‘I thought it possible that Coralie’s mother had been buried with full ecclesiastical honours, so to speak, so I did as I was advised, interviewed vicars, pastors and sextons, so on and so forth, but failed to find any trace of any Coralie St Malo’s grave, neither was I introduced to Lawrence’s helpful undergraduate friend. Oh, well, if you won’t involve yourself you won’t and I don’t blame you, but I know Lawrence is a wrong ’un – and I don’t just mean the embezzlement.’
In spite of her objections, Dame Beatrice found that she could not avoid involvement. Fate, as she expressed it later, sent to her from Abbesses College a card inviting herself and Laura to the principal’s annual garden-party.
The official card of invitation was accompanied by a letter. Part of it ran:
Do come if you can. We shall be overflown, not with a honey-bag, as Bottom feared Cobweb might be, but with a bevy of reverend signiors (pronounced Seniors) and younger married dons with dreadful wives and frightful children, because everybody interesting dashed off on holiday the minute term ended. I know this is anything but an inducement to you to come, but I should be so delighted to see you and the lively Laura again.
‘The gardens at Abbesses should be at their best,’ said Dame Beatrice, when Laura had read the letter. ‘Shall we go?’
‘I see that we are invited to stay to dinner and for the night,’ said Laura. ‘That means evening kit as well as our garden-party get-up. I suppose I shall have to wear a garden-party hat! Ah, well! “One must suffer to be beautiful!” One thing, we need not take George. I can drive and that will do away with any bother about where to lodge him for the night. The end of next week? That will give me time to get my hair fixed and iron my finery.’
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.