Fludd: A Novel

TEN

The Royal and Northwestern Hotel had been designed by a pupil of Sir Gilbert Scott in a moment of absent-mindedness, and when Roisin O’Halloran entered its portals she felt uneasily at home. She turned to her companion. “Like church,” she whispered. The foyer had a marmoreal chill. Behind a mahogany desk, curiously carved, proportioned like an altar, stood a sallow-faced personage, with the bloodless lips and sunken cheeks of a Vatican City intriguer; and he proffered them a great volume, like a chained Bible, and with a pallid, spatulate fingertip indicated the place for Fludd to put his superscription. When this was done, the personage frowned at it, and then smiled a thin wintry smile, like a martyr whose hangman has cracked a joke: “We have a nice quiet room, Doctor,” he said.

Doctor, thought Roisin. So you are up to your old tricks. Fludd caught her eye and smiled faintly, but with more merriment than the personage. The personage eased open a great drawer, like a vestment chest, and selected among the keys; then he drew one out and presented it. In this way, with the same caution, St. Peter selects a key for one of Heaven’s more inconspicuous doors, and hands it to one of the elect who has only just scraped in.

“They’re not over-friendly,” she whispered, on her way to the lift. But then, she thought, it’s not us perhaps, hotel keepers are like it. She thought of Mrs. Monaghan, at Monaghan’s Hotel, grumbling if she had to turn out her back room for a commercial traveller. Dymphna used to wash up at Monaghan’s Hotel, and later, it was said, make herself available in the bar parlour.

When she thought of this, Roisin O’Halloran’s cheeks burned. Then something more obvious struck her. “Is it me?” she mouthed at Fludd. “Is it the funny way I look?”

The iron grilles of the lift clattered behind them, trapping them in. Fludd’s hand crept over her cold hand. With a lurch, the machine began to move; an unseen force drew them upward, up into the bowels of the place. As they vanished into the darkness between floors, for one instant she saw, beyond the bars, Perpetua’s face; it was a mask of fury, and with a snort of jealousy and rage the decapitated vision reached out, and spouted clawing hands, and wormed her fingers between the metalwork.

There was a wardrobe to put your clothes. It was a novelty to her. At home they had only a chest of drawers, and an old musty cupboard in the wall. In a convent, well, you don’t need such things.

“Are you going to unpack your bag?” Fludd said. “Hang things up?”

“I could hang up my costume,” she said, “if I took it off.” As she looked around her, naked pleasure shone from her face. “I could hang up my frock. I’ve brought a frock. It belonged to Sister Polycarp. It’s got a sailor collar. You’ve never seen such a frock.”

Fludd turned away. She was a sore, sharp, grievous temptation; now that he saw her here, in a warm room, amid furnishings, he saw her glow with gentleness and hope. She had never been part of his plans; no woman had, no fleshly tie of any sort. Some spoke of the soror mystica, companion in a man’s work; but to him it had seemed always that women were leeches on knowledge, sappers of scholarship. Still, he thought: other times, other manners.

Other times, other manners. Philomena took off her jacket. She folded it and laid it on the bed. The room was cavernous, stuffy; some great engine, hidden beneath the floor, chuffed out heat. The bed was made with stiff white linen; the eiderdown was plump and purple, shining and silky, the kind of quilt a Papal legate might have. On the wall, cabbage roses bloomed; blue roses, the white space between them pickled a yellow-brown by the tobacco smoke of previous guests. There was a washbasin in the corner, behind a screen, and upon it a cold cake of green soap, and by it a white towel, with the hotel’s initials sewn on it in a florid scarlet script.

“Must I take my other clothes off too?” the girl said.

When Roisin O’Halloran lay at last beneath the bedsheets, her naked body rigid in their glacial embrace, her thoughts were of her own ineptitude, of how easily everything could have gone awry. Fludd had been wearing, when she met him at the station, a suit made of tweed, and so when the passengers came off the train from Fetherhoughton she had failed to see him, because she was looking for clerical black. She had not told him this, nor how she had panicked in the moment before he hurried up to her and kissed her cheek and took the bag from her hand. The mistake seemed to add a further dimension to her foolishness; was there ever a woman in the history of the world who ran off with a man she could not recognize?

Now Fludd undressed modestly, his back turned to her. She watched him take his handkerchief from his pocket and lay it on the dressing table, like a white nest—into which he dropped his small change. She thought, I am seeing what other women see every day. Then he had gestured to her—his torso transparently white, like a saint’s robe—that she should turn back the covers for him and switch off the lamp. Reduced to a dim outline, he shed the rest of his clothes, and they fell on to the floor, beside hers. Gliding over the Axminster without a sound, he arrived at the bed.

When she reached out, and folded her arms around his body, she felt that she was closing them on air. Her eyes opened wide, her lips pressed together in fear of pain, she fell back against the pillows, her neck outstretched. She turned her head and watched the wall, the curtain, their shadows moving across the wall. Every possession is a loss, Fludd said. But equally, every loss is a possession.

Later, while she slept, her cropped head buried deep in the feather pillow, Fludd slipped from the bed and stood watching her, and listening to the sounds of the city at night. He heard the mournful shunting and the calls of trains, the feet of night porters on the stairs, the singing of a drunk in St. Peter’s Square: he heard ragged breathing from a hundred rooms, the Morse chattering of ships at sea, the creak and scrape of the pivot as angels turned the earth. He splashed water on his face and rubbed it with the white towel; then he crawled back into the bed beside her, and fell asleep as his eyes closed, overcome by the power of his dreams.

The next day, Roisin O’Halloran didn’t want to go out. She was ashamed of her clothes, and of her hair too, without the checked headscarf. Fludd said he would take her to a department store and she could get something in the fashion, but she hardly felt she could face a saleswoman; they would trick her out of her money, she felt, turn her out in some clownish way.

For years she had never thought of her body; swathed inside her habit, it seemed to have developed its own secret way of life. You put one foot in front of the other and that was how you walked. You rolled, you shambled, the habit hiding your gait. You got along as best you might; but now you must study moving. Last night she had caught a glimpse of women in the hotel corridors, stepping along on bird-like legs. They were alive with a contained tension, their eyes smiling under painted brows; in the echoing cathedral nave of the foyer, they pulled on gloves with tiny pecking movements of their fingers. They snapped open their handbags and fumbled inside them, and took out little handkerchiefs, and powder compacts.

“I ought to have all that,” she said, incredulous. “Lipsticks.”

“And scent,” Fludd said.

“Face-powder.”

“Furs,” Fludd said.

He tried to coax her out of the room, out of the bed; but she sat up against the pillows, with the linen sheets, which had crackled with starch last night and now felt limp and damp, pulled up to her chin. She could not explain to him that she felt that she already had new clothes, that with the loss of her virginity she had put on another skin. People say, “loss,” she reflected, but they do not know what innocence is like. Innocence is a bleeding wound without a bandage, a wound that opens with every casual knock from casual passers-by. Experience is armour; and she felt already clad.

She had woken at five, the convent hour, and found herself ravenously hungry. She had to contain and soothe her hunger in the dark, lying beside Fludd’s sleeping form. She could not see him breathe; sometimes she leant over him to see if he were dead.

At seven o’clock Fludd woke up. He ordered breakfast to be sent to their room. She pulled the sheets over her head and hid when the knock came at the door, and for minutes afterwards she cowered there in case the hotel person should have forgotten something and come back again. Fludd plied the EPNS teapot; she heard the little clink the china made, when cup was set on saucer. “Sit up,” he said. “Here is an egg for you.”

She had it on her knees, on a tray. She had never had breakfast in bed before, but she had read about it in books. It seemed a dangerous business, keeping the tray wedged just so between ribs and navel, not breathing too much, not moving your legs. Fludd picked up sugar lumps in little tongs, and dropped them into her tea, and stirred it for her; each cup and saucer had its own spoon.

“Just try it,” Fludd urged, as she half-sat, half-lay looking dubiously at what was put before her. “Let me butter some toast for you, and you can have marmalade too. Eat up your egg, it will make you strong.”

She took up her cutlery; hesitated. “Which is the better side of the egg to cut into, do you think?”

“It’s a matter of personal preference.”

“But which do you think?” she persisted.

“Doesn’t matter what I think. You must do as you like. There’s no rule, you see.”

“At the convent we didn’t get eggs. We got porridge.”

“You must have had eggs at home. In Ireland. I thought you were from off a farm.”

“We had eggs on the farm, yes, but not to eat. To sell. At least,” she added, after some thought, “we did eat them sometimes, but not so often that you worked out your own way of going on.”

Fludd’s egg was already pithed, demolished. She hadn’t seen him open it up, much less eat it, and yet she could swear that for five minutes she hadn’t taken her eyes from his face.

Later they needed more food. When she unpacked her Gladstone bag she realized that Sister Anthony had secreted, in the folds of Sister Polycarp’s sailor dress, a number of small, gritty buns. She thought they might subsist on these, but Fludd had other ideas.

He sent downstairs again. A large oval plate came, with a doily on it, with very small sandwiches with the crusts cut off; and there was another plate, which had buns with frosted icing, some white and some pink, topped with angelica leaves and tiny candied flowers.

The day passed. She was tired, so tired. Fludd took the trays away, and she leant back against the pillows. All the weariness of her convent years, all the weariness of her early-rising childhood, seemed to visit her at once, like a tribe of unexpected relatives. “I could drink sleep,” she said, “I could eat it, I could roll around in my dreams like a pig in mud.” When she was awake, they talked, in a desultory way; she told him her childhood, but he did not tell her his. Later, he telephoned for wine. Money seemed no problem to Fludd.

And the wine—a sweetish, straw-coloured wine, the first she had tasted—went to her head. She closed her eyes for a moment and allowed herself to think of next day. Fludd said it would be all right about her hair, that if she liked he would go himself to Paulden’s on Market Street and buy her a silk scarf, which they would arrange around her head in some artistic way; or if she preferred, he said, some kind of smart toque. But she did not know what was a toque; she kept silent on the matter.

When she opened her eyes again, Fludd was standing by the window, looking down into the street. People were on their way home from work, he said, hurrying to Exchange Station and to Victoria. It was raining, he said, and the people were packed on the pavements under their bobbing umbrellas, like lines of black beetles on the march.

Fludd stood watching them, leaning with his outstretched arm propping the wall. His head drooped on to his arm, and he nuzzled it with his forehead and cheek, like a cat against a sofa. “I feel trapped, in this room,” he said. “Tomorrow we must certainly go out.”

But it is only one day, she wanted to protest. Twenty-seven hours ago, she had been in the convent parlour, dressing herself under the directions of Sister Anthony. Twenty-four hours ago—perhaps a little less—they had entered this room. Elsewhere, life went on as before; bells rang, the convent kept its hours. Whatever had Purpit said, when she returned from her parish visits and found her gone? Had she known at once, or was it at chapel she had missed her, or at the evening soup collation? Had the others made some excuse, to hide her absence as long as possible? Had they lied for her? Had they imperilled their immortal souls?

She twisted Miss Dempsey’s paper ring round and round on her finger. It really was a skilful construction. Already, when she thought about it, Purpit’s face was growing dim: as if time and experience had consumed her, burnt her like a wax doll.

Presently Fludd, tired of watching the office workers, rejoined her in the bed.

Miss Dempsey, that little smile still hovering about her lips, brought in the tea-tray. In Fetherhoughton, of course, the weather was worse than in town. The bishop sat blocking the fire, looking chilly and shrunken, a shadow of himself.

He had not been into the church yet; he was not pious, except upon provocation. When he did go in, he would simply leap to the conclusion that his orders had been ignored. The statues, upon their plinths, were as good as new, each one with its iron circle of candles; for the Children of Mary had washed them down, buffed and polished them, and made good any minor damage with their paintbrushes.

Father Angwin toyed with a bourbon biscuit. What will you say, Aidan Raphael Croucher, when you conclude your fiat has been ignored? If you are wise, and do not want your former opinions blazoned about the diocese, you will smile at me politely and say nothing. And in the future, you will deal more respectfully with me.

“Absconded,” the bishop said, in a flat voice. “Dear, oh dear. Modern manners.”

“Absconded, perhaps. Or done away with.”

“Oh, dear God,” said the bishop. “Do you tell me?” He could see repercussions from this.

“I am expecting the police, tomorrow at first light, to dig about the grounds. An Inspector was here. He walked about behind the garage and saw a place where the ground had been disturbed.”

“Is it possible?” The bishop’s hand trembled; his tea slopped over into his saucer. “Who would want to do away with a nun?”

“Suspicion would fall upon the people from Netherhoughton,” Father Angwin said, “seeking a virgin for their rites.”

He recalled the parishioner who, with trembling hand, had come to him after early Mass, and handed him a brown paper bag. In that bag was a part of Fludd’s vestments—his stole, found tied to a fence post on the allotments. Rumours of the curate’s disappearance were already about the parish, and there were those who had opined, when dawn broke over the hen-houses, and in the early light the silken streamer became visible from Back Lane, that he had placed it there as a flag of distress; others, quicker to conclude against their neighbours, believed that a drunken and cannibalistic raiding party from the Old Oak and the Ram had carried off the young man in the small hours from the unfortified presbytery, and now flew his stole as a banner of triumph.

Father Angwin was perfectly confident that nothing ill had befallen Fludd, but he could not say so; for then he would be obliged to account for him, produce him. But he had tried to assuage the parish’s fears, earlier that day, by encouraging the rationalist tendency; and by laying the blame for any malfeasance in the district at the door of a certain stranger, who had been about the place unremarked until, the railwaymen said, he had turned up at the station at six o’clock yesterday evening and purchased a single ticket to town. The railwaymen remembered the stranger’s tweed suit; but as for his features, they were not able to give even the vaguest information.

But thankfully, the bishop had not yet mentioned Fludd. He was preoccupied with convent affairs. “Please God she may be discovered safe and sound,” he said. “She can be brought back if we can discover her. We could put out some story about amnesia. It would prevent the giving of scandal.”

“The Protestants will make hay with it,” Father Angwin remarked.

“You sit there, Father, and look so cool,” the bishop burst out. He slammed his cup and saucer down onto the table, spilling some tea over Agnes’s red chenille cloth. “You look so cool, after telling me a professed sister has run off from the convent, that Mother Perpetua has burst into flames while on her parish visits—tell me, what did she say, she must have said something before they took her away, you do not have a nun, and a convent superior at that, just suddenly set on fire!”

Father Angwin picked a crumb from his knee, fastidious, making no immediate reply. He remembered how a wondering Sister Anthony had brought the news: “Mother Purpit has burnt up, wart and all.” The bishop, he noticed, washed his fists together in an agitated way, right hand in left palm, then left hand in right.

“She was in no condition for much conversation,” he said. “The stretcher-bearers said she mumbled something about a low blue flame, creeping towards her over the grass … They could make nothing of it.”

“She must be questioned at the hospital.”

“They say she is not fit. Agnes telephoned this morning and they said she had spent a comfortable night. That is what hospitals say, Agnes tells me, when you are nearly dead. I spoke to the ward sister myself and they said that she was not much disfigured but that she had had a shock. They couldn’t think when she would be able to explain events. I think you underestimate, Aidan, the seriousness of the conflagration. As you know, she was only put out by the good offices of a passing tobacconist.”

“The tobacconist must be questioned. He is a Catholic, you say?”

“A prominent parishioner. Very active in the Men’s Fellowship.”

“Oh dear, dear,” said the bishop again. “What a mercy he was passing. It is a bad business, this, Angwin, it is a very bad business. It looks very bad, and it all comes back on me.”

“Do you think it was a diabolic manifestation?” Angwin asked.

“Tosh,” the bishop replied, with a flash of spirit.

Angwin gave him a warning look. “Nuns have had their troubles in that line,” he said. “Demons threw St. Catherine of Siena into the fire many a time. They pulled her off her horse and tipped her into a freezing river head first. Sister Mary Angelica, a nun from Evreux, was followed for two years by a devil in the form of a green scaly dog.” He paused, enjoying the effect he was making. “A Mother Agnes, a Dominican, was attacked by the devil in the form of a pack of wolves. St. Margaret Mary had her seat pulled from under her as she sat before the convent fire. Three other nuns testified in writing that they saw the holy person repeatedly and by supernatural forces dumped on her backside.”

“There must be some other explanation,” the bishop said pathetically.

“You mean a more modern explanation? A more relevant one? Some ecumenical kind of a reason why it occurred?”

“Do not torment me, Angwin,” the bishop wailed. “I am a man sorely tried. I feel there must have been some chemical reaction that caused it.”

“The devil is a great chemist,” Angwin said.

“Of course there are cases of it, people bursting into flames, though I have never heard of it in a nun. There is a case of it in one of the novels of Dickens, is there not? And that fellow has written a study of it, what do you call him, the fellow with the deerstalker and the violin?”

“I think perhaps you mean Mr. Arthur Conan Doyle,” Father Angwin said. “I did not know you read such sensational stuff. More tea?”

“They call it spontaneous combustion,” the bishop said. He looked wild-eyed at the thought.

“Combustion, certainly,” Father Angwin agreed. Personally he doubted the spontaneity of it; he had doubted it at once, when he learnt that McEvoy was on the scene. It is a wise man, he thought, who can tell the firefighter from the arsonist.

In his room at the Royal and Northwestern, while women in cocktail dresses tripped downstairs to drink gin in the tomb-like bar, Fludd turned over in bed. Roisin O‘Halloran stirred herself from her doze. She reached out, trailing her fingertips across his chest, and switched on the bedside lamp. It was eight o’clock. They had not drawn the curtains, and a streetlamp shone in, lending a parched, sub-lunary whiteness to the room; the lamp’s silk fringe cast a pattern of massive loops onto the wall by the wardrobe.

She sat up. She was beginning to feel a stiffness in the muscles of her inner thighs. Fludd said that they were muscles she had not used before. He said she should go along the corridor and take a hot bath, and put in perfumed bath oil, and revel in the steam and heat and spotless white tiles.

He rolled on to his back now; his eyes were open, looking into the darkness. “It must be time for dinner,” he said. “We could go down.”

“Yes,” she said. Suddenly—perhaps it had happened in her last bout of sleep—she had stopped caring so much about her clothes, her hair, the inadequacies her new life exposed to view. She sat up, and now that she had stopped caring, let the sheets fall away. Her throat and the fine skin of her chest were mottled and glowing, and she brushed a hand across her breasts, which had begun to ache. How heavy they were; she cupped them for a moment. “I must have a brassiere,” she said. “Tomorrow.”

“For tonight you must do without,” Fludd said. “I suppose if I were a man of great ardour I would suggest that we stay here for the rest of the night, but they are said to have French food in this place, and I should like to eat some. You will come, won’t you?”

“Yes.” She leant over to put on her lamp, and sat huddled in the wreck of the bed, her ankles crossed and her knees drawn up to her chest. “Before we get up,” she said, “read my palm again. You saw a star on it, didn’t you? Will you look for it again?”

“It is too dim in here,” said Fludd.

“Later then?”

“Perhaps. Downstairs.”

The bishop seemed to have got paralysed. He sat in silence, looking into the fire, as if he were wondering about its nature. Father Angwin did not know whether he ought to get Agnes to cook something for them both. He wondered what she had bought that day when she went Upstreet, and indeed whether, considering that Upstreet hummed with rumour and speculation, she had remembered to buy anything at all.

“We might have a little something,” he suggested to the bishop. “I could ask my housekeeper to see about it. Whatever she has got, there should be ample for both of us. Father Fludd cannot join us, I’m afraid, he is dining elsewhere tonight.”

He had got excuses ready, to cover for his curate’s disappearance: Fludd has been bidden forth by a member of the Men’s Fellowship, whose sister is visiting from the country and has brought a rabbit for a pie. Better still: Father Fludd has been invited to a funeral tea. He is out comforting the bereaved, and they will be having cold boiled ham.

The bishop looked up. “Fludd?” he said. “Who is Fludd? I know nothing of Fludd.”

Father Angwin heard what the bishop said. He did not answer. It was a moment before the implications came home to him. He sat very still. He was not surprised, when he thought about it: he was not surprised at all.

What was it the angel said, when he explained himself to Tobias? “I seemed indeed to eat and drink with you; but I use an invisible meat and drink, which cannot be seen by men.”

The waiter put a damask napkin in her lap; it was as large as a small tablecloth. She wore the little white muslin dress, with the sailor collar; Fludd had helped her into it, and told her she looked pretty, and now, old-fashioned as it was, its airy summer skirt caressed her calves beneath the table. And the bodice was decent, she thought. Not that she much cared.

A second waiter lit a candle on the table; others moved in the shadows, pushing trolleys and pulling out diners’ chairs. The waiters had stiff white jackets buttoned over their hollow chests, and their faces were the ancient, sharp faces of juvenile delinquents.

“In my former life,” Fludd said, “I never had much to do with women. Now I see what I was missing.”

“What do you mean, your former life? Do you mean when you were impersonating a doctor?”

Fludd looked up, a piece of fruit he called melon speared on his fork and poised in the air.

“Who told you I did that?”

“You. You as good as told me.”

“You don’t understand an analogy, do you?”

“No.” She looked down at her plate, ashamed. She could make nothing of the melon; it tasted to her like sucked fingers, flesh dissolved in water. “I like everything to be just what it is, I suppose. That’s why I hated it when I had the stigmata. I didn’t understand it. Nobody had crucified me. I didn’t understand why I had to have it at all.”

“Don’t talk about that,” Fludd said. “That’s all over and done with now. You’re going to get a fresh start.”

The waiter came and took their plates away. “My palm,” the girl said. “You’re forgetting. You said you’d read it, if I’d come down.”

She held it out under the candle. “Once is enough,” Fludd said.

“No, tell me again. I didn’t listen properly the first time. I want to know my destiny.”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“I thought it was written in my lines. I thought you believed in it.”

“Patterns can alter,” Fludd said. “A soul is a thing in a state of flux. Your fate is mutable. Your will is free.” He reached across the table and tapped once with his forefinger, urgently, in the palm of her hand. “Roisin O’Halloran, listen to me now. It is true that, in a way, I can tell the future. But not in the way you think. I can make you a map. I can indicate to you a choice of turnings. But I cannot travel the route on your behalf.”

She dropped her head. “Are you afraid?” Fludd said.

“Yes.”

“Good. That’s the way it should be. Nothing is achieved without proper fear.” Her mouth trembled. “You don’t understand,” he said tiredly.

“Help me then.” Her eyes pleaded: animal eyes. “I don’t know who you are. I don’t know where you come from. I don’t know where you might take me.”

At other tables, the sated diners rose and cast down their napkins to the seats of their red plush chairs. Businessmen, their deals concluded, offered each other a toast. Crystal clinked on crystal; wine flowed, dark as Our Saviour’s blood. Fludd opened his mouth to speak, began, and broke off. His throat ached with pity. “I should like to tell you,” he said at last. “For my own reasons, I cannot.”

“What kind of reasons?”

“You might say, professional ones.”

Because in the work of transformation, there are conditions of success. The art requires the whole man; and besides the alembics and retorts, the furnace and the charcoal, there must be knowledge and faith, gentle speech and good works. And then when all of these are brought together, there must be one further thing, guarantor of all the rest: there must be silence.

Fludd looked around the room, attracted the attention of the waiter, signalled that they were ready for their next course. The waiter brought other plates, and then a little spirit-burner, which he set up on their table. He whipped his white napkin around in an ostentatious way and flipped it over his arm; he seemed to be looking around, out of the corner of his eye, to see whether his colleagues were observing him.

Then some meat came along, in a sauce, and Roisin O’Halloran watched the waiter put it over the spirit-burner to warm it up for them; then he poured something over it. A moment later he set fire to the whole lot. Her cheeks burned in embarrassment for him. It was something even Sister Anthony had never managed. On the stove, yes, often: not at the very table.

But Fludd didn’t seem to mind. He looked at her steadily from behind the blaze. She supposed the meat would still be edible, and she would try to get through it: to please him.

At that moment when the blue flame leapt up between them, illuminating the starched white cloth and his dark face, tears sprang into her eyes. This is all very well, she thought, while it lasts, but it won’t last, will it, because even Hell comes to an end, and even Heaven. “Champagne,” Fludd said to the waiter. “Come on man, look lively, didn’t I order champagne?”

When she woke next morning, and the bed was empty, she cried a little; in fright and panic, like a sleepy child in a strange room. It did not surprise her that she had slept so soundly that she had not heard him go; it had been a willed, furious sleep, the kind of sleep that perhaps felons have the night before they are hanged.

She got out of bed stiffly and, naked, groped about on the dressing table. Sunlight crept around the edges of the heavy curtains. She looked about the room; she was casting around for something, but she hardly knew what.

But very soon, she found what she was looking for. Her eye fell on a paper. He had left her a letter, it seemed.

The eiderdown had fallen to the floor. Roisin O’Halloran pulled a blanket from the bed and wrapped it around her shoulders. She did not want to draw back the curtains; she switched on the lamp.

Then she took up the paper. She unfolded it. His writing was strange, black, cramped, old-fashioned, like a secret script. The letter was brief.

The gold is yours. You will find it in the drawer.

Not a word, not a word of love. Perhaps, she thought, he does not love in the ordinary way. God loves us, after all; He manifests it in cancer, cholera, Siamese twins. Not all forms of love are comprehensible, and some forms of love destroy what they touch.

She sat down on the bed with the piece of paper, holding it in both hands, as if it were some State Proclamation. She twisted her bare foot on the carpet, right and left, left and right. It was a slip of the pen, she thought, when he put “gold.”

Presently she got up, laying the note down on the pillow. She pulled open the top drawer of the tallboy, where his things had been. Now the drawer was almost empty.

But he had left her the railwayman’s kerchief, which he had torn from the fence pole as he crossed the allotments on his way to the station. “I left them something of my own,” he had said. “I did not wish to go from the parish having made no mark.”

She picked the kerchief up, shook it out. She held it to her face. It smelled of peat and of coal fires, of fog and hen-houses, of the whole year past. She folded it up and laid it on the tallboy’s polished top.

Apart from the kerchief there was nothing but a drawstring bag of grubby calico; the sort of bag the children kept their marbles in, but a good deal larger. She picked it up and felt it; it was bulky and heavy. She pulled at its mouth and stretched it open. Inside, banknotes.

Jesus, she thought, has he done some robbery? Is it spirit-money, or would they take it in the shops? She took the first sheaf out onto her lap and held it as if she were weighing it. It looked real enough. It seemed that those little sixpences that he had put into his handkerchief had multiplied. There were notes of a denomination she had never seen before.

Roisin O’Halloran emptied the bag. She turned the bundles about in her hands and riffled their edges. She did not know how much cash there might be. It would be a body’s work to count it. She felt sure that it would be enough for anything that she might want to buy.

So. She sat for a while, thinking about it. She wanted him back, yes; she imagined the hours, days, months, years, when her heart was going to ache. But leaving that aside, did she not feel remarkably consoled? After all, she would not be going begging to a farmer now. She would not be knocking on some convent door. Nobody would have to take her in and give her charity; not while this lasted, and with her frugal habits she thought it would last a great while. By the time this money runs out, she thought, I shall be somewhere else, somebody else; life will have its second chance with me.

And why indeed should it ever run out, was her next thought. This was no ordinary coin or common gold. This money is like love, she thought at once. Once you have some, once it has come into being, it can go on multiplying, each part dividing itself, doubling and doubling like the cells of an embryo.

She glanced down at her paper wedding ring. I could get a real one, she said to herself. Her spirits rose. She picked up a wad of notes and pressed it to her cheek. And they say it’s the root of all evil. Well, Protestants say that. Catholics know better.

She replaced the money, bit by bit, each sheaf nestling against its fellow; then she drew up the string and put the whole carefully into the bottom of her Gladstone bag. Then she took the letter from the pillow and folded it, and put that in too. It was quite clear, if anyone should challenge her; the gold is yours, it said.

She stood at the washbasin and watched hot water gush from the taps; she took her flannel and wetted it and squeezed it, and washed herself all over with scented soap and then let the water out, and refilled the basin, and washed herself again with water that was clear and almost cold. People live like this, she thought. Every morning they can get up and do this if they want.

She dressed herself. There was only the costume to put on. She had become used to it. After all, she thought, there are more important things to worry you than what other people think.

She made the bed; then she sat down on it and cried for five minutes. She timed it by the clock; she felt it was as much as she should be allowed. Because she had known he would leave her; she did not imagine it could have been different.

When her five minutes were up she went to the washbasin for a last time, ran a corner of the flannel under the cold tap, and bathed her eyes. She straightened up and looked at herself in the mirror. She tied on her checked headscarf; public opinion might not matter, but she told herself that it would be a pity if she were taken up and sent to an asylum. Then she drew back the curtains. A great wave of sunlight poured into the room and washed over the wardrobe and the tallboy and the newly made bed. She stepped back and looked at it in astonishment.

Then, timidly, she quit the room and crept down the corridor; past the large windows curtained with grease and soot, and then with greying net, with crimson velvet drapes restrained by gold ropes and tassels, like a cardinal’s hat in a coat of arms. She descended the wide stone staircase and approached the mahogany altar, behind which the personage stood and gave her a civil greeting. She offered to settle the bill: to which the personage, much surprised, said that the doctor had already done that. Where was the doctor, he wanted to know? Already left, she said.

Oh, I see, then we’d better have you out of here right away, Mrs. Fludd, the man said. She noticed that his manner had changed and become markedly less civil; but she simply said, mildly, that she was leaving at once, did he not see that she had her bag? Oh you could have called a porter, Madam, the personage said, you wouldn’t want to strain yourself: and when she had handed him the key and was crossing the slippery expanse of the foyer, that waste of marble like an iced lake, she heard him say to some colleague of his, well, would you credit it, Tommy, I thought I could spot one a mile off, I’ve never seen such a bloody strange-looking tart in twenty years in the hotel trade.

It was one of those days, rare in the north of England, when a pale sun picks out every black twig of a winter tree; when a ground-frost forms a gilded haze over the pavements; and great buildings, the temples of commerce, shimmer as if their walls were made of air and smoke. Then the city casts off its grim arctic character, and its denizens their sourness and thrift; the grace of affability dawns on their meagre features, as if the pale sun had warmth in it, and power to kindle hearts. Then office workers long to hear Mozart, and eat Viennese pastries, and drink coffee scented with figs. Cleaning women hum behind their mops, and click their stout heels like flamenco dancers. Canaletto pauses on Blackfriars Bridge to take a perspective; gondoliers ply their trade on the Manchester Ship Canal.

Roisin O’Halloran hurried to the station. She passed under the great advertisers’ hoardings that wound their way up London Road, and if anyone noticed her blue serge suit and her black plimsolls, they took them as part of the novelty of the day. Her eyes stung and her cheeks burned; but it was an exhilarating cold, and everything about her—the gilded pavements, the faces of Mancunians, the coloured pictures above her head—seemed to her to have been freshly created—made overnight, manufactured by some new and ingenious process that left them clean and hard-edged and resplendent, faces immaculate, hoardings immaculate, pavements without a stain. I could go anywhere, she thought. Back to Ireland. On a boat. If I liked. Or not.

When she entered London Road Station, its clamorous darkness full of smoke and steam, its railway noises breaking like waves against the roof, she put her bag down carefully, between her feet, and looked up at the destination boards. Then she picked one out.

Father Angwin woke late; Miss Dempsey brought him tea in bed, the first time in all their years together that she had ever done such a thing. The Children of Mary would be scandalized, she thought, if they knew I was in a priest’s bedroom while the priest was in his bed. Perhaps I would be drummed out, and disgraced for ever.

Anyway, it would prepare him to face what the day must bring: questions, circumventions, realizations. The time will come, she thought, when we will look back on what has occurred and account it an Age of Miracles. She touched the spot where her wart used to be; these last two days, whenever she passed a looking-glass-and she had plans to hang many more—she would pause, and gaze at herself, and smile.

Meanwhile there were the police to be dealt with. At nine o’clock the Chief Constable came in person. He was a modern policeman, fresh-faced and cold-eyed, and he liked nothing better than to tear around the county in his big black car.