The Abbess of Crewe

by Muriel Spark

  ‘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.

  ‘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:

  As I went down the water side,

  None but my foe to be my guide,

  None but my foe…

  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:

  It’s a very odd thing —

  As odd as can be —

  That whatever Miss T. eats

  Turns into Miss T….

  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.’

  Something crackles on the line. ‘Gertrude, are you there?’ says Alexandra.

  Something crackles, then Gertrude’s voice responds, ‘Sorry, I missed all that. I was tying my shoelace.’

  ‘You should be here, Gertrude. The nuns are beginning to murmur that you’re avoiding us. Felicity is saying that if she’s elected Abbess of Crewe she wants an open audit of all the dowries and she advocates indiscreet sex. Above all, she has proclaimed a rebellion in the house and it’s immoral.’

  ‘What is her rebellion against?’ Gertrude inquires.

  ‘My tyranny,’ says Alexandra. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Is the rebellion likely to succeed?’ says Gertrude.

  ‘Not if we can help it. But she has a chance. Her following increases every hour.’

  ‘If she has a chance of success then the rebellion isn’t immoral. A rebellion against a tyrant is only immoral when it hasn’t got a chance.’

  ‘That sounds very cynical, Gertrude. Positively Machiavellian. Don’t you think it a little daring to commit yourself so far?’

  ‘It is the doctrine of St Thomas Aquinas.’

  ‘Can you be here for the election, Gertrude? We need to consult you.’

  ‘Consult Machiavelli,’ says Gertrude. ‘A great master, but don’t quote me as saying so; the name is inexpedient.’