world. She contemplates and sees it is good. Her lips move with
the Latin of the psalm. She stands before her high chair as one exalted by what she sees
and thinks, as it might be she is contemplating the full existence of the Abbess of
Crewe.

Soon she is whispering the melodious responses in other words of
her great liking:

I
N
the summer before the autumn, as God
is in his heaven, Sister Felicity’s thimble is lying in its place in her
sewing-box.

The Abbess Hildegarde is newly dead, and laid under her slab in the chapel.

The Abbey of Crewe is left without a head, but the election of the new Abbess is to take
place in twenty-three days’ time. After Matins, at twenty minutes past midnight,
the nuns go to their cells to sleep briefly and deeply until their awakening for Lauds
at three. But Felicity jumps from her window on to the haycart pulled up below and runs
to meet her Jesuit.

Tall Alexandra, at this time Sub-Prioress and soon to be elected Abbess of Crewe, remains
in the chapel, kneeling to pray at Hildegarde’s tomb. She whispers:

She wears the same black habit as the two asters
who wait for her at the door of the chapel.

She joins them, and with their cloaks flying in the night air they return to the great
sleeping house. Up and down the dark cloisters they pace, Alexandra, Walburga and
Mildred.

‘What are we here for?’ says Alexandra. ‘What are we doing
here?’

‘It’s our destiny,’ Mildred says.

‘You will be elected Abbess, Alexandra,’ says Walburga.

‘And Felicity?’

‘Her destiny is the Jesuit,’ says Mildred.

‘She has a following among the younger nuns,’ Walburga says.

‘It’s a result of her nauseating propaganda,’ says lofty Alexandra.
‘She’s always talking about love and freedom as if these were attributes
peculiar to herself. Whereas, in reality, Felicity cannot love. How can she truly love?
She’s too timid to hate well, let alone love. It takes courage to practise love.
And what does she know of freedom? Felicity has never been in bondage, bustling in, as
she does, late for Mass, bleary-eyed for Prime, straggling vaguely through the Divine
Office. One who has never observed a strict ordering of the heart can never exercise
freedom.’

‘She keeps her work-box tidy,’ Mildred says. ‘She’s very
particular about her work-box.’

‘Felicity’s sewing-box is the precise measure of her love and her
freedom,’ says Alexandra, so soon to be Abbess of Crewe. ‘Her sewing-box is
her alpha and her omega, not to mention her tiny epsilon, her iota and her omicron. For
all her talk, and her mooney Jesuit and her pious eyelashes, it all adds up to
Felicity’s little sewing-box, the norm she departs from, the north of her compass.
She would ruin the Abbey if she were elected. How strong is her following?’

‘About as strong as she is weak. When it comes to the vote she’ll
lose,’ Mildred says.

Walburga says sharply, ‘This morning the polls put her at forty-two per cent
according to my intelligence reports.’

‘It’s quite alarming,’ says Alexandra, ‘seeing that to be the
Abbess of Crewe is my destiny.’ She has stopped walking and the two nuns have
stopped with her. She stands facing them, drawing their careful attention to herself,
lighthouse that she is. ‘Unless I fulfil my destiny my mother’s labour pains
were pointless and what am I doing here?’

‘This morning the novices were talking about Felicity,’ Mildred says. She was
seen from their window wandering in the park between Lauds and Prime. They think she had
a rendezvous.’

‘Oh, well, the novices have no vote.’

‘They reflect the opinions of the younger nuns.’

‘Have you got a record of all this talk?’

‘It’s on tape,’ says Mildred.

Walburga says, ‘We must do something about it.’ Walburga’s face has a
grey-green tinge; it is long and smooth. An Abbess needs must be over forty years, but
Walburga, who has just turned forty, has no ambition but that Alexandra shall be elected
and she remain the Prioress.

Walburga is strong; on taking her final vows she brought to the community an endowment of
a piece of London, this being a section of Park Lane with its view of Rotten Row,
besides an adjoining mews of great value. Her strength resides in her virginity of heart
combined with the long education of her youth that took her across many an English quad
by night, across many a campus of Europe and so to bed. A wealthy woman, more than most,
she has always maintained, is likely to remain virgin at heart. Her past lovers had been
the most learned available; however ungainly, it was invariably the professors, the more
profound scholars, who attracted her. And she always felt learned herself, thereafter,
by a kind of osmosis.

Mildred, too, has brought a fortune to the Abbey. Her portion includes a sizeable block
of Chicago slums in addition to the four big flats in the Boulevard St Germain. Mildred
is thirty-six and would be too young to be a candidate for election, even if she were
disposed to be Abbess. But her hopes, like Walburga’s, rest on Alexandra. This
Mildred has been in the convent since her late schooldays; it may be she is a nourisher
of dreams so unrealizable in their magnitude that she prefers to keep them in mind and
remain physically an inferior rather than take on any real fact of ambition that would
defeat her. She has meekly served and risen to be Novice Mistress, so exemplary a nun
with her blue eyes, her pretty face and nervous flutter of timidity that Thomas the
Jesuit would at first have preferred to take her rather than Felicity. He had tried,
following her from confession, waiting for her under the poplars.