The Abbess of Crewe

by Muriel Spark

  They descend the stairs with such poise and habitual style that the nuns below, amongst whom already stir like a wind in the rushes the early suspicion and dread of what is to come, are sobered and made vigilant, are collected and composed as they file across the dark lawn, each in her place to Vespers.

  High and low come the canticles and the Abbess rises from her tall chair to join the responses. How lyrically move her lips in the tidal sway of the music! …

  Taking, obtaining, benefiting, procuring, deriving, securing, collecting, reaping, coming in for, stepping into, inheriting, coming by, scraping together, getting hold of, bringing grist to the mill, feathering one’s nest …

  Sisters, be sober, be vigilant, for the devil goeth about as a raging lion seeking whom he may devour.

  Gloating, being pleased, deriving pleasure, etcetera, taking delight in, rejoicing in, relishing, liking, enjoying, indulging in, treating oneself, solacing oneself, revelling, luxuriating, being on velvet, being in clover, slaking the appetite, faisant ses choux gras, basking in the sunshine, treading on enchanted ground.

  Out of the deep have I called unto thee, O

  Lord:

  Lord hear my voice.

  O let thine ears consider well:

  the voice of my complaint.

  If thou, Lord, will be extreme to mark

  what is done amiss:

  O Lord, who may abide it?

  Happy those early days! when I

  Shined in my angel infancy.

  Before I understood this place

  Appointed for my second race,

  Or taught my soul to fancy aught

  But a white, celestial thought.

  ‘The point is, Winifrede, that you took a very great risk passing the money to a young Jesuit seminarian who was dressed up as a woman in Selfridge’s ladies’ lavatory. He could have been arrested as a transvestite. This time you’d better think up something better.’

  The Abbess is busy with a pair of little scissors unpicking the tiny threads that attach the frail setting of an emerald to the robes of the Infant of Prague.

  ‘It pains me,’ says the Abbess, ‘to expend, waste, squander, lavish, dissipate, exhaust and throw down the drain the Sisters’ dowries in this fashion. I am hard used by the Jesuits. However, here you are. Take it to the pawn shop and make some arrangement with Fathers Baudouin and Maximilian how the money is to be picked up. But no more ladies’ lavatories.’

  ‘Yes, Lady Abbess,’ says Winifrede; then she says in a low wail, ‘If only Sister Mildred could come with me or Sister Walburga …’

  ‘Oh, they know nothing of this affair,’ says the Abbess.

  ‘Oh, they know everything!’ says Winifrede, the absolute clot.

  ‘As far as I’m concerned I know nothing, either,’ says the Abbess. ‘That is the scenario. And do you know what I am thinking, Winifrede?’

  ‘What is that, Lady Abbess?’

  ‘I‘m thinking,’ the Abbess says:

  I am homesick after mine own kind,

  Oh, I know that there are folk about me,

  friendly faces,

  But I am homesick after mine own kind.

  ‘Yes, Lady Abbess,’ says Winifrede. She curtsies low and is about to depart when the Abbess, in a swirl of white, lays a hand on her arm to retain her.

  ‘Winifrede,’ she says, ‘before you go, just in case anything should happen which might tend to embarrass the Abbey, I would like you to sign the confession.’

  ‘Which confession?’ says Winifrede, her stout frame heaving with alarm.

  ‘Oh, the usual form of confession.’ The Abbess beckons her to the small desk whereon is laid a typed sheet of the Abbey’s fine crested paper. The Abbess holds out a pen. ‘Sign,’ she says.

  ‘May I read it?’ Winifrede whines, taking up the papers in her strong hands.

  ‘It’s the usual form of confession. But read on, read on, if you have any misgivings.’

  Winifrede reads what is typed:

  I confess to Almighty God, to blessed Mary ever Virgin, to blessed Michael the archangel, to blessed John the Baptist, to the holy apostles Peter and Paul, and to all the saints, that I have sinned exceedingly in thought, word and deed, through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.

  ‘Sign,’ says the Abbess. ‘Just put your name and your designation.’

  ‘I don’t really like to commit myself so far,’ Winifrede says.

  ‘Well, you know,’ says the Abbess, ‘since you repeat these words at Mass every morning of your life, I would be quite horrified to think you had been a hypocrite all these years and hadn’t meant them. The laity in their hundreds of millions lodge this solemn deposition before the altar every week.’ She puts the pen into Winifrede’s frightened hand. ‘Even the Pope,’ says the Abbess, ‘offers the very same damaging testimony every morning of his life; he admits quite frankly that he has committed sins exceedingly all through his own grievous fault. Whereupon the altar boy says: “May almighty God have mercy on you.” And all I am saying, Winifrede, is that what’s good enough for the Supreme Pontiff is good enough for you. Do you imagine he doesn’t mean precisely what he says every morning of his life?’

  Winifrede takes the pen and writes under the confession, ‘Winifrede, Dame of the Order of the Abbey of Crewe,’ in a high and slanting copperplate hand. She pats her habit to see if the emerald is safe in the deep folds of her pocket, and before leaving the parlour she stops at the door to look back warily. The Abbess stands, holding the confession, white in her robes under the lamp and judicious, like blessed Michael the Archangel.

  Chapter 6

  ‘WE have entered the realm of mythology,’ says the Abbess of Crewe, ‘and of course I won’t part with the tapes. I claim the ancient Benefit of Clerks. The confidentiality between the nuns and the Abbess cannot be disrupted. These tapes are as good as under the secret of the confessional, and even Rome cannot demand them.’

  The television crew has gone home, full of satisfaction, but news reporters loiter in a large group outside the gates. The police patrol the grounds with the dogs that growl at every dry leaf that stirs on the ground.

  It is a month since Sister Winifrede, mindful of the Abbess’s warning not to choose a ladies’ lavatory for a rendezvous, decided it would show initiative and imagination if she arranged to meet her blackmailer in the gentlemen’s lavatory at the British Museum. It was down there in that blind alley that Winifrede was arrested by the Museum guard and the attendants. ‘Here’s one of them poofs,’ said the attendant, and Winifrede, dressed in a dark blue business suit, a white shirt with a faint brown stripe and a blue and red striped tie, emblematic of some university unidentified even by the Sunday press, was taken off to the police station still hugging her plastic bag packed tight with all those thousands.

  Winifrede began blurting out her story on the way to the police station and continued it while the policewomen were stripping her of her manly clothes, and went on further with her deposition, dressed in a police-station overall. The evening paper headlines announced, ‘Crewe Abbey Scandal: New Revelations’, ‘Crewe Nun Transvestite Caught in Gent’s’ and ‘Crewe Thimble Case — Nun Questioned’.

  Winifrede, having told her story, was released without charge on the assurances of the Abbess that it was an internal and ecclesiastical matter, and was being intensively investigated as such. This touchy situation, which the law-enforcement authorities were of a mind to avoid, did not prevent several bishops from paying as many calls to the Abbess Alexandra, whitely robed in her parlour at Crewe, as she would receive, nor did it keep the stories out of the newspapers of the big wide world.

  ‘My Lords,’ she told those three of the bishops whom she admitted, ‘be vigilant for your own places before you demolish my Abbey. You know of the mower described by Andrew Marvell:

  While thus he drew his elbow round,

  Depopulating all the ground,

  And, with his whistling scythe, does cut

&
nbsp; Each stroke between the earth and root,

  The edged steel, by careless chance,

  Did into his own ankle glance,

  And there among the grass fell down

  By his own scythe the mower mown.’

  They left, puzzled and bedazzled, having one by one and in many ways assured her they had no intention whatsoever to discredit her Abbey, but merely to find out what on earth was going on.

  The Abbess, when she finally appeared on the television, was a complete success while she lasted on the screen. She explained, lifting in her beautiful hand a folded piece of paper, that she already had poor Sister Winifrede’s signed confession to the effect that she had been guilty of exceeding wrongdoing, fully owning her culpability. The Abbess further went on to deny rumours of inferior feeding at Crewe. ‘I don’t deny,’ she said, ‘that we have our Health Food laboratories in which we examine and experiment with vast quantities of nourishing products.’ In the field of applied electronics, the Abbess claimed, the Abbey was well in advance and hoped by the end of the year to produce a new and improved lightning conductor which would minimize the danger of lightning in the British Isles to an even smaller percentage than already existed.

  The audiences goggled with awe at this lovely lady. She said that such tapes as existed were confidential recordings of individual conversations between nun and Abbess, and these she would never part with. She smiled sublimely and asked for everyone’s prayers for the Abbey of Crewe and for her beloved Sister Gertrude, whose magnificent work abroad had earned universal gratitude.

  The cameras have all gone home and the reporters wait outside the gates. Only the rubbish-truck, the Jesuit who comes to say Mass and the post-van are permitted to enter and leave. After these morning affairs are over the gates remain locked. Alexandra has received the bishops, has spoken, and has said she will receive them no more. The bishops, who had left the Abbess with soothed feelings, had experienced, a few hours after leaving the Abbey, a curious sense of being unable to recall precisely what explanation Alexandra had given. Now it is too late.

  Who is paying blackmailers, for what purpose, to whom, how much, and with funds from what source? There is no clear answer, neither in the press nor in the hands of the bishops. It is the realm of mythology, and the Abbess explains this to Gertrude in her goodbye call on the green telephone.

  ‘Well,’ Gertrude says, ‘you may have the public mythology of the press and television, but you won’t get the mythological approach from Rome. In Rome, they deal with realities.’

  ‘It’s quite absurd that I have been delated to Rome with a view to excommunication,’ says the Abbess, ‘and of course, Gertrude, dear, I am going there myself to plead my cause. Shall you be there with me? You could then come back to England and take up prison reform or something.’

  ‘I’m afraid my permit in Tibet only lasts a certain time,’ Gertrude huskily replies. ‘I couldn’t get away.’

  ‘In response to popular demand,’ says the Abbess, ‘I have decided to make selected transcripts of my tapes and publish them. I find some passages are missing and fear that the devil who goes about as a raging lion hath devoured them. There are many film and stage offers, and all these events will help tremendously to further your work in the field and to assist the starved multitudes. Gertrude, you know I am become an object of art, the end of which is to give pleasure.’

  ‘Delete the English poetry from those tapes,’ Gertrude says. ‘It will look bad for you at Rome. It is the language of Cranmer, of the King James version, the book of Common Prayer. Rome will take anything, but English poetry, no.’

  ‘Well, Gertrude, I do not see how the Cardinals themselves can possibly read the transcripts of the tapes or listen to the tapes if their existence is immoral, Anyway, I have obtained all the nuns’ signed confessions, which I shall take with me to Rome. Fifty of them.’

  ‘What have the nuns confessed?’

  The Abbess reads in her glowing voice over the green telephone to far-away Gertrude the nuns’ Confiteor.

  ‘They have all signed that statement?’

  ‘Gertrude, do you have bronchial trouble?’

  ‘I am outraged,’ says Gertrude, ‘to hear you have all been sinning away there in Crewe, and exceedingly at that, not only in thought and deed but also in word. I have been toiling and spinning while, if that sensational text is to be believed, you have been considering the lilies and sinning exceedingly. You are all at fault, all of you, most grievously at fault.’

  ‘Yes, we have that in the confessions, Gertrude, my trusty love. O felix culpa! Maximilian and Baudouin have fled the country to America and are giving seminars respectively in ecclesiastical stage management and demonology. Tell me, Gertrude, should I travel to Rome by air or by land and sea?’

  ‘By sea and land,’ says Gertrude. ‘Keep them waiting.’

  ‘Yes, the fleecy drift of the sky across the Channel will become me. I hope to leave in about ten days’ time. The Infant of Prague is already in the bank — Gertrude, are you there?’

  ‘I didn’t catch that,’ says Gertrude. ‘I dropped a hair-pin and picked it up.’

  Mildred and Walburga are absent now, having found it necessary to reorganize the infirmary at the Abbey of Ynce for the ailing and ancient Abbot. Alexandra, already seeing in her mind’s eye her own shape on the upper deck of the ship that takes her from Dover to Ostend, and thence by train through the St Gothard the long journey to Rome across the map of Europe, sits at her desk prettily writing to the Cardinal at Rome. O rare Abbess of Crewe!

  ‘Your Very Reverend Eminence,

  Your Eminence does me the honour to invite me to respond to the Congregational Committee of Investigation into the case of Sister Felicity’s little thimble and thimble-related matters …’

  She has given the orders for the selection and orchestration of the transcripts of her tape-recordings. She has gathered her nuns together before Compline. ‘Remove the verses that I have uttered. They are proper to myself alone and should not be cast before the public. Put “Poetry deleted”. Sedulously expurgate all such trivial fond records and entitle the compilation The Abbess of Crewe.’

  Our revels now are ended. Be still, be watchful. She sails indeed on the fine day of her desire into waters exceptionally smooth, and stands on the upper deck, straight as a white ship’s funnel, marvelling how the wide sea billows from shore to shore like that cornfield of sublimity which never should be reaped nor was ever sown, orient and immortal wheat.

  Copyright © Copyright Administration Ltd. 1974

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  First published as a New Directions Bibelot in 1995

  Published by arrangement with Dame Muriel Spark, ber agent Georges Borchardt, Inc.,

  New York, and Penguin Books Ltd., London. The Abbess of Crewe was originally published in the U.S.A. by The Viking Press, 1974.

  Acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to quote material: The Literary Trustees of Walter de la Mare and The Society of Authors as their representative for material from “Miss/T.” by Walter de la Mare. Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., A.P. Watt & Son, M. B. Yeats, Anne Yeats, and the Estate of W. B. Yeats for material from “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” copyright 1928 by Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., copyright © Georgie Yeats, 1956; for “He Remembers Forgotten Beauty,” copyright 1906 by Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., copyright 1934 by William Butler Yeats. Both poems from Collected Poems by William Butler Yeats. New Directions Publishing and Messrs Faber & Faber for “In Durance” from Personae by Ezra Pound, copyright 1926 by Ezra Pound. Random House Inc., and Messrs Faber & Faber for material from “Lay your sleeping head, my love” from Collected Shorter Poem
s 1927-1957 by W.H. Auden. copyright 1940 by W.H. Auden. Copyright © W.H. Auden, 1968.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Spark, Muriel.

  The Abbess of Crewe / Muriel Spark.

  p. cm.

  “New Directions bibelot.”

  eISBN 978-0-8112-2155-9

  I. Title.

  PR6037.P25A65 1995

  823’.914--dc20

  95-1628

  CIP

  New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

  by New Directions Publishing Corporation,

  80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011