Free The Finishing School by Muriel Spark Page B

When he thought of Chris, he felt a decided simmering of resentment.
    But he was now thoroughly bored at the monastery. He knew the Psalms by heart, so that they had become just words, and there was really nobody for him to talk to. The good prior scarcely appeared outside of the Mass and other services in the chapel. One morning he decided to go home and avoid Chris as much as possible. He was expecting Nina to arrive that afternoon.
    He left word with the prior that he was leaving, wrote a gracious letter thanking the community for their support in his difficulties and made ready to go in to the refectory for his last lunch of barley soup and macaroni-cheese. He crossed the courtyard for this purpose. Around the bend toward the main gate came hooting a Honda piled with a backseat bundle; it was ridden by a lithe, helmeted youth.
    “Hallo, Rowland,” said the youth, and drew up noisily, dramatically, at the doorway.
    Rowland peered at his face. The boy took off his helmet and shook his red, red hair.
    “Chris.”
    “Yes, Rowland.”
    “What are you doing here?”
    “I phoned the prior. They’ve got a place for me.”
    “You want to come here?”
    “I can’t work without you, Rowland. I need whatever it is you radiate. I have to finish my novel in peace.”
    “You’re mad.”
    “And you?”
    “I? —I’m going home with Nina this afternoon.”
    Chris left his bike in the courtyard and pushed his way through the door into the house. He said, over his shoulder, “Nina isn’t coming this afternoon.”
    “Come in and meet the sub-prior. It’s lunchtime. Remember this is a religious house.”
    The friar whose duty it was that day to read to the assembled company during their midday meal had chosen a passage from the English mystical book The Scale of Perfection . Chris listened, absorbed, as he chewed his bread and swallowed his soup, and did not notice when Rowland helped himself to the keys on the table; he didn’t notice that Rowland’s place was suddenly vacant.
    Rowland, in fact, having liberated the Honda from its package by dumping it in the courtyard, was on his way back to Ouchy on Chris’s Honda, stopping only to fill up with petrol.
    Nina was conducting her comme il faut class. “Be careful who takes you to Ascot,” she said, “because, unless you have married a rich husband, he is probably a crook. Even if he’s your husband, well . . . Not many honest men can take four days off their work, dress themselves in a black suit and a silk hat with all the accoutrements, and lose a lot of money on the horses, and take you out afterward or join a party of people like him. For Ascot you will need warm underwear in case it’s cold. You can wear a flimsy dress on top. But your man is bound to be a crook, bound to be. It teems with crooks . . .”
    “My Dad doesn’t go to Ascot,” said Pallas.
    “Oh, I didn’t say all crooks went to Royal Ascot, only that there are plenty of them at that function.”
    In walked Rowland. Célestine, who occasionally became an honorary student, and was today participating in this much favored lesson of Nina’s, let out a cry: “Monsieur Rowland—but Chris is already on his way to join you at the Monastery of St. Justin Amadeus. He needs some literary support.”
    “Will someone ring up the monastery and tell Chris I’ve got his bike here. I borrowed it.”
    Célestine said, “It’s time for tea”; she hurried out of the room as if to avoid some explosive situation. But Nina had kept her head.
    “Nice to see you back,” she said.
    “Don’t let me interrupt,” Rowland said. “I’m just checking in. Do you mind if I join you? —Go ahead.” He sat down among them, beaming at Nina.
    “I was just winding up,” Nina said. “I have been describing how one goes about Ascot. And now a word about good manners. If it can be said of you that you’ve got ‘exquisite manners,’ it’s deadly. Almost as bad as having a name for being rude. Ostentatious manners,