Convent on Styx (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  With the advent of the new regime eight years previously, however, the Commercial Studies course had been dropped, and, with it, Sister Wolstan’s status in the school had declined.

  “The girls who want that sort of thing would do far better at a polytechnic,” said Sister Hilary. “The merely basic stuff they learn here won’t be to them the least bit of good in getting the sort of job they want. It’s a something and a nothing, Sister, as I’m sure you will be the first to admit. I want to run the school on academic and cultural lines. If our kind of education depends upon anything, it depends upon snob-value, and you don’t get that by teaching elementary shorthand and the rudiments of how to operate a typewriter.”

  So the Commercial Studies had gone down the drain and Sister Wolstan had gone from a well-ordered classroom to the secretary’s poky little office next to the school front door. There was another thing, too, that Sister Wolstan did not like. Before Sister Hilary took over the reins, the Community had employed a sufficient number of resident teachers to work a small boarding establishment, and now, in addition to Sister Wolstan and Sisters Romuald, Fabian, Honorius, Elphege, and Leo, there were still secular teachers on the staff, though they were no longer resident. There was Nancy Webb, who took physical education and coached the games; there was Petrella Grey, the dance and drama instructress; and there was Frances Fennell, the remedials teacher, who took on what were known in the staffroom as “the backwards” and to themselves and their parents as “the special advantage group.”

  These women seculars might all have been bearable, though, in her secret heart, Sister Wolstan despised seculars as a spoilt, undisciplined, self-seeking, lax majority, but the women secular teachers formed only the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. What Sister Wolstan found hard to accept was the presence of men on the teaching staff. True, like the women, they were visitors only, coming each morning and returning home at night; true, they were of the same sex as Father MacNicol, the parish priest and the nuns’ confessor; true, they seemed gentlemanly and unobtrusive enough, but Sister Wolstan did not trust them. In her opinion they had no place in the school and should have taken no part in educating growing girls.

  It was all very well for Sister Mary Hilary to laugh at these prejudices and call them hidebound, out of date, and reactionary, and to assert that in her pre-convent days she herself had been on the mixed staff of a large comprehensive school. Sister Wolstan knew that men were wolves and she trembled to think of tender ewe lambs being taught mathematics, physics, chemistry, and (worse than these) simple woodwork, by men. The woodwork lessons even took place in a building detached from the main school and situated far out on the field beyond any but the most spasmodic and cursory form of supervision and inspection.

  There was, however, one compensatory clause in the scroll of Sister Mary Wolstan’s disappointments, frustrations, and fears. Her position as secretary made her a go-between of a sort. She formed a link between the staffroom and the headmistress’s room, the staff and the parents, the staff and the children, even between the headmistress and, in a sense, the outside world. In other words, nothing went on in the school, or was in any way connected with it, of which she had no cognisance. She might not know all, but she knew more than most people, of such inner workings as there are bound to be in any institution, especially one as sensitive and vulnerable as a private, fee-paying girls’ school, and, although she was discreet, she enjoyed the sense of power that intimate knowledge of the various tides, currents, and cross-currents was almost bound to provide.

  To reach the school Sister Wolstan first had to skirt the convent car-park. The only vehicle in it at the moment was the convent car itself. As it was Monday, one of the three days in the week when Father MacNicol served Mass in the nuns’ chapel and then was given his breakfast in the convent refectory, Sister Mary Romuald was already in the driver’s seat ready to take him back to the presbytery. She was dispensed from attending school Assembly on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for this special purpose.

  Sister Romuald was twenty-six years old and of astonishing beauty. Wistfully remembering the days when, wearing the old, majestic habit, the nuns were regarded with awe in the village and with great respect in the nearest town, whereas nowadays they were jostled by unheeding crowds, had to wait their turn in the shops, and were compelled to queue up in the bank and the post office like everybody else, Sister Wolstan sometimes felt tempted to cast a jaundiced eye upon Sister Romuald, who suffered none of these aggravations. Moreover, Sister Romuald could execute U-turns in the main road of the town and even reverse halfway up a one-way street which she had entered from the forbidden end, all this under the very nose of Police Constable Sean Duffy, without exciting rebuke or even mild comment from that susceptible, admiring (and, of course, Catholic) copper.

  However, as Sister Wolstan was compelled to admit, Sister Romuald was as good as she was beautiful. Her nature was as lovely as her face. Envy, malice, and all uncharitableness had been omitted from her make-up. There were those, including the young men on the teaching staff, who wondered why she had never married and sighed in sympathy with what they imagined must be a secret sorrow. There were also those who argued, with Shakespeare:

  Let those whom Nature hath not made for store,

  Harsh, featureless and crude, barrenly perish;

  . . . She carved thee for her seal, and meant thereby

  Thou shouldst print more, not let that copy die.

  However, the plain and simple truth was that, far from having suffered an unhappy love affair, or the sudden death of her promised man, or to keep a vow made without due consideration of its consequences, Sister Mary Romuald was a fulfilled and happy young woman and had the strongest religious vocation of anybody in the convent.

  On the present occasion, perceiving that the older nun was heavily laden, she called out cheerfully across the intervening space,

  “Your briefcase looks weighty, Sister. Jump in and let me run you over to school.”

  “You’ll keep Father waiting,” said Sister Mary Wolstan, coming up to the car, “but if you’ll take the briefcase and drop it into school on your way back from the presbytery, I’d be rather glad.”

  Relieved of her burden, she quickened her steps, left the car-park by way of a side gate which opened on to the kitchen garden, took the short cut across this and, following a path past the third and largest of the ponds on the school field, reached the school car-park and the school entrance.

  The vestibule outside her little office was occupied by three small girls and Sister Honorius. Unable to approach her office door because the visitors were in attendance upon a large, indignant bird, she surveyed the scene and remarked:

  “It looks as though Jemima Puddleduck has been in a fight with one of the pigs.”

  “You should call him Jeremy Puddledrake,” said Sister Honorius, without looking up from her ministrations, “or are you like Mrs. Cadogan, who, so the Resident Magistrate tells us, ‘had all the disregard of her kind for the accident of sex in the brute creation’?”

  Sister Honorius was a short, fat, grey-haired nun for whose equable temperament and sly sense of humour the headmistress often found herself grateful. On the present occasion Honorius was wearing a voluminous blue pinafore over her habit. Her hands were large and strong, her habit was well tucked up and, in place of the regulation black shoes, she was wearing a mud-plastered pair of Wellington boots from which emanated the all-pervading effluvium of the pigsties.

  Sister Wolstan wrinkled her nose.

  “I advise you to get changed and to tell these children to run along to their form room,” she said. “Don’t you know it’s a quarter to nine?”

  “Mercy on us, so it is,” said Sister Honorius, flipping aside her pinafore and extracting a turnip-like watch from the pocket of her habit. “Away with you, children, and my compliments and regrets to Sister Mary Fabian should she chance to have got there before you.”

  “She won’t mind, Sister,” they sa
id. “She doesn’t mind anything except us dropping lumps of wet clay on the floor and painting moustaches on each other.”

  As Sister Fabian was the art mistress, had been an art student and a careless bohemian before she Entered, and had brought much of her former insouciance into the convent with her, Sister Honorius could readily believe this.

  “Run along! Run along!” she said. The children trotted off, two dancing pony-tails and a sober pigtail, and Sister Honorius retired to change out of her pinafore and her Wellingtons. Sister Wolstan crossed the vestibule, went past the window of her little office, which commanded a view of the entrance so that she could waylay visitors and enquire their business, tapped at the headmistress’s door, opened it, and went in.

  Sister Mary Hilary was seated behind her desk. She was a fresh-faced, capable-looking woman of forty-six, with high cheekbones, a pugnacious nose, full grey eyes, and a red mouth which owed nothing to art, but everything to natural good health and great vitality. She pushed a pile of correspondence towards her secretary.

  “I’ve got a traveller coming at ten,” she said, “and I’ve a good deal to say to the girls at Assembly this morning, so I’ll leave you to sort out this lot. If there’s anything to sign, I’ll be free as soon as Jackson’s man has gone.”

  “Very well, Sister,” said Sister Wolstan. She gathered the heap of letters, circulars, and bills into her scapular, bunched it up, and made for the door.

  “And if Timms are still bothering us about that new tape recorder,” said Sister Hilary to her retreating back, “tell them on the phone that we don’t want it, and say that a letter follows. Sister Elphege wants those French records, the expensive Advanced Conversation ones, and we can’t afford those and a new tape recorder as well. Miss Grey will have to wait until I send in the next Requisition.”

  “Miss Grey won’t be very pleased about that,” said Sister Wolstan, pausing at the door with the correspondence looped up in the lap of her scapular and her other hand on the doorhandle. “She badly wants that new tape recorder for Modern Dance now that Mrs. Golightly is not available to play the piano for her.”

  “I know, but it can’t be helped. She will just have to manage with the old one for the time being. Sister Elphege takes the cookery classes as well as the French, and must have the help she wants. Perhaps sometimes I can free Sister Romuald to play for Miss Grey. I’ll see what can be done. When you’ve been through the correspondence perhaps you’d pop over to the house and get Sister St. Elmo to sign the chit I’ve left on your table. I’ve signed it, but it’s got to be endorsed. She’ll have sent Father off by now, so she ought to be free.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Sniper’s Bullet

  “Mark where the pressing wind shoots javelin-like,

  Its skeleton shadow on the broad-back’d wave!”

  George Meredith

  Sister St. Elmo was the prioress. In the old days, thought Sister Wolstan, decanting the bundle of letters on to the seat of a basket chair which was there for the accommodation of children sent to her for first-aid in the matter of cut knees or wrenched ankles and which took up a disproportionate amount of space in the tiny office, Sister St. Elmo would have been referred to as Mother, or even Reverend Mother, but all that had been bundled into limbo. Everybody was downgraded nowadays, except the working-classes, thought Sister Wolstan.

  The prioress was the child of a Maltese mother and an English father who, before the era that produced Mr. Mintoff, had been a chief petty officer in the Royal Navy. He had grown to like Malta well enough to fall in love with and marry one of the island women. Sister St. Elmo, prioress, was one of the end-products of this union, and had two older brothers.

  Sister St. Elmo would have been a martinet except that she had wit enough to realise that the wind was changing, even in convents, and that the old autocracies were out of date and were gone for ever.

  Particularly she steered clear of upsetting or antagonizing Sister Mary Hilary, in whom she suspected there was enshrined the next head of the Order. For this and other reasons she had long left the school to flourish in its own way without interference from her.

  When Sister Wolstan appeared, she was in conclave with Sister Mary Marcellus, the convent cook. Marcellus had joined the Order as a lay sister, but nowadays there were no such persons as lay sisters. In these changed times all were choir sisters and, as such, were expected to attend the four daily Hours of Divine Office which were now called Morning, Middle, Evening, and Night prayers. An exception to the rule was provided only if a Sister had any essential duties unconnected with the canonical Hours, otherwise every member of the Community was expected to be in chapel at the proper time. Sisters on school dinner duty, for example, were allowed to miss Middle Hour, and occasionally there were empty “stalls” if the school, or any section of it, happened to be out on an educational visit supervised by a nun during the set time of Evening prayer; but that about summed it up.

  So far as Sister Marcellus was concerned, there was no exemption. She was supposed to arrange the cooking to suit the chapel Hours. Although this pleased her by giving emphasis to her status as a choir nun, and although she loved chapel, she remained true to her peasant upbringing and was always grumbling, a state of things that amused the younger nuns when they were feeling cheerful, but which they found a cross to bear when they were tired. Her main cause for complaint was voiced pretty regularly and referred to what she considered to be a lapse on the part of the General Council.

  “I do not understand it, all this nonsense! Nobody to be called Mother in this Community? Not even the prioress? Not even Sister Ignatius, who is ninety-three and soon to be taken to God? Perhaps I should be called Mother! Why not, then? Who else sees to it that you are fed? Is not that the work of a mother? Who goes to the market, I should like to know? Who has to stretch the money as far as it will go, yes, and farther than it will go? So my mother did for our family and so I do for you, all of you. And I go into the village on my own two feet and wait in a long queue for the bus to the town. No riding in the convent car for me! I was not taught to drive it. And I wait in another queue at the supermarket to pay for the groceries, and I wait in another queue for the bus to come back here, and I drag those groceries up the hill from the bus stop, yes, still on my own two feet, and why?—only that you may eat!”

  “Well, if we didn’t eat we couldn’t teach, and then there would be no money for groceries and you wouldn’t eat, either,” said Sister Leo, who, with reason, considered herself to be overworked in school. “I would change places with you any day, Sister. How would you like to have three full-time subjects to teach and all that marking to do? Some people don’t know when they’re well off, do they?”

  Sister Leo, who was thirty-five and, like her headmistress, a late entrant into religious life, unfortunately for herself was the kind of person who, for no very obvious reason, is let in for tasks she neither wishes nor is fitted to perform. In Sister Leo’s case, although a geographer by training and inclination, she had been compelled also to take on the history teaching, there having been no history specialist since the departure of that Mrs. Golightly who had combined the teaching of history with playing the piano for Miss Grey’s classes in Modern Dance. The Order had sent Sister Leo for three years to a Theological College, so she was also saddled with giving Divinity lessons to the Upper and Lower Fifth and the Sixth. This formidable programme had soured her outlook and given her scant patience with the grousings of Sister Marcellus.

  Another nun on the teaching staff was the Sister Elphege who had demanded (and was to be given) the gramophone records of French Conversation. She was herself a Frenchwoman who taught the cookery classes by choice and Advanced French because Sister Hilary decreed it. She was a small, intense, vinegary body, contemptuous of the English and Irish nuns, more than contemptuous of Sister St. Elmo’s mixed blood, and, altogether, a thorn in the flesh of most of her companions and particularly to Sister Leo, who thought that Sister Hilary favoured
her.

  There were only two of the others who got on with Sister Elphege at all well, although animosity and resentment on the part of the rest of the Community was usually carefully disguised; the two were Sister Romuald, whose all-embracing charity made her sorry for the grey-faced, waspish little Frenchwoman, and Sister Honorius, from whose simple good humour and tolerance any snide remarks and offensive allusions by the French nun bounced off as a tennis ball will bounce back from a mellow brick wall.

  Sister Mary Wolstan, having retired to her little den with the morning’s letters, began to sort and then to read them, making two piles as she did so. One pile consisted of correspondence with which she could deal without having to trouble the headmistress. The other would have to be submitted to Sister Hilary and the answers dictated, a course to which Sister Wolstan mutely but definitely objected, but which she was obliged to follow.

  Over one letter she pursed up her lips. She re-read it, then, picking up the chit that required the signature of the prioress, took it and the letter over to the convent and handed both to Sister St. Elmo in the prioress’s office.

  Sister St. Elmo endorsed the one and read aloud the writing on the envelope that enclosed the other.

  “To Whom It May Concern, Convent and School, Near Bristington.” She drew out the letter, remarking as she did so, “Somebody who does not even know the name of our village. I suppose you have read this.” She unfolded and perused it. “But this is school business, if business it can be called,” she said. “In any case, the wastepaper basket is the place for anonymous rubbish.”

  “Rubbish it may be, but I thought you ought to see it,” said Sister Wolstan.

  “Has Sister Hilary read it?”