Fludd

by Hilary Mantel

  Miss Dempsey moved away from the door. The bishop came out into the hall and gave her a piercing look. She wiped her hands nervously on her pinny and knelt on the floor. “May I kiss the ring, M’lud?”

  “Oh, get away, woman. Get into the kitchen. Contribute something practical, will you?”

  “The bishop cannot abide the piety of the ignorant,” Father Angwin said.

  Miss Dempsey got painfully to her feet. Two strides carried the bishop through the hall, a thrust of his arms carried him into his cape, and he threw open the front door, tussling on the path with the damp, windy day. “Summer’s over,” he observed. “Not that you see much of it at this end of the diocese.”

  “Allow me to attend you into your princely vehicle,” Father Angwin said. He had bowed his shoulders, and adopted a servile tone.

  “That will do,” the bishop said. He eased himself into the driver’s seat, grunting a little. He knew that Angwin was mad, but he did not want a scandal in the diocese. “I shall visit you again,” he said, “when you least expect it. To see that everything has been done.”

  “Okey-dokey” Father Angwin said. “I’ll prepare the boiling oil for you.”

  The bishop roared away, with a clashing and meshing of gears; around the next bend the schoolchildren brought him to a halt, processing out of the gate to the Nissen hut for their dinners. The bishop put his fist on his horn and blew out two long blasts at the mites, scattering them into the ditch. They crawled out and stared after him, wet leaves sticking to their bare knees.

  In Father Angwin’s parlour the tinny little mantel-clock struck twelve. “Too late,” Agnes Dempsey said, in a discouraged tone. “Only, Father, I was thinking to cheer you up. If you pray to St. Anne before twelve o’clock on a Wednesday, you’ll get a pleasant surprise before the end of the week.”

  Father Angwin shook his head. “Tuesday, Agnes my lamb. Not Wednesday. We have to be exact in these matters.”

  Her invisible eyebrows rose a fraction. “So that’s why it has never worked. But there’s another thing, Father—I must alert you. I can hear a person walking about upstairs, when nobody is there.”

  Nervously, she put her hand up to her mouth and touched the pale flat wart.

  “Yes, it happens,” Father Angwin said. He sat on a hard chair at the dining table, huddled into himself, his rust-coloured head bowed. “I often think it is myself.”

  “But you are here.”

  “At this moment, yes. Perhaps it is a forerunner. Someone who is to come.”

  “The Lord?” Miss Dempsey asked wildly.

  “The curate. I am threatened with a curate. What a very extraordinary curate that would be … a walker without feet, a melter through walls. But no. Probably not.” He forced himself to sit up straighter. “I expect the bishop will send some ordinary spy. Just with ordinary powers.”

  “A sycophant.”

  “Just so.”

  “What will you do with the statues, Father? You know the garage has not got a roof, in the proper meaning of the word. They would be exposed to the damp. They would get mould. It hardly seems right.”

  “You think we should treat them with reverence, Agnes. You think they are not just lumps of paint and plaster.”

  “All my life,” Agnes said impressively, “all my life, Father, I have known those statues. I cannot think how we will find our way around the church without them. It will be like some big filthy barn.”

  “Have you any ideas?”

  “They could be boarded out. With different people. The Children of Mary would take St. Agatha, turn and turn about. We would need a van, mind. She couldn’t fit in your car.”

  “But they would get tired of her, Agnes. Suppose one of them got a husband? He might not like its presence in the house. And then, you know, people in Fetherhoughton have so little room. I’m afraid it would not be a permanent solution.”

  Miss Dempsey looked stubborn. “They ought to be preserved. In case of a change of bishop.”

  “No. I’m afraid they will never be wanted again. We are asking for time to run backwards. The bishop is right about so many things, but I wish he would stick to his politics and keep out of religion.”

  “Then what’s to be done?” Miss Dempsey put up her hand, and wavered, then touched her wart. “They’re like people, to me. They’re like my relatives. I wouldn’t put my relatives in a garage.”

  “Faith is dead,” Father Angwin said. “Its time is up. And faith being dead, if we are not to become automatons we must hang on to our superstitions as hard as we may.” He looked up. “You’re quite right, Agnes. It isn’t proper to put them in a garage like old lumber, and I’ll not farm them out around the parish and have them left on street corners. We’ll keep them together. And somewhere we know where they are. We’ll bury them. That’s what we’ll do. We’ll bury them in the church grounds.”

  “Oh, dear God.” Tears of fright and fury sprang into Agnes’s eyes. “Forgive me, Father, but there’s something inexpressibly horrible about the idea.”

  “I shan’t have a service,” Father Angwin said. “Just an interment.”

  You could not say that in Fetherhoughton there was a bush telegraph, for in that place, scoured as it was by Siberian winds, you could not find a bush. Nevertheless, by the time the schoolchildren were released next day for their morning break, everyone had heard of the developments.

  St. Thomas Aquinas School had been, in their grandparents’ time, one long schoolroom; but the rowdyism and ill-behaviour of successive generations had rendered this hugger-mugger sort of education impossible, and now flimsy partitioning divided one age of children from the next. Of course, when the school had been founded, great girls and boys of twelve years old were recognized to have no more need of arithmetic and improving verses, and were launched on the world to begin their adult careers among the textile machines. But now civilization had advanced so far that fifteen-year-olds occupied the Top Class, towering over Mother Perpetua, who was the headmistress, and who was responsible for keeping this Top Class from the excesses of frustrated youth.

  And yet it was not youth as we know it, because Youth, elsewhere, was in the process of being invented. A faint intimation of it reached Fetherhoughton; the boys of fifteen slicked their hair greasily over their knobbly foreheads, and sometimes, like people suffering from a nervous disease and beset by uncontrollable tics, they would make claws of their hands and strum them repetitiously across their bellies. Mother Perpetua called it “imitating skiffle groups.” It was a punishable offence.

  These boys were undergrown youths, their faces burnt from kicking footballs into the moorland wind. They were vague and heedless, and their childhoods hung about them. The narrow backs of their necks showed it, and their comic papers, and their sudden indecorous bursts of high spirits—indecorous, because high spirits are a foolish waste in those destined for the chain gang of marriage and the mill.

  But in the Big Girls there was no vestige of childhood left. The Big Girls wore cardigans, and at playtime they skulked together in a knot by the wall, their faces moody, spreading scandal. They clasped their arms across their chests, hands hugging woollen upper arms: podgy hands, and low-slung bosoms like their grandmothers. Their cheap clothes were often small for them, and it was this that gave them their indecent womanliness; it was a rule, in the outside world, that girls stopped growing at about this age, but if you had seen the Big Girls of Fetherhoughton you would say, they will never stop growing, they will devour the world. The schoolroom chairs creaked under their bottoms; from time to time, nodding forward, swaying, and raucous, rhythmic, terrible, they would laugh: hehr, hehr, hehr.

  The girls had learnt nothing; or if they had, they had forgotten it, immediately and as a matter of policy. The school was a House of Detention to them. Many of them suffered poor sight, and had done from their early years; the school nurse came, with letters on cards, and tested their eyes, and the State gave them spectacles. But they would not wear them. “Men seldo
m make passes at girls who wear glasses.” But no one will make passes at them anyway. The process by which they will eventually mate and reproduce is invisible and had better remain so. They may as well have their astigmatism corrected, for all the sexual success it will bring them.

  While the Big Girls leant by the wall, and while the big boys with their footballs tacked across the square of asphalt, the juniors of Fetherhoughton, red in tooth and claw, occupied themselves in games of tag, in hopscotch, and skipping games. Their games were played in a fever of intolerance, an agony to those who could not hop or skip; as for tag, it was their habit to pick on some poor child more than usually ragged, or stupid, or scrofulous, and to bawl out his name and declare you had his “touch” and must pass it on. Of those not caught up in these games, a number occupied themselves in jumping, time after time, from the low wall that divided the upper level of the playground from the lower; others started fights. The level of disorder, the incidence of injury, was so high that Mother Perpetua was obliged to segregate the infant class from the rest of the school at playtime, and corral them in a cobbled, evil-smelling yard at the back of the building; it was here, under the shadow of a moss-covered wall some twenty feet in height, that the school had its privies. It will not do to call them lavatories, for there was no provision to wash. To wash would have been thought an affectation.

  Above the school the ground banked steeply, towards the convent and the church; below, it fell away to the village. The dismal wooded slopes that flanked the carriage-drive were referred to by local people as “the terraces.” From the wall at the lower end of the playground the children looked down on tree-tops; behind the school, above the towering wall that fenced the infants in, they could see the gnarled and homeless and jutting roots of other trees, thrust out from the hillside and growing into air. These terraces were lightless places, without footholds, and it was a peculiarity of their trees that they bore foliage only at the very top, so that below the green canopy there twisted a mile of black branches, like a witch’s knitting. Autumn came early; and underfoot, at every season of the year, there was a sunless mulch of dead leaves.

  On this particular day, the playground was more than usually animated; the children surged into knots and unravelled themselves again, and streamed wailing across the asphalt, and banked up against the low dividing wall. “St. Hippo,” they shouted, and “St. Beehive”; they made their arms into the wings of bombers, and wheeled and dived, and made the snarling whining noise of engines and the crunch of impact and the whoosh of flames.

  Mother Perpetua watched them from the school door. She watched for a minute or two, and then with a swift rustle passed back into the shadows, and re-emerged with her cane. She lifted her habit four inches, and thrust out her laced black shoes and strode; then she was amongst the children, arm uplifted, her great deep sleeve falling back to reveal underlayers of black wool. “In, in, in,” cried Mother Perpetua, “get in with you, get in.” Her cane rose and fell across the children’s fraying jerseys. Howling, they dispersed. A bell rang; mouths agape, they ran into little lines, and sniffled back into their classrooms. Mother Perpetua watched them in, until the playground was empty; a damp wind picked at her skirts. She tucked the cane under her arm, and marched out of the school gates, and up the road to see Father Angwin. As she passed the convent she scanned its windows for signs of life, but could see none: could see nothing to displease her.

  Quite unable to grasp her name, the local people had always called her Mother Purpiture; the more irreverent schoolchildren called her Old Ma Purpit, and it was some years since Father Angwin himself had thought of her by any other name. Purpit was a stumpy woman, of middle years—it is not proper to speculate about the exact age of nuns. Her skin was pale and rather spongy, her nose of the fleshy sort; she had a hoarse flirtatious laugh, and with this laugh, a way of flicking a corner of her veil back over her left shoulder; she had tombstone teeth.

  Miss Dempsey brought her in, doing the office of a maid, her hands clasped before her at about the bottom button of her twin-set. “Mother Purpiture,” she announced, grave and respectful. Father Angwin was not reading his breviary, but he at once picked it up, defensively, from the table beside him. Agnes took a little pace back to admit the nun and stood uneasily fingering her artificial pearls, her mouth turned down at the corners. “Will you be wanting tea?” she exhaled; and let her eyes travel from side to side. Without an answer, she effaced herself; slid behind Mother Perpetua, and left the room backwards.

  Perpetua took a gay little step, arching her instep in the lace-up shoes. “Ah, but I’m interrupting you,” she said.

  I hope Agnes does not bring in tea, Father Angwin thought. I hope she does not take that upon herself. It would be encouraging Purpit. “Take a seat?” he said. But Purpit continued her dance.

  “Can I believe the evidence of my ears?” she asked. “Is it true that the bishop wants the statues disposed of?”

  “It is true.”

  “I always thought the church was cluttered. Not that it is for me to say.”

  “Not that it is for you to say,” Father Angwin muttered.

  Purpit flicked her veil back over her shoulder. “Do I also hear right? That you mean to bury them? Because what do you want, Father? Do you mean to have the village up here with wreaths? Or do you mean the congregation should just go on as normal and pretend that they are not buried and light their candles round the graves?”

  “It is you who say, graves. I have not said any other than ‘holes.’ It is not a ceremony. It is not a rite. It is a measure.” Hearing himself say this, Father Angwin found himself consoled a little. “A measure” gave it distance, gave it dignity, gave it an air of calculation.

  “And when do you intend taking this measure?”

  “I thought of Saturday. To have the services of the Men’s Fellowship.”

  “Well, and I can lend you Sister Philomena. A fine strong girl. She can dig. A true daughter of the Irish soil.”

  “Oirish,” she said; it was her little joke. You cannot expect much of the humour of nuns. Purpit gave her hoarse horse laugh, and flicked her veil again. “I hear you’re threatened with a curate,” she said.

  Father Angwin noted her choice of word. He looked up. Between Mother Perpetua’s two front teeth there was a gap; not an uncommon thing, but Father Angwin found that it attracted his eye. He thought of Mother Perpetua as a cannibal; and through that gap, in his imagination, she pulled and sucked the more tender bits of her victims. “Well, you never know,” the nun said. “Fresh blood.”

  The Saturday following was the day that Father Angwin had marked out for the interment; and he had chosen dusk, to draw a veil of decency over the indecent. The weather had cleared, and the declining sun gold-tipped the battlements; in the damp, moss-scented air, house-martins dipped and wheeled over the presbytery.

  The Men’s Fellowship, when they were assembled in their ancient and greeny-black suits, wore an aspect of mourning. “I don’t know,” Father Angwin said, “but would not corduroys have been more suitable?” In all his years in the parish he had not reconciled himself to the strange and hybrid character of the place. He knew in his heart that they were clerks and millhands, that they had no corduroys, no woollen shirts, no rustic boots.

  The married men, on the whole, eschewed the Fellowship. They came to church but once a year, and that at Easter or thereabouts; they left such business to their wives. But there were many bachelors in the parish, men of middle years for the most part, desiccated through abstinence and yellow through long devotion; clerics manqués, but most of them too humble or stupid to put themselves forward as candidates for ordination. The smell of mould arose from the speckled shoulders of their jackets, and, being hung about with holy medals, they clanked as they walked. Some of them, as he knew from the confessional, practised austerities: meagre diets, the denial of tobacco. He suspected much else: hair shirts, knotted-string scourges. Only supernumerary devotions could kindle their dull
eyes. Each lived for the day when he might help an elderly nun across the road, or be nodded to by a monsignor.

  The ground had been professionally prepared, for Father Angwin was not about to overtax or overestimate his crew. The grave-digger and his assistant had been called in from the cemetery that St. Thomas Aquinas shared with the neighbouring parish; the Fetherhoughtonians did not merit a facility of their own. There had been a discussion (heated) in the church porch, and eventually, and after money had changed hands, the two craftsmen had seen the logic of the priest’s case. True, they were not employed to dig holes; it was not their vocation, it did not agree with them. For that he might better have employed, as one of them pointed out, a landscape gardener. But given that the holes were grave-shaped, it might be seen as trespassing on their speciality should he retain some other professional; and the holes need not be so deep as graves, so the work would be easy. They had conceded the point, and excavated the ground behind the garage.

  When Father Angwin saw the holes, he clasped his arms across his chest, hugging behind his soutane a nameless, floating anxiety; what he saw was a graveyard prepared for some coming massacre or atrocity, and he said to himself, as clever children always say, if God knows our ends, why cannot he prevent them, why is the world so full of malice and cruelty, why did God make it at all and give us free will if he knows already that some of us will destroy ourselves in exercising it? Then he remembered that he did not believe in God, and he went into the church to supervise the removal of the statues from their plinths.

  Father Angwin had himself a good knowledge of the principles of levers and pulleys, but it was Sister Philomena who, by example, spurred the Men’s Fellowship on to the effort needed. By the time the statues were out of doors, and the men had coiled their ropes and picked up their shovels, the scent of her skin had seeped to them through her heavy black habit, and they edged away, their celibate frames shaken by what they did not understand. She was a big, healthy girl, in her woollen stockings. You were conscious of the smell of soap from her skin, of her eyebrows, and of her feet, and of other parts you do not notice on nuns. It was possible to think of her having knees.