Fault in the Structure

CHAPTER 4

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…a world that changes to a crazy tempo

On the off-beat from the rhythm of eternity

Abbesses College was set in the midst of water meadows on the outskirts of the town and, as its name implies, had been built as a convent for nuns. As was the custom with mediaeval abbeys, it had been built round a cloister and this still remained although it was not much frequented, since it was both dark and damp.

The dampness was due to an imperfectly repaired roof; the darkness was accentuated by the undisciplined tangles of climbing and rambler roses which a former principal of the College had planted in the cloister garth just outside the embrasures which served as windows. The growth of the roses had gone unchecked during the war, when gardeners were hard to come by, and pruning had received little attention since.

What had been the nuns’ chapel was now the parish church. It formed the north wall of the cloister, but there was no longer any connecting door between the two. This had been blocked up so that visitors to the church had no direct communication with the College. Of the other original features which remained, the nuns’ frater, was now the College dining-hall and the convent kitchen which adjoined it, although it had been completely modernised, still fulfilled its original purpose. The nuns’ infirmary had become the College chapel and the abbess’s lodging, a commodious building because it had been designed to accommodate important visitors to the abbey as well as housing the abbess herself, had become the house of the High Mistress, as the principal was proudly entitled. Part of the lodging had been made into the Senior Commonroom, but the Fellows, the dons, the students and the servants were domiciled in a large new block which had been erected on what had at one time been the nuns’ orchard.

The High Mistress’s garden, known as Nuns’ Enclosure, was her personal property in that the only means of admittance to it was from the Lodging itself or by way of a small gate to which she alone held the key.

The much larger Fellows’ garden was adjacent to it, but the two were separated by a broad walk between two high stone walls, each smothered in free-blooming, climbing roses. There was a doorway in each wall, but only the High Mistress held the keys to both doors, so that she had access to the Fellows’ garden, but they had none to hers.

Beyond the gardens the original outer court of the convent was now tree-lined and had flower-beds. It was known as Bessie’s Quad after the intrepid Abbess Elizabeth Smallfield, who had held Henry VIII’s commissioners at bay outside the gate-house (which was still standing and which formed the main entrance to the College) for three days before she would allow them inside.

Beside the gate-house, but a few yards from it, the nuns’ store-house and barn had been turned into garages (lock-ups) for staff cars and a bicycle shed for the students, who were not allowed, for lack of space, to keep their cars in College. Between the bicycle shed and the gate-house was the porter’s lodge. It was nothing but a small, stone-built hut consisting of one room and a wash-room. There were two porters who worked four-hour shifts. The gates were locked at night and opened at eight in the morning. This arrangement was occasionally inconvenient, but in the main it worked smoothly. Each Fellow and don had a key to the little, roundheaded door in the huge gate-house portal, but for students the hours of ingress and egress were strictly enforced, and to bring a don in her dressing-gown and slippers to let one in after hours was not a practice worth cultivating.

Dame Beatrice and Laura lunched on the way down and arrived at the gatehouse at three. The enormous gates were wide open, so Laura drove in and was stopped by a uniformed man on duty.

‘Police at a garden-party?’ said Laura, who, on the strength of possessing a husband who was an Assistant Commissioner at New Scotland Yard, treated policemen with aunt-like familiarity. ‘How come, Sergeant?’

‘We have to search your car for bombs, madam.’

‘What! Has there been a scare?’

‘No, madam, but this is a big do. The Vice-Chancellor is expected and the local M.P., besides other celebrities.’

Laura and Dame Beatrice emerged from the car and Laura handed over the keys. The suitcases were taken out and examined and the interior of the car scrutinised before they were allowed to drive on to that part of Bessie’s Quad which had been reserved as a parking-lot for visitors’ cars.

The gate which ordinarily shut off the walled path between Nuns’ Enclosure and the Fellows’ garden was open and so were the gates which ordinarily kept the two gardens private from one another. Dame Beatrice, who had visited the College on many previous occasions, led the way into Nuns’ enclosure where, as she had expected, the High Mistress of the College was circulating among her guests and greeting new arrivals.

The garden was completely walled in, the buildings which were now the principal’s Lodging forming the fourth wall. Below the walls were flower-beds and the centre-piece at the house end of the garden was a well. It had a high stone surround and a fine canopy of wrought-iron work from the top of which depended a bucket and chain, the bucket held below the top of the stone-work so that its utilitarian purpose did not offend the eye. Adjacent to the well were two ancient apple-trees, but they gave little shade and the day was hot.

Laura, whose Highland blood had no sympathy with a temperature in the eighties, noted that over the wall she could see the branches of a magnificent cedar tree; so, leaving her employer (who heeded the heat no more than a lizard on a sunbaked wall) in earnest and apparently entertaining conversation with a group who had come up to renew acquaintance with her, Laura wandered out through the gate, crossed the broad path and entered the Fellows’ garden.

Here there was not only the spreading cedar whose shade she sought, but a bonus in the form of little tables at which tea, cakes, ice-cream and strawberries and cream were being served. The waitresses consisted of one or two maids reinforced by half a dozen women students who were remaining in College for a week or so to take advantage of the facilities offered by the College and the University libraries because they wanted to put in some extra work before going down.

Laura seated herself in a deck-chair, and was soon approached by a student wearing a backless sun-suit, enormous dark-glasses and open-toed sandals.

‘Gracious!’ said Laura. ‘You look more comfortable than I feel!’ She removed her festive and detested hat and, grateful for the shade of the cedar which made the hat unnecessary, she hung the redundant lid on a projection at the back of her deck chair.

‘We agreed to do our waitress act so long as we could dress as we liked,’ said the student. ‘The Bursar thought it was all right so long as we didn’t turn out in bra and panties or in bikinis. The trouble is to keep old Doctor Giddie at bay. Giddie by name and giddy by nature is that old goat. What would you like? It’s all free.’

Laura laughed and opted for iced lemonade. When the girl brought it she was accompanied by another who carried a tray laden with cakes and strawberries.

‘I say,’ said this second girl, who was somewhat more decorously clad than her companion in that her frock, although backless, was almost knee-length, albeit her feet were bare, ‘didn’t I see you come in with Dame Beatrice? Do you know her?’

‘I am her dogsbody. I type, drive the car, chase away unwelcome visitors, answer letters, look up references, bark, balance lumps of sugar on my nose, jump through hoops at the word of command and sometimes join Dame B in pastoral dances by the lee light of the moon,’ Laura replied.

‘Could you ask if I can consult her after Hall tonight?’

‘Consult her? She’s here as a visitor,’ said Laura, becoming serious.

‘Oh, I know, but, you see, I need a psychiatrist and I can’t afford the fare to London as well as paying her fee.’

‘Oh, you plan to be a cash customer? What’s the trouble?’

‘I’ve been seeing the College ghost, a monk dragging a sack. I need help and – well – is it true that she charges according to one’s means?’

‘A foolish practice for which I have often upbraided her. All the same, if you want a psychiatrist, well, she’s no longer in regular practice, you know. Even if you did attend her London clinic, you wouldn’t get her. You’d get one of the three doctors who now run it. She visits every now and again, but that’s all.’

‘I see.’ The two girls left her table, for a stream of visitors suddenly cascaded into the Fellows’ garden, so Laura finished her cake, lemonade and strawberries and relinquished her seat in the shade to a plump, blonde woman who was feeling the effects of the sun. Then she wandered around the grounds. She discovered the cool silence of the cloister and noticed that on the side opposite the church an open archway led into a pleasantly secluded little garden and that this, again, opened on to the main quadrangle and the enclosure formed by the twentieth-century College annexe.

An archway between two blocks led to an acreage of grass which Laura deduced must be part of the College playing fields and she was delighted and surprised to see that one boundary of this area was formed by a backwater of the river. She wandered down to it. As it could be crossed by a wooden bridge which had no gate at either end, she assumed that the land on the other side was also College property.

There was a boathouse on her side of the water. Laura studied the stream, noted that it was clear of weed and, as there were dressing-boxes alongside the boat-house, she realised that she was looking at the College bathing-place.

‘Lucky devils!’ thought Laura. She tried the first of the cubicles. It was open. In two minutes, naked as a mermaid, she was in the water.

Four tables were set for dinner in Hall that evening. Dame Beatrice sat at the high table with the High Mistress and the more distinguished of the guests, two tables below the dais accommodated the remainder of the invited, and at the end of the long room sat an unusually muted gathering at a table to themselves, the students who were staying up.

Laura found herself seated between two of the reverend signiors referred to by the High Mistress in her letter. One of them asked her whether her husband was a member of the University.

‘No, he’s a policeman,’ Laura replied.

‘Ah, yes, I remember. I knew the name meant something to me. Assistant Commissioner Robert Gavin, isn’t it? I think I met him once. Tell me, does he still believe in ghosts?’

‘I don’t know that he ever did.’

‘This place is haunted, you know. Oh, yes, it’s a fact.’ He chuckled. ‘It’s a scandal, too. The ghost is that of a monk, and the monks were not necessarily or even usually, in early monastic times, ordained priests. I conclude, therefore, that he had no right to visit a convent.’

Laura, who disliked what she called ‘sniggery little men,’ said calmly, ‘The custom of ordaining monks to be priests was begun I believe, by the Augustinian canons who founded houses in England from towards the end of the eleventh century, but the Benedictines and even the Cluniacs, who followed the Benedictine rule but with considerably greater austerity, were slow to follow suit.’

‘I see that you have studied your subject,’ said her partner, slightly taken aback. ‘Anyway, to revert to the frivolous topic of the ghost, you will admit that he had no business in a convent of nuns.’

‘Oh, he had business all right,’ said Laura’s other neighbour whom she knew, from the place-names at table, to be the apparently notorious Doctor Giddie.

‘I believe he’s been seen quite recently,’ said Laura. ‘One of the students who is staying up claims to have seen him.’

‘Where?’

‘She didn’t say. Incidentally, as I said, I don’t think my husband has ever believed in ghosts. I wonder what made you think he did?’

‘All Scotsmen, if they’re Highlanders, believe in ghosts,’ said the don.

Someone opposite contested this and the argument turned on to kelpies, water-horses and the Loch Ness monster, a conversation in which Laura, who was well informed on all these matters, was able to distinguish herself.

‘Are you a Catholic?’ her partner enquired when, coffee having been served, the guests were standing around waiting to bid their hostess goodnight before departing to their homes.

‘No. Why? Oh, you mean because of monasteries. I’ve always been interested in monastic life and not so very long ago I helped Dame Beatrice to investigate a murder which took place in the grounds of a convent.’

‘Oh, I see. Does Dame Beatrice believe in ghosts? You see, I’m a member of a local society for psychical research and we’d very much like to investigate the story of the monk who haunts this College, but, so far, the High Mistress won’t give permission.’

‘Not even during the Long Vacation when the last of the students has gone down and the College is empty?’

‘No, because there is still a skeleton staff of maids in residence. She says they would be so much alarmed by an investigation that they would leave. And in these days, when it’s so difficult to get good, reliable domestic help, she cannot take the risk. I thought perhaps Dame Beatrice might persuade her. The ghost of the monk is well authenticated.’

‘She wouldn’t persuade anybody to risk losing servants,’ said Laura. They passed out of Hall and the don took his leave and went out through the Fellows’ garden. This was now bespangled with fairy lights hanging from the apple trees and placed around the coping of the well. All were of a sinister shade of blue.

Laura shivered. It seemed to her that the summer night struck suddenly chill. She thought of blue-papered, blue-brocaded rooms in haunted houses. An owl screeched. The trees rustled and talked.

‘All the trimmings!’ muttered Laura anxiously.