Fludd: A Novel

SIX

Outside the purlieus of the convent Philomena had a different kind of walk. She strode ahead of him, swinging her arms carelessly, hopping over the tussocks of grass.

“I came up here one day last year.” The wind scattered her voice. “Quite early … it would be April. There were daffodils. Small ones, wild. Not those big yellow brutes you get in the shops.”

Tramping after her, Fludd imagined these blooms. He saw them flinching from the spring winds: frail and whitish yellow, like Chinese hands in sleeves. “Last year, or this year? I thought last year you weren’t here?”

She stopped, catching her breath. “This year is what I meant. Dear Lord, the months have dragged past. The days seem so long, Father Fludd. They seem to be stretching themselves out. I don’t know when that started. I think it was since we buried the statues.”

“I do not find it so,” Fludd said. He felt old, and breathless from the uphill climb, and weary from thankless enterprises. “‘My days have passed more swiftly than the web is cut by the weaver, and are consumed without any hope.’”

The girl did not recognize a quotation. “Have you no hope?” She looked up at him for a second. Her eyes were extraordinary, he thought: a smoky fawn flecked here and there with yellow, a colour more suitable in a cat than a nun. The question seemed to have struck her. Rather than give an answer, Fludd walked on.

“Are you not afraid to be seen?” he asked. “I doubt you should be here. I may walk where I please, but not you. This is a strange place for a spiritual conference.”

“I came to confession. Netherhoughton night. I thought you would be there. It was the old fellow. I had to hold his attention with some questions about Lent.”

“I have heard a thing about you.”

She turned. Because of her headdress a full turn of her head was necessary, if she were to meet his eyes, and he saw how this fact laid a veneer of import over every exchange. “The stigmata?”

They had reached the shed of which she had spoken. Its broken door flapped. On the floor were wood-shavings and the chalky droppings of long-dead fowl.

“Yes,” Fludd said. He ducked his head under the lintel. Inside he had just room to stand upright. A draught, blowing straight from Yorkshire, was unimpeded by the broken window.

Philomena followed him in, ducking her head in turn. “’Twasn’t true,” she said.

“But you pretended it was?”

Philomena looked at her surroundings without contempt. “I don’t care where I come,” she said, “to get an hour out of that place. People think a convent’s quiet, don’t they? They should hear Perpetua, going on all day.” She cast around, and leant against a kind of rough workbench, folding her arms. “I had no choice, you see. They gave me none. Father Kinsella got my mother in on it. You’d have thought they’d got all their birthdays at once.”

“What was it really, if it was not the stigmata?”

“Nerves.”

“What had you to be nervous about?”

“It’s a long story. It’s about my sister.”

Fludd leant against the wall. He wished he might have a cigarette; it would have been a natural thing. “Tell it then. Since we are here.”

“Well, she—my sister—came in the convent just after me. Kathleen was her name at home but Finbar was her name in religion. She never said she had a vocation, you know, but my mother’s burning ambition was to have us all in the convent, she didn’t somehow take to the idea of sons-in-law, and being a grandma and all. At least, that’s what we used to say, we girls, and that she wanted to get in with the priest, and have people pointing at her after Mass on a Sunday, saying, ‘Oh, could you credit that woman’s sacrifice, all her daughters given to religion.’”

“You had no brother?”

“No. Or he could have been a priest, and perhaps she might not have been so hot on us. One priest in a family equals three or four nuns. That’s the way they count in Ireland.”

“So your sister Kathleen entered without a vocation. And it went wrong.”

“She disgraced herself.” Sister Philomena picked up a fold of her habit and ran it between her fingers. She too wished she had, not a cigarette, but something to occupy her, something to distract her from the moment, the place, the person. “And after she disgraced herself, we got a bad name in the neighbourhood. When I came out in the rash, my mother thought we were going to recoup our fortunes. She was a cleaner, you know, up at the convent, did their shopping for them. I was never away from her a day until I came here. As soon as she noticed it, this thing on my hands, she hauled me off to Father Kinsella, my feet didn’t touch the ground.” She imitated her mother’s ingratiating mode, her semi-genuflection. “‘Look at this, Father, appeared last Friday on Sister Philomena, the very spit and image of the nail marks in the palms of Our Blessed Lord.’”

Fludd folded his arms, in a judicious way. “But what did your sister Kathleen do, to disgrace herself in the first place?”

“She was only just the victim of a muddle. She wasn’t a bad-hearted girl at all. Only a novice when the whole thing occurred. In some Orders the novices are kept shut up and taught theology, but in our Order they are set the dirty jobs. When I was a novice I didn’t learn much about the spiritual life. I spent the time peeling potatoes. It was more like the army.”

“Was Kathleen—Sister Finbar—was she a rebel?”

“Oh, nothing of that sort. But you know, Father, how nuns can’t travel alone? Well, there was a Sister Josephine, a cross old creature with short sight and bad legs, and she got sent to another of the Order’s houses, a few miles away. The Order does that, especially when you’ve been settled about fifty years, they like to put you on general post before you die. Well, our Kathleen—Sister Finbar—was to go with her. Kathleen delivered her safe and sound, but then she had to get back to where she came from. So another sister, Sister Gertrude, she had to escort her, didn’t she?”

“Yes, I see a difficulty looming,” said Fludd.

“But when Kathleen got back to her own convent, there was Sister Gertrude, wasn’t she? Now, who was to take Gertrude back where she belonged?”

Fludd thought about it. “Kathleen.”

“I see you’ve a quick grasp of these matters. I suppose some other mind, like Mother Provincial say, might have cut through the difficulty. But Kathleen’s superior wasn’t any great thinker.”

“What happened then?”

“Our Kathleen took Gertrude back to Gertrude’s convent. She asked if she could stay a day or two while she thought it out, but they couldn’t have that, they didn’t have a permission for it, so they turned her round and sent her straight back again, and another nun with her—Sister Mary Bernard, I think it was.”

“They changed the personnel but failed to grapple with the principle.”

“Now it was Sister Mary Bernard that was at the wrong end of things. Our Kathleen escorted her back. By this time after all the travelling she was fit to drop. The soles of her shoes were worn thin. When she had handed Sister Mary Bernard over she was hanging about in the parlour, waiting to see who was going to bring her back home this time, and her nerves just snapped. She ran out of the front door.”

“What? She just bolted, did she?”

“She couldn’t take it one more time, she said. She knew if they saw her they’d call her back and send somebody with her. So she got over a gate and legged it across the fields. When she came out on to the road she walked along a bit, then she saw a lorry coming. The driver stopped and asked her was she lost or what. He said, hop up here beside me, Sister, and I’ll take you where you want to go, so she did. He was a good sort, she said, a real gentleman. He gave her half this cheese sandwich that he’d got for his dinner—she was starving, you see, because she’d always arrived in places at the wrong time for a collation, and in a convent you can only eat at the set times. This man, this lorry driver, he went out of his way for her, took her back to her own convent, right to the door. But when she rolled up, I’m afraid they were anything but pleased to see her.”

“It was innocent,” Fludd said. “I’m sure it was. The girl was desperate.”

“The lorry driver turned out to be a Protestant, that was what made it worse.”

“The whole thing could have been avoided,” Fludd said, “if the original sister had only set out with two escorts, instead of one.”

“That would have been reasonable.” Sister Philomena looked gloomy. “But then, the whole process was very far from reason.”

“So what happened to Kathleen? Did they throw her out?”

“Oh, she got her marching orders all right. They had her out of there before the evening collation—booted out on an empty stomach again, she said, that’s what made her bitter. She didn’t even get to say goodbye to me. To me, her own sister.”

“What did she do then?”

“She had to go home. My mother couldn’t hold her head up in the parish. Soon after that Kathleen went to the bad. Like Aunt Dymphna. Drinking and going to dances. She talked about having her hair bleached, my mother said.” She looked up at him, her face puzzled. “It’s something in our family, I think. Hot blood.”

“Would you mind if I smoked a cigarette, Sister?” Fludd reached for his silver case. He must have something to do. “I can imagine the effect all this must have had on you.”

“Soon afterwards my hands broke out. I believed it myself, not that I would have shown anybody if it had been left up to me. Is a stigmatic a good person, that’s what I wondered. A stigmatic could be the greatest crook.” She looked up. “Yes, smoke away, I don’t mind. Well, it was a nine-days’ wonder, my stigmata. The bishop took a dim view of it, they won’t hear of miracles nowadays. That’s how I came to be here. Tossed out of believing Ireland to this Godforsaken place.”

“You were harshly dealt with. When one considers, say, how much of the mystic vision may be put down to temporal-lobe epilepsy.”

“To what, Father?”

“When St. Teresa of Avila had her three day vision of Hell, she was merely working up to a fit … the flames and the stench were a part of her aura. And the Blessed Hildegard, seeing God’s fortress—she was having a migraine attack.”

She looked dubious. “I don’t have fits. I have thin skin. That’s all.”

“You don’t have as much between you and the world as other people do. Let me see your hand, please.”

She raised one, shaking back her sleeve, and stared fixedly at the palm: as if here, a year on, the delicate embroidery of blood might seep through the skin. Father Fludd leaned forward and reached for her hand with his, as tentative as a cat. He placed the tip of his index finger on to the tip of her second finger. Her outstretched hand, palm upturned, dipped towards him. “Why are you doing that?” she asked. She too gazed down at her palm. “You look as if you were going to tell my fortune. But it’s forbidden.”

“I could tell your fortune,” Fludd said.

“I tell you,” she said quietly, “the Church forbids it.”

Fludd touched her forefinger. “This is the finger of Jupiter,” he said. “The Ram governs the tip; the middle phalange is governed by Taurus the Bull, and the base by Gemini. This, now,” he took her middle finger, “is the finger of Saturn. The Goat governs its tip. Here in the middle comes the Water Carrier, then the Fishes. Your third finger is the finger of Apollo, God of the Sun. The Crab governs here, then the Lion, then the Virgin. Venus rules the thumb; the little finger is ruled by Mercury. Libra the Scales governs its tip, Scorpio its middle phalange, the Archer its base.”

“What does it all mean, Father?”

“God knows,” Fludd said. Her lifeline was long and unbroken, curling out of sight into her snug inner sleeve; the Mount of Venus was large and fleshy. He saw a nature active, mutable, fiery; a rationalist’s finger-tips. There were no shipwrecks in her palm, no danger from four-legged beasts, or iron instruments; but danger from the malice of women, and from self-doubt, and faintness of heart. “The line of Saturn is doubled,” he said. “You will wander from place to place.”

“But I never go anywhere.”

“I am not known to be wrong.”

“It’s only an old gypsy thing, anyway.”

“I must differ. This science was practised before gypsies were thought of.”

“Well, if you know so much … aren’t you going to tell me what’s there?”

Fludd lifted his eyes to her face for a second, then dropped them again to her palm. He traced the course of her heartline; it dipped sharply, and ended in a five-pointed star. “Anything I say is superfluous,” he said. “The point is, Sister, you know what your fortune will be.”

She drew back her hand. Smiled. Held it splayed and selfconscious against her thigh; hardly touching the cloth of her habit, as if she thought it was smeared with ink. She looked around again. “I wish we could sit down. I should have thought about it, I could have brought sacks for the floor.” Her foot scraped at the wood-shavings; her words were aimless, random, without meaning.

“You asked me if I could do anything for you. What is it you want?”

She would not look at him; continued that little sidetracking motion with her foot. “Answers to my questions.”

“About Lent?”

“No.”

“Good. I didn’t become a priest to answer that sort of question. I want to answer something deeper.”

She glanced up, just for a moment. “One of the children asked me, what was there before Creation?”

Cigarette in hand, Fludd looked out of the broken window, beyond the rotting coops and the scraps of chicken wire, to where the railwayman’s handkerchief snapped and lashed against its pole. “There was the prima materia, without dimension or quality, neither large nor small, without properties or inclinations, neither moving nor still.”

“I’m afraid they won’t take that kind of answer.”

He put his cigarette to his lips. “What kind of answer do they want?”

“They go on about guardian angels,” she said. “They expect to be able to see them, walking behind them up the carriage-drive. They think if they could turn round fast enough, they would catch them.”

“Ah,” Fludd said, “if only any of us could turn round fast enough. We might catch a glimpse of our own face.”

“They say—the children—people are getting born and dying all the time, so you need more and more angels, or after somebody’s died do they get reassigned? They say, what if you die young, does your angel get forty years off? One of them said last week, my guardian angel used to be Hitler’s.”

“Angels aren’t following us,” Fludd said. “No one’s following us, except ourselves. Look at you. They sent you out from Ireland. Are you less tormented now? No. Yourself followed you.”

“I have to teach them the Creed. I have problems there. Jesus was crucified, and then, it says, ‘he descended into Hell.’”

“Limbo, is meant,” said Fludd, taking the orthodox line.

“Yes, I know. That’s what I was always taught.”

“But you don’t believe it?”

“Why should he go to Limbo? Just a lot of old patriarchs and prophets, and little dead babies nobody had time to baptise. I like to think it is really Hell that is meant. I like to think of him paying a call. To be reacquainted with it.” Fludd raised an eyebrow. “Reacquainted,” she said. “After all, he made it.”

The air about them was growing colder now, light fading from the sky; he had never known evening come down so early as it did among these hills. The girl’s eyes had lost their daytime glow; they looked slaty now, a Fetherhoughton colour. He shivered a little, dropped his cigarette end on to the floor, put his hands in his pockets.

“I was thinking,” Philomena said, “why does God permit the bishop to exist?”

“It’s more than a permission. God made him.”

“He’s gross. He’s like a pork-butcher.”

“You could ask, why did God make anything that doesn’t please us? But he does not have the same sensibilities as we do. He does not share our tastes.”

“Why did God let my Aunt Dymphna and my sister Kathleen go to the bad?”

“Perhaps he did not take a special interest in undoing them. Perhaps they undid themselves. You said they had hot blood.”

“Will Dymphna roast in Hell for all eternity? Or can it have an end? We are not allowed, are we, to pray for the people in Hell?”

“Not under normal circumstances. Though they say that Gregory the Great prayed out the Emperor Trajan. And we think of Origen’s doctrine of Larger Hope … It was his belief that all men will ultimately be saved. Eternity isn’t really exactly that. The torment of Hell is a purifying process, and there will be an end to our punishment.”

She glanced up, half-hoping. “Is that a respectable belief?”

“No. Most people think that Origen got his wires crossed.”

“Because it occurs to me … if Hell has an end, does Heaven?” She stopped scraping the ground with her foot, came over to stand by him and look out of the broken window. “Are these the sort of questions you became a priest to answer?”

Fludd shivered. “I wish I had a hip-flask.”

“I fancied it was growing warmer.”

“Is it?” His eyes opened wide. He seemed taken aback; he looked away, and seemed to mutter something to himself. He touched the shed’s wall, gingerly, as if fire might have begun in the damp fibres of the wood. Can it be, he thought, that the transformative process is already underway? In these days, he no longer worked in metal, but practised on human nature; an art less predictable, more gratifying, more dangerous. The scientist burns up his experimental matter in the athenor, or furnace, but no scientist, however accomplished, can light that furnace himself. The spark must be set by a shaft of celestial light; and in waiting for that light, a man could waste his life. “It is warmer,” he said, aloud. “I dare say the wind has dropped.”

The girl stared out at it, riffling the twilit grass. Her cheeks glowed. She knew it was no use to look around her for the source of heat; it was inward. Since he came here, she thought, a match had been put to her future. She did not think she loved him, but still, something burned: a slow, white flicker of approaching change.

“Well, tell me,” she said. “What made you enter the priesthood, Father?”

“There are some men,” Fludd said, “who are driven to be surgeons. From an early age they have an appetite to slit up persons and look into their guts. Some men are so consumed by it, that if want of money or education impedes them from obtaining the qualifications they desire, they will simply impersonate surgeons. Many an appendix has been whipped out, in our major hospitals, by some fellow who’s walked in off the street.”

She was impressed. “Wouldn’t you ever think they’d be found out? Wouldn’t you ever think they’d kill somebody?”

“Sometimes they do. But not more than their quota.”

Jesus, she thought. In England they have a quota. “So they get away with it, you’re saying?”

“Sometimes for years. But then you know there are other men, the would-be priests, they have a complementary desire; they want to take a scalpel to the soul. Sin is their intestinal loops. You can see them drape it around their hands as they go probing into the depths.”

His language was not strange to her. Each morning as she ate her breakfast she regarded the neat antiseptic wounds of Christ. One of the soldiers with a spear opened his side, and immediately there came out blood and water. “But it’s not quite the same as doctors,” she said. “You can’t cure sin, can you?”

“The physicians can’t cure a half of the corporeal diseases that they go after. They only do it out of curiosity, and to keep the patients’ relatives satisfied, and to earn a crust.”

The temperature around her seemed to have increased now. Why did he not feel it? It was a Mediterranean frenzy of heat, a Sicilian afternoon. The wool of her undergarments fretted her skin, and she felt a heat-rash prickle between her shoulder-blades and along her forearms. She said, “Father Fludd, you’re not a real priest, are you? I thought it all along.”

Fludd didn’t answer. He might well not answer, she thought. But his features seemed less pinched now; the warmth had touched even his usual corpse-like pallor. “In my former trade,” he said, “a trade which I seem to have forgotten now, or at least I have lost my touch with it, there was a business which we called the nigredo, which is a process of blackening, of corruption, of mortification, of breakdown. Then there is a process we call the albedo, it is a whitening … Do you see?”

She seemed afraid; looking at him with her eyes large, her expression drawn. “What is that trade?”

“It was a deep science,” he said. “Releasing spirit from matter. It should be every man’s study.”

“A killer does it. When he kills. Is that a deep science?”

“There are things in one’s self one must kill.”

“Oh, I know,” she said wearily. “The flesh and its appetites. I have been hearing it since I was seven. I am sick of hearing it. Don’t you start.”

“I meant something else really. I meant that there are times in life when you must murder the past. Take a hatchet to what you used to be. Ax down the familiar world. It’s hard, very painful, but it is better to do it than to keep the soul trapped in circumstances it can no longer abide. It may be that we had a way of life that used to satisfy us, but it does so no more; or a dream which has soured by longkeeping, or a pleasure which has become a habit. Outworn expectations, Sister, are a cage in which the soul rots away, like a mangy beast in a menagerie. When the reality in our head and the reality in the world are at a disjunction, we feel pained, fretted—” He broke off and stared at her, at the crucifix on her chest, the serge and flannel behind it, the epidermis behind that; and she felt her skin crawl, itch, flame. “Fretted,” he said, sucking his lip. “Irritated. Itching. Flayed. Besides, I’m not sure about this killing the flesh. We have a saying, If it were not for the earth in our work, the air would fly away, neither would the fire have its nourishment, nor the water its vessel.”

“Those are lovely words,” she said. “Like a psalm. You weren’t some kind of Protestant, were you? A lay-preacher?”

“I think we must accommodate our bodies, you know. I think we must find some good in them. Otherwise, as you say, the most blessed men would be the executioners. Besides, grace perfects nature. It doesn’t destroy it.”

“Who says so?”

“Um,” Fludd said, unwilling to name-drop. “St. Thomas Aquinas.”

She put out a hand: that palm on which he had already seen the star of a happy destiny. “Oh, him,” she said. She smiled slowly. She reached out, touched his shoulder. “Him,” she said. “He was always a friend of mine.”

She hoped the warmth would follow them, out into the evening; but Fludd had become cold and silent, and the hand he offered to steady her over the rough ground hardly seemed to be the hand of a human being, so spare and chilly was the flesh. The wind rushed the clouds across the chimneys of Fetherhoughton, down below them; she looked up at the black wild jut of moorland, and felt suddenly sobered and afraid.

She let the priest—the man—tow her along; he seemed to know the way, although he was a stranger to the district, and if he had walked the allotments in the daylight it could not have been more than a half a dozen times. He turned without faltering on to the convent path. He must eat a lot of carrots, she thought; can see in the dark.

“The stile,” Fludd said. “Just ahead of us now. Can you manage?”

They reached it; he mounted first. Philomena was half over, putting out her long leg in its thick fuzzy stocking. A shape materialized from, it seemed, the ditch.

“Good evening,” Fludd said. “Mr. McEvoy, isn’t it?”

She imagined, though she could not see, that the parishioner gave him a look: as if to say, yes, young fellow, you will learn who I am. But when McEvoy approached, and took out a pocket torch, and shone it, his face wore its normal expression, amiable but knowing.

“Taking my constitutional,” he explained.

“In the dark?”

“It is my habit,” said McEvoy. “I seem, Father, better equipped than you and Sister Philomena, although by venturing the observation I mean no breath of criticism. Would you care to borrow my pocket torch?”

“Father Fludd can see in the dark,” she said.

“Handy,” said McEvoy. His tone was sardonic. His torch beam travelled downwards; it came to rest on her leg, and slithered over it, as if her stocking had fallen down.

“Come, Sister,” Fludd said. “Don’t stick there. Hop over.” He held out his hand; but the tobacconist was there before him, courtly but insistent. “I should never like to see a Sister struggle,” McEvoy said. “You will find me always at your service, a strong arm and a willing heart.”

He seemed to know it was effusive, uncalled-for; backed away under Fludd’s sharp look, and then touched his cap. His exit was as sudden as his entrance: sucked away into the murk.

She shuddered. “Father Angwin says he is the devil.”

Fludd was surprised. “McEvoy? Why, but he’s a harmless man.”

She felt the distance between them increase; a shaft of cold, as he moved from her side.

“Has Father Angwin never spoken to you of it? Of meeting him one afternoon?”

“Yes. He has spoken of something of that kind. But he did not say the man’s name.”

“I don’t know why he thinks it. I saw the devil myself when I was seven. He was nothing like McEvoy.”

“Seven,” Fludd said. “The age of reason. What was he like?”

“A beast. A great rough thing. Breathing outside my bedroom door.”

“You were a brave girl to open it.”

“Oh, I knew I must. I had to see what was there.”

“Did he come another night?”

“He had no need.”

“No. Once is enough.”

“But now,” she said, “if Father Angwin is right, the devil has come much closer.”

“Indeed. He has taken your arm. He has proffered his assistance. Any time, he seemed to say. At your service. Does that alarm you?”

“The way he rose up just now, out of nowhere it seemed to be …”

“I can do that myself,” Fludd said indifferently. “I have my exits and my entrances. It is cheap. A conjuror’s trick.”

“How do I know that it is not you who is the devil?” She came to a halt; they could see the convent below them, and a light burning in an upstairs room. Her voice came out stubborn, hostile. “A man who pretends to be a priest? Hears confession? Gets people’s confidence …” And she thought, what if the white flame I felt in my chest was the first flame of that gnawing Hellfire, the fire that renews as it consumes, so that torture is always fresh? What if the unaccountable heat that wrapped me in the shed were from the first blast of Satan’s bellows?

“You must choose,” Fludd said, his tone practical. “I cannot tell you what to think. If you think I am bad for you I will not try to talk you out of it.”

“Bad for me?” She was aghast at his choice of word. Man or devil, she thought, devil or devil’s pawn, you’ll only damn my immortal soul. That’s all you’ll do.

“But if I were a devil,” Fludd said, “I would have a relish for you. It is strange that though you would think the devil a man of fiery tastes, there is nothing he likes better at his banquet than the milk-toast soul of a tender little nun. If I were the devil, you would not be clever enough to find me out. Not until I had dined on you and dined well.”

A long-drawn wail came from Sister Philomena, a wail of shock and distress; then she began to cry. She put her fist in her mouth, and cried around it, her mouth working around the knuckle, bleats escaping from around the bone. In the convent parlour Mother Perpetua waited for her, sitting upright by the dead fire, smiling in the dark.