Fludd: A Novel

SEVEN

Purpit thumped her. “Going about like a hoyden,” she said. “Traipsing through the fields. Out in the night like a tinker.”

She knew it was the fields, and not the roads, because of the burrs and dead leaves that clung to the girl’s habit, and because of the mud on her shoes. She did not know the girl had been with Father Fludd. If she did, I would get worse, Philly thought. She’s jealous of me, wants him to pay her some attention. No nun, she. Ought to be ashamed. Goes after men. Priests. Tried it with Angwin. Chased her out of the presbytery. Sister Anthony said so. Never forgiven him.

So she kept her own counsel, while Purpit ranted and thumped. This is a sick province, she thought, they’re hopeless people. It’s a place full of devils, it needs a mission sending to it. It wrestles not against flesh and blood but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world. St. Paul would have sorted it out.

“Make my convent a laughing stock,” Perpetua said. Thud, thud with her bony knuckles.

Philomena reached out and grabbed Perpetua’s arm, just above the wrist. She held it in her farm-girl’s grip. She said nothing, but in her eyes those yellow lights flashed, like chips of gold.

That night, tossing on her hard bed, she couldn’t sleep or lie awake; wakefulness seemed the lesser evil. She tried to rouse herself, but marauding nightmares circled her brain like the outriders of a guerrilla band. Nigredo, a huge blackamoor, offered her a cigarette from a silver case. Albedo, an angel, lit it for her. They wrestled on the allotments, rolling over and over on the rough ground. Later they linked arms and sang “Danny Boy.”

At five o’clock she heard the rising bell and turned over, ramming her face into the pillow. She thought it was a special penitential pillow that Mother Perpetua had decreed for her; it seemed filled with small stones. Sister Anthony was the caller for the week, and she could hear her progress along the corridor, rapping at each door and calling Dominus vobiscum.

Philomena yawned and pushed herself upright in the bed. She fumbled at her throat. The strings of her nightcap were thin and waxy from her sweat. She dug her fingernails into the knot, trying to loosen them. But she hardly had any fingernails. Dominus vobiscum fluted outside her door, and Sister Anthony tapped and tapped again. “Dominus vobiscum. What are you doing in there, Sister?”

She felt she could not trust her voice. She tilted up her chin, still picking at the knots. If I had scissors, she thought. Scissors of my own. That would be against my vow of holy poverty. If I had a looking-glass. That would be against my vow of holy chastity.

“Goodness gracious me, girl,” Sister Anthony sounded cantankerous now. “Dominus vobiscum. Are you deaf?”

The knots unravelled. The cap came off. She dropped it on the coarse blanket. Put her bare feet on the linoleum floor, stretched. Under her shift her upper arms, shoulders, were covered in small blue bruises.

“Dominus vobiscum. Are you ill?”

Sick at heart, she thought. “Et cum spiritu tuo,” she intoned. Her voice sounded normal; traitor voice. But her throat ached with tears, and her chest felt clogged with unholy expectation.

“I should think so too,” Sister Anthony said, and passed on.

Later, after an hour on her knees in the chapel, she went into the kitchen and helped Sister Anthony fill the jugs with weak tea, for breakfast.

“I think Father Fludd has the gift of prophecy,” she remarked.

“Is that the case now?” the old nun inquired civilly. “I wonder will he prophesy something for Aintree races.”

“Prophecy doesn’t mean telling the future. It means speaking out about the true nature of things.”

Sister Anthony could see that little Philomena had been crying. Dimly she remembered her own early days in the convent, the ritual humiliation and the lonely nights. Since it was she who was in charge of ladling out the breakfast she had it within her means to be kind to the girl; she gave her extra porridge.

Morning: Judd McEvoy, smiling to himself and whistling between his teeth, dusted his shelves and opened up his shop, drawing the bolts on the front door and turning round the cardboard sign that hung in the window. Agnes Dempsey washed up the breakfast dishes. Father Fludd put on his vestments for Mass, praying for each one the correct prayer. Philly could see him, in her mind’s eye: amice, alb, cincture, maniple, stole, chasuble. “Make me white, O Lord, and cleanse my heart …”

That morning she had to take a class for a PE lesson. Not her communion class; these children were older. The gloss had gone off them.

First there was dressing them, in the fug of the classroom; outside it was sharp and cold, and until ten o’clock sparse crystals of frost shone on the ruts of the carriage-drive. The girls, between their desks, had to squirm into thick navy-blue knickers, and out of their frocks and their layers of cardigans; the boys had to take their exercise as best they might in their knee-length grey flannel shorts. There were black pumps to be given out, from the metal cage in the corner of the classroom where they were kept between use: common to the whole class, assorted sizes, in different conditions but mostly poor. Most of the children did not know their shoe size, and if they did, they had no way of securing it; there was no method of distribution, merely a free-for-all, and this was the way it had always been. They were enjoined to keep silence during the proceeding; Philomena stood over them, hefty-seeming this morning, her eyes blazing, making sure not a mutter or groan escaped. But the silence of the exercise rendered it no less violent; arms flailed, pinches were delivered, until in some fashion everyone was shod.

Then the procession. Some walked wincingly, their toes mashed together; others, who had made the contrary error, flapped like water birds. In addition—it was mysterious—there were more left pumps than there were right, and Sister Philomena noticed that it was the poorest, the meekest, the most stupid, who were further disadvantaged by this, and had to edge along with their two feet swerving the same way.

The Nissen hut served as a dining room besides a gymnasium, and smelt of dumplings and fat. The trestle-tables and wooden benches were stacked around the room, and on the floor the children set up their equipment. This was what Mother Perpetua called it: the Equipment. “The Education Committee is sending us Equipment.” Until this year there had only been small oval mats, one per child. They would set them out and roll about on them; once they began they were no trouble. Then they would stand by the mats and practise jumping on the spot. It was an exercise suitable for all age groups. Most of them could manage it. And it did not strain their taut nerves.

But the Equipment had added a new terror to their lives. It was shiny and hard, with sharp edges. Just setting it up and fitting it together was a problem for an engineer; the half-clad children sweated beneath its weight, as if they were building bridges for the Japanese. There were steps, and slides. There was a great ladder on supports that they were meant to swing on and, she supposed, hoist themselves up and pop their heads between the rungs. And most awful of all, there was a thick round wooden pole; it rested on metal stands, parallel to the ground and at the height of her chest.

“Form teams,” she said, despairingly. “You, you, you.” None of them wanted to go on the pole. They did not know what to do with it, what to make of it at all. Some, when it came to their turn, crouched beneath and threw their arms around it and kicked off with their feet, trying to raise themselves and wrap their ankles over its top. It became the vogue, she noticed; each child would attempt it, some with more feebleness than others, few with any lasting success. In the face of the Equipment their timidity became clear, and the extent of their clumsiness, weakness, poor eyesight. They were embarrassed—for it was an emotion that they could feel. They knew that the Equipment had hidden uses, which they could not discern; they knew that other children, somewhere else, in happier circumstances, might unlock its secrets. The Equipment was a message that the Education Committee had sent them, to prepare them for the humiliations of their future.

Mass would be long over now, Sister Philomena thought. She stood in a shadow at the side of the hut, letting the children do as they pleased, for she knew that none of the other nuns would come by. Presently they grew tired of their efforts and fell timidly out of line, eyeing her out of the corners of their eyes, and got out their familiar oval mats; they bent over, put their skinny grey arms on the floor, and began to do a thing they called bunny-jumps. The two children from Netherhoughton withdrew into a darker corner and began to hypnotize each other.

He could come and find me, she thought. If he were to inquire at the school they would tell him I was there. But no, he would not do that. He would not inquire.

But he could make some excuse. Something that he wanted me to do for him. What could that be? Now that I am not sacristan, he cannot say, I need polishing doing, Sister, I need extra polishing, I need a very special shine putting on the candlesticks. What could he want then?

But he hardly needs a priest’s reasons for what he wants to do, because he is not a priest. Did I know it all along, or just suspect it; did he make a slip, or did I just feel it in my bones? He is just an ordinary man.

But no, she thought, correcting herself. Not that. Not in any sense an ordinary man. What had struck her forcibly, on waking that morning, now occurred to her again; that she had no clear picture of his features in her mind. At Mass, it was true, she had been forced to study him mostly from the back; but had she not been alone with him at the allotments for an hour or more?

Perhaps, she thought, I have looked so intensely that I have been unable to see. I have looked at him as he seems to look at me, with eyes that see beyond the skin. She had heard it said that you could “devour” someone with your eyes. It was an expression that people used. Yes, that was what she had done. Her eyes had eaten him all up, and rendered his features pulp. Now, like a greedy, heedless child, she had left nothing over for the hour of hunger, the hour of dearth.

When the end of the lesson came, Philomena lined the children up and trailed them along the carriage-drive. The sun had struggled out, and filtered thinly between the bare branches. “Look, Robin Redbreast.” She pointed to the ditch, where the bird with its mouse-brown back darted in crisp leaves. “Yes, Sister,” they said dutifully. They looked where she pointed but they did not see. They did not know what they were looking for. Sparrows, they knew; pigeons.

In procession, they rounded the curve of the carriage-drive, and there was Father Fludd: stepping towards them in animated conversation with Agnes Dempsey. Sister Philomena made the children stop, stand aside respectfully while the priest passed. They began, more or less as he drew level, a drawling, yodelling chant. “Good mo-or-orning Father. Good mo-or-or-ning Miss Dempsey.”

It was the way the children always spoke, when they spoke together. They learnt it at five years old, in the nursery class; learnt it in their first hour at school. Sometimes Philomena thought that if she ever heard it again she would give way to screaming; she would sit on the floor and rend her garments and put ashes on her head, in reparation for the foolishness of the world. Christ died to free us from the burden of our sin, but he never, so far as she could see, lifted a finger to free us from our stupidity.

And as her thoughts ran on, her heart beat faster. She thought it was climbing into her throat, battering there and twisting inside out, contorting in that small space; nobody would see it underneath her habit, but suppose she were some ordinary woman, in a costume and blouse? People would nudge each other; that poor woman’s heart is fighting its way out. It shocked and amazed her, that the thought should occur—that she should think of herself as a woman, when she was in fact a nun. She felt her face grow red, and her hands begin to tremble. “Good morning, children,” Fludd said cheerfully. Agnes Dempsey gave them a thin tight smile.

Fludd’s eyes flickered over her. He inclined his head, sombre; walked on, his conversation with Miss Dempsey proceeding in lower tones, a more subdued manner. Agnes Dempsey walked more slowly. She took a long look over her shoulder at the young nun, who had turned aside now, and dropped her face, and whose right hand had gone to the wooden crucifix hanging at her chest.

She had not turned aside fast enough to hide her expression from Miss Dempsey—that compound of fear, yearning, and excitement, that had yet to be broken down into its elements and recombined by another’s will. Agnes, in agitation and sadness, touched her wart. I have missed all my chances in life, she thought. Even a nun has not missed more chances than me. Virgins may see unicorns. Spinsters never do.

This time, when Philomena approached the confessional, she knew it would be Angwin.

She knelt, in the fragrance of polish and tobacco; began at once, rattling her words off. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It is no time at all since my last confession. I have a question for you. A German friend of mine, who knows only a few words of English …”

“Oh, hallo there, my dear,” the priest said.

“ … was anxious to go to confession, but unfortunately none of the priests in the neighbourhood knew any German. Was my friend obliged to make his confession through an interpreter?”

“Hm,” Father Angwin said. He thought. It was not a problem he had encountered directly, though he had often found the Fetherhoughtonian speech thick and incomprehensible when he had first arrived in the parish. “Well now,” he said at last, “do you know what I think he should do? I think he should get one of those dictionaries, a German-English dictionary, and discover what are the names of his sins in English. And as for the number of times he has done each sin, well, he may very quickly learn to count in English, I suppose. Then he might pass a note to the priest in the confessional. Though,” he added, “it might be as well if the priest were warned as to what were to occur. I should not like to come to hear confessions one day, and find a foreigner poking a paper at me through the grille.”

“So that would be better than an interpreter, would it, Father?”

“I am not ruling out an interpreter, mind. If the need were desperate. Communication is difficult at the best of times, don’t you find?” He paused. “No one should walk around in a state of sin for a moment more than necessary. Perhaps especially not if the person is in a place strange to them. If a person is travelling, you know, there is always a danger of accidents.”

“And if you did use an interpreter, he would be bound by the seal of the confessional, of course.”

“Naturally.” There was another short pause. Angwin said, “Have you anything to tell me today? Anything about yourself, I mean?”

“No, Father.”

“You are wrestling with your problem still. Your temptation to sin. Or has the temptation passed?”

“No. If anything—”

He cut in. “I have been praying for you.”

He heard her breathing, beyond the grille and the curtain: the hiccups in her breathing’s rhythm, as if she might cry. “Any more questions today?”

“Oh yes, many.”

She reads them off a paper, he thought.

“A doctor has human bones in his possession, from the days of his studies. He is anxious to get rid of them. He got them while he was a student in a Protestant country.”

“Germany again?”

She stopped. His question had thrown her. He was not meant to interrupt. “Do go on.”

“Where is he supposed to bury them?”

“Protestant bones,” Father said. “I hardly know.”

“In Ireland,” she said timidly, “there are special plots, in the major hospitals, for burying the bits of bodies that are taken away in operations.”

“There may be a similar dispensation here.”

“If they might be useful to some hospital, he could donate them?”

She has answers on her paper, he thought, as well as questions. “I don’t see why not.”

“But he must be reverent with them, must he not? They were part of a living body once, he must recollect, and that body was the temple of the spirit. Even though it was a Protestant. Probably.”

“Again,” Father Angwin said, “if in the parish there were a funeral, I mean just in the ordinary course of events, a funeral of some elderly person … and the relatives could be prevailed upon … it might be a good thing to lay them to rest in that way.”

“Protestant bones in a Catholic grave …” She paused for thought. “Just say nothing to the relatives,” she said. “That would be my way. Because you know how people are. They wouldn’t take account of how old the bones were, they’d carry on about it just the same. Just slip them in, while the mourners are all gossiping. That would be how to do it. There’s no need to cause unnecessary fuss and alarm and give people a chance to get on their high horses.”

“Do I know this doctor?”

“Oh no, Father.”

“Because I was thinking … I myself have this graveyard. Of sorts.” But I am like the elder Tobias, he thought: “wearied with burying.”

She said, “It is a hypothetical case.”

“Yes. Of course it is. Any more?”

He felt that she moved closer, that she had shuffled forward on her kneeler and put her face inches from his own.

“Suppose I can save a man from drowning. And I have not the courage to do it? Am I in justice bound to repair the loss to his family?”

“Repair the loss? Well, how could you do that?”

“I was considering their situation in life. How they would be left. Financially. They would be badly off. He would be the breadwinner. And suppose I could have saved him—should I make some restitution, do you think? Am I obliged to?”

“In justice, no. In charity, perhaps.”

This is the world we inhabit, he thought: burning houses, drowning men, alien bones on the loose; all perplexity and pain to the tender conscience that cannot speak of its dearest concerns.

“I think that is enough,” he said, “in the way of hypotheses.”

“If you think … ,” she said, “if you think of a sin, but you do not do it, can that be as bad as if you had actually done it?”

“It can be. I would need to know more.”

“Supposing a person entertains certain thoughts … but he does not know at the time that they are bad? Suppose they start off as quite ordinary, permissible thoughts, but then he feels where they are tending?”

“He should stop thinking at once.”

“But you cannot stop thinking. Can you? Can you?”

“A good Catholic can.”

“How?”

“Prayer.”

“Prayer drives thought out?”

“With practice.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It has been my experience that you can pray but the thoughts run under the prayers, like wires under the ground.”

“Then you are not doing it properly.”

“I have tried.”

“Trying is not enough.” He almost spoke out, giving their game away. He almost said, remember what you were taught in your novitiate. It is not enough to do a thing as well as you can. You must do it perfectly.

“It is impossible, isn’t it?” she said. “You begin innocent enough, but you can’t walk around with your eyes shut, with your ears shut, with your mind a blank. But once you see and hear and think … things lead to things.”

“Oh yes,” he said. “They do that.”

When his penitent had left, Father Angwin gave her time to get out of the church; then, out of old habit, he crossed himself, though he did not see any point in it, and did not believe in the cross, and did not believe he was redeemed; and silently rose, and left the confessional. There, whisking around the corner into the porch, was Dempsey’s pleated skirt.

“Agnes,” he called, his voice surprisingly, sacrilegiously loud. “What are you doing there?”

Miss Dempsey froze to the spot, her fingers in the holy-water stoup. He strode down the centre aisle and bore down on her.

“Saying my prayers, Father.” Her voice was placid; her face told a different story.

“I see. You are unwontedly pious, for the middle of the day. What are you praying for? Have you a special intention?”

Oh yes, she thought. That there should be a splendid scandal in the parish—for we need a good shake-up. “I have been praying for the suppression of heresy, the exaltation of the Church, and concord amongst Christian princes,” she replied.

Since her Child of Mary’s handbook obliged her to do this, and regularly, there was nothing Father Angwin could say.

That evening it turned colder. A wind soughed across the moors, out of England’s autumnal heart; a wind with no breath of the sea, bearing an upland odour of privation and loss. Darkness came early, seeming to swell from the high ground above the church and roll down the carriage-drive, a carpet of night that pushed the children before it, down Church Street and into their lighted homes in Chapel Street and Back Lane. When the last of them had left the gates, the nuns locked the school doors with iron keys and hurried in concert back to their refectory, to the tea and bread and margarine that Sister Anthony had prepared for them.

The margarine had a peculiar, sharp taste tonight, as if something had got mixed with it—which was perfectly possible, as Sister Anthony was absent-minded now, and short-sighted, and, some believed, malicious. The meal was eaten in the silence enjoined by the Rule; but there would be plenty said about the marge at a later date. The faces of Polycarp, Ignatius Loyola, and Cyril were twisted with the effort they made to hold back scathing speech. Their complaints rolled about their mouths, like loose teeth.

The next collation would be the last of the day, and it would be soup. Philomena imagined she could smell it already. She pictured herself in her place at table; for places never changed, unless someone came or went—or died, which would be more likely. Soon I shall be sitting here again, she thought, after the evening routine; after the hard kneeler in the convent chapel, directly behind Sister Cyril; after the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary, and sundry other prayers. The nightly Examination of Conscience, the sign of the cross, then the kitchen, to help Sister Anthony serve and collect my share of black looks and blame. Into the big blue apron, and out with the tureen and the ladle; the usual draught rattles the windows as I step down the corridor to the refectory carrying the tureen, elbows jutting out. “Bless us, oh Lord, and these thy gifts …” The small clank of the metal ladle on the side of each bowl. Spoon raised to lips; she tasted the soup, a greyish, frothy liquid, oversalted, scraps of vegetables (or perhaps peelings) awash in its depths.

A violent pain in her ribs made her jump back, almost drop off the refectory bench. She stifled her exclamation; why add another fault to the fault that Perpetua had just discerned? It was that rigid, cruel forefinger again, meant to wipe the expression off her face; she knew it must have been there, that blank dreaming expression that Purpit took as a personal affront. Her brief absence of mind had put away the day as if she were folding it into a box, telescoped all the time between the bread-and-margarine collation and the soup collation.

But what did it matter? Certainly, when time passed in the ordinary world at its ordinary rate, it would bring her to the same seat, the same spoon, the same sensation, the same salt-and-sour taste on her tongue. All her life was reducible perhaps to one long day starting with the caller’s Dominus vobiscum and ending with private prayer before the crucifix in her cell, knees chilled by the linoleum. If every day from now on was to be the same, why have the days at all, why not elide them somehow and live the next forty years in a minute? She lowered her head, as if examining the grain in the wood of the refectory table. I have reached, she thought, a human being’s lowest ebb; I have no curiosity about the future. I know what the future will be; the Rule sets it out for me. She looked up at Perpetua, her present vision blurred, her eyes dwelling still on what was to come, and for the first time, a thought occurred to her: whoever regulates my future steals it from me.

And if the future is predictable, does that mean it is planned? If it is predictable, is it in the least controllable? This is old stuff, she thought, in disgust with herself: this is seminarians’ stuff. Is my will free? Outside the wind dropped. The nuns, draining the dregs of their tea, lifted their heads and looked at each other across the table. It was as if in the sudden silence they discerned a voice, a voice speaking out of turn. It was a moment of expectancy, unease. A curious ripple ran around the table. Overhead, the forty-watt bulb that the Order approved flickered once, twice, three times: like St. Peter’s denials of Christ. Then gaunt shadows turned their faces down and muttered a grace; then rose, as if in the grip of flames, and flickered from the room.

The priests had eaten early: hotpot. At least, Father Angwin had eaten his, he did not know what Fludd might have done. It was the usual tale: a full plate, then an empty plate, and that discreet mastication in between quite insufficient to account for the disappearance of the curate’s supper.

Then, too, Father Angwin was seriously concerned about the level of the whisky in his bottle. However much he drank nowadays, it never seemed to drop. Many the night he had said to the curate, we’ll be needing a new bottle if we are to have a drink together tomorrow; but then he had contrived, in the course of the day, to dismiss the unpleasant fact from his mind. And in the evening there always seemed to be enough. Not enough to hold a party with, mind. Not a quantity of whisky. But a sufficiency.

“This place has gone very quiet,” Father Angwin said, helping the curate to a glass.

“The wind has dropped.”

“No, I mean in general. It’s since you came. You haven’t maybe without telling me done a spot of exorcism?”

“No,” Fludd said. “But I have been up and done a spot of minor repair work on the guttering. I take an interest in such matters. I was able to borrow a ladder from a pious household in Netherhoughton. And I have consulted with Judd McEvoy about the downspouts. For a tobacconist, he is very well-informed. He fears the church too needs quite extensive structural renovations. But he says it would cost a mint of money.”

“It wasn’t the drips and creaks that bothered us, though,” Father Angwin said. “We were accustomed to those. But we used to get feet walking up and down overhead, and various banging noises, and you would feel that someone had come in. Or the door would be kicked open, and no one would enter.”

“Well, I entered,” Fludd said. “Did I not? Eventually.”

“Agnes was of the opinion that the house was full of discarnate entities.”

“Of a malign sort?”

“We hardly knew. But Agnes believes in a multiplicity of devils. In that, she is of quite an old-fashioned turn of mind.”

“Yes, I understand you. There is this lax modern way of talking about ‘the devil.’ It surprises me. When you consider that for centuries some of the finest minds in Europe were occupied in counting devils and finding out their various characters.”

“Reginald Scot, I think, towards the end of the sixteenth century, made it fourteen million. Give or take.”

“I can be more precise,” Fludd said. “He made it fourteen million, one hundred and ninety-eight thousand, five hundred and eighty. That excluded, of course, the lords and princes of Hell. That was just the ordinary drone devils.”

“But in those days,” Father Angwin said, “if a devil put in an appearance, they had spells for binding him and questioning him and getting his name and number out of him. They understood very well that devils had their specialities, and that each devil was quite distinct in personality.”

“St. Hilary tells us that each devil had his particular bad smell.”

“But now people just say ‘Satan,’ or ‘Lucifer.’ It is the curse of the present century, this rage for oversimplification.”

“Sister Philomena told me,” Fludd said, sipping his whisky, “that she had encountered a devil as a child. She said that he was nothing like Judd McEvoy. But then, why should he be?”

Father Angwin looked away. “I know that no one agrees with me, in the matter of Judd. But you see, Father Fludd, we do not have the privileges of a former age. Devils do not so readily manifest themselves. Not within the range of our vision. Sister Philomena has been singularly fortunate. When she thinks of a devil she can put a face to it.”

“You have tried to do the same.”

“Every devil must have a face. Even if it is a wolf’s face, even if it is a serpent’s face, even if it is a tobacconist’s. It must be something we can know and recognize, it must be in our own image or very close to it, it must be animal or human or some hybrid of the two. Because what else can we imagine? What else have we seen?”

“Demonology,” Fludd said, taking a sip. “It is an unbearable subject. Deep and unbearable. Especially for you, Father. Since you ceased to believe in God.”

“If it had not been for McEvoy,” Angwin said, looking away again, “I don’t know whether the notion of the devil would have such a strong grip on me either. My mind might have taken a secular turn. I might have become some kind of rational man.”

“I have seen changes.” Fludd followed the other man’s gaze, and looked into the fire. “There was a time when the air was packed with spirits, like flies on an August day. Now I find that the air is empty. There is only man and his concerns.”

Father Angwin sat hunched and brooding, his whisky glass between the palms of his hands. The bottle was as full as ever. “I am ill,” he said. “My soul chooseth hanging, and my bones death.”

“My dear fellow,” said Fludd, removing his gaze from the fire and fastening it anxiously on the priest’s face.

“Oh, a quotation,” Angwin said. “A biblical quotation. The Old Testament, you know. Book of somebody-or-other.”

Fludd thought of Sister Philomena, striding over the fields, failing to recognize his own quotations. When he thought of the nun, a soft, creeping uneasiness made itself felt; it was located in his solar plexus. Well now, he said to himself. I never knew that I had human feelings. He reached for his glass.

“I am like Father Surin,” Angwin said.

“Forgive me. I never knew him.”

“I mean the exorcist of Loudun.” Father Angwin rose, levering himself up with his hands on the arms of his chair; Fludd had noticed how, in the short time he had been in the parish, the priest’s movements had slowed, and his animated features had become masked by a frozen disappointment and grief. He had carried on his pretence so well, so long, never by word or deed betraying the disillusion at the core of his priestly vocation. But my coming here has changed things, Fludd thought; falseness can no longer be endured, truth must out. There must be new combinations within the heart: passions never witnessed, notions never before formed. “What was I saying?” Angwin asked. “Ah yes, Father Surin.” He went to the bookcase, took out a volume, opened it at a place he had marked. “When I wish to speak my speech is cut off; at Mass I am brought up short; at confession I suddenly forget my sins; and I feel the devil come and go within me as f he were at home. I translate,” he said, “freely.” He closed the book and put it back on the shelf. “Father Surin lost all consciousness of God. He entered on a state of melancholy. His illness lasted for twenty years. In the end he could not read or write, he could not walk, and he had to be carried everywhere. He had not the strength to lift his arms to change his shirt. His attendants beat him. He grew old and paralysed and mad.”

“But he was cured, was he not? In the end.”

“What cures melancholy, Father Fludd?”

Fludd said, “Action.”

At midnight, Fludd went out alone. It was cold, clear, still; a dried-up half-moon was skewered against the sky. The upper air was full of snow, the year’s first. He could hear his own footsteps. He let his torch-beam loose among the trees, then brought it back to his side, as if it were a serpent he were training.

The old wooden doors of the garage were quite rotten. They should have been painted, he thought, with some kind of wood preservative, if they were to withstand the Fetherhoughton weather. There was a key somewhere, but he had not wanted to advertise his intentions by asking for it. He stood back and gave the door a good kick.

Sister Philomena sat up in bed—quite suddenly, as if she had been given an electrical shock—and her hair—what there was of it—rose on the back of her neck. She threw back the covers, put her feet on the chilly floor. When she stood up a pain darted through her joints, as if her bones were filed sharp.

I am a wreck, she thought. Her ribs and shoulders still ached from Purpit’s recent assaults. She went to the small attic window and peered out. Not an owl: no nightbird, no storm, no lightning flash. She did not know what had woken her. Her window was at the back of the convent; beyond lay the slumbering moors, unseen but always present, like the life of the mind. The thought of the moors made her shudder. What anarchy in Heaven the day those moors were made. Anything may happen, she thought. Her nape prickled again. She stared at the black treetops: but not for long.

Miss Dempsey fumbled, and found: her candlewick bedspread, her knees, and her dressing-gown, draped decorously over the end of her bed. She pulled it towards her and, still sitting up in bed, wriggled her arms into it and fastened it across her chest. The room seemed more than usually cold.

The brass-belled alarum clock said ten past twelve. Are they still down there, carousing, she thought? Is that what woke me, Father falling over?

If he has fallen over, she thought, he will need another cup of cocoa, and strong admonition. That young little devil doesn’t seem to have a need of sleep, or else he sleeps so sound in the few hours he takes that it does him more good than it does the rest of us.

Miss Dempsey eased her feet into her bedroom slippers. They were the standard Fetherhoughton sort, with a nylon-fur ruff of powder blue. They made no sound as she passed along the corridor and set them on the stairs.

At the foot of the stairs, she stopped and listened. But there was nothing to hear: not the expected murmur of voices, nor the snoring of Father Angwin fallen asleep in his chair. She sensed at once that she was alone in the house, and this sensation was enough to send her, despite the cold and her state of undress, hurtling out of the front door and into the night.

A dry leaf touched his cheek. Father Angwin stood quivering, a fox at bay. Waking suddenly, he had scrambled from his bed and had pulled on his clothes, armed himself with the presbytery’s other torch, and taken the stairs two at a time, impelled by he hardly knew what; and I said I was paralysed, he thought, I told Fludd that soon I would need people to carry me about. He heard the dull grate of metal striking stone; then nothing more, but a soft sound of funerals, earth falling on earth with its familiar hiss.

Yet not the sound of funerals, but anti-funerals. He approached the broken ground, the private graveyard that he had mentioned to Philly in the confessional, which he had offered for the use of her Protestant bones.

Fludd, he saw. Elegant back bent. Digging. Digging like an Irishman. And as he watched, the curate stepped back, and with a cavalier gesture, holding his spade at chest height, tossed the soil and gravel over his left shoulder.

“Holy God,” Father Angwin said. He approached the excavation, his black feet sliding on the frosty ground. He flashed his torch-beam into the hole. “Would we have such a thing as a second shovel?”