I knew you were a devil, Father Angwin thought. Bystanders are an evil breed.
“They do say,” Agnes put in timidly, “that the onlooker sees most of the game.”
“Quite so,” Judd said. “Miss Dempsey, I am sure you will not refuse a piece of my fish?” He unwrapped his newspaper. A delicious aroma crept out.
“Well, I am tempted,” Miss Dempsey said.
“Sister Philomena,” Judd said, enticingly. “Now, there is so little here that I am sure you could not offend the canons of your Order.”
“I’m starving,” Philly said.
McEvoy proffered the parcel. Father Angwin broke off a piece of fish. Soon they all ate, Father Fludd picking at a flake or two. It was cold but good. “I wonder,” Father Angwin said, “whether it was fried in lard, or dripping?” He looked at Philomena inquiringly. But she would not meet his eye. His spirits rose; he felt quite jocular, feasting like this in the presence of his enemy, and on his enemy’s own supper. “I wish we might have a fish each,” he said; looking inquiringly again, but this time at Father Fludd. He wondered whether the curate might effect some sort of multiplication. After all, there was a precedent for it. But Fludd, though his portion had been smaller than any, continued to eat.
“It seems to me now,” Fludd said, “that we should wait for full daylight. We need ropes and brute strength.”
“The Children of Mary,” Miss Dempsey said at once. “It is our meeting tomorrow.”
“Tonight, you mean,” Philly said.
“We would undertake to wash them down. I believe the president would allow it. We could do our litany, and so on at the same time.”
“I cannot think why you ever agreed to bury them,” Fludd said.
“You don’t know the bishop.” Philomena brushed earth from her habit. “If we’d have left them exposed, he might have come up here with a mallet and smashed them all to bits.”
“I think your imagination is running away with you, Sister,” Agnes said. “And of course Father Fludd knows the bishop.”
“We still have the bishop to contend with,” Angwin said. “Our sudden bravado does not make him vanish away.”
“He could ban the statues all over again,” Miss Dempsey said. “Our night’s work could be wasted.”
“Not wasted,” Judd said. “At least you have not been bystanders. Father Angwin will value that in you.”
Agnes touched the priest’s arm. “What if he tells us to get rid of them all over again? Will we defy him?”
“You could have a schism,” Father Fludd said.
“I thought of it before.” Father Angwin also brushed earth from himself. “But I lacked heart.”
“You say ‘you,’ Father Fludd,” observed McEvoy. “You do not say ‘we.’ May I take it that you will not be amongst us for very long?”
Fludd did not answer. He put his spade over his shoulder. “I have done all I am going to do,” he said. “Miss Dempsey, I think you should make a warming drink. Perhaps you could light the oven and warm Mr. McEvoy’s peas for him. He has been kept from their enjoyment.”
Faces looked up from the ground; bone-coloured, blank-eyed, staring at the snow-charged sky. Miss Dempsey gathered her dressing-gown more closely about her. Wordlessly, she put her arm through Father Angwin’s, and they turned towards the presbytery. The priest shone his torch before them to pick out the path. The tobacconist followed.
“I must go back,” Philly whispered. The clock struck. “We get up at five.”
“That was half-past two. I do not suppose they are in bed in Netherhoughton.” Fludd put out his hand. She hesitated for a moment, then placed hers in it.
“There’s plenty of tonight left,” Fludd said.
They turned downhill, towards the convent. Before them the hard ground gleamed silver with frost. Behind them the abandoned candles flickered. Around them was an argentine brightness, solar and lunar, unearthly and mercurial, sparkling from the dead branches, flickering in the ditch, glinting on the cobbles before the church door. The convent windows were washed with brightness, the grimy stonework glowed; high on the terraces, fireflies seemed to dart.
All my life till now, she thought, has been a journey in the dark. But now another kind of travelling begins: a long vagrancy under the sun, in its sacred and vivifying light.
When three o’clock struck, Fludd placed on her forehead—just below the place where the white band bit into it—a chaste, dry kiss. A sacramental kiss, she thought. At the thought, she closed her eyes. Fludd bent his head. She felt the tip of his tongue flick across her eyelids. “Philly,” he said, “you know, don’t you, what you have to do?”
“Yes, I know I have to get out.”
“You know that you must do it soon.”
“It will take years,” she said. “My sister, they just threw her out on her ear. But she was a novice. I’m professed. It’ll have to go to the bishop. It’ll have to go to Rome.”
Fludd left her for a moment, moved away. As soon as his body ceased to touch hers, she felt the creeping cold, and felt her courage ebb. There was no moon now; only a single Mass candle, placed where she had left it, lit again with Fludd’s cigarette lighter. And there were the pans, up-ended on their rack, the pans that she had so often scrubbed for Sister Anthony; and there were the tea jugs, waiting for the morning.
Fludd walked about the kitchen. His feet made no sound on the stone floor. She craved real sunlight, a July day; to see him clearly, know what he looked like.
“You don’t have to go to Rome.”
“I wish it were summer,” she whispered.
“Did you hear what I said? You don’t have to go to Rome.”
“But I do. I have to be dispensed from my vows. There are papers to be forwarded. Only the Vatican can do it.”
Summer will come, she thought. And I will be here still, waiting; for who will expedite the matter, I have no friends. And another winter will come, and a summer, and another winter. By that time, where will he be?
“You’re not taking in what I say,” Fludd told her. “You say you have to be dispensed, I say you don’t have to be dispensed. You say you are bound, I say you are not bound. What law do you think keeps you here?”
“The law of the Church,” she said, startled. “Oh, no, I suppose that’s not a law. Not like the law of the land. But Father Fludd—”
“Don’t call me that,” he said. “You know the truth of the matter.”
“—but Father Fludd, I would be excommunicated.”
Fludd moved towards her again. The candle flared upward, as if the flame had breathed. He touched her face, the back of her neck; began to draw the pins out of her veil.
She jumped back. “You mustn’t,” she said. “Oh no. No, you mustn’t.”
He desisted for a moment. Fell back. His expression was dubious. He did not seem tired. His stamina was wonderful. Philomena turned her head suddenly, attracted by a movement at the window. The snow had begun to fall; big flakes, fleecy, brushing the glass without a sound. She watched it. “It must be warmer outside. It’ll never stick, will it? It won’t last the night.”
For she knew that nothing as good as that could ever happen for her; God would not arrange it that when she jerked at five o’clock from her edgy doze she would creep to the window and see a new landscape, its features obliterated, its ground untrodden, its black trees hung with bridal veils. No: the snow would be the night’s hallucination, a phantasm of the small hours. Tomorrow at five there would be no sun or snow, she would look from the window and see nothing but her own face dimly reflected in the pane; but if dawn by some freak of nature broke so early, it would reveal only the dark, swollen edge of the moors, and the web of branches near at hand, and a section of the drain-spout, and the sparrows hopping along the guttering in search of food. She would see the same old world; the one in which she had to live. I can’t bear it, she thought; not one more day. Her hands crept to her throat; then to her temples and the cloth of her veil; then to the
nape of her neck; then searched out the pins.
Fludd took the pins from her one by one, and laid them in a line on the edge of the kitchen table. He set his long fingers on either side of her head and lifted off the vice of her white cap. She had only the strength she needed to make her decision, to give in to him; she felt weak now, limp and cold and beyond resisting anything. He took out the safety-pins from her linen inner cap, and set them on the table beside the straight pins. With one neat firm pull, he freed the drawstring, and lifted off her cap and dropped it on the floor.
“You look like a badly cut hedge,” he said.
She felt a blush creep over her exposed neck. “Sister Anthony does it. Once a month. Everybody. Even Purpit. The scissors are rusty. We don’t have our own. I’ve often wished for a pair. It’s against holy poverty.”
Fludd ran his hand over her head. The hair, an inch long in places, grew this way and that; here was a neglected tendril growing into curl, here was a bald patch, here was a bristly tuft fighting its way upward like a spring shoot fighting for light and air. “What was it like?” he said.
“Brown. Quite ordinary brown. It had a bit of a wave.”
It seemed to him, as far as he could judge in the poor light, that the proportions of her face were altered now. It was smaller and softer; her eyes were less watchfully large, and her lips had lost their pinched nun-look. She seemed to have melted away, and remoulded herself into some other woman whom he had never met. He kissed her on the mouth; less sacramentally now.
At nine o’clock McEvoy came to the back door with a wheelbarrow. Agnes jumped out of her skin when she heard his knock. She wiped the washing-up suds from her hands and hurried to the door.
“Mr. McEvoy. Who is minding your shop?”
The tobacconist removed his checked cap respectfully. “A dear friend,” he said.
“Have you got ropes there too?”
“I have everything requisite. I think the barrow is the way to manage.”
“I suppose you have told everybody?”
“Nothing of the night’s events has passed my lips. The parish will know soon enough.”
“The Children of Mary will know tonight.”
“The nuns will know earlier, no doubt. If Father Fludd is willing and able, we can have all the saints back on their plinths in an hour or two.” He smiled faintly. “When we buried them, there was quite a crowd to help us. Digging things up is not so hard as digging them in, is it?”
It was harder for me, Miss Dempsey thought. “I will call Father Fludd,” she said. “He was up as usual to say Mass. He is having some tea now.”
She did not offer McEvoy a cup, but left him waiting by the door. The snow had vanished; there was a raw cold. She called Fludd, as she made her way through to the kitchen; heard him quit the sitting room, banging the door after him, and greet McEvoy, and leave by the front door, exclaiming as he did so over the wheelbarrow, its timeliness and convenience. She took her duster from the pantry and went into the sitting room which the curate had just vacated. Hurrying out to McEvoy, he had placed his teacup carelessly on the mantelshelf. She reached out for it, and caught sight of herself in the oval looking-glass. Her face was dead white, weary; her eyes looked sore. But all the same, her wart had gone.
Father Angwin sat in the confessional; he felt safe there. He drew his velvet curtain across the grille and listened fearfully to the thumps and scrapes from the nave. When the bishop comes, he thought, perhaps I can take refuge here. He wouldn’t drag me out, would he? And do violence on me, like Thomas a Becket and the knights?
Father’s mood swung, between distress and jubilation, between terror and mirth. Why should the bishop come, he thought? There are no confirmations this coming year. He shows no relish for our company. Unless malicious persons like Purpit inform him of our schism, it can just go quietly on its own way. Perhaps in time I might become an antipope.
He wished Miss Dempsey would bring him refreshments.
When the door opened, with a gentle creak, he jerked out of his daydream. “Fludd?”
“No. He is putting St. Ambrose up.”
“Ah. My penitent.”
She knelt, with a soft rustle.
“How is your temptation?” He was afraid to hear the answer.
“A question,” she said.
“Yes. Go ahead.”
“Father, suppose a building collapsed. And in the ruins there are people buried. Can the priest give them absolution?”
“I think he could. Conditionally. If they were rescued, of course, they would have to confess their sins in the ordinary way.”
“Yes, I see.” A pause. “Is there any kind of absolution you can give me?”
“Oh, my dear,” Father Angwin said. “You are a girl who has stayed out all night. You could hardly make use of absolution now.”
It had not in fact occurred to Miss Dempsey to take refreshments to Father Angwin, for she did not know where to find him. She sat in her room, eating a caramel toffee. It was most unusual for her to suspend her activities in the course of the day. There was always something one could polish. And if ingenuity were really exhausted, one could turn mattresses.
But now she sat quietly, her eyes distant, crimping her gold toffee-paper into tiny folds. From time to time she touched her flawless lip. Certain lines ran through her head:
Sweet Agnes, Holy Child,
All purity;
O may we undefiled
Be pure as thee …
Swiftly, in her usual way, she twisted her paper into a ring. She took it reverently in her right hand, holding it between finger and thumb.
Ready our blood to shed
Rather than sin to wed …
She slid it on to her wedding finger. It looked admirable, she thought. One of the best rings she had achieved. It seemed a pity to waste it. She took it off and slipped it into the pocket of her pinny.
Ready our blood to shed
Rather than sin to wed.
And forth as martyrs led
To die like thee.
NINE
“I’ve got the key,” Sister Anthony whispered. “She never normally lets it out of her possession. She was in a state this morning though. She’s got a wart.” The nun tapped her face. “Here. Here, on her lip. Ugly thing. Come up in the night like a mushroom. Cyril said to her, ‘Mother Purpiture, you want to get that looked at, I think it’s cancer.’”
“Oh, Sister Anthony,” Philly said, “whatever shall I do?”
“Just follow me into the parlour.” Sister Anthony, her veil flapping, her elbows out, made sheepdog movements behind her back. “Quick now, get a move on. I thought I’d never get her out of the place. How can I go on parish visits, she said, with this excrescence? In the end I told her there was a piece of gossip on Back Lane, some woman run away with her lodger. She can’t resist a piece of gossip. She’ll be out for the afternoon, going from house to house.”
“It goes dark by half past four,” Philly said.
“We’ll have you out of here by then. By half past four you’ll be on the train.”
Sister Anthony ushered her into the parlour, shut the door, and shoved a chair against it. Philomena regarded her, eyes wide.
“I can’t put those clothes on. They’re years old. They’re older than me. There are clothes in there were put in before I was born.”
“Well, I can’t credit this,” Sister Anthony said. “I’d have thought you’d worry about being excommunicated, but all you care about is whether you’re up with the modes.”
“That’s not it at all. But everybody will notice me.”
“Nonsense. I’ll transform you out of all recognition.”
“I’m not afraid will they recognize me. I’m afraid children will shout things and run after me down the street.”
“Well, what course do you favour?” the old nun demanded. “I can’t take you to the Co-op drapers to get outfitted. If you could beg borrow or steal from Agnes Dempsey, her skirts would be up r
ound your thighs, you a great tall thing and she such a squat little woman.”
Sister Anthony bent over the chest and put the key in the lock. “Come on, you filthy thing,” she said. “Come on, you ingrate mechanism.” She gritted her teeth; cursed further. The lock gave. She turned back the lid.
“Well now,” she said, speculatively.
“You shouldn’t be doing this for me,” Philly said.
“Nonsense.” Sister Anthony sniffed. “I’m old. What can they do to me? They could put me on general post, I suppose. But I’d be glad to get away from here. I wouldn’t mind if they shipped me out to the African missions. I’d rather live in a leper colony than spend another year with Purpit.”
Sister Anthony bent over and rummaged in the chest. “Oh, by the way, speaking of Agnes Dempsey, she delivered this envelope for you.” She produced it from her pocket. “I can’t think what’s in it. I hope it’s a ten-shilling note. I can’t spare you more than half a crown from the housekeeping without Purpit on my back saying I’ve lost it on a horse.”
Philly felt like a child, going on holiday. Or being togged up for a visit to relations. Leaving home for the first time.
But I can never come back, she thought. I know nothing except farms, convents, my mother’s house. No convent in the world will take me in, after this afternoon. Even a farmer would show me the door; a Catholic farmer, that is. My mother would spit out at me across the street. Even my sister Kathleen wouldn’t give me the time of day.
She took the envelope from Sister Anthony. Rattled it. It didn’t really rattle. She opened it, carefully; nuns waste nothing. Even an envelope can sometimes be reused.
Miss Dempsey’s ring rolled out on to her palm.