The Bell (11 page)

‘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 Dora noticed that the centre of the causeway was missing and had been replaced by a wooden section standing on piles.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.

‘This is the visitors' chapel,' said Mrs Mark, speaking now in such a low whisper that Dora could hardly hear her. ‘What you see through the bars is the high altar of the nuns' chapel. The main body of the chapel faces the altar and can't be seen from here. By this arrangement we can participate in the services without ever seeing the nuns, which of course would be forbidden. There is a Mass at seven every morning which visitors may attend. That's the gate the priest comes through to give communion to anyone who is in this chapel. When the nuns are receiving the sacrament these curtains are closed to cut this chapel off from the main one. This is the place where outsiders like us can come nearest to the spiritual life of the Abbey.'

A soft rustle came from somewhere in the distance, round the corner beyond the bars, and then the sound of a footstep.

‘Is someone - ?' whispered Dora.

‘There is always a nun in the chapel,' murmured Mrs Mark. ‘It is a place of continual prayer.'

Dora felt stifled and suddenly frightened and began to retreat towards the door. The rich exotic smell of the incense roused some ancestral terror in her Protestant blood. Mrs Mark genuflected, crossing herself, and followed. In a moment they were out in the bright sunlight. The tall grasses moved, mingling with the reeds at the water's edge, and the lake flickered quietly in the sun. The wide scene, with a slanting view of Imber Court and a hazy distance of parkland elms, was laid out under a cloudless sky. There was something incredible about the proximity of that dark hole and that silence. Dora shook her head violently.

‘Yes, it is impressive, isn't it?' said Mrs Mark. ‘There is a wonderful spiritual life here. One just can't help being affected by it.'

They began to walk back across the causeway.

‘We'll take that little path to the left,' said Mrs Mark, ‘and cut through behind the house to the market-garden.'

The path led them from the end of the causeway a little way along the shore, and then turned away to the right, skirting a thick wood. A glint of greenhouses was to be seen ahead. As they turned by the wood, leaving the edge of the lake, the thin tinkling of the hand bell followed them from across the water.

Dora burst out, ‘It's terrible to think of them being shut up like that!'

‘It is true', said Mrs Mark, ‘that these women lay upon themselves austerities from which you and I would shrink in terror. But just as we think the sinner better than he is when we imagine that suffering ennobles him, so we do less than justice to the saint when we think that his sacrifices grieve him in the way they would grieve us. Indian file here, I think.'

Mrs Mark led the way along the narrow track which could still just be found in the middle of the encroaching grass, tall and bleached to a faded yellow. Long feathery plumes, brittle with dryness, learned from either side, touching the shoulders of the two women as they passed. Still stirred and affected by what she had seen, Dora blundered on in her uncomfortable shoes, watching where she stepped, and seeing ahead of her through the undergrowth the intermittent flash of Mrs Mark's well-developed calves, healthily shining, burnished by the sun to a glowing golden brown. The back view of the Court could be seen on the right, from this side a long unbroken façade, with pillars set close into the wall to frame the impressive round-topped windows of the Long Room. They emerged into an open space where the grass had been cut and stacked. The path faded away here and Dora's high heels sank into sharp stubble.

‘This is where the market-garden begins,' said Mrs Mark. ‘It's still very small, you know. This nearer part is what used to be the flower garden of the Court. We're cultivating that in strips with lettuce mainly, and some carrots and onions and young leeks. Beyond is what used to be the fruit garden of the Court. That's enclosed by the high walls you see straight ahead. We've kept that very much as it was. It's well stocked with apples and pears and plenty of soft fruit. There are some greenhouses in there, and we've added the more modern ones you see on the left. They're all full of tomatoes at present. The wire thing beside them is a chicken house. Just one or two birds, you know. Then we've just started to cultivate a piece of the pastureland beyond the ha-ha. We've got cabbage there, and a good area of potatoes and brussels sprouts. We're only growing the safer vegetables at present till we've gained experience. We shall dig up more of the pastureland in the autumn.'