Fludd

by Hilary Mantel

  “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 ag
ain. 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.