The Abbess of Crewe

‘W
HAT
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: because 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:

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

‘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.