Convent on Styx (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

Apart from her occasional disregard of traffic lights, coupled with a tendency to exceed the speed limit, Sister Mary Romuald was a skilful driver. To save money, she and Tom were told by the prioress that they would take it in turns to have Sister Mary Raymund as their pupil.

  She turned out to be an earnest, willing, moon-faced young nun not very long out of the novitiate. It was soon obvious that she desired to please not only the prioress and Sister Hilary, but everybody else, including Sister Marcellus (whom she suspected of having a sharp and scolding tongue) and even the convent’s paying guests, Mrs. Wilks, Miss Lipscombe, and Mrs. Polkinghorne.

  She came of a family that had been Catholic for generations. She had been taken to Rome as a child and had entered the Order as soon as she had finished her economics course and obtained her degree. Her parents were of moderate affluence; she was the fourth of their six children; and conditioned to piety and religious observances since her earliest years.

  Like most of her generation, she had been “brought up with cars,” as she explained to the prioress, and would be glad to learn to drive.

  “She’ll hardly pass her test first pop out of the box,” said Tom, in grinning understatement to Sister Mary Romuald after he had taken Sister Raymund out for two or three trial runs.

  “She knows the Highway Code backwards, anyway,” said Sister Romuald cheerfully, “so she’ll be all right there.”

  “Be as well if Sister St. Elmo would let her have a lesson or two from a pro, though, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I did suggest it, Tom, but Sister thinks you and I are adequate.”

  “Penny wise, pound foolish, if you ask me,” said Tom, wagging his head.

  This gloomy prophecy was destined to be fulfilled on the Saturday of the following week.

  Soon after half-past nine in the morning Sister Romuald deposited the prioress at the parish church to arrange the flowers, then she decanted Sister Marcellus as near the supermarket as the parking regulations allowed, picked up Marcellus and the shopping half an hour later, and then called for the prioress at the church and the three of them returned to the convent.

  They arrived back at barely half-past eleven, too early for Middle Hour prayers and much too early for lunch. They found Sister Raymund waiting in the convent car-park.

  “If you have time, Sister,” she said, timidly, “could you please let me have a go in the car?”

  “Oh, of course!” Sister Mary Romuald smiled charmingly. “You can take me as far as the common and round by Mere Edge. There won’t be much traffic that way. Keep a sharp lookout going through the village, though, because the children won’t be at school and they are apt to play in the street.”

  “I didn’t do too badly last week, when I was with Mr. Quince. I think I’m getting the hang of it, but, of course, I’ll be careful,” said the optimistic, round-faced, ingenuous nun.

  “Good. You haven’t been through the village before, though, have you?”

  “Oh, but I have! I had a double period of marking-time on Thursday, and Sister Hilary said I might take a driving lesson with Mr. Quince if he was free and I had no marking to do. Well, I don’t know whether he really was free, and, of course, there is always marking to do, but Mr. Quince was willing and we went through the village. It was very encouraging because I managed quite well at the cross roads and practised reversing and everything.” She spoke with modest self-congratulation, not having heard Tom’s subsequent comment on her performance.

  “Yes, but the village schoolchildren weren’t about,” Sister Romuald gently reminded her. “They’re a real menace on Saturdays because they will play in the street instead of going on to the common. I found I had to be very careful driving through the village this morning.”

  The accident happened, as accidents usually do, unexpectedly and without previous warning. The village street was narrow and the car was down to just under thirty miles an hour. This was just as well, for what might have been a fatality stopped short of that, although the child’s injuries were serious enough to warrant her being treated in hospital.

  It all happened so quickly that, in court, although she tried her best, Sister Mary Romuald, who was called as a witness, found it impossible to relate exactly what had occurred. The charge against Sister Raymund was of driving without due care and attention and the police had made it clear that it might easily have been one of dangerous driving except that their measurements showed that the car was not travelling fast.

  “You say that a dog ran out from the right-hand side of the road?” asked the prosecution.

  “Yes.”

  “And that, in swerving to avoid the dog, the driver struck the child?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where was the child before the car struck her?”

  “I don’t know exactly.”

  “But you were a passenger in the car, so what do you mean by that?”

  “I was looking the other way to make sure that the dog was all right.”

  “You were more concerned about the dog than about the child?”

  “Certainly not. That is a dreadful thing to suggest. The child ran into the road, but I did not see her in time to warn the driver.”

  “Because you were looking at the dog?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure the child ran into the road?”

  “Oh, yes. She must have come tearing out of the alley which leads up to the village church and she was almost under our wheels when the driver swerved to the left to avoid the dog.”

  “I believe there is no pavement on that side of the road—the side from which the child ran out?”

  “No, there is not.”

  “So, as there is no pavement, I would take it that people are perfectly entitled to walk along, on that side of the road, in the road?”

  “Yes, of course, but the little girl . . .”

  “And I might also assume that, as pedestrians have no option but to walk along the roadside, there being no pavement, it is the plain duty of a motorist to take pains to avoid them?”

  “Yes, but, you see . . .”

  “Thank you, Sister. That will be all.”

  The defence rose.

  “You say, Sister—and the prosecution does not contest it—that your driver was keeping within the urban speed limit?”

  “Yes. I kept my eye on the speedometer. We were below thirty miles an hour as we passed through the village.”

  “When did you first catch sight of the child?”

  “A fraction of a second before we hit her.”

  “Why only a fraction of a second?”

  “Because she was running very fast. She came pelting out of Church Alley into the road, and my driver had no chance of avoiding her.”

  “The driver is a learner, of course. Could an experienced driver have avoided the accident, do you think?”

  “Nobody could have avoided it, however experienced they were. I have been driving, with a clean licence, for seven years, and I cannot see how any driver could have avoided the accident. The child ran straight into the middle of the road.”

  “Why do you think the child was running so fast? Did you see any cause for that?”

  “She was being chased by an older child, a biggish boy.”

  “And she ran into the road in front of the car to get away from him?”

  “Yes. I heard her scream, but she could not stop herself and no driver could have pulled up in time to save her from injury.”

  All this was but a fraction of the evidence called, but one of the witnesses was the biggish boy. He was sullen and frightened, but truthful.

  “Yes, I run after young Polly. I had a spider in me fist. She don’t like spiders. Yes, she run out into the road. Yes, I seen the car hit her. No, I reckon she run in front of it. Yes, I knows the dawg. It’s Mrs. Hawkins’ dawg. It’s a guard dawg, supposed to be, but it ain’t trained right. Yes, it’s always running into the road. Yes, it had the postman orf of his boike week before last. I didn’t half laugh. A p
roper mucker he come. Yes, the dawg rushes out at anythink on wheels. No, he don’t bark, he just rushes. He don’t like wheels, and young Polly Blatt, she don’t like spiders.”

  “Now you don’t need to fret, Sister,” said Tom Quince when, under orders from the prioress but much against her own will, Sister Raymund took her next driving-lesson. “You was exonerated, wasn’t you? Well, then! And old Mother Hawkins have been ordered to keep that dog off the street, so what have you got to worry about? You’d have spotted the damn’ kid if it hadn’t been for the damn’ dog, if you’ll excuse my French. Now, see here, Sister! We’re going through the village and you’re going to drive. It’s the only way to make sure your nerve stands up.”

  As it was a week-day, all the children were in school, and as it was also a day on which Sister Marcellus had never gone to the town to do the marketing, nobody was expecting to see either a nun waiting at the bus stop or a nun driving the convent car, for it was long after the time when Sister Mary Romuald was accustomed to take Father MacNicol back to the presbytery and not one of his days for saying Mass at the convent, anyway. The upshot was that there was nobody in the village except the milkman on his second round and a couple of women gossiping outside their front doors.

  “There you are, you see,” said Tom, encouragingly, when they returned from their drive having experienced no untoward incident except an occasional stalling of the engine. “Right as rain, eh, Sister? Nothing to worry about, was there?”

  “No, but only because there weren’t any children,” said Sister Mary Raymund, her ingenuous moon-face clouding over.

  “Oh, well, Sister Romuald says she’ll be the one to take the trip next Saturday. After that, all what’s happened will be forgot, and it wasn’t nowise your fault, remember. It was only that stupid kid and the damn’ dog.”

  “I was to blame,” said Sister Raymund, “and I don’t think this is the end of it, somehow, Mr. Quince. I was brought up in a village and villagers have very long memories.”

  “Oh, well, them as lives longest will see most,” said Tom philosophically. “Now just mind the gatepost this time.”

  “’Tis not as deep as a well nor as wide as a church door, but ’twill serve,” said Sister Raymund, smiling.

  “So all your troubles is over,” said Tom, as they came safely to anchor in the convent car-park. “Told you, didn’t I?”

  CHAPTER 4

  Other Inmates

  “I remember a house where all were good

  To me, God knows, deserving no such thing.”

  Gerard Manley Hopkins

  The nuns were not the only people who lived in the convent building. Some of the rooms were allotted to paying guests and, in some special cases, to guests who were not asked to pay. At one time these guest rooms had been school dormitories, but the boarding school, as such, had long been a thing of the past. There were good and sufficient reasons for this. For one thing, without extensive rebuilding it would have been impossible to keep pace with the increase in the number of children; for another, it was difficult to get resident staff and the nuns became too few to cope with all the extra duties which were involved in running a boarding school.

  The change had been made gradually. Girls who were already boarders had the option of remaining in residence until they left the school and, as the numbers had been small in those days, in a few years worked themselves out. Newcomers were offered tuition only, and, in the day of the ubiquitous motor-car, it suited parents well enough to bring their children to school and take them home again, as most of them lived in the town.

  The convent building, however, was too large to house the nuns only, especially when they became fewer, so the three one-time dormitories were partitioned off to make six good-sized bedrooms. Old Miss Lipscombe’s room was typical of most of the bedrooms in the house. In addition to the usual furnishings, it contained a comfortable basket chair and a solitary bookshelf intended for devotional works but, in Miss Lipscombe’s case, given over to the display of one or two prized ornaments which she had salvaged from her old home and brought with her to the convent.

  Miss Lipscombe had lived at the convent for the past five years and knew more about its inside workings than any of the other inmates suspected. She was considered to be a comparatively harmless old creature, but she had an itch to ferret things out. Some instinct seemed to tell her when and where there was anything to be learnt, but, having learnt it, she did not always gossip about it. Sometimes she turned it over in her mind and extracted every scrap of flavour from it simply by speculating upon it, but sometimes she told stories in which she built up imaginary situations, in which case her hearers ended up with a mental image which, although originally based on fact, hardly approximated to the truth by the time Miss Lipscombe had done with telling the tale.

  The only person who had really summed her up, and knew how dangerous she could turn out to be, was Tom Quince. Tom combined the duties of school caretaker with those of odd-job man and general factotum to the convent. He cleaned and, when Sister Romuald was not available and before the arrival of Sister Raymund, he had driven the convent car, and it was while he was attending to some trivial mechanical fault in it one Saturday morning when Sister Romuald was waiting to run the prioress to the parish church and Sister Marcellus to the supermarket for the weekly shopping, that he said to the beautiful nun:

  “So Mrs. Wilks be leaving us, then.”

  Sister Mary Romuald looked surprised.

  “Leaving us? How do you mean, Tom?”

  “Giving up her room. Going back into the wicked old world.”

  “I’m sure you are mistaken. Who told you so?”

  “Heard it at the garridge when I took her down to fill her up yesterday before she started to knock.” He slapped the bonnet of the car to indicate that he referred to the ancient vehicle and not to the elderly lady. “It isn’t true, then, Sister?”

  “Not so far as I am aware.”

  “Oh, well, I reckon as old Miss Lipscombe have been spreading tales around. No love lost between her and Mrs. Wilks. Bit of wishful thinking, I suppose. Wants to be rid of the old pussy. Cat eat cat, you might say.”

  “That’s not a very charitable way to put it, Tom.”

  “No more it isn’t, but you knows as well as I do what a couple of old pussies ’em be. Alius on about each other. Oh, well, as long as it keeps ’em happy! Well,” he gave the car another affectionate slap, “the old girl’s all right again now, you’ll find, so what about one of them convent ten-pound notes you dishes out?” He grinned disarmingly and Sister Romuald responded with her delightful smile.

  “Of course,” she said. “God bless you, Tom. I don’t know what we should do without you. There you are, then, and thank you.”

  “That’s the ticket. That’s what I likes to hear you say. There we are, then, and just you mind how you go. They got half the high street up between Boots and the Co-op. It’s one-way traffic, so watch them temp’ry lights. If they’s red, no matter what your hurry, you pull up and wait till they changes, see?”

  “But I always do.”

  “No, you don’t, neither. Who sailed slap through the ‘stop’ sign last Toosday week after school? If it had been anybody but young Duffy on dooty you’d have collected a ticket, and so I’m telling you!”

  “How do you know anything about it?” asked Sister Romuald, wrongheadedly amused by all this.

  “’Cos I does my homework where you’re concerned, that’s how. Learnt you to drive, didn’t I? So I feels responsible when you goes and does anything daft.” Fortunately Sister Romuald did not recognise this as a declaration of undying love.

  The Mrs. Wilks to whom Tom Quince had referred occupied the room next to Miss Lipscombe’s sanctum on the ground floor. It was perfectly true that there was no love lost between the two elderly ladies, and the zealous Sister Marcellus had once suggested to the prioress that one of them should be moved to the floor above in an endeavour to put a curb on their endless ri
valry.

  “Yes, but which one to move, Sister?” had been Sister St. Elmo’s unanswerable query; so the two old ladies were left to their feuding and their passionate, unending attempts to get the upper hand of one another. Each felt that she had an advantage over the other; Mrs. Wilks, although she was widowed, certainly had achieved marital status and looked down upon Miss Lipscombe, who was unfortunate enough not to have attained to this estate; however, Miss Lipscombe was the daughter of a former mayor of the nearby town and, owing to the early death of her mother, had acted for one unforgettable year as his mayoress, a feat which Mrs. Wilks could never hope to match.

  Mrs. Wilks had once referred to Miss Lipscombe as “that old maiden from Bristington,” and Miss Lipscombe had been known to describe Mrs. Wilks as “that butcher-boy’s daughter who lived above their own shop.” Honours, to date, were about even, Mrs. Wilks having reminded her hearer, a certain Mrs. Polkinghorne, the Spanish widow of an English merchant master mariner, that Cardinal Wolsey himself had been the son of a flesher, and Miss Lipscombe having informed the same inmate that she was pleased and proud to be called a maiden, which was more than some people could have said about themselves, even before they were married.

  The convent followed tradition in that it was built round a cloister. On three sides was the house itself; on the fourth side there was a high brick wall in which two wrought-iron gates opened on to the nuns’ garden with its lawn, its grotto, and its statue of the Virgin.

  From the front door and square hall of the convent a passage led straight through to the cloister. It passed between the guest room allotted to Mrs. Wilks and that of Mrs. Polkinghorne. On the kitchen garden side of Mrs. Wilks’s room was Miss Lipscombe’s domain and, as the ground floor bedrooms had once been school dormitories, their windows were heavily barred.

  The room next to that occupied by Mrs. Polkinghorne was devoted to the very old nun, Sister Mary Ignatius, so that she could reach the chapel by the shortest possible route, for her room opened on to that part of the cloister which led directly to the chapel door. The rest of the ground floor housed the Community Room (a kind of nuns’ common-room), the convent parlour where visitors could be entertained and in which all meals to seculars were served, the prioress’s office, the little sacristy which was attached to the chapel, the chapel itself, the kitchen, the nuns’ refectory, and the convent library.