Fludd

by Hilary Mantel

  Across the moors that train must come, but what if snow had fallen in Sheffield today? What if Woodhead was blocked, what if a blizzard was brewing? Snowploughs out. Ice on the points. Sheep buried alive on the moors. Men in mufflers and spiked boots, crystals in their moustaches, going about with spades to dig people out. She pictured herself huddled in the waiting room, on the bench into which the Netherhoughtonians had cut their runes; she imagined the voice of the station-master, “No trains out tonight.”

  She had no watch. She did not know when the train ought to come. She had bought her ticket with her head bowed, in a false voice. She was like a parcel, she thought, addressed but not posted. She had felt the ticket-man’s eyes on her back. She did not dare ask him, what time will the train come? She had hoped for a public notice of some kind. But no doubt if there had been one, the people from Netherhoughton would have come by night and torn it down.

  In her shyness, her confusion, her haste, she had not asked Father Fludd, what time will the train come and carry me away? She had only heard him say, I will be after you. When you reach the other end, mait in the baggage hall. Confide in no one. It occurred to her that this man, this false priest, the impostor with whom she would soon embark on the dreadful Act, was a mystery she hardly dared address, a man whom she did not know. I do not know God, she thought. But I always Trusted in Him.

  Roisin O’Halloran put down her bag, and rubbed her hands together to restore the circulation. A question drifted up to her mind: Some years ago I intended going to a certain town by train. I happened to meet a man who had a ticket for that place, but who changed his mind and decided not to travel. He gave me his ticket and I travelled with it. Was there any injustice to the railway company?

  What was the answer? She stood frowning, trying to recall it; bending her furious thoughts to anything but the matter in hand. There is no injustice. The railway companies do not insist on personal identification. They are satisfied if every traveller has the ticket required for the journey.

  The platform, by some merciful dispensation, had been deserted when she arrived, but now she saw, out of the corner of her eye, that a man had arrived. He stood behind her, a little distance away. She hunched her shoulders into the navy jacket and put a hand up to draw her scarf further over her head. Let it be some Protestant, she prayed, someone who wouldn’t know me. Then she thought, what’s the use of praying for that sort of thing? Or any sort of thing at all?

  He must, she thought, be examining with some curiosity my peculiar-looking back. The skin of her neck crawled, almost as if the man were Fludd. She began to turn her head, slowly but inexorably, as if it were subject to a magnetic attraction.

  And yes, of course he was staring at her. Their eyes met; shocked, she jerked her gaze away, as if she had seen a corpse on the track.

  As the man was Mr. McEvoy, he could hardly have failed to recognize her; but he did not speak. The wind tore through her jacket and sliced her through to the bone; it got under her skirt and barrelled it out around her legs. She turned her eyes down and kept them on her gym pumps; one right, one left.

  Then at last the train appeared, a dot in the distance, so faint in the gathering darkness that she could hardly be sure it was there. For seconds it seemed to stick absurdly, going neither forwards nor back; then, when she saw that it was growing larger, she stepped forward to the edge of the platform, and raised her face, caught in the orange glow of the station lamps.

  Only when the train drew in did Mr. McEvoy step up beside her. She was trembling all over. “Sister?” he said, in a low voice. He offered his arm. Her fingertips rested on it; she had some thought of fending him off. He swung open the carriage door for her. “Don’t alarm yourself,” he said. “I am only travelling as far as Dinting, just the few stops. I shall pretend not to know you. I am the soul of discretion.”

  “Then get away,” she hissed. “Leave me alone.”

  “I only wish to be of assistance,” McEvoy said. “Somebody must hand you your bag and see that you have a seat facing the engine. And you know what they say, Sister. Better the devil you know.”

  With a simper, Mr. McEvoy placed her bag on the rack. A door slammed. A railwayman gave a wild inchoate shout. Flags waved. And a moment later they were off, rattling across the points to Manchester, her defloration, and the Royal and Northwestern Hotel.

  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 proppi
ng 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.