The Finishing School

by Muriel Spark

“Oh, I didn’t say all crooks went to Royal Ascot, only that there are plenty of them at that function.”

  In walked Rowland. Célestine, who occasionally became an honorary student, and was today participating in this much favored lesson of Nina’s, let out a cry: “Monsieur Rowland—but Chris is already on his way to join you at the Monastery of St. Justin Amadeus. He needs some literary support.”

  “Will someone ring up the monastery and tell Chris I’ve got his bike here. I borrowed it.”

  Célestine said, “It’s time for tea”; she hurried out of the room as if to avoid some explosive situation. But Nina had kept her head.

  “Nice to see you back,” she said.

  “Don’t let me interrupt,” Rowland said. “I’m just checking in. Do you mind if I join you? —Go ahead.” He sat down among them, beaming at Nina.

  “I was just winding up,” Nina said. “I have been describing how one goes about Ascot. And now a word about good manners. If it can be said of you that you’ve got ‘exquisite manners,’ it’s deadly. Almost as bad as having a name for being rude. Ostentatious manners, like everything else showy, are terribly bad. If you’re a man don’t bow and scrape. Never wash your hands in the air as did a late Cardinal of my acquaintance, when trying to please someone. If you’re a girl, just show a lot of consideration to the elderly. There’s no need to jump to your feet if one of your friend’s parents comes into the room, far less your own. It looks too well trained. Try not to look very well brought up, it’s awful. At the same time, you should consider others round you. Don’t be boring as so many people are, who have exquisite manners. Never behave as if people didn’t exist. What do you say to that, Rowland?”

  “Excellent advice,” he said. “I’ll try to bear it in mind, later in life when no doubt I’ll be an S-shaped professor dragging a small suitcase on tiny wheels at an airport.”

  Everyone seemed relieved that Rowland’s appearance had not caused a crisis. Nina said, “That’s very probable. But I was really about to give advice to any student who is thinking of going into some job where they would have to deal with the public, such as the hotel business, or a shop, or entertainment of some kind. You must learn, first of all—and teach your staff from those in the most humble position upward—the arts of hypocrisy. In the hotel business it is, to start with, called accueil. It involves greeting every newcomer with a welcoming attitude and a modest smile. Let the client believe it means all the world to you that they have arrived in your hotel, your business, your café or whatever.”

  “In the same way as you welcome us to the school?” said Tilly.

  “A good observation. You’re perfectly right. We make you welcome, however frightful your parents are. You yourselves are seldom horrible, as you know. And I must tell you, now, that very often behind the scenes in places of business which have to do with the public, the employers, as well as the employees, grumble greatly about the people they have to deal with. These quite understandable, often quite valid, feelings spill over into the business itself. If such an attitude catches on in any place open to the public, and the owners and staff fail to practice the necessary hypocrisy, the business will suffer. People will tell each other, ‘Don’t go to that store, the assistants turn their backs on you and just go on with their private conversations or they just go on talking to their Mums on their phones and ignore you.’ Same with universities. Nobody wants to listen to a lecturer who is obviously bored with his class. He has to feign enthusiasm.

  “In order to succeed with the public you have to be a hypocrite up to a definite point. You will know yourselves when the point has arrived at which you drop all hypocrisy. This can happen. But that’s another discourse. On the whole it’s best to avoid discussing your clients unfavorably among yourselves.”

  “Is it difficult to be a hypocrite?” said Mary Foot. She was thinking of her ceramics shop-to-be.

  “Not very much,” said Nina. “We do it in civilized society the whole time, in fact.”

  Opal Gross, her family having faced the financial crash, was in some difficulties about her future. She asked Nina, “Do you have to be a hypocrite if you have a career in the Church?”

  “Oh, yes. What I say applies to the Church very much.”

  “The Anglican Church?”

  “Any church.” Nina knew that Opal thought of becoming an Anglican priest as a solution to her problems, spiritual and material.

  “It’s hypocrisy,” said Nina then, “that makes the world go round.”

  Tea was brought in. Nobody noticed that Rowland had left the room.

  After dinner that night a taxi drew up at College Sunrise, bearing Chris and his luggage.

  “What do I do now?” said Rowland. Chris had gone upstairs with his things. “What do I do now?” He was in the sitting room having coffee with Nina and most of the students.

  “He was bound to come back,” Lionel Haas said. “He needs a tutor, some creative writing guidance.”

  “Did he tell you that?” Rowland said.

  “Oh, yes. It’s part of his identity as a writer. He started out writing a book with you as his mentor, and it set a pattern. He can’t go on without you.”

  “What a mad idea,” said Pallas. “As if Rowland can hover over him all the time. Doesn’t he intend to be a writer in the future?”

  “Chris isn’t really one of our students,” Nina said. “He’s only here to write his novel. I think we should just ignore him. He’s free to come and go, so long as we know roughly where he is.”

  13

  Dr. Alice Barclay-Good had agreed to come again and lecture to College Sunrise in the winter term because it made a break in her retirement routine; she would be paid a modest fee and her traveling expenses. She would be put up for the night at the school in Switzerland. She had nothing better to do, and Scottish history of the sixteenth century was very much her subject. She had been invited by the principal, Nina Parker, to speak on the subject of Mary Queen of Scots and her times. “One of our students,” went the e-mail, “is at work on a very original novel on the subject. He already has a publisher and is negotiating the film rights. So we are very proud of him.”

  It was true that Chris had been visited by a film producer and a director, both of them staying prominently and luxuriously in the nearby hotel. One was tall and middle-aged, the other short and young. They had spent two days discussing every possibility with Chris, including the casting. But Chris was reticent as to how the book would develop and how it would finish. The producer (the tall one) was anxious about Chris’s need for “much more time.” “You’re seventeen. Under age. That’s a selling point. If you wait till you’re eighteen, nineteen, you might as well be anybody.”

  While these film men were at the hotel they were visited by Pansy, who introduced herself as a fellow student of Chris—“Maybe I could help you? Call me Leg.”

  This ambiguous approach by the small, eager girl earned her a glass of chilled white wine and a promise to bear her in mind for the motion picture script. She impressed on them that she had attended a summer course at Cambridge and that she had the advantage of a rare insight into Chris’s working mind.

  After the filmmakers had left Nina asked Chris what were his intentions now. Did he still want to stay at the College and finish the novel?

  “It depends on Rowland.”

  “How, ‘depends on Rowland’?”

  “I need him.”

  Nina was apprehensive about what he would say next, suspecting that it was something she couldn’t handle.

  However, Chris went on to say what he had to say next: “I need his jealousy. His intense jealousy. I can’t work without it.”

  And Nina, terrified of what she herself would inevitably say next, nevertheless went on to say it. “Chris, he might kill you.”

  “That would be bad for the school,” said Chris.

  “Go away,” she said. “I think I want you to go away.”

  “Rowland doesn’t.”

  How
would one handle a situation like this? She and Rowland were joint heads of the school. Nina foresaw the possibilities of a great fuss, a complete breakup of the school with this and that student taking “sides.” There were weeks ahead till the end of term. Nina had hoped to balance the tension between Rowland and Chris for the remaining period.

  “Chris,” she said, “I believe you are coming to Dr. Alice Barclay-Good’s lecture?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Will you introduce her?”

  “No, let Rowland do that. After the lecture I’ll thank her profusely on behalf of the school.” Chris was very much in charge.

  Israel Brown had work to do at his London art gallery, but he neglected it on account of his growing attraction to Nina. She seemed to say exactly what he hoped she would say. She handled her plainly psychotic husband with admirable tact and helpfulness, she was a beautiful girl and aware of it. The more he lingered on in his lakeside villa, the more he loved Nina. They made love in the afternoons whenever Nina could free herself from the school, and when she had gone he could feel satisfaction in looking at a wool jacket she had left behind, hanging on a peg in his bathroom, beside his dressing gown. He would have liked to put a frame round the two garments, almost as if they were a picture. In the weeks when Rowland had been at the monastery, Nina had spent whatever hours of her time she could spare from the school with Israel Brown.

  The students were hesitantly conscious of this affair although Nina was careful. They were not scandalized if Nina went to swim in Israel’s indoor pool rather than the pool in the nearby hotel, where the school often went by special arrangement. It was not Nina’s affair that occupied their speculations, but Rowland’s obsession with Chris, and Chris’s reaction.

  Rowland, when he returned from the monastery, resumed a routine of literature and art classes, his creative writing class and his computer-wisdom class and he accompanied them to the gym in the hotel, or to a game of squash. He went for walks along the lake and on steamboat expeditions. Rowland, in fact, helped to fulfill the school’s curriculum equally with Nina. But he had become ill-looking, absent.

  Mary Foot, who so much adored Rowland, was inconsolable when he forgot her name: “Opal—Lisa—oh, yes, Mary.”

  “I think he’s gay and hooked on Chris,” was Lionel Haas’s verdict.

  “You should be so gay,” said Célestine Valette, the long-legged cook.

  Dr. Alice Barclay-Good was a tall, built-up woman with a smooth, applelike face, gray swept-back hair, deep eyes, and was altogether handsome for her age, sixty more or less. Nina had been to the airport to meet her, radiant and proud as she always was when one of her much admired scholars visited the school. Nina was well-satisfied with the authoritative and confident aspect of her lecturer. She had not changed much.

  Rowland had been to their local doctor that afternoon, complaining of a sense of imbalance and stomach unease. He was trembling. The doctor prescribed medicine for Menière’s disease, an affliction of the inner ear which causes dizziness. “But you suffer from your nerves, don’t you?” he added, recalling the number of Rowland’s recent visits—more than everyone else in the school put together. He gave Rowland an additional calming drug which in fact rendered him useless for the rest of the day, so that Nina was obliged to introduce the lecturer while Rowland lolled in a front seat, eyes half closed.

  Dr. Alice was first introduced one by one to the students. This was to give Nina a chance to explain, when it came to Chris’s turn, that he was the star pupil who had already earned the attention of film producers and some newspaper diary paragraphs by writing his historical novel.

  “I should have thought Mary Queen of Scots had been exhausted as a subject,” said Dr. Alice.

  “I have a new theory on Darnley’s murder,” said Chris, and he described how it might have been that, with a little help from an imported source, Rizzio’s brother, Jacopo, might well have connived at the murder of his brother’s killer, Darnley. It would be the natural reaction in any Italian family.

  “We must discuss this further,” said Dr. Alice, plainly not wishing her lecturing juice to be used up before the event.

  Mary Queen of Scots and her times was comfortably launched in the cozy, crowded common room. “The Queen and her times,” she said “are closely connected. You know already that Mary was condemned to death on counts of treason and murder. To bring about her downfall, letters and sonnets, known as the ‘Casket Letters and Sonnets,’ were produced. It is clear to any legal or even lay mind today that these were forgeries. But what you should realize about the intellectuals and even ordinary intelligent people of her court and surroundings—they didn’t believe these incriminating documents were true. They could not possibly have done so. The letters and poems are full of the wildest contradictions. They are patched-up jobs, proving nothing. But in the times of Mary Queen of Scots, legal truth quite obviously took on a political, not a moral significance. It was the truth of propaganda in aid of a cause that condemned Mary Queen of Scots. This is not to say she was guilty of the murder of her husband or otherwise. It is to say that there was no direct proof.”

  Rowland, sleepily in the throes of his calming drug, kept his eyes on Chris, while Chris himself gazed with what looked like admiration at the lecturer throughout. Her voice was monotonous. She had the persevering tone of one who believed in and had thoroughly rehearsed what she was saying. Nina was anxious lest Rowland should really drop into sleep, which he barely avoided doing.

  “. . . and,” proceeded Alice, “another incidental point we can discern from the very Casket Letter we have been discussing: it was obviously the accepted mode of writing a long letter, to first make a list of the subjects to be covered, and then expand on the list. This remains to the present day a very good system. It was a system employed by the Queen, but the letter was grossly misrepresented by the list appearing in the text. But methodology aside, what is it that we find moved the sixteenth-century political scene along life’s way? What caused them to overlook plain facts in favor of propaganda? What caused the slaughter of Rizzio followed by the deliberate murder of Darnley? —Remember his house was not only blown up as he slept, but when he was found alive in the grounds he was actually slaughtered. The gunpowder was meant for him, not for the Queen. What was the cause? We are in the latter half of the sixteenth century, in Scotland. The causes of these homicides were jealousy, uncontrollable jealousy. And the subsequent execution of the Queen of Scots by the edict of Elizabeth? —It was hardly fear of treason. Mary was a prisoner. She could intrigue by word and pen, but she had no power. The secret, I feel, is jealousy. When James VI of Scotland, I of England, the son of Mary Queen of Scots was born, it is chronicled that Elizabeth exclaimed, ‘The Queen of Scotland is delivered of a fair child and I am but barren stock.’ Jealousy, green jealousy, that was the motivation of the age . . .”

  For the occasion, sherry was offered all round after the lecture. Chris had made a very graceful speech of thanks to Dr. Barclay-Good on behalf of the school. She had, he said, widened and enlivened their awareness of the elements of hypocrisy prevalent in the society that had brought Mary Queen of Scots to judgment, a hypocrisy that serves its own ends, ignoring the simplest and most evident solutions such as the one he hoped to put forward in his forthcoming novel. Thank you, Dr. Barclay-Good.

  Alcoholic drinks were a great rarity at College Sunrise, unless smuggled in occasionally by the likes of Princess Tilly.

  The sherry, as an event, was soon reflected in noisy chatter. The snacks were presided over by handsome young Albert who had attended the lecture, with a white apron tied over his gardening jeans. He himself took Coca-Cola.

  Albert’s only language was French and, perceiving both this, and his charming looks, Dr. Alice engaged him in her best, not bad, conversational French. Rowland had disappeared.

  As they went into dinner Nina put up an explanation for Rowland’s absence. “He was at the dentist this afternoon and had a heavy anesthe
tic. I insisted he went to bed.”

  “I noticed,” said Dr. Alice blandly, “that he was dopey.” She was under the impression he had slept through most of her lecture.

  To Nina’s rescue that evening, after dinner, came Israel Brown. He brought his very young aunt Giovanna with her violin, and, to everyone’s rather stunned amazement, she played the solo theme of one of Niccolò Paganini’s capricci.

  “You know,” said Dr. Alice, “I was at a finishing school only a few miles from here. But it was very different from this. Much more strict.” She also said, “Music speaks to you. It speaks.”

  Giovanna smiled at her nephew and put away her lively violin.

  It was raining heavily outside. Their guest was to leave early next morning for the airport. The party broke up at ten thirty. Dr. Alice was put in the attic guest room. Nina said, “I’m afraid you’ll hear the rain thumping down on the roof.”

  “Oh, I’m so tired, I’ll sleep through everything.”

  “It was a really wonderful talk,” said Nina. “I can’t tell you what it means to us. Chris was especially very enthralled, I could see. I only regret my husband was so much under the weather. But I know he’ll want me to thank you again on his behalf.” The envelope containing the check for the fee and the fare had already been slipped into Dr. Alice’s hand. Nina was to take her guest to the airport immediately after breakfast. “Good night. Good night.”

  The house was silent already when, less than an hour later, Dr. Alice was awakened by a tap on her door.

  “Who’s that?”

  The door opened. She sat up in bed and switched on her bedside light.

  Chris’s red head appeared.

  “May I have a word with you?”

  “A word—”

  “You’re so magnificent,” he said.

  “I just want to tell you,” said Chris, “that your insight into the life and times of Mary Queen of Scots is simply astonishing. How could you divine so much? Jealousy. Enmity based on jealousy . . .”

  He came and sat on her bed.