The Bell

by Iris Murdoch

  Urged by Paul she got up just in time for breakfast at seven-thirty. The refectory of the community was the big room on the ground floor between the two stone staircases, with its doors opening on to the gravel terrace. Meals were taken in silence at Imber. At lunch and high tea one of the community read aloud during the meal, but this was not the custom at breakfast. Dora was pleased with the silence, which excused her from effort, except for such as was involved in the gesturing, pointing, and smiling, a certain amount of which went on, initiated especially by Mrs Mark and James. She consumed a good deal of tea and toast, looking out across the already baking terrace to where the lake could be seen fiercely glinting in the sun.

  After breakfast Mrs Mark told Dora that she would find time during the morning to show her round the house and the estate. She would fetch Dora from her room soon after ten. Paul, who had meanwhile been at the telephone, came back with the good news that the suitcase had been found and was being returned to the railway station. Someone in the carriage had observed Dora’s forgetfulness. The sun hat, however, was not to be traced. Dora promised that she would go to the station before lunch and fetch the case. This seemed to Paul an appropriate arrangement, and he disappeared in the direction of the Abbey to get on with his work. Mrs Mark would be sure to bring Dora to see him, he said, in the course of her tour. Paul was gentle this morning, and Dora became more positively aware that he was very glad indeed that she had come back. Quite simply and immediately she was pleased to have pleased him, and that and the sunshine and some indomitable vitality in her made her feel almost gay. She picked a few wild flowers in the grass near the lake and went back up to her room to wait for Mrs Mark.

  As Dora looked round the room it occurred to her how nice it was to live once more in a confined space which one was free to organize, with small resources, as one pleased. The bare room brought back to her nostalgic memories of the various digs she had lived in in London before she met Paul, shabby bed-sitting rooms in Bayswater and Pimlico and Notting Hill, which it had given her so much pleasure to embellish with posters and more or less crazy items of interior decoration created at small cost by herself or her friends. Paul’s flat in Knightsbridge, which at first had so much dazzled her, seemed later by contrast as lifeless as a museum. But on this room at Imber, Paul had made no mark. He had informed Dora that all rooms were to be swept daily and he now delegated this function to her. She had already discovered the place on the landing where the brushes were kept and had swept the room meticulously. She made the beds and tidied Paul’s things, with caution, into neat piles. She arranged the wild flowers into a careful bouquet and put them into a tooth mug which she had filched from the bathroom. They looked charming. She wondered what else she could do to make the room look nice.

  There was a knock on the door and Mrs Mark came in. Dora jumped, having forgotten all about her.

  ‘So sorry to have kept you waiting,’ said Mrs Mark. ‘Ready for our little tour?’

  ‘Oh yes, thank you!’ said Dora, seizing her jacket which she threw loosely round her shoulders.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind my saying so,’ said Mrs Mark, ‘but we never have flowers in the house.’ She looked censoriously at Dora’s nosegay. ‘We keep everything here as plain as possible. It’s a little austerity we practise.’

  ‘Oh dear!’ said Dora, blushing. ‘I’ll throw them out. I didn’t know.’

  ‘Don’t do that,’ said Mrs Mark magnanimously. ‘Keep those ones. I thought I should tell you, though, for next time. I feel sure you’d rather be treated like one of us, wouldn’t you, and keep the rules of the house? It’s not like a hotel and we do expect our guests to fit in - and I think that’s what they like best too.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Dora, still extremely confused, ‘I’m so sorry!’

  ‘You see, we don’t normally allow any sort of personal decoration in the rooms,’ said Mrs Mark. ‘We try to imitate the monastic life in certain ways as closely as we can. We believe it’s a sound discipline to give up that particular sort of self-expression. It’s a small sacrifice, after all, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, indeed!’ said Dora.

  ‘You’ll soon get used to our little ways,’ said Mrs Mark. ‘I do hope you’ll enjoy it here. Paul has fitted in so well - we all quite love him. Shall we go along? I’m afraid I haven’t a great deal of time.’

  She led the way out of the door. ‘I expect you know the geography of the house roughly by now,’ said Mrs Mark. ‘The members of the community sleep right at the top of the house in this wing, in what used to be servants’ bedrooms. The main rooms on your floor are all kept as guest bedrooms. We act, you know, as a sort of unofficial guest house for the Abbey. We hope to develop that side of our activities very much in the future. At present there are still a lot of rooms which we haven’t even been able to furnish. The other wing is completely empty. Directly below us on the ground floor are the kitchen quarters at the back of the house, and the big ground-floor room on the corner in the front of the house is the general estate office. Then in the middle, as you know, there’s the refectory underneath the balcony, and two little rooms up above, set back behind the portico, which act as offices for James and Michael. And at the back there’s the historic Long Room, a great feature of the house, which is two stories high. We’ve made that into our chapel.’

  As she talked Mrs Mark led Dora along a corridor, past the dark well of a back stairway, into a larger corridor and threw open a large door. They entered the chapel, this time from the end opposite the altar. In the bright daylight the room looked, Dora thought, even more derelict, like an aftermath of amateur theatricals. Though scrupulously clean, it appeared dusty and as if the walls were dissolving into powder. The hessian cloth reminded Dora of school.

  ‘It’s not a proper chapel, of course,’ said Mrs Mark, not lowering her voice. ‘That is, it’s not consecrated. But we have our own little regular services here. We go over to the Abbey chapel for Mass, and those who wish to can attend at certain other hours as well. And we have a special Sunday morning service here at which an address is given by a member of the community.’

  They went out by the other door and emerged a moment later into the stone-flagged entrance hall. Mrs Mark threw open the door of the common-room. Modern upholstered chairs with arms of light-varnished wood stood in a neat circle, incongruous against the dark panelling.

  ‘This is the only room we’ve really furnished,’ said Mrs Mark. ‘We come here in our recreation time and we like to be comfy. The oak panelling isn’t original, of course. It was put in in the late nineteenth century when this was the smoking-room.’

  They emerged on to the balcony and began to descend the right-hand stone staircase.

  ‘There’s the general office,’ said Mrs Mark, indicating the windows of the large corner room. ‘You’ll see my husband working inside.’

  They approached one of the windows and looked into the light room, which was furnished with trestle tables and unpainted deal cupboards, and seemed to be full of papers, all neatly stacked. Behind one of the tables sat Mark Strafford, his head bowed.

  ‘He does the accounts,’ said Mrs Mark. She watched him for a moment with a sort of curiosity which struck Dora as being devoid of tenderness. She did not tap on the window, but turned away. ‘Now we’ll cross to the Abbey’, she said, ‘and call on Paul.’

  Seeing Mrs Mark watching her husband, and seeing her now a little stout and perspiring in her faded girlish summer dress, Dora felt a first flicker of liking and interest, and asked, ‘What did you and your husband do before you came here?’ Dora, when she thought of it, never minded asking questions.

  ‘You’ll think me an awful wet blanket,’ said Mrs Mark, ‘but, do you know, we never discuss our past lives here. That’s another little religious rule that we try to follow. No gossip. And when you come to think of it, when people ask each other questions about their lives, their motives are rarely pure, are they? I’m sure mine never are! Curiosity that is idle soon
degenerates into malice. I do hope you understand. Mind the steps here, they’re a bit overgrown. ’

  They had crossed to the Abbey side of the terrace and were going down some stone steps, much riddled by long dry grasses, which descended to a path leading to the causeway. Dora, exasperated, kept silent.

  The lake water was very quiet, achieving a luminous brilliant pale blue in the centre and stained at the edges by motionless reflections. Dora looked across at the great stone wall and the curtain of elm trees behind it. Above the trees rose the Abbey tower, which she saw in daylight to be a square Norman tower. It was an inspiring thing, without pinnacles or crenellations, squarely built of grey and yellowish stone, and decorated on each face by two pairs of round-topped windows, placed one above the other, edged with zigzag carving which at a distance gave a pearly embroidered appearance, and divided by a line of interlacing arches.

  ‘A fine example of Norman work,’ said Mrs Mark, following Dora’s gaze.

  They went on down to the causeway. This crossed the lake in a series of shallow arches built of old brick which had weathered to a rich blackish red. Each arch with its reflection made a dark ellipse. Dora noticed that the centre of the causeway was missing and had been replaced by a wooden section standing on piles.

  ‘There was trouble here at the time of the dissolution, the dissolution of the monasteries, you know,’ said Mrs Mark, ‘and that piece was destroyed by order of the nuns themselves. It didn’t help them, however. Most of the Abbey was burnt down. After the Reformation it became derelict and when Imber Court was built the Abbey was a deserted ruin, a sort of romantic feature of the grounds. Then in the late nineteenth century, after the Oxford movement, you know, the place was taken over by the Anglican Benedictines - it was formerly a Benedictine Abbey, of course - and was rebuilt about nineteen hundred. They acquired the manuscripts that interest your husband at about the same time. There’s very little of the old building left now except for the refectory and the gateway and of course the tower.’

  They stepped onto the causeway. Dora felt a tremor of excitement. ‘Will we be able to go to the top of the tower?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, you know, we’re not going inside,’ said Mrs Mark, slightly scandalized. ‘This is an enclosed order of nuns. No one goes in or comes out.’

  Dora was stunned by this information. She stopped. ‘Do you mean’, she said, ‘that they’re completely imprisoned in there?’

  Mrs Mark laughed. ‘Not imprisoned, my dear,’ she said. ‘They are there of their own free will. This is not a prison. It is on the contrary a place which it is very hard to get into, and only the strongest achieve it. Like Mary in the parable, they have chosen the better part.’ They walked on.

  ‘Don’t they ever come out?’ asked Dora.

  ‘No,’ said Mrs Mark. ‘Being Benedictines, they take a vow of stability, that is they remain all their lives in the house where they take their first vows. They die and are buried inside in the nuns’ cemetery.’

  ‘How absolutely appalling!’ said Dora.

  ‘Quiet now, please,’ said Mrs Mark in a lowered voice. They were reaching the end of the causeway.

  Dora saw now that the high wall, which had seemed to rise directly out of the lake, was in fact set back more than fifty yards from the edge of the water. From the lake shore there ran two roughly pebbled paths, one up to the great gateway, whose immense wooden door stood firmly shut, and the other away to the left alongside the Abbey wall.

  ‘This door’, said Mrs Mark, pointing to the gateway and still speaking softly, ‘is never opened except for the admission of a postulant: a rather impressive ceremony that always takes place in the early morning. Well, yes, it will also be opened in a week or two. When the new bell comes it will be taken in this way, as if it were a postulant.’

  They turned to the left along the path which ran midway between the wall and the water. Dora saw a long rectangular brick building with a flat roof which seemed to be attached as an excrescence to the outside of the wall.

  ‘Not a thing of beauty, I’m afraid,’ said Mrs Mark. ‘Here are the parlours where the nuns occasionally come to speak to people from outside. And at the end is the visitors’ chapel where we are privileged to participate in the devotional life of the Abbey. The nuns’ chapel is the large building just here on the other side of the wall. You can see a bit of the tiled roof there through the trees.’

  They went in through a green door at the end of the brick building. A long corridor stretched ahead with a row of doors leading off it.

  ‘I’ll show you one of the parlours,’ said Mrs Mark, almost whispering now. ‘We won’t disturb your husband just yet. He’s down at the far end.’

  They entered the first door. Dora found herself in a small square room which was completely bare except for two chairs and the shiny linoleum upon the floor. The chairs were drawn up at the other side of the room against a great screen of white gauze which covered the upper half of the far wall.

  Mrs Mark went forward. ‘The other half of the room,’ she said, ‘on the other side, is within the enclosure.’ She pulled at the wooden edge of the gauze screen and it opened as a door, revealing behind it a grille of iron bars set about nine inches apart. Behind the grille and close up against it was a second gauze screen, obscuring the view into the room beyond.

  ‘You see,’ said Mrs Mark, ‘the nun opens the screen on the other side, and then you can talk through the grille.’ She closed the screen to again. It all seemed to Dora quite unbelievably eerie.

  ‘I wonder if you’d like to talk to one of the nuns?’ said Mrs Mark. ‘I’m afraid the Abbess is certain to be too busy. Even James and Michael only manage to see her now and then. But I’m sure Mother Clare would be very glad to see you and have a little talk.’

  Dora could feel her bristles rising with alarm and indignation. ‘I don’t think I would have anything to talk to the nuns about,’ she said, trying to prevent her voice from sounding aggressive.

  ‘Well, you know,’ said Mrs Mark, ‘I thought it might be nice for you to talk things over. The nuns are wise folk and you’d be surprised at what they know of how the world goes on. Nothing shocks them. People often come here to make a clean breast of their troubles and get themselves sorted out.’

  ‘I have no troubles which I care to discuss,’ said Dora. She was rigid with hostility, shuddering at these phrases. She’d see the place in hell before she’d let a nun meddle with her mind and heart. They retreated into the corridor.

  ‘Think it over anyway,’ said Mrs Mark. ‘Perhaps it’s the sort of idea that takes some getting used to. Now we’ll call on Paul. He works down there in the last parlour.’

  Mrs Mark knocked and opened the door revealing a room similar to the first one, only furnished with a large table at which Paul was working. The gauze screen was closed.

  Paul and Dora were glad to see each other. Paul looked up from the table and fixed a beaming smile upon his wife. His delight whenever she found him at his studies had always struck Dora as childish and touching. She was pleased now to see him so importantly at work, and immediately felt proud of him, regaining her vision of him as a distinguished man, how obviously superior, she felt, to Mark Strafford and those other drearies. Dora’s capacity to forget and to live in the moment, while it more frequently landed her in grave trouble, made her also responsive without calculation to the returning glow of kindness. That she had no memory made her generous. She was unrevengeful and did not brood; and in the instant as she crossed the room it was as if there had never been any trouble between them.

  ‘These are some of the manuscripts I’m working on,’ Paul was saying in a low voice. ‘They’re very precious and I’m not allowed to take them away.’ He was leaning over the table and opening several large leather-bound volumes with thick and brightly illuminated pages for Dora to see. ‘Here are the early chronicles of the nunnery. They’re unique of their kind. This is called a “chartulary”, which contains copies of charters and legal
documents. And here is the famous Imber Psalter. See these fantastic initial letters, and the animals running up the side of the page? And this is a picture of the Abbey as it was in 1400.’

  Dora saw a complex of white castellated buildings against a background of very leafy green trees and blue sky. ‘I suppose it wasn’t really so white,’ she said. ‘It looks more like Italy. However does all that gold stuff stay on? Why, there’s the old tower!’

  ‘Sssh!’ said Paul. ‘Yes, that’s the tower that still exists. It’s a very formalized picture, of course. And here’s the Bishop who founded the place holding a model of the Abbey in his hand. You get a better idea of the lay-out from that. The modern Abbey follows the ground-plan of the old one, though of course they haven’t attempted to reproduce the medieval buildings. That section still survives as well as the tower. In this old Book of Evidences you can see-’

  ‘We mustn’t keep you too long,’ said Mrs Mark. ‘And I must show Dora the chapel and buzz her round the market-garden and get back to my own jobs.’

  Paul was disappointed. ‘I’ll show you more tomorrow,’ he said, and squeezed Dora’s arm as she turned away.

  Dora, who would like to have stayed, gave him a rueful smile behind Mrs Mark’s retreating back. She was already determining how she would mock that lady when she was once more alone with Paul. Mockery did not come easily to Dora, and had to be thought out beforehand. Her jests at other people’s expense were often a trifle laboured. She followed Mrs Mark now, smiling to herself, and cheered too by the ease of her complicity with Paul.

  Mrs Mark took the last few steps along the corridor and entered a little vestibule with two doors, one opening into the garden and the other into the chapel. She opened the inner door and propelled Dora through it into an almost complete blackness. As she strained her eyes to see, Dora was conscious of Mrs Mark vigorously genuflecting beside her. Then she began to be aware that she was in a small box-like room with a highly polished parquet floor, some religious prints on the walls, and a number of chairs and hassocks. A strong smell of incense pervaded the place. The room faced inwards towards an enormous grille which this time stretched from floor to ceiling for the whole width of the room. Some of the bars had been severed to make a door, which was closed. There was a low rail, set a few feet back on the near side of the grille, and behind the bars could be dimly seen, at a higher level upon a dais, an altar set sideways on to the room. Two long white curtains, drawn back now to reveal the scene, hung from a brass rail which traversed the grille. Near the altar a small red light was burning. An annihilating silence came from within.