Miss Dempsey tiptoed away.
The curate moved his hand over the tablecloth, in a skimming motion, sweeping the topic aside. His fingers—bloodless, pointed fingers—floated over the linen like swans on a lake of milk.
“I thought you might be one of those modern fellows,” Father Angwin said. “I thought you might have no scholarship. I was sick to think about it.”
Father Fludd looked down, with an inward modest smile, as if disclaiming any pretensions. He had been drinking too, but he was certainly not drunk; despite the hour—and it was now eleven o’clock—he was as pleasant, mild, and breezy as if it were teatime. Whenever Father Angwin looked up at him, it seemed that his whisky glass was raised to his lips, but the level of what was in it did not seem to go down; and yet from time to time the young man reached out for the bottle, and topped himself up. It had been the same with their late dinner; there were three sausages (from the Co-op butcher) on Father Fludd’s plate, and he was always cutting into one or other, and spearing a bit on his fork; he was always chewing in an unobtrusive, polite way, with his mouth shut tight. And yet there were always three sausages on his plate, until at last, quite suddenly, there were none. Father Angwin’s first thought was that Fludd had a small dog concealed about his person, in the way that starlets conceal their pooches from the customs men; he had seen this in the newspaper. But Fludd, unlike the starlets, had not got his neck sunk into a fur; and then again, Father Angwin thought, would a dog drink so much whisky?
From time to time, also, the curate leant forward and busied himself building up the fire. He was a handy type with the tongs, Father Angwin could tell. His efforts were keeping the room remarkably warm; and yet when Agnes came in, lugging a bucket of coal, she checked herself in surprise and said, “You don’t need this.”
Presently Father Angwin got up, and opened the window a crack. “It makes a change, for this house,” he said, “but it’s as hot as Hell.”
“Though far better ventilated,” said Fludd, sipping his whisky.
It’s time they had cocoa, Miss Dempsey thought. They’ll be tumbling under the table. The bishop will have chosen this toper, to lead poor Angwin on; he had a good head for drink, that was for sure, and no doubt when Angwin had passed out he would be tiptoeing into the hall and lifting the receiver on his special telephone line to His Corpulence.
And yet Miss Dempsey was not sure what to think. That look he had given her, in the hall; was it not, for all its chilling nature, a look of deep compassion? Could it be that Fludd was not a sycophant, but some innocent that the bishop wished to ruin? She felt that look still: as if her flesh had become glass.
I’ll sing again, she thought, to impress on him that if I’m given to singing it’s usually something pious. I’ll just hum as I take in this tray. She spread on the tray a white cloth with a scalloped edge, embroidered with satin-stitch pansies, which she had purchased in June at the parish Sale of Work; it looked, she thought, more pure than ocean foam. She placed the cups of cocoa upon it, and then two plates, and on each plate three Rich Tea biscuits. To Christ thy heart was given,/ The world pursued in vain …
She knocked; no reply of course, they were talking again. Its promises ne’er moved thee … She shoved open the door with her foot, and manoeuvred herself in. The heat took her aback; the fire was roaring up the chimney. She lost the thread of her verse. The curate looked up at her and smiled as she put the tray on the table, and she looked back, full into his face; this time, she thought, I must be sure and form some notion of what he looks like. She held his gaze for what length of time she could, without appearing to stare, and then bent over the hearth, touching the tiles up quite needlessly with the little gilt brush from the fireside set. She surprised herself; she usually brought in a filthy, bristly kitchen-type of brush for this job, and at the thought of anyone violating the fireside set, she would have spat.
She waited for Father Angwin to say, as he usually did, these are boring biscuits, I like Fig, I like Custard Creams; but he was entirely caught up in his conversation with the curate, his hands knotting and unknotting on the table, a flurry of agitation in his voice. “I try to tell myself that whatever evil is done is done permettio dei, with God’s sanction—”
“I understand,” said the curate gravely.
“—and certainly Augustine argues most persuasively in The City of God that though good can exist without evil, evil cannot exist without good. And yet the feeling has taken hold of me that the devil has got his independence in this world. It is he who has got the reins in his hands, I feel.”
Father Fludd stirred his cocoa judiciously. His eyes were downcast.
“I’ll come in for the tray,” Agnes said. “I like to get washed up before bedtime, Father. If there’s one thing I cannot abide it’s to see dirty pots first thing in the morning. I think it’s a habit low in the extreme.”
“I don’t know where God is,” Father Angwin said. “I don’t know that he is.”
“Drink it while it’s hot,” Agnes said to him, “and don’t get yourself worked up before bedtime.”
But Father Angwin was not listening to her. He looked through her as if he were not seeing her, and for a moment she felt an uprush of fear, like cold water on the back of her neck; what if she were really not visible, what if Father Fludd had disappeared her in some way? The next moment, her good sense reasserted itself. She went out into the hall, humming: All vain the wooer’s pleading/ All vain the judge’s ire: / One love alone thy bosom/ Inflamed with chastest fire. Was not “bosom” a rude word? But you were always getting it in hymns. Miss Dempsey had no terms at all for some sections of her anatomy; she never paid them attention. As men go to a banquet … She tried to remember what Father Fludd looked like, but the pattern of his features had been cleanly erased from her mind.
“So one morning,” Father Angwin went on, “I woke up. This was twenty years ago. It had gone in the night.”
“I see,” said Father Fludd.
“How can you explain that? I had it at night, and in the morning it had gone. I felt for the first quarter of an hour that it might come to light, in the way, you know, you might kick your slippers under the bed, or be absent-minded with your toothbrush.”
Father Fludd leant forward; they had transferred themselves now to the two armchairs, and sat at either side of the fire. “Did you apply to St. Anthony? You know he is the nonpareil for finding what is lost.”
“But how could I?” Father Angwin threw out his hands, in a large and liberal gesture of despair. “How could I, considering the nature of my loss, apply to Anthony or any other saint?”
“I suppose not,” Fludd said. “There are some losses—virginity, for instance—that St. Anthony could do nothing about; but you would not be debarred from asking him, if you were an optimist. Your situation, it seems to me, was more grave than the loss of virginity. What did you do next?”
“I looked in the wardrobe, I think. I got up—it was five o’clock, still dark—and I went and looked in the sacristy. I opened the press up and felt among the vestments. I knew there was no chance, but you can imagine how it was. I was half out of my mind with fear of the future.”
“And then?”
“I looked on the altar. It wasn’t there. It had vanished while I slept, and I had to accept the fact.” Father Angwin’s head drooped. “I had lost my faith. I no longer believed in God at all.”
“You relive the moment,” Fludd said, “as if it were yesterday. May I ask what you did next?”
Father Angwin placed his hands together, fingertip to fingertip. He considered. “It seemed to me that what I had urgent need of was some kind of survival plan, some kind of strategy. I wondered, is there a diocesan House of Detention for priests in my case? Somewhere they are put to be kept from view? After all, you cannot stop being a priest, can you? No matter how faithless or scandalous a man is, once he is a priest he is a priest for all eternity. I couldn’t abscond, could I, I couldn’t do a moonlight flit?�
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“I should say your way was plain,” Fludd said. “A man may preserve the outward form, if he lacks the inward grace.”
“Yes. So I thought, well, I have no faith, I must just pretend I have.”
“And may I venture a guess? You had a parish. It must be served. And yet you would feel—what? On shaky ground. Suppose you made a slip, gave yourself away?”
“I was a charlatan,” Father Angwin said. “A pretender. A fake. Do you know what worried me? That I would stop thinking like a priest. Stop talking like a priest. That one day some parishioner would come at me with some question—is this or that a sin, should I do that or the other—and I’d say, well, what do you think, what do you feel like doing, what does your common sense tell you?”
“Common sense has nothing to do with religion,” Father Fludd said reprovingly. “And personal opinion has little to do with sin.”
“Exactly. Just my point. I was afraid I’d forget myself, respond as any person might—appeal, as it were, to the human and not the divine. I had to safeguard myself. Against this grievous peril.”
“So did you then become scrupulous? Did you become exacting?” Fludd leant forward in his chair, his eyes alight. “Did you make a point of it to become known in the district for the strictness of your opinions, for your old-fashioned stances, for the rigidity of your views? You would not hear of any innovation, deviation: of any slight departure from the rules of Lenten fasting, say? You would not remit a jot or a tittle?”
“That is about the size of it.” Father Angwin looked morose; he slumped a little. “Any more in that bottle?”
Fludd had secreted it by his chair, it seemed. He reached down, and poured his senior a generous measure. “Wonderful,” Father Angwin murmured. “Go on now, Father Fludd. You seem to be on my trail.”
“Shall we say, for instance, that in the confessional you gave no leeway? Supposing, for instance, some woman with six children came along. What did you recommend?”
“Oh, you know, I said they must abstain.”
“What did they say to that?”
“They said, thank you, Father.”
“They were relieved?”
“The word does not convey the measure of their jubilation. The men of Fetherhoughton are not noted for romance.”
“And if they said to you, Father, I cannot abstain, for the brute insists on his pleasures?”
“I said, then there is no help for it, my dear, you must have six more.”
“I understand,” Fludd said. “Suppose as a good Catholic you meet some very particular hardship, some tiny absurdity, which, as you imagine, is making life very hard for some poor son or daughter of the Church. You think, well now, what can this matter? What can it signify, in the eternal scheme of things? I will just, in this little instance, separate my judgement from the traditions of the Church. But faith, Father Angwin, is like a wall, a big, blank, brick wall. One day, some fool comes with a hairpin and chooses some inch of it, and begins to scrape away at the mortar. When the first dust flies up, the wall falls down.”
Father Angwin took a draught of his whisky. What Fludd said was comprehensible entirely; and he imagined the bishop, producing some dusty, purloined hairpin from the hot depth of his pocket. “I thought to myself,” he said, “a priest must believe in God, or at least pretend to; and who knows, if I pretend for thirty years, for forty years, perhaps the belief will grow back in again, the mask will grow into the flesh. And if you can accept the preposterous notion of a living creator who gives a bugger about every sparrow that falls, why jib at the rest of it? Why jib at rosaries and relics and fasting and abstinence? Why swallow a camel and strain at a gnat? And with that as my philosophy, it somehow seemed possible to go on, enclosed in ritual, safe as houses, as they say. Oh, the central premise was missing, but do you know, it didn’t seem to matter all that much? You wouldn’t think it, would you? You’d think if you lost your faith you couldn’t continue in this life. But I can assure you—this is the one life you can continue in.”
“You made an accommodation,” Fludd said. “It is natural. Suppose a woman marries a man after some great love affair. Then one morning she wakes up beside the chap, and sees that he is a mere nothing, despicable, a blot on her landscape. Does she rise up from her bed and go about the streets proclaiming her error? No, she does not. She gets back under the bedclothes. For the rest of the day she is even more civil to him than she has been before.”
“I dare say you are right,” Father Angwin said. “I dare say the parallel can be drawn. But I have not given much thought to the married state. I put it to myself differently. I thought, suppose your heart were taken out? But you could still walk and talk, and have your breakfast. Well, you wouldn’t miss it, would you?”
“So,” said Father Fludd, “you walked about the district without your heart, and you continued to hear confessions and say early Mass, you did all that was required of you and more; you travelled your necessary way, fettered as you were to this stale bridegroom, the Church. You didn’t shout from the pulpit that you no longer believed in God.”
“Why should I? If the heathen in his blindness bows down to wood and stone, why should not the Fetherhoughtonians do the same? Oh, I’d be willing, as the bishop says I ought, to deliver them from their ignorance: but what would I deliver them to?”
“It is a question,” Fludd said. “But now, what is this problem you have with the devil? How can it be that your belief in him remains?”
“Well, I saw him,” Father Angwin said, rather curtly. “He hangs about the parish.” He was silent for a moment, recovering his manners. “My dear boy, could I prevail upon you to drink that cocoa? I see you have stirred it up, and then taken no further interest in it. I wouldn’t wish you to provoke Agnes on your first night. She believes cocoa is good for priests.”
Fludd picked up his cup. “What did he look like?”
“The devil? He was a little man in a checked cap. He had one of those round faces, apple-cheeked, you’d say.”
“And you had never seen him before?”
“Oh, I’d seen him many a time. He comes from Netherhoughton. He keeps a shop. A tobacconist, he is. But don’t you understand, Father, how you can look and look at a thing, perhaps all the days of your life, without knowing its true nature at all? Until one day light dawns?”
“I would not say in this instance that it was light. I would say it was darkness.”
“That afternoon,” Father Angwin picked up his own cup and inspected its contents, “that afternoon, I say, I was walking about the church grounds, making my circuit around the convent and the school, just having a think to myself. And there the fellow appeared to me, just bobbed up from nowhere, and raised his cap. He smiled at me—and by God, I knew him.”
“How did you know him?”
“It was his smile … his horrible jauntiness … the little tune he whistled.”
“Anything else?”
“Perhaps the smell of sulphur. It stank out the afternoon.”
“Sulphur,” said Fludd, “may be taken as definitive.”
Agnes put her head around the door. She cleared her throat. “Are you finished with the tray?” The rest of her appeared. “It’s bedtime,” she said. “We keep decent hours, Father Fludd.”
“Agnes,” Father Angwin said, “Father Fludd is not obliged to go to bed just because you are going.”
“It’s not a matter of obligation,” Agnes said. “It’s a matter of seemliness. I’ve already locked up, hours ago.”
“Good,” Father Angwin said. “If there is anything we want, we shall get it ourselves. Father Fludd, I daresay, knows how to boil a kettle.”
Miss Dempsey went out and double-checked the big bolts on the front door, rattling them as she did so; not in protest at being sent about her business, but as a counter to the deep calm that had fallen on the house. The storm was over. When she looked through the kitchen window, she could see that the trees still swayed, but only a little, li
ke polite dancers on a crowded floor. And any noise they made was lost to her, shut out by thick stone walls and the evening’s events. She touched her lip, fingering the small flat protuberance there. She turned off the light and went up to bed, leaving the dirty cocoa cups in the sink; departing from the habit of a lifetime, feeling that her life was somehow altered. It was true that the curate had not spoken to her, apart from an exchange of pleasantries, a few words when she brought in the sausages. But there was a whisper at the back of her mind, and only he could have put it there: I have come to transform you, transformation is my business.
The two men sat on, talking through the night. Soon it came, the peevish dawn. The fire fell to ash. Father Angwin felt his way upstairs in the dark, his hand against the wall. He had an hour or two before he must be up to say Mass. He lay down, removing only his shoes, and fell at once into a deep sleep.
When he woke up, he did not know what time it was. His mouth felt dry, there was unaccustomed sun outside the window. He lay thinking, not caring about anything very much. It seemed possible—probable, even—that he had dreamt Father Fludd. The details of their conversation were remarkably clear, but he found that he could not call the young man’s face to mind. Bits of it he could get: an eye, the nose. He could not somehow fit it together. It seemed possible that Fludd was some composite figure he had got out of his imagination; perhaps he had fallen asleep before the fire.
He sat up, rubbed his palms over his face, put the heel of his hands into his eyes and rubbed them, stroked his chin and thought of shaving, conversed mentally with his empty stomach and promised it a digestible coddled egg. Then, in his stockinged feet, his shoes in his hand, he crept down the passage and pushed open the door of the curate’s room.
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