Fludd: A Novel

EIGHT

Torches were not enough; and when they had debated what to do, Father Angwin took from his pocket the key of the sacristy and handed it to Philomena. “But I am not sacristan any more,” she said. “Purpit took it away from me.”

“Tonight is not an ordinary night. These are extraordinary circumstances. Agnes, go with her. Open the top cupboard, on the left. You’ll find half a dozen old candlesticks. Bring some of the big tall High Mass candles, you know where they are. We’ll plant them around the place.”

“I have household candles,” Agnes said.

“Don’t waste time,” Father said. “Off you go.”

In the church porch, Philly gave Miss Dempsey her hand, feeling that she should somehow be the stronger of the two. The door into the church opened with its customary groan, like a jaded actor falling back on proven effects; and they made their way together up the centre aisle, over the familiar stone flags, mouths open slightly, swallowing in the darkness. There was a moment when Miss Dempsey disappeared; Philly’s stomach squeezed tight in sudden terror, and she clutched at the empty air. But the housekeeper was only genuflecting; she bobbed up again, with a whispered apology, and they moved closer together and tiptoed on.

In the sacristy they spoke, short and to the point; Philly got up on a chest, and unlocked the cupboard, and found what Father wanted. She handed down the candlesticks, one by one, and Agnes grappled them to her bosom and jiggled them to herself with an upraised knee. Philly jumped down and chose six candles from the box, running her fingertips over the arches of creamy wax.

When they returned, Father Fludd was leaning on his spade; Father Angwin, like a sprite, sat cross-legged on the ground. He jumped up, “Fiat lux. Delve away, my boy.”

Philomena knelt on the ground by the hole Father Fludd had made and put out one finger, experimentally as if the earth were water and she were going to bath a baby. Below the loose surface the soil felt heavy, saturated. She felt something move, against her finger: as it might be, a worm. “Oh,” she said, pulling her hand away: the refinements of the convent parlour. “Worm,” she said.

“Don’t frighten me,” Father Angwin said.

Fludd said, “We see devils in serpents. We see serpents in worms. They are things within our common experience.”

Philomena glanced up. She imagined a sceptical glittering expression in his eyes, although really it was too dark to see any expression at all. Agnes Dempsey said, “As for worms, we all know where they are coming from and going to.”

There was a silence. They looked down at the graves. Candle flames flickered in the air, doubling and bowing like genii let out of bottles; their eyes grew accustomed to such light as there was, and they wished that they had not, for the priest, the nun, and the housekeeper were able to see in each other’s faces a reflection of their own unease.

When Philly explored again, she found something solid, thin, hard, and sharp. “It’s OK, you’ve done it, Father Fludd,” she said. “We’re down to them. They weren’t too deep at all.”

Without speaking, Father Angwin dropped to his knees beside her. She saw his breath, a smoky plume in the air. The snow above was too hard and cold to fall; if you could shake Heaven tonight, it would rattle like a cradle toy. The priest leant forward, one hand steadying himself, the other groping in the shallow pit. “I feel it,” he said. “Father Fludd, I feel it. Agnes, I feel it. I think it is the edge of St. Cecilia’s portable organ.”

“Let me scrape with my spade,” said Fludd.

“No, no. You might damage it.” Father Angwin crouched, both hands dabbling and patting at what lay beneath the soil.

“If we are not to use the spade,” Agnes said, “the excavations will not be done by dawn.”

“Miss Dempsey, you are ill-protected against the elements,” Fludd said, “I did not notice, when you so suddenly arrived. Should you not go back indoors and dress more sensibly?”

“Thank you, Father,” Agnes said. She blushed red under cover of the night. “I have this warmish flannelette nightgown on underneath.” She shivered, but she could not tear herself away.

Philomena at least was properly dressed. When she had turned from the window of her room, excitement and fear had guttered inside her, a blaze about to start; but she must roll on those thick woollen stockings, pull on her drawers. Her heart pounding, she must shake out the three petticoats the Order prescribed, and lash them about her waist, knotting their sashes and strings. She must punch her arms through her stout scratchy bodice, her cheeks growing hot, and fumble with her shaking fingers at the buttons at its neck. What a time it took, what an agonizing time, what an eternity to climb into her habit, the black folds stifling and gagging her. Then her undercap with its drawstrings, and the tiny safety-pins to secure it, and all the time the knowledge of the necessary encounter, waiting out there in the frozen night. Fludd is adjacent, he is proximate, he is nigh; and here she juggles with her starched white outer cap, ramming it on to her skull, pressing it over the brows, feeling it bite into its accustomed sore groove on her forehead; and now she scrabbles for the long straight pins to secure her veil, and now she drops one, and hears them—yes, in the midnight silence of the convent, hears a pin drop, and roll. So now she must throw herself to her knees and pad with her hands and dab the floor under the bed, and then, rising successful, pin pinched between her fingers, catch the back of her head a glancing blow on the under-edge of the bedstead; iron on bone. Sick, half-stunned, emerging from under the bedstead on hands and knees, she must lever herself up and put on her veil, skewering it with the pins, and then seize up her crucifix and drop it over her head, then lay hold of the long swinging string of her rosary beads and whip it out into the room and secure it around her waist. Then—the breath of the future misting the panes, the future grinning at the window eager to have her in its jaws—she must bend again, dizzily, pick up her shoes, pluck at the knots in the laces which, contrary to holy obedience and all the dictates of the Order, she has left fastened the night before. Then, gasping with irritation, she must fling the shoes to the floor, work her feet into them still fastened, stamp and then jump them into place; thrust her handkerchief into her pocket, and then, only then, cross herself, murmur a short prayer for guidance, open the door of her cell, make her way along the passage, down the stairs and swerve sharp right, ignoring the big front door, and through the passage to the empty, echoing kitchen. She had not dared to put on a light, but the moon from a clear sky shone through the kitchen window, a small, mean, wintry moon, palely gilding the ladle and the tureen, the up-ended pans on their rack, the jugs standing ready for morning tea. She had tugged at the bolts of the back door and held her breath as she drew them back; then she had pulled the door shut behind her, and run out into the night.

Now Miss Dempsey leant forward, and put a hand on Philomena’s shoulder to steady herself. Grunting with effort, the housekeeper got to her knees; sucking her underlip, she put out her hands to feel the ground. “I beg to differ, Father Angwin. I don’t think it is the portable organ. I think it is the edge of St. Gregory’s Papal tiara.”

“Let me at it,” said Fludd. “I won’t smash a thing.”

“You are both wrong,” Philomena said. “What you can feel there has no thickness at all. It is the arrow that pierces the heart of St. Augustine.”

“We had better yield to Father Fludd,” the priest said. “Two women and an ageing fellow like me, what can we do against superior strength? Go at it, my dear.”

“Move aside, Sister,” Fludd said. Unwilling to stand up and retreat, she remained on her knees and shuffled two feet to the left. His braced knee brushed her upper arm. He aligned the tip of his spade, and then she heard the sickening squelch and clatter: steel on plaster. He had driven it in, right by (she believed) St. Agatha’s head; as if the virgin were to be martyred again.

“Careful, careful,” said Agnes, clasping her hands; Father Angwin breathed, “Steady on.” But Philly moved forward on to hands and knees, her eyes on the edge of the spade; she wanted to be the first to see, the first to catch a glimpse of the face emerging from its grave.

Father Fludd planted his foot in the trench he had made; it was an inch, perhaps, to the left of Agatha’s shoulder. He seemed not to feel her own urgency to uncover one particular set of features; his efforts were general, unspecific. But then, she thought, he did not know the statues, not as individuals. His curiosity did not focus on one or the other. Long before he came to the parish, they had been buried.

“St. Jerome,” she whispered up at him. She pointed. “Over there. Uncover the lion.”

“You should get up,” he said, pausing for a moment, but not looking directly at her. “You’ll take a chill.”

“Agnes,” Father Angwin said, “would it not be the best service you could render if you brought us cocoa?”

Fludd’s spade scraped away; the tip of a nose appeared, startlingly white.

“Oh, I could not,” Miss Dempsey said. “Forgive me, Father. I could not leave now.”

Philomena launched herself forward once again. With her fingers she scooped the earth away. It was Agatha, indeed. Philly pinched out the plaster cheekbones. She passed a finger over the sealed lips. Then, flinching, over the painted retina.

“Shine your torch, Father Angwin,” she said. She wanted to see the face; and as soon as she did so, she knew that this interval, this suspension, this burial had brought about a change. She did not mention this change to the others; she realized that it might be something only she could see. But the virgin’s expression had altered. Blankly sweet, she had become sly; unyielding virtue had yielded; she gazed up, with a conspiratorial smile, into Heaven’s icy vault.

Soon they ceased to speak; the cold crept into their bones. They heard one o’clock strike. Bulky outlines were seen, still shrouded by the soil. Then parts of saints emerged; an elbow, a foot, St. Apollonia’s pincers. In silence they recognized and greeted each one. When St. Jerome and the lion came out, Sister Philomena jumped into the trench, and Fludd paused, leaning on the spade, allowing her to clear the beast’s features with her hands. Her feet slipped, as she regained her place with the others; Father Angwin put out a hand to steady her, and she clung to him for a moment, leaning heavily on his arm, as if she were winded.

Then Fludd stopped digging, and said, “Listen. Somebody’s coming.”

“Who goes there?” called Miss Dempsey: introducing a military note. But without reply or preamble, the new arrival was upon them, transfixed for a moment like a rabbit in the beam of Father Angwin’s torch, yet wearing an expression too smug, too imperturbable, for a rabbit to wear. Then he shone his own flashlight, right into the priest’s eyes.

“It is I. Judd McEvoy.”

“Good morning, Judd,” Father Angwin said. “Why are you out at this hour? If I may inquire?”

“I have been down to Fetherhoughton,” Judd replied. “I wanted a basin of peas.”

“So that is what you have there.”

“Yes, and fish. In my newspaper.”

“I did not know the shop was still open at this hour.”

“They fry very late, these nights, to oblige anyone from up the hill who might feel peckish. We people up the hill are never early to bed. When the nights are long, we take advantage of them.”

“Not you surely, Judd.” Father Angwin faced him across the graves. “Surely you, a pillar of the Men’s Fellowship, you don’t go in for their rites?”

“Oh, I am aware that you have your opinion of me, Father.” Judd’s tone was airy. “You speak as if you mean to shame me into some admission. But when I say ‘we,’ I speak of my neighbours. I speak of the Netherhoughtonians. It was an expression, merely an expression. Would you like some of my fish?”

“Be careful there,” Father Angwin said. “You have almost got your foot on Ambrose.”

Judd looked down. “So I have.” With a delicacy and sureness that suggested to Father Angwin that he was indeed of nocturnal habit, the tobacconist picked his way through the trenches. “It is a pity I did not come on the scene earlier. By way of the footpaths it is no distance to my home. I could have brought my own spade. Father Fludd has had everything to do.”

“Why have you a spade, Judd? You have no garden.”

“You forget, Father, that I was one of the allotment holders. In the old days.”

“Were you so? Then why could you not influence your brutish compatriots? Could you not turn away the raiding parties from their careers of crime and violence?”

“Oh, I am not a man who would turn a person away from anything,” Judd said. “Or towards anything, either. I am by nature merely an onlooker. This enterprise of yours, for example, this secret and private enterprise—I regard it with complete equanimity. You have not asked my opinion, I have not given it. Nothing would induce me to give it. I am one of the world’s bystanders.”

I knew you were a devil, Father Angwin thought. Bystanders are an evil breed.

“They do say,” Agnes put in timidly, “that the onlooker sees most of the game.”

“Quite so,” Judd said. “Miss Dempsey, I am sure you will not refuse a piece of my fish?” He unwrapped his newspaper. A delicious aroma crept out.

“Well, I am tempted,” Miss Dempsey said.

“Sister Philomena,” Judd said, enticingly. “Now, there is so little here that I am sure you could not offend the canons of your Order.”

“I’m starving,” Philly said.

McEvoy proffered the parcel. Father Angwin broke off a piece of fish. Soon they all ate, Father Fludd picking at a flake or two. It was cold but good. “I wonder,” Father Angwin said, “whether it was fried in lard, or dripping?” He looked at Philomena inquiringly. But she would not meet his eye. His spirits rose; he felt quite jocular, feasting like this in the presence of his enemy, and on his enemy’s own supper. “I wish we might have a fish each,” he said; looking inquiringly again, but this time at Father Fludd. He wondered whether the curate might effect some sort of multiplication. After all, there was a precedent for it. But Fludd, though his portion had been smaller than any, continued to eat.

“It seems to me now,” Fludd said, “that we should wait for full daylight. We need ropes and brute strength.”

“The Children of Mary,” Miss Dempsey said at once. “It is our meeting tomorrow.”

“Tonight, you mean,” Philly said.

“We would undertake to wash them down. I believe the president would allow it. We could do our litany, and so on at the same time.”

“I cannot think why you ever agreed to bury them,” Fludd said.

“You don’t know the bishop.” Philomena brushed earth from her habit. “If we’d have left them exposed, he might have come up here with a mallet and smashed them all to bits.”

“I think your imagination is running away with you, Sister,” Agnes said. “And of course Father Fludd knows the bishop.”

“We still have the bishop to contend with,” Angwin said. “Our sudden bravado does not make him vanish away.”

“He could ban the statues all over again,” Miss Dempsey said. “Our night’s work could be wasted.”

“Not wasted,” Judd said. “At least you have not been bystanders. Father Angwin will value that in you.”

Agnes touched the priest’s arm. “What if he tells us to get rid of them all over again? Will we defy him?”

“You could have a schism,” Father Fludd said.

“I thought of it before.” Father Angwin also brushed earth from himself. “But I lacked heart.”

“You say ‘you,’ Father Fludd,” observed McEvoy. “You do not say ‘we.’ May I take it that you will not be amongst us for very long?”

Fludd did not answer. He put his spade over his shoulder. “I have done all I am going to do,” he said. “Miss Dempsey, I think you should make a warming drink. Perhaps you could light the oven and warm Mr. McEvoy’s peas for him. He has been kept from their enjoyment.”

Faces looked up from the ground; bone-coloured, blank-eyed, staring at the snow-charged sky. Miss Dempsey gathered her dressing-gown more closely about her. Wordlessly, she put her arm through Father Angwin’s, and they turned towards the presbytery. The priest shone his torch before them to pick out the path. The tobacconist followed.

“I must go back,” Philly whispered. The clock struck. “We get up at five.”

“That was half-past two. I do not suppose they are in bed in Netherhoughton.” Fludd put out his hand. She hesitated for a moment, then placed hers in it.

“There’s plenty of tonight left,” Fludd said.

They turned downhill, towards the convent. Before them the hard ground gleamed silver with frost. Behind them the abandoned candles flickered. Around them was an argentine brightness, solar and lunar, unearthly and mercurial, sparkling from the dead branches, flickering in the ditch, glinting on the cobbles before the church door. The convent windows were washed with brightness, the grimy stonework glowed; high on the terraces, fireflies seemed to dart.

All my life till now, she thought, has been a journey in the dark. But now another kind of travelling begins: a long vagrancy under the sun, in its sacred and vivifying light.

When three o’clock struck, Fludd placed on her forehead—just below the place where the white band bit into it—a chaste, dry kiss. A sacramental kiss, she thought. At the thought, she closed her eyes. Fludd bent his head. She felt the tip of his tongue flick across her eyelids. “Philly,” he said, “you know, don’t you, what you have to do?”

“Yes, I know I have to get out.”

“You know that you must do it soon.”

“It will take years,” she said. “My sister, they just threw her out on her ear. But she was a novice. I’m professed. It’ll have to go to the bishop. It’ll have to go to Rome.”

Fludd left her for a moment, moved away. As soon as his body ceased to touch hers, she felt the creeping cold, and felt her courage ebb. There was no moon now; only a single Mass candle, placed where she had left it, lit again with Fludd’s cigarette lighter. And there were the pans, up-ended on their rack, the pans that she had so often scrubbed for Sister Anthony; and there were the tea jugs, waiting for the morning.

Fludd walked about the kitchen. His feet made no sound on the stone floor. She craved real sunlight, a July day; to see him clearly, know what he looked like.

“You don’t have to go to Rome.”

“I wish it were summer,” she whispered.

“Did you hear what I said? You don’t have to go to Rome.”

“But I do. I have to be dispensed from my vows. There are papers to be forwarded. Only the Vatican can do it.”

Summer will come, she thought. And I will be here still, waiting; for who will expedite the matter, I have no friends. And another winter will come, and a summer, and another winter. By that time, where will he be?

“You’re not taking in what I say,” Fludd told her. “You say you have to be dispensed, I say you don’t have to be dispensed. You say you are bound, I say you are not bound. What law do you think keeps you here?”

“The law of the Church,” she said, startled. “Oh, no, I suppose that’s not a law. Not like the law of the land. But Father Fludd—”

“Don’t call me that,” he said. “You know the truth of the matter.”

“—but Father Fludd, I would be excommunicated.”

Fludd moved towards her again. The candle flared upward, as if the flame had breathed. He touched her face, the back of her neck; began to draw the pins out of her veil.

She jumped back. “You mustn’t,” she said. “Oh no. No, you mustn’t.”

He desisted for a moment. Fell back. His expression was dubious. He did not seem tired. His stamina was wonderful. Philomena turned her head suddenly, attracted by a movement at the window. The snow had begun to fall; big flakes, fleecy, brushing the glass without a sound. She watched it. “It must be warmer outside. It’ll never stick, will it? It won’t last the night.”

For she knew that nothing as good as that could ever happen for her; God would not arrange it that when she jerked at five o’clock from her edgy doze she would creep to the window and see a new landscape, its features obliterated, its ground untrodden, its black trees hung with bridal veils. No: the snow would be the night’s hallucination, a phantasm of the small hours. Tomorrow at five there would be no sun or snow, she would look from the window and see nothing but her own face dimly reflected in the pane; but if dawn by some freak of nature broke so early, it would reveal only the dark, swollen edge of the moors, and the web of branches near at hand, and a section of the drain-spout, and the sparrows hopping along the guttering in search of food. She would see the same old world; the one in which she had to live. I can’t bear it, she thought; not one more day. Her hands crept to her throat; then to her temples and the cloth of her veil; then to the nape of her neck; then searched out the pins.

Fludd took the pins from her one by one, and laid them in a line on the edge of the kitchen table. He set his long fingers on either side of her head and lifted off the vice of her white cap. She had only the strength she needed to make her decision, to give in to him; she felt weak now, limp and cold and beyond resisting anything. He took out the safety-pins from her linen inner cap, and set them on the table beside the straight pins. With one neat firm pull, he freed the drawstring, and lifted off her cap and dropped it on the floor.

“You look like a badly cut hedge,” he said.

She felt a blush creep over her exposed neck. “Sister Anthony does it. Once a month. Everybody. Even Purpit. The scissors are rusty. We don’t have our own. I’ve often wished for a pair. It’s against holy poverty.”

Fludd ran his hand over her head. The hair, an inch long in places, grew this way and that; here was a neglected tendril growing into curl, here was a bald patch, here was a bristly tuft fighting its way upward like a spring shoot fighting for light and air. “What was it like?” he said.

“Brown. Quite ordinary brown. It had a bit of a wave.”

It seemed to him, as far as he could judge in the poor light, that the proportions of her face were altered now. It was smaller and softer; her eyes were less watchfully large, and her lips had lost their pinched nun-look. She seemed to have melted away, and remoulded herself into some other woman whom he had never met. He kissed her on the mouth; less sacramentally now.

At nine o’clock McEvoy came to the back door with a wheelbarrow. Agnes jumped out of her skin when she heard his knock. She wiped the washing-up suds from her hands and hurried to the door.

“Mr. McEvoy. Who is minding your shop?”

The tobacconist removed his checked cap respectfully. “A dear friend,” he said.

“Have you got ropes there too?”

“I have everything requisite. I think the barrow is the way to manage.”

“I suppose you have told everybody?”

“Nothing of the night’s events has passed my lips. The parish will know soon enough.”

“The Children of Mary will know tonight.”

“The nuns will know earlier, no doubt. If Father Fludd is willing and able, we can have all the saints back on their plinths in an hour or two.” He smiled faintly. “When we buried them, there was quite a crowd to help us. Digging things up is not so hard as digging them in, is it?”

It was harder for me, Miss Dempsey thought. “I will call Father Fludd,” she said. “He was up as usual to say Mass. He is having some tea now.”

She did not offer McEvoy a cup, but left him waiting by the door. The snow had vanished; there was a raw cold. She called Fludd, as she made her way through to the kitchen; heard him quit the sitting room, banging the door after him, and greet McEvoy, and leave by the front door, exclaiming as he did so over the wheelbarrow, its timeliness and convenience. She took her duster from the pantry and went into the sitting room which the curate had just vacated. Hurrying out to McEvoy, he had placed his teacup carelessly on the mantelshelf. She reached out for it, and caught sight of herself in the oval looking-glass. Her face was dead white, weary; her eyes looked sore. But all the same, her wart had gone.

Father Angwin sat in the confessional; he felt safe there. He drew his velvet curtain across the grille and listened fearfully to the thumps and scrapes from the nave. When the bishop comes, he thought, perhaps I can take refuge here. He wouldn’t drag me out, would he? And do violence on me, like Thomas a Becket and the knights?

Father’s mood swung, between distress and jubilation, between terror and mirth. Why should the bishop come, he thought? There are no confirmations this coming year. He shows no relish for our company. Unless malicious persons like Purpit inform him of our schism, it can just go quietly on its own way. Perhaps in time I might become an antipope.

He wished Miss Dempsey would bring him refreshments.

When the door opened, with a gentle creak, he jerked out of his daydream. “Fludd?”

“No. He is putting St. Ambrose up.”

“Ah. My penitent.”

She knelt, with a soft rustle.

“How is your temptation?” He was afraid to hear the answer.

“A question,” she said.

“Yes. Go ahead.”

“Father, suppose a building collapsed. And in the ruins there are people buried. Can the priest give them absolution?”

“I think he could. Conditionally. If they were rescued, of course, they would have to confess their sins in the ordinary way.”

“Yes, I see.” A pause. “Is there any kind of absolution you can give me?”

“Oh, my dear,” Father Angwin said. “You are a girl who has stayed out all night. You could hardly make use of absolution now.”

It had not in fact occurred to Miss Dempsey to take refreshments to Father Angwin, for she did not know where to find him. She sat in her room, eating a caramel toffee. It was most unusual for her to suspend her activities in the course of the day. There was always something one could polish. And if ingenuity were really exhausted, one could turn mattresses.

But now she sat quietly, her eyes distant, crimping her gold toffee-paper into tiny folds. From time to time she touched her flawless lip. Certain lines ran through her head:

Sweet Agnes, Holy Child,

All purity;

O may we undefiled

Be pure as thee …

Swiftly, in her usual way, she twisted her paper into a ring. She took it reverently in her right hand, holding it between finger and thumb.

Ready our blood to shed

Rather than sin to wed …

She slid it on to her wedding finger. It looked admirable, she thought. One of the best rings she had achieved. It seemed a pity to waste it. She took it off and slipped it into the pocket of her pinny.

Ready our blood to shed

Rather than sin to wed.

And forth as martyrs led

To die like thee.