Free The Finishing School by Muriel Spark Page A

afternoon.
    “Are you afraid?” Rowland said.
    “Afraid?”
    “To come on my bike?”
    “Of course not, Rowland. But I do like the drama class. It’s so marvelous to learn how to arrange flowers that aren’t there and talk to someone who actually isn’t there, at the same time.” She was dressed in a tight-fitting orange wool dress, very much prepared for her drama class.
    Rowland went to Nina. “I offered Tilly. I offered Chris a ride on my bike, but they won’t come.”
    “There’s the drama class this afternoon,” she said. The drama class was extremely successful. Nina knew that the students wrote home enthusiastically about it. And indeed they were lucky with Mme. Sousy de Merier, a born conveyor of the facts and tricks of the profession. Even Chris would leave his novel to participate in Mme. Sousy’s lessons. “They can’t leave the lessons,” Nina said. “I won’t allow it.”
    “But Chris and Tilly are afraid to ride on the back of my bike. I can feel it. I can sense it. Am I in a nervous condition?”
    “Yes.”
    “How do you know?”
    “Everyone knows.”
    “Everybody is discussing me?”
    “That’s not so. And it’s neither here nor there.”
    “It’s Chris. He’s getting me down.”
    “I’ll send him home if you like.”
    “Home? Where does he live? I’d only follow him. You don’t understand what it’s like to feel this compulsion to stop a kid writing an idiotic book. He’s got publishers now, on account of his age. Every publisher wants a novel by a red-haired youth of seventeen with a smattering of history and a good opinion of himself.”
    “Maybe it’s a good novel.”
    “Impossible.” Rowland’s voice went up to something near a scream.
    “Listen, Rowland,” she said. “I’ve been talking to Israel Brown.”
    “And you’re having an affair with him,” he said suddenly very bored, very weary.
    “And you don’t care.”
    “No, frankly, I don’t. Who is he? What does he do?”
    “I think he has a gallery. I think he studies art and music. Maybe philosophy . . .”
    Rowland was not listening. He said, “I could even take out a boat on the lake and tip all Chris’s possessions, all of them including his computer, his discs, his printouts, into the lake . . .”
    “And Chris as well,” said Nina.
    “Yes, I could tip him over the edge. He stopped me writing my novel. I have a book of observations about Chris that would make you shriek and shiver. I could . . .”
    “Enough,” said Nina. “You’re ill.”

12
    It was the end of October and Rowland had been three weeks at the Monastery of St. Justin Amadeus on a Swiss mountain plateau near the French border. He was soothed; he was calm. The sound of plainsong three times daily so filled his ear that he found it difficult to rid his mind of the music in between the services. He helped to chop wood every day. He meditated, he prayed.
    In these weeks he had written three long essays on the subject of literary composition which Nina, who visited him every other day, had taken back to College Sunrise to be read aloud to the creative writing class in Rowland’s absence, by Lionel Haas. Nina brought Mary Foot to visit Rowland several times, and had promised to bring other students to the monastery. These visits, in fact, seemed quite naturally to fit in with part of their education. The white-robed monks moved like automatons about their duties, sometimes separately, sometimes, on their way to the chapel, in single file. The prior, who had a becoming white beard, caused them to be served carrot juice, which was, he held, a good drink for high altitudes. The friars made a wine which they sold to merchants in the French valleys. On the labels, in English, it was pronounced to have “a great personality in the mouth, savoring of prunes, tobacco, wild fruits.”
    Rowland had managed to put the thought of Chris aside, as something to be dealt with when he should later “return to reality,” as he told himself.