Convent on Styx (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  “Not yet. I thought I ought to leave it to your discretion whether she should see it or not. In any case, she is very busy this morning. For my own part, I have always thought it a mistake to have a young man in charge of that woodwork-shed so far from the school buildings. Now, it seems, some nasty-minded busybody has had the same thought, and is probably not the only one.”

  “Well, you had better show the letter to Sister Hilary. I still cannot think why you did not wait until she had time to look at it, rather than bring it over here.”

  “There is the reference to Sister X, and the letter is addressed to the convent as well as to the school.”

  The prioress re-read the letter, this time aloud. “Sister X is a whited sepulchre. Why don’t you have a look at what goes on in that big hut of yours by night? I wouldn’t be too sure about the daytime, either, come to that. Get some eye-drops and clear the motes out of your eyes, you female Bartimeuses—or are you only too willing to be blind? A Well-Wisher, I don’t think. Ha! Ha!” read the prioress aloud.

  “My good Sister,” she went on, putting down the letter, “this comes from some madman. However, as there is this reference to the woodwork centre, Sister Hilary must see it, and no doubt she will arrange for a stricter supervision to be kept on the hut for a while, if only to refute any further rumours. People have such prurient minds, unfortunately.”

  “And what about Sister X?”

  “Well, what about her? The very fact that the writer does not give her a name proves her to be a fictional character. Take this crazy outpouring back to school. Sister Hilary will know what to do with it.”

  “That woodwork-shed ought to come down,” said Sister Wolstan. “What do girls want with carpentry, anyway? I never liked the idea of a young man teaching big girls under such unsuitable and questionable conditions, and Sister Hilary knows my views.” Sister Wolstan had been in religion as long as the prioress herself; moreover, she allowed herself more licence with a half-Maltese than she would have done with someone who was not what she would have called “of mixed blood.”

  The prioress, who had always suspected that this was Sister Wolstan’s view and who had to examine her conscience narrowly and often to quell the temptation to resent an attitude she felt was lacking in respect for her office, said sharply,

  “Unsuitable in some ways the conditions may be, but you know perfectly well that such disturbing noises as sawing and hammering would be quite intolerable in the school building itself. The shed was there when the Order acquired the property and naturally it was put to good use. As for your employment of the word ‘questionable,’ I can assure you that young Mr. Chassett came to us with the highest references and, but for being the main support of a widowed mother who, incidentally, used to teach here, he would undoubtedly have gone into the priesthood. No more of these subversive opinions, therefore, I beg of you, Sister. They are mischievous and unbecoming.”

  This rebuke was almost more than Sister Wolstan could bear. However, true to her training, she cast down her eyes, assumed a chastened demeanour and said, “Very well, Mother. Sister Hilary is engaged just at present. I will show her the letter as soon as she is free.”

  Faced with the letter as soon as the travelling salesman of school books had gone, Sister Hilary emitted a snort of contempt, handed it back to Sister Wolstan, and said, “I suppose you had better let Sister St. Elmo see this. Then, unless she wants to keep it and make an investigation, you may destroy it. All the same, I think perhaps you might make a point of going over to the woodwork hut now and again just to keep an eye on things.”

  “What excuse shall I make?”

  “There is no need for excuses. You need not go inside. You are sufficiently experienced to know, from outside the door or window, whether work is being carried on in a proper manner. Personally I have every confidence in Mr. Chassett, but if there are rumours flying around because he is out of our orbit and teaches the older girls, your visits should scotch them. If you have reason to think that he has problems with his discipline, you will, of course, report to me and no doubt I shall find a way of dealing with them.”

  “Sister St. Elmo has seen the letter,” said Sister Wolstan, flushing as she remembered the prioress’s stern rebuke. “You were not available earlier, so . . .”

  “I see,” said Sister Hilary, who was not in the least taken in by this specious excuse, but saw Wolstan’s action for what it was—a rather mean little attempt to discredit her in the eyes of the prioress. “Oh, well, that’s that, then.” She tore the letter into tiny pieces, gathered these on to her blotting-pad, and handed the pad across the desk to Sister Wolstan. “Perhaps the lavatory pan would be the best place for this rubbish,” she concluded, “unless you think it may clog the drain.”

  Mid-morning break came soon after Sister Wolstan had returned the blotting-pad without its load of mischief, and at break Sister Hilary sent a senior girl to find the caretaker and send him into her study.

  “Quince,” she said, when he appeared, “how many keys are there to the woodwork hut?”

  “Keys, Sister? Let’s see now. You has one, I has one, Mr. Chassett, he have one, of course, and Mrs. Riggs have one so her can get in there and clean up. Ah, and do she grouse about the mess! ‘Worse than the art room,’ she do say. ‘One thing about the cookery room, Sister Elphege make them clean their own ovens and stove-tops. Why can’t Mr. Chassett make them sweep up their own sawdust and shavings? Knee-deep,’ she says, ‘and more work than one woman ought to have to cope with.’ That’s her grouse, Sister.”

  “Yes, perhaps it is,” said Sister Hilary mildly.

  “Ask me,” went on Tom Quince, encouraged by this reasonable attitude, “her have thoughts of giving in her notice on account of it.”

  “Oh, she mustn’t do that. You had better tell her that I will consult with Mr. Chassett and see what can be done to leave the hut a little tidier.”

  When she saw Ronald Chassett later in the day she said to him,

  “I know of four keys to your hut. Could there be a fifth?”

  Looking surprised, Ronald replied, “Not to my knowledge, Sister. There are yours and mine, Quince has one and so, I believe, has the cleaner.”

  “Ah yes, the cleaner. Do you find her a grumbling, disgruntled kind of woman?”

  “I don’t have any contact with her, Sister. I’m gone by the time she cleans out the hut.”

  “Have you ever had any suspicion that some unauthorised person or persons might get into the hut after school hours? That is why I asked about another key.”

  “Good gracious, no! Why should anybody get in?” But he blushed as he spoke and Sister Hilary noted it.

  “Well, I intend to ask the cleaner to give up her key. I shall make no accusations, of course,” she said, eyeing him as though they shared in some conspiracy.

  “You mean you think she may lend or hire out her key for—for—” stammered Chassett, now turning pale.

  “Let us say ‘for clandestine assignments,’ Mr. Chassett. Will you see that the girls do their clearing up and leave the hut tidy when lessons are over?” concluded Sister Hilary, giving him a very sweet smile. “Good training for them, I think.”

  Young Mr. Chassett, who foresaw that any clearing up would be done by him and him alone, ungraciously agreed.

  CHAPTER 3

  Accident

  “No, no. The fault was mine, impute it to me,

  Or rather to conspiring destiny,

  Which (since I loved the form before) decreed

  That I should suffer when I loved indeed.”

  John Donne

  On the whole, the village took little interest in the convent. This was because most of the convent connections were not with it, but with the town. The Catholic Church was in the town and so was the bank. The supermarket was there and so was the firm of motor coach owners from whom the convent hired the vehicles it needed for school outings. The railway station was there and, under the new and more liberal rules whic
h die-hards such as Sister Wolstan deplored so much, the nuns were allowed a holiday every year to visit their families or stay at another convent. They needed the railway to take them to their destinations and bring them back. The convent even had its own car, so did not require the services of the village taxi to run nuns and their luggage to the station when they went on journeys.

  There were, however, one or two points of contact. The village doctor was one; the post office was another, if only because the convent’s perennial guests cashed their pension vouchers there before paying their dues to Sister Wolstan, who, in addition to acting as school secretary, was the convent bursar. The only other real link, however, was with the local garage, which supplied petrol and kept the convent car on the road when its ailments were too serious to be treated at home by Tom Quince.

  Village memories, though, are long ones, and there were those still alive who remembered a former small prosperity. In the days when the convent ran a boarding school there had been various perks for the villagers, which ceased when the supply of boarders had worked itself out and the day pupils were fetched and carried in their parents’ private cars.

  Gone, therefore, were the days when the shops in the village profited from the sale of sweets, cakes, pots of jam, and all those little extras upon which the boarding school pupils spent their pocket money. Gone, too, was the riding-school, which, threatened with liquidation when the school no longer hired hacks from it, had moved to other quarters; gone was the little restaurant that had provided cream teas. The town in those days was out of bounds to the pupils, but the village was not. In consequence, with the loss of the boarding school went a loss of trade and the shopkeepers did not forget that. One or two of them still nursed a feeling of grudge against the convent.

  Nothing might ever have devolved from this but for a most unfortunate occurrence which derived directly from a meeting which took place about a fortnight after the first anonymous letter. It was the result of a decision by the prioress that to have one driver for the convent car was no longer sufficient for the needs of the Community, since, if that driver happened to be ill or otherwise unable to take the car out, there was nobody among the Community able to do it. She put the point to the assembled nuns at one of those gatherings at which general convent affairs were discussed.

  “But we have two drivers already,” Sister Hilary pointed out.

  “You mean Sister Romuald and Tom Quince. Yes, I know, but it is not always convenient to take Tom from his other duties merely so that he may drive the car. Besides, he might be taking his annual fortnight at the same time as Sister Romuald is away on her family holiday, and then where should we be? No, I am quite clear in my mind that we must train another driver.”

  “Couldn’t it be arranged that one of our present drivers is always there?” asked Sister Honorius.

  “Then there is the question of using the car for these holiday journeys,” proceeded the prioress, ignoring Sister Honorius, who had turned up late at the meeting for the inadequate reason that she had been in attendance upon her beloved animals. Therefore she was under Sister St. Elmo’s displeasure for the time being. “I have been looking into some figures and I find that, now everybody is entitled to take an annual holiday, the train fares run us into a considerable amount of money. By using the car we could save at least a pound or two each time anybody goes on leave.”

  “Only if the journeys were short ones—say a hundred miles or less—or if everybody was willing to spend her furlough at another of our houses instead of with her family,” said Sister Hilary. “No driver of ours ought to be expected to do more than two hundred miles in a day. I would think even that was rather much for one of the Sisters, when you consider the state of the car.”

  “The car is perfectly roadworthy,” said Sister St. Elmo, coldly.

  “Of course. All the same, it is very old. One could expect delays and breakdowns on long journeys. Apart from that, the point I wished to make is that the Sister who is acting as driver, whether it is Sister Romuald or another, would have to make the journey there and back in one day, unless her destination was another of our houses. There, of course, she could be put up for the night, but even that might not always be convenient. Not every house has the accommodation that we have here.”

  “Quite so,” said the prioress. “I had not considered that aspect, nor thought about the length of the journeys.”

  “Apart from that,” Sister Hilary went on, “if your plan were carried out, every time somebody went on holiday not only should we be deprived of two of the Community instead of only the one whose leave it was, but we should lose the use of the car itself for the best part of twenty-four hours. What we should need would be two cars as well as two drivers.”

  “Then there is Sister Marcellus,” went on the prioress, this time as though Sister Hilary had not spoken. “It is really becoming too much for her to drag the shopping uphill from the bus stop. Apart from that, the bus fares are continually soaring, and to pay them twice and usually three times a week runs us into an unnecessary amount of money considering that we have the car, not to speak of the continual tax upon Sister’s strength, of course.”

  “Oh, but, Sister!” exclaimed Hilary, dismayed by what this appeared to imply and nettled, also, by the slight snub she felt she had received over her last argument.

  “But what, Sister?” the prioress asked, with what was intended as a propitiatory smile. She was anxious, as usual, not to antagonise the headmistress and felt that the snub she had administered had been undiplomatic and had been given out of pique for having been worsted in argument.

  “Well, even if we do train another driver, it still means she would have to be a member of my staff,” said Sister Hilary, “unless you yourself are thinking of learning to drive.”

  “I am too old, I fear, Sister.”

  “Well, I simply cannot spare a teacher to take Sister Marcellus shopping three mornings a week during term-time. It would make nonsense of my timetable and lead to all sorts of complications. We are recognised by the Ministry, if you remember, so how should I feel if one of Her Majesty’s inspectors came in and I had to explain that a teacher was taking Sister into town to do the shopping?”

  “Ah, now, that I have thought about, Sister,” said the prioress, somewhat smugly. “I am going to trade in our present refrigerator for a very much larger one with a big deep-freeze compartment. This means that, so long as the shopping can be brought by car instead of Sister Marcellus having to carry it uphill from the bus stop, it need be done only once a week.”

  “But, even so . . .”

  “On Saturdays,” concluded the prioress, “when school is closed. That should meet your very proper objections, I think, Sister.”

  Sister Marcellus, who had put on a martyred expression at the mention of her having to carry the shopping uphill from the bus stop, now changed it to one of horror and alarm. The last thing she wanted was to have her two (sometimes three) weekly outings cut down so drastically to one only, and that one to be on a Saturday, when not only was the supermarket crowded out, but when she was accustomed to allow herself the luxury of a long lie-in while the others got their own breakfasts.

  “But on Saturdays you yourself need the car, Sister,” she said, “to pick up the flowers and take them to the church and arrange them so beautifully for Sundays.”

  “I’ve thought of that, too,” said the prioress. “The car seats four persons, so it will certainly take three of us and your shopping. The driver, whether it be Sister Romuald or some other, can drop me off at the church—the flowers are always ready soon after nine in the morning—and then you can do your shopping while Sister waits for you, and I can be picked up when you are ready to return. There is no problem at all, you see.”

  “Except,” said Sister Mary Leo, “to settle which of us is going to learn to drive. As I have defective eyesight, I think that for the general safety it had better not be me.”

  “There is nothing wrong with your e
yesight that your spectacles cannot cope with,” said the prioress, “but, as you are unwilling, perhaps we should look elsewhere.”

  “I’m afraid I should be much too nervous to make a safe driver,” said Sister Mary Fabian, meaning that it was not her nervous system but her fecklessness that was the danger.

  “The choice of a learner-driver need not be settled at this meeting. It certainly requires thought,” said the prioress. “Now to another matter, and one that I hope will relieve Sister Leo of some of her rather heavy school duties. Will you explain, Sister Hilary?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Sister Hilary. “I’ve realised for some time that Sister Leo has too heavy a timetable. She takes every form for both history and geography, in addition to the preparation of her daily Religious Education lessons, for which, as you know, she has had special training at a College of Theology. She is a geography specialist, actually, and I have had it in mind for some time that she ought to be relieved of her history teaching. Well, the chance has come. The Superior is sending us Sister Mary Raymund who has a degree in economics and can take over the history, perhaps on those lines. I am sure that the more everybody knows about economics in these times, the better.”

  “Perhaps she knows how to drive a car,” said Sister Leo, hopefully.

  “Most young people drive nowadays,” said Sister Fabian.

  Sister St. Elmo correctly summed up the feeling of the meeting. Nobody felt the urge to learn to drive the convent car; some were too old; Sister Hilary, who had kept it dark, ever since she Entered, that she had been a driver for ten years, was, in any case, too important to be sent on errands. Those who were not too old (in the prioress’s opinion) were clearly not willing to face the responsibility of being put in charge of a lethal vehicle on congested roads and amongst fast traffic. She said, with finality and great simplicity:

  “Well, if Sister Raymund does not know how to drive the car, she will have to learn, that’s all.”

  Everyone breathed again.