She had not turned aside fast enough to hide her expression from Miss Dempsey—that compound of fear, yearning, and excitement, that had yet to be broken down into its elements and recombined by another’s will. Agnes, in agitation and sadness, touched her wart. I have missed all my chances in life, she thought. Even a nun has not missed more chances than me. Virgins may see unicorns. Spinsters never do.
This time, when Philomena approached the confessional, she knew it would be Angwin.
She knelt, in the fragrance of polish and tobacco; began at once, rattling her words off. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It is no time at all since my last confession. I have a question for you. A German friend of mine, who knows only a few words of English …”
“Oh, hallo there, my dear,” the priest said.
“ … was anxious to go to confession, but unfortunately none of the priests in the neighbourhood knew any German. Was my friend obliged to make his confession through an interpreter?”
“Hm,” Father Angwin said. He thought. It was not a problem he had encountered directly, though he had often found the Fetherhoughtonian speech thick and incomprehensible when he had first arrived in the parish. “Well now,” he said at last, “do you know what I think he should do? I think he should get one of those dictionaries, a German-English dictionary, and discover what are the names of his sins in English. And as for the number of times he has done each sin, well, he may very quickly learn to count in English, I suppose. Then he might pass a note to the priest in the confessional. Though,” he added, “it might be as well if the priest were warned as to what were to occur. I should not like to come to hear confessions one day, and find a foreigner poking a paper at me through the grille.”
“So that would be better than an interpreter, would it, Father?”
“I am not ruling out an interpreter, mind. If the need were desperate. Communication is difficult at the best of times, don’t you find?” He paused. “No one should walk around in a state of sin for a moment more than necessary. Perhaps especially not if the person is in a place strange to them. If a person is travelling, you know, there is always a danger of accidents.”
“And if you did use an interpreter, he would be bound by the seal of the confessional, of course.”
“Naturally.” There was another short pause. Angwin said, “Have you anything to tell me today? Anything about yourself, I mean?”
“No, Father.”
“You are wrestling with your problem still. Your temptation to sin. Or has the temptation passed?”
“No. If anything—”
He cut in. “I have been praying for you.”
He heard her breathing, beyond the grille and the curtain: the hiccups in her breathing’s rhythm, as if she might cry. “Any more questions today?”
“Oh yes, many.”
She reads them off a paper, he thought.
“A doctor has human bones in his possession, from the days of his studies. He is anxious to get rid of them. He got them while he was a student in a Protestant country.”
“Germany again?”
She stopped. His question had thrown her. He was not meant to interrupt. “Do go on.”
“Where is he supposed to bury them?”
“Protestant bones,” Father said. “I hardly know.”
“In Ireland,” she said timidly, “there are special plots, in the major hospitals, for burying the bits of bodies that are taken away in operations.”
“There may be a similar dispensation here.”
“If they might be useful to some hospital, he could donate them?”
She has answers on her paper, he thought, as well as questions. “I don’t see why not.”
“But he must be reverent with them, must he not? They were part of a living body once, he must recollect, and that body was the temple of the spirit. Even though it was a Protestant. Probably.”
“Again,” Father Angwin said, “if in the parish there were a funeral, I mean just in the ordinary course of events, a funeral of some elderly person … and the relatives could be prevailed upon … it might be a good thing to lay them to rest in that way.”
“Protestant bones in a Catholic grave …” She paused for thought. “Just say nothing to the relatives,” she said. “That would be my way. Because you know how people are. They wouldn’t take account of how old the bones were, they’d carry on about it just the same. Just slip them in, while the mourners are all gossiping. That would be how to do it. There’s no need to cause unnecessary fuss and alarm and give people a chance to get on their high horses.”
“Do I know this doctor?”
“Oh no, Father.”
“Because I was thinking … I myself have this graveyard. Of sorts.” But I am like the elder Tobias, he thought: “wearied with burying.”
She said, “It is a hypothetical case.”
“Yes. Of course it is. Any more?”
He felt that she moved closer, that she had shuffled forward on her kneeler and put her face inches from his own.
“Suppose I can save a man from drowning. And I have not the courage to do it? Am I in justice bound to repair the loss to his family?”
“Repair the loss? Well, how could you do that?”
“I was considering their situation in life. How they would be left. Financially. They would be badly off. He would be the breadwinner. And suppose I could have saved him—should I make some restitution, do you think? Am I obliged to?”
“In justice, no. In charity, perhaps.”
This is the world we inhabit, he thought: burning houses, drowning men, alien bones on the loose; all perplexity and pain to the tender conscience that cannot speak of its dearest concerns.
“I think that is enough,” he said, “in the way of hypotheses.”
“If you think … ,” she said, “if you think of a sin, but you do not do it, can that be as bad as if you had actually done it?”
“It can be. I would need to know more.”
“Supposing a person entertains certain thoughts … but he does not know at the time that they are bad? Suppose they start off as quite ordinary, permissible thoughts, but then he feels where they are tending?”
“He should stop thinking at once.”
“But you cannot stop thinking. Can you? Can you?”
“A good Catholic can.”
“How?”
“Prayer.”
“Prayer drives thought out?”
“With practice.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It has been my experience that you can pray but the thoughts run under the prayers, like wires under the ground.”
“Then you are not doing it properly.”
“I have tried.”
“Trying is not enough.” He almost spoke out, giving their game away. He almost said, remember what you were taught in your novitiate. It is not enough to do a thing as well as you can. You must do it perfectly.
“It is impossible, isn’t it?” she said. “You begin innocent enough, but you can’t walk around with your eyes shut, with your ears shut, with your mind a blank. But once you see and hear and think … things lead to things.”
“Oh yes,” he said. “They do that.”
When his penitent had left, Father Angwin gave her time to get out of the church; then, out of old habit, he crossed himself, though he did not see any point in it, and did not believe in the cross, and did not believe he was redeemed; and silently rose, and left the confessional. There, whisking around the corner into the porch, was Dempsey’s pleated skirt.
“Agnes,” he called, his voice surprisingly, sacrilegiously loud. “What are you doing there?”
Miss Dempsey froze to the spot, her fingers in the holy-water stoup. He strode down the centre aisle and bore down on her.
“Saying my prayers, Father.” Her voice was placid; her face told a different story.
“I see. You are unwontedly pious, for the middle of the day. What are you praying for? Have you a special inte
ntion?”
Oh yes, she thought. That there should be a splendid scandal in the parish—for we need a good shake-up. “I have been praying for the suppression of heresy, the exaltation of the Church, and concord amongst Christian princes,” she replied.
Since her Child of Mary’s handbook obliged her to do this, and regularly, there was nothing Father Angwin could say.
That evening it turned colder. A wind soughed across the moors, out of England’s autumnal heart; a wind with no breath of the sea, bearing an upland odour of privation and loss. Darkness came early, seeming to swell from the high ground above the church and roll down the carriage-drive, a carpet of night that pushed the children before it, down Church Street and into their lighted homes in Chapel Street and Back Lane. When the last of them had left the gates, the nuns locked the school doors with iron keys and hurried in concert back to their refectory, to the tea and bread and margarine that Sister Anthony had prepared for them.
The margarine had a peculiar, sharp taste tonight, as if something had got mixed with it—which was perfectly possible, as Sister Anthony was absent-minded now, and short-sighted, and, some believed, malicious. The meal was eaten in the silence enjoined by the Rule; but there would be plenty said about the marge at a later date. The faces of Polycarp, Ignatius Loyola, and Cyril were twisted with the effort they made to hold back scathing speech. Their complaints rolled about their mouths, like loose teeth.
The next collation would be the last of the day, and it would be soup. Philomena imagined she could smell it already. She pictured herself in her place at table; for places never changed, unless someone came or went—or died, which would be more likely. Soon I shall be sitting here again, she thought, after the evening routine; after the hard kneeler in the convent chapel, directly behind Sister Cyril; after the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary, and sundry other prayers. The nightly Examination of Conscience, the sign of the cross, then the kitchen, to help Sister Anthony serve and collect my share of black looks and blame. Into the big blue apron, and out with the tureen and the ladle; the usual draught rattles the windows as I step down the corridor to the refectory carrying the tureen, elbows jutting out. “Bless us, oh Lord, and these thy gifts …” The small clank of the metal ladle on the side of each bowl. Spoon raised to lips; she tasted the soup, a greyish, frothy liquid, oversalted, scraps of vegetables (or perhaps peelings) awash in its depths.
A violent pain in her ribs made her jump back, almost drop off the refectory bench. She stifled her exclamation; why add another fault to the fault that Perpetua had just discerned? It was that rigid, cruel forefinger again, meant to wipe the expression off her face; she knew it must have been there, that blank dreaming expression that Purpit took as a personal affront. Her brief absence of mind had put away the day as if she were folding it into a box, telescoped all the time between the bread-and-margarine collation and the soup collation.
But what did it matter? Certainly, when time passed in the ordinary world at its ordinary rate, it would bring her to the same seat, the same spoon, the same sensation, the same salt-and-sour taste on her tongue. All her life was reducible perhaps to one long day starting with the caller’s Dominus vobiscum and ending with private prayer before the crucifix in her cell, knees chilled by the linoleum. If every day from now on was to be the same, why have the days at all, why not elide them somehow and live the next forty years in a minute? She lowered her head, as if examining the grain in the wood of the refectory table. I have reached, she thought, a human being’s lowest ebb; I have no curiosity about the future. I know what the future will be; the Rule sets it out for me. She looked up at Perpetua, her present vision blurred, her eyes dwelling still on what was to come, and for the first time, a thought occurred to her: whoever regulates my future steals it from me.
And if the future is predictable, does that mean it is planned? If it is predictable, is it in the least controllable? This is old stuff, she thought, in disgust with herself: this is seminarians’ stuff. Is my will free? Outside the wind dropped. The nuns, draining the dregs of their tea, lifted their heads and looked at each other across the table. It was as if in the sudden silence they discerned a voice, a voice speaking out of turn. It was a moment of expectancy, unease. A curious ripple ran around the table. Overhead, the forty-watt bulb that the Order approved flickered once, twice, three times: like St. Peter’s denials of Christ. Then gaunt shadows turned their faces down and muttered a grace; then rose, as if in the grip of flames, and flickered from the room.
The priests had eaten early: hotpot. At least, Father Angwin had eaten his, he did not know what Fludd might have done. It was the usual tale: a full plate, then an empty plate, and that discreet mastication in between quite insufficient to account for the disappearance of the curate’s supper.
Then, too, Father Angwin was seriously concerned about the level of the whisky in his bottle. However much he drank nowadays, it never seemed to drop. Many the night he had said to the curate, we’ll be needing a new bottle if we are to have a drink together tomorrow; but then he had contrived, in the course of the day, to dismiss the unpleasant fact from his mind. And in the evening there always seemed to be enough. Not enough to hold a party with, mind. Not a quantity of whisky. But a sufficiency.
“This place has gone very quiet,” Father Angwin said, helping the curate to a glass.
“The wind has dropped.”
“No, I mean in general. It’s since you came. You haven’t maybe without telling me done a spot of exorcism?”
“No,” Fludd said. “But I have been up and done a spot of minor repair work on the guttering. I take an interest in such matters. I was able to borrow a ladder from a pious household in Netherhoughton. And I have consulted with Judd McEvoy about the downspouts. For a tobacconist, he is very well-informed. He fears the church too needs quite extensive structural renovations. But he says it would cost a mint of money.”
“It wasn’t the drips and creaks that bothered us, though,” Father Angwin said. “We were accustomed to those. But we used to get feet walking up and down overhead, and various banging noises, and you would feel that someone had come in. Or the door would be kicked open, and no one would enter.”
“Well, I entered,” Fludd said. “Did I not? Eventually.”
“Agnes was of the opinion that the house was full of discarnate entities.”
“Of a malign sort?”
“We hardly knew. But Agnes believes in a multiplicity of devils. In that, she is of quite an old-fashioned turn of mind.”
“Yes, I understand you. There is this lax modern way of talking about ‘the devil.’ It surprises me. When you consider that for centuries some of the finest minds in Europe were occupied in counting devils and finding out their various characters.”
“Reginald Scot, I think, towards the end of the sixteenth century, made it fourteen million. Give or take.”
“I can be more precise,” Fludd said. “He made it fourteen million, one hundred and ninety-eight thousand, five hundred and eighty. That excluded, of course, the lords and princes of Hell. That was just the ordinary drone devils.”
“But in those days,” Father Angwin said, “if a devil put in an appearance, they had spells for binding him and questioning him and getting his name and number out of him. They understood very well that devils had their specialities, and that each devil was quite distinct in personality.”
“St. Hilary tells us that each devil had his particular bad smell.”
“But now people just say ‘Satan,’ or ‘Lucifer.’ It is the curse of the present century, this rage for oversimplification.”
“Sister Philomena told me,” Fludd said, sipping his whisky, “that she had encountered a devil as a child. She said that he was nothing like Judd McEvoy. But then, why should he be?”
Father Angwin looked away. “I know that no one agrees with me, in the matter of Judd. But you see, Father Fludd, we do not have the privileges of a former age. Devils do not so readily manifest themselv
es. Not within the range of our vision. Sister Philomena has been singularly fortunate. When she thinks of a devil she can put a face to it.”
“You have tried to do the same.”
“Every devil must have a face. Even if it is a wolf’s face, even if it is a serpent’s face, even if it is a tobacconist’s. It must be something we can know and recognize, it must be in our own image or very close to it, it must be animal or human or some hybrid of the two. Because what else can we imagine? What else have we seen?”
“Demonology,” Fludd said, taking a sip. “It is an unbearable subject. Deep and unbearable. Especially for you, Father. Since you ceased to believe in God.”
“If it had not been for McEvoy,” Angwin said, looking away again, “I don’t know whether the notion of the devil would have such a strong grip on me either. My mind might have taken a secular turn. I might have become some kind of rational man.”
“I have seen changes.” Fludd followed the other man’s gaze, and looked into the fire. “There was a time when the air was packed with spirits, like flies on an August day. Now I find that the air is empty. There is only man and his concerns.”
Father Angwin sat hunched and brooding, his whisky glass between the palms of his hands. The bottle was as full as ever. “I am ill,” he said. “My soul chooseth hanging, and my bones death.”
“My dear fellow,” said Fludd, removing his gaze from the fire and fastening it anxiously on the priest’s face.
“Oh, a quotation,” Angwin said. “A biblical quotation. The Old Testament, you know. Book of somebody-or-other.”
Fludd thought of Sister Philomena, striding over the fields, failing to recognize his own quotations. When he thought of the nun, a soft, creeping uneasiness made itself felt; it was located in his solar plexus. Well now, he said to himself. I never knew that I had human feelings. He reached for his glass.
“I am like Father Surin,” Angwin said.
“Forgive me. I never knew him.”
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