Fludd: A Novel

NINE

“I’ve got the key,” Sister Anthony whispered. “She never normally lets it out of her possession. She was in a state this morning though. She’s got a wart.” The nun tapped her face. “Here. Here, on her lip. Ugly thing. Come up in the night like a mushroom. Cyril said to her, ‘Mother Purpiture, you want to get that looked at, I think it’s cancer.’”

“Oh, Sister Anthony,” Philly said, “whatever shall I do?”

“Just follow me into the parlour.” Sister Anthony, her veil flapping, her elbows out, made sheepdog movements behind her back. “Quick now, get a move on. I thought I’d never get her out of the place. How can I go on parish visits, she said, with this excrescence? In the end I told her there was a piece of gossip on Back Lane, some woman run away with her lodger. She can’t resist a piece of gossip. She’ll be out for the afternoon, going from house to house.”

“It goes dark by half past four,” Philly said.

“We’ll have you out of here by then. By half past four you’ll be on the train.”

Sister Anthony ushered her into the parlour, shut the door, and shoved a chair against it. Philomena regarded her, eyes wide.

“I can’t put those clothes on. They’re years old. They’re older than me. There are clothes in there were put in before I was born.”

“Well, I can’t credit this,” Sister Anthony said. “I’d have thought you’d worry about being excommunicated, but all you care about is whether you’re up with the modes.”

“That’s not it at all. But everybody will notice me.”

“Nonsense. I’ll transform you out of all recognition.”

“I’m not afraid will they recognize me. I’m afraid children will shout things and run after me down the street.”

“Well, what course do you favour?” the old nun demanded. “I can’t take you to the Co-op drapers to get outfitted. If you could beg borrow or steal from Agnes Dempsey, her skirts would be up round your thighs, you a great tall thing and she such a squat little woman.”

Sister Anthony bent over the chest and put the key in the lock. “Come on, you filthy thing,” she said. “Come on, you ingrate mechanism.” She gritted her teeth; cursed further. The lock gave. She turned back the lid.

“Well now,” she said, speculatively.

“You shouldn’t be doing this for me,” Philly said.

“Nonsense.” Sister Anthony sniffed. “I’m old. What can they do to me? They could put me on general post, I suppose. But I’d be glad to get away from here. I wouldn’t mind if they shipped me out to the African missions. I’d rather live in a leper colony than spend another year with Purpit.”

Sister Anthony bent over and rummaged in the chest. “Oh, by the way, speaking of Agnes Dempsey, she delivered this envelope for you.” She produced it from her pocket. “I can’t think what’s in it. I hope it’s a ten-shilling note. I can’t spare you more than half a crown from the housekeeping without Purpit on my back saying I’ve lost it on a horse.”

Philly felt like a child, going on holiday. Or being togged up for a visit to relations. Leaving home for the first time.

But I can never come back, she thought. I know nothing except farms, convents, my mother’s house. No convent in the world will take me in, after this afternoon. Even a farmer would show me the door; a Catholic farmer, that is. My mother would spit out at me across the street. Even my sister Kathleen wouldn’t give me the time of day.

She took the envelope from Sister Anthony. Rattled it. It didn’t really rattle. She opened it, carefully; nuns waste nothing. Even an envelope can sometimes be reused.

Miss Dempsey’s ring rolled out on to her palm.

“Oh yes,” Sister Anthony said. “What a mercy. You’ll need a ring.”

“She must be barmy,” Sister Philomena said.

Her habit lay on one of the parlour chairs—folded, because she did not feel she could just drop it there. In disrobing before Sister Anthony, she had committed, she felt sure, ten or a dozen sins against holy modesty. Even to take off your clothes when you were by yourself could be a sin against holy modesty, if you didn’t do it the right way. When she had joined the Order, she had learnt how to undress in a religious manner; to drop over her head the linen marquee of her nightgown, and wriggle out of her day clothes beneath it. Similarly, she had learnt to take a bath in her shift.

“What will you do with it? My habit?”

“I’ll dispose of it in my own way.”

Now Sister Anthony felt for her more than ever. Out of her black drapings and her rolls of petticoats, standing shivering in the fireless parlour in her long linen drawers, she looked a pitiful beanpole, not at all the rough rural lass they were used to. She stood with her arms crossed over her breasts in a pose at once picturesque and gauche: going to God knows what.

“Twilfit or Excelsior?” Sister Anthony asked.

“Oh, I couldn’t. I couldn’t put on corsets. I’ve never worn corsets in my life.”

Sister Anthony was taken aback. “Don’t you have them in Ireland these days?”

“I shouldn’t know how to manage. What if I wanted to go to the lavatory?”

“You’ll have to have something, you know.” Sister Anthony felt around in the chest. “Try this bust bodice. Come on now. Look lively.”

She couldn’t get any sense of urgency into the girl. It was as if she were dressing up for charades. “Either you may have my silk combinations,” she said, “or you’ll have to go in your drawers, please yourself.” She straightened up. “Look, it’s not too late, you know.” She pointed to the habit folded on the chair. “You can climb back into that now, go straight up to Father Angwin, ask for absolution, say your penance, and forget about the whole thing.”

Philly turned a glance on her: large mild eyes. Then bent of her own accord over the chest: a swooning movement. She stood up, her white arms full of clothes. “Anything,” she whispered. “Anything will do. I can’t stay here now. Purpit would know. She’d see it in my face. I’d rather be like St. Felicity, eaten by the beasts in the circus.”

Finally Sister Anthony got her dressed. The blue serge suit seemed best, because warmest; it seemed no one had ever entered the convent in a top coat. The skirt dropped almost to her ankles, and its large waist swivelled round her small waist, washing about on her narrow frame. The jacket hung on her.

“I wish it were not such bad weather, you could take my straw hat,” Sister Anthony said. “Such a lovely blue ribbon. I remember buying it, the summer before I came in.” She held it for a moment and smoothed the ribbon with her pudgy flour-coloured fingers; then with sudden energy, sent it spinning back into the chest. She had produced from some other source a scratchy woollen headscarf of a kind of ersatz tartan, lime green and maroon. “This will cover a multitude of sins,” she said. It was the kind of thing the Fetherhoughton women wore; perhaps a Child of Mary had mislaid it after a meeting, and Sister had snapped it up.

Shoes were a problem. Philly could just squeeze her feet into the smart little navy pair with the waisted heels; but to walk was another matter. She teetered about the parlour, wincing and crying out, “Oh God,” she said. “I’ve never had high heels. Oh, they do pinch.” She stopped. “I suppose I could offer it up.”

“Not really,” Sister Anthony said. “Not any more. There’s no point in your offering anything up, is there?”

Philomena clung to the back of a chair. “Will I be damned, Sister Anthony?”

“I should think so,” the nun said easily. “Come on now, let me see you walk across the room.”

Philomena bit her underlip. She began; holding out her arms to aid her balance, like a performer on the high wire.

“I have to laugh,” Sister Anthony said, without doing so. “If you wear those you’ll end up in a casualty ward. I’ll run down to school and fetch you a pair of the children’s pumps.”

Philomena nodded. She saw the sense of this. “Get different feet. Not two lefts.”

“And then if you wait another minute, I’ll go into the kitchen and make you up a parcel of provisions for the journey.”

“Oh no, Sister Anthony. Oh no, please don’t trouble. I’m only going to Manchester.”

Sister Anthony’s face said, you do not know where you will be going; and what can it matter to you if the bread gets a little stale? Think of the Pharaohs, their eternal picnics sealed in their tombs.

“Sit down, Sister. Rest your ankles.”

Obediently, Philly sat, then burst into tears. She had done well until now. But it was what the old woman had called her: “Sister.” Soon she would never again hear that form of address.

Anthony regarded her thoughtfully. Then she took a clean, folded handkerchief out of her pocket and passed it over. “Keep it,” she said. “I know you never have one of your own.” Strictly speaking, she knew, it was not hers to give. It was common property, which the Order had prescribed for her personal, temporary use. “By the way,” she said. “What was your name? Before you came into religion?”

Sister Philomena sniffed. “Roisin.” She wiped her eyes. “Roisin O’Halloran.”

Sister Anthony had said: wait until dusk. Now Roisin O’Halloran fled like an animal over the dark ground. In that moment, in that heart-stopping moment before Anthony let her out of the back door—when she stood with her Gladstone bag in her hand, like a runner on his mark—she had heard in the passage, approaching, a little clicking noise. It was Polycarp, Cyril, and Ignatius Loyola; and as they bustled along, their rosary beads clinked together, and made a noise like the gnashing of teeth.

She ran; but when she had gained the path to the allotments, she stopped and looked back, conserving her breath. Four o’clock struck by the church clock. She saw them clustered, all three, at an upper, open window. She wanted to shrink into the scrubby bushes, the standing pools. Then she saw that they were waving their handkerchiefs; dipping them up and down, with a curiously sedate, formal motion.

She turned around fully, her bag clasped before her in two hands, a skinny, dowdy figure in her strange clothes. She looked up at the convent, its many small windows, its smoke-blackened stone; beyond it were the slates of the church roof, slick with the air’s moisture, and above the church the glowering terraces, leaf-mulched, slippery, the jungle of the north. The mill-windows of Fetherhoughton were lit up; the smoke from the tall chimneys had faded into the darkening sky, but factory furnaces burnt, dull slow jewels of the year’s end. She raised her arm, waved. The handkerchiefs bobbed up and down. A voice carried to her.

“Send us an epistle,” said Polycarp.

“Send us a food parcel,” said Cyril.

“Send us—,” said Ignatius Loyola; but she never found out what it was because she had turned again, and loped onwards, towards the first stile. When she looked back again, they were still there, but well out of earshot now; handkerchiefs and faces were indistinguishable in the gloom.

Roisin O’Halloran fled like an animal over the dark ground, observed—from a vantage point on Back Lane—by Mother Purpiture.

In the presbytery, the telephone rang. “I have the bishop for you,” whispered the sycophant, across the wires.

“One moment,” said Agnes Dempsey. She placed the telephone receiver on the hall table, went down the hall, and tapped on the sitting-room door. “It’s him,” she said. “Will I get Father Fludd to talk to him?”

Father Angwin raised his hands, poised them like a pianist over the keys; he let them fall on to the arms of his chair, and bounced to his feet. “No,” he said, “I am responsible.” He opened the door and glanced swiftly up and down the hall, as if the bishop might be lurking in the shadows. “Where is Father Fludd?”

“In his room. I think I heard him go up.”

“I thought I heard him come down. Still, both are possible.” Both at once, he thought.

Agnes stood by his elbow when he took up the receiver. Formerly, she would have crept back to the kitchen. She had grown bolder; a smile played continually about the corners of her mouth, as if she had seen something gratifying, or learnt something that pleased her.

Father Angwin held the receiver at a good distance from his ear. For a while he listened to the bishop prosing on. She caught a phrase here and there: something in the way of a social for the younger end … the altar boys … a record hop, as I believe our American friends call it. “He doesn’t know,” Father mouthed at Agnes. “Doesn’t know yet.”

“That Purpiture,” Agnes mouthed back, “has gone Upstreet. She might go in the Post Office and telephone him. Sister Polycarp said she took coins with her. She doesn’t shop, so what else could it be for?”

“She’s my mortal enemy,” Father Angwin whispered. “I wouldn’t put it past her.” He turned back to the bishop. “I was wondering, Aidan, could you help me out with a question put to me by a parishioner?”

There was a frigid pause on the line; Miss Dempsey wondered why Father had used the bishop’s Christian name, for he had never done so before. Father’s tone, she thought had a meaningful mysterious jocularity. “It’s about a friend of his, a doctor,” he continued. “This doctor has human bones in his possession, and got them when he was a student in a Protestant country. It may have been Germany, because my parishioner has another friend, some Hun, who is anxious to go to confession but speaks no English, and I hardly know whether we should have an interpreter or some other arrangement?”

Miss Dempsey strained to hear. It seemed that the bishop made no reply or a muffled one.

“No, don’t rush yourself,” Father said, “give it your leisurely consideration, it’s a nice point. Really, Aidan, you wouldn’t credit it, I am beginning to encounter the most bizarre difficulties, circumstances that one does not come across in forty years as a parish priest. There is also some confusion here in Fetherhoughton about the minutiae of the Church’s teaching on the Lenten fast, and we were wondering, out of the depth of your accumulated experience, would you advise us?”

There was a long pause; the bishop said, in a tone that lacked his habitual fire: “Now look here …”

Miss Dempsey missed his next words. Then she heard, “ … just doing my job. Duty of obedience. Task laid upon me … only a young feller.” Father Angwin hugged the receiver, and smiled. “Times change,” the bishop said. “ … hardly reason to be ashamed …”

“But you are ashamed, aren’t you?” Father Angwin said. “Why, man, if this were to get out, then where two or three modern bishops are gathered together, you would lose your credibility entirely.”

“I will be upon you, Angwin, one day this week. Count upon it.”

“And I will be upon you,” muttered the priest, as he put the receiver down. “I shall have your liver on toast. Agnes, warn Fludd.”

“Warn him?” The word stood out, shockingly, claiming attention for itself.

“Yes. Warn him that the bishop may turn up any time.”

“How shall I warn him?” Agnes said carefully.

“You may call up the stairs.”

“Shall I not go up?”

“To call will be sufficient.”

“Yes. I should not discommode him by tapping at his door.”

“He might be at prayer.”

“I should not like to interrupt him.”

They looked at each other. “I did not positively see him go up,” said Miss Dempsey.

“Or come down.”

“I would have to assume he was up there.”

“It would be a fair assumption. A reasonable man might make it.”

“Or woman.” Miss Dempsey went to the foot of the stairs. “Father Fludd,” she called softly. “Father Fludd?”

“Don’t expect an answer,” Angwin said.

“He would not break off his devotions.”

“But we can suppose he has heard.”

They knew, though, that the upper storey was empty, quite as certainly as they had ever known anything. Ashes rustled softly through the grate; on the walls twisted Christs continued dying; in the church grounds, yellow leaves floated in darkening air, birds huddled in the trees of the terraces, and worms turned.

“Shall I put the kettle on?” Agnes said.

“No, I am going to have a glass of whisky and read a book that a parishioner has lent me.”

Has left me, he almost said. He bit the word back in time. Miss Dempsey nodded. Fludd is in his room, of course, praying. Philomena is in her convent, of course, sweeping out the kitchen passage under the direction of Sister Anthony. Everyone is where they should be; or we may collude in pretending so. And God’s in his Heaven? Very bloody likely, Father Angwin thought.

He sat with his book, turning it over in his hands; the stained, battered yellow-brown cover. Faith and Morals for the Catholic Fireside: A Question-box for the Layman. Published Dublin, 1945. Nihil Obstat: Patrilius Dargan. Here was the imprimatur of the Archbishop of Dublin himself, with a little cross printed by his name.

She got it all out of this, he thought, all our conversations: what a treasury of scruple, what a cache of conservative principle. Here it is, the old faith in its entirety; the dear old faith, with no room for doubt or dissent. The rules of fasting and abstinence; no mention of record hops. Diatribes against impure thoughts; no mention of relevance. And just here on the tattered spine the general editor’s name, none other than The Revd. (as he was then) Aidan Raphael Croucher, Doctor of Divinity: the bishop in person.

I shall store it under my pillow, Father Angwin resolved; it will keep me in gibes for years to come. How I shall persecute the fellow with his past opinions; bringing up one question or another, intruding them into casual conversation, until his terror of me is complete. May dripping be used for pastry, or is it allowed only for-frying fish? He has got up to his bishopric on the back of such questions. None of us can know what we will come to; but some of us cannot even remember how we began.

Question: Why is fortune-telling permitted at Catholic bazaars? Answer: The practice is not to be encouraged, many healthier amusements could be substituted. Question: Is it right for the Catholic Church to pass a collection-box during Sunday evening Lent services? It is always right, sometimes it is advisable and frequently it is necessary.

I knew she was reading it off a paper, Father said to himself. I suspected she had all the answers. There was a name written in pencil on the fly-leaf, in a round schoolgirl’s hand. Dymphna O’Halloran. This is all she brought from Ireland, he thought; and I supposed it was one of the convent’s books. This is all she brought from Ireland and now she has left it to me. He thumbed his way back to the preface. Divine Revelation, coupled with two thousand years’ experience has made the Church an incomparable teacher in matters of human conduct. There is not a walk of life, a personal activity, a private or public occasion, on which our Holy Mother is not able to teach, encourage, warn or advise us, from the deep knowledge she has of the human heart and mind, and their strange modes of action.

Two thousand years’ experience, Father Angwin said to himself. It is an awesome thought. He reached blindly for his whisky glass. His fingers closed on it, he brought it to his mouth. He tasted it and held it off, he held it up to the light with his eyes screwed up and looked at it. It had the appearance, the colour, the outer properties, yet it was not whisky; it was water. Oh, Fludd, he thought, you sorcerer’s apprentice, you’ve gone and got it wrong this time. You’ve worked a miracle in reverse. You’ve doused the celestial fire, you’ve taken the divine and made it merely human, you’ve exchanged the spirit for damp, warm flesh.

But meanwhile, Perpetua scrambled across country. I shall get her at the station, she thought. She did not stop to think what a figure she cut, galloping and puffing, her habit bunched up in her fists to clear the ground, her lace-ups scuffed and a hole torn in her stocking, her crucifix on its cord bouncing against the place where laywomen have their bosoms. She ran at a peculiar crouch, pausing every so often to stand upright, massage her ribs, and sight her quarry. On the tops of stiles she hovered, to scan the country. The beast was not now in sight; but I shall corner her on the platform, Purpit thought.

She had time to notice, as she ran, the white streamer that looped and snaked on the wind, fastened to a fence pole; and even as she ran, she thought there was something familiar about it, something faintly ecclesiastical, something that made her want to stop and genuflect. She conquered the inclination. I shall trap her on the platform, she thought, and drag her back, I shall drag her down Upstreet in full view, and before night falls I shall have pulled those clothes from her back and locked her in her cell to wait until the bishop comes, and then we shall see, and then we shall see, then we shall see about the degraded minx.

Her heart pounded and roared in her ears, under the folds of her veil. She did not doubt she had the advantage; the station path was but a sprint away. As she turned downhill, the evening seemed to close in over the allotments behind her: that rolling darkness, rolling down from the moors. From the hen-houses, a single point of light gleamed: as it might be, the tip of a lighted cigarette.

She had almost gained the station path, when a figure rose up before her, out of the bushes, and blocked her path. She stopped and stared, eyes popping. It was a figure she knew, a form she knew, yet subject to change, to a transformation that froze her blood. “Oh, horrible,” said Mother Purpit: caught half-way over the final stile.

Roisin O’Halloran stood on the platform, her Gladstone bag held before her in her hands; prepared, as if she did not know how quickly the train might come upon her. She stared down the track. Her tartan headscarf flapped boisterously, and her ungloved hands with their paper ring were blue around the knuckles.

Across the moors that train must come, but what if snow had fallen in Sheffield today? What if Woodhead was blocked, what if a blizzard was brewing? Snowploughs out. Ice on the points. Sheep buried alive on the moors. Men in mufflers and spiked boots, crystals in their moustaches, going about with spades to dig people out. She pictured herself huddled in the waiting room, on the bench into which the Netherhoughtonians had cut their runes; she imagined the voice of the station-master, “No trains out tonight.”

She had no watch. She did not know when the train ought to come. She had bought her ticket with her head bowed, in a false voice. She was like a parcel, she thought, addressed but not posted. She had felt the ticket-man’s eyes on her back. She did not dare ask him, what time will the train come? She had hoped for a public notice of some kind. But no doubt if there had been one, the people from Netherhoughton would have come by night and torn it down.

In her shyness, her confusion, her haste, she had not asked Father Fludd, what time will the train come and carry me away? She had only heard him say, I will be after you. When you reach the other end, mait in the baggage hall. Confide in no one. It occurred to her that this man, this false priest, the impostor with whom she would soon embark on the dreadful Act, was a mystery she hardly dared address, a man whom she did not know. I do not know God, she thought. But I always Trusted in Him.

Roisin O’Halloran put down her bag, and rubbed her hands together to restore the circulation. A question drifted up to her mind: Some years ago I intended going to a certain town by train. I happened to meet a man who had a ticket for that place, but who changed his mind and decided not to travel. He gave me his ticket and I travelled with it. Was there any injustice to the railway company?

What was the answer? She stood frowning, trying to recall it; bending her furious thoughts to anything but the matter in hand. There is no injustice. The railway companies do not insist on personal identification. They are satisfied if every traveller has the ticket required for the journey.

The platform, by some merciful dispensation, had been deserted when she arrived, but now she saw, out of the corner of her eye, that a man had arrived. He stood behind her, a little distance away. She hunched her shoulders into the navy jacket and put a hand up to draw her scarf further over her head. Let it be some Protestant, she prayed, someone who wouldn’t know me. Then she thought, what’s the use of praying for that sort of thing? Or any sort of thing at all?

He must, she thought, be examining with some curiosity my peculiar-looking back. The skin of her neck crawled, almost as if the man were Fludd. She began to turn her head, slowly but inexorably, as if it were subject to a magnetic attraction.

And yes, of course he was staring at her. Their eyes met; shocked, she jerked her gaze away, as if she had seen a corpse on the track.

As the man was Mr. McEvoy, he could hardly have failed to recognize her; but he did not speak. The wind tore through her jacket and sliced her through to the bone; it got under her skirt and barrelled it out around her legs. She turned her eyes down and kept them on her gym pumps; one right, one left.

Then at last the train appeared, a dot in the distance, so faint in the gathering darkness that she could hardly be sure it was there. For seconds it seemed to stick absurdly, going neither forwards nor back; then, when she saw that it was growing larger, she stepped forward to the edge of the platform, and raised her face, caught in the orange glow of the station lamps.

Only when the train drew in did Mr. McEvoy step up beside her. She was trembling all over. “Sister?” he said, in a low voice. He offered his arm. Her fingertips rested on it; she had some thought of fending him off. He swung open the carriage door for her. “Don’t alarm yourself,” he said. “I am only travelling as far as Dinting, just the few stops. I shall pretend not to know you. I am the soul of discretion.”

“Then get away,” she hissed. “Leave me alone.”

“I only wish to be of assistance,” McEvoy said. “Somebody must hand you your bag and see that you have a seat facing the engine. And you know what they say, Sister. Better the devil you know.”

With a simper, Mr. McEvoy placed her bag on the rack. A door slammed. A railwayman gave a wild inchoate shout. Flags waved. And a moment later they were off, rattling across the points to Manchester, her defloration, and the Royal and Northwestern Hotel.