Sister Philomena lifted her skirts a fraction to kneel on the damp ground, watching intently as the saints were lowered into the earth. At the last moment she leant forward, and skimmed her rough housewife’s hand across the mane of St. Jerome’s lion; then she eased herself back, settled on her haunches, and drew the back of her hand across her eyes.
“I liked him, Father,” she said, looking up. He put out a hand to assist her; she rose smoothly and stood beside him, tipping back her head so that her veil dropped itself over her shoulder into its proper folds. Her hand was warm and steady, and he felt the slow beat of her pulse through the skin.
“You are a good girl,” he said. “A good girl. I could not have managed. I am too sad.”
Philomena raised her voice to the Men’s Fellowship, who were teetering and swaying one-legged, black flamingos, scraping off their shoes. “You all gentlemen should go to the Nissen hut now. Sister Anthony has got the tea urn out and is baking you some fruit-loaf.”
At this news, the men looked cast down. Sister Anthony, a rotund and beaming figure in her floury apron, was feared throughout the parish.
“Poor old soul,” Father Angwin said. “She means well. Think of the good sisters, they have to face it every day, breakfast, dinner, and tea. Do this last one thing for me, lads, and if it is very unpalatable, you must offer it up.”
“There’s not more than a handful of grit in it,” Philomena said, “though possibly more grit than currants. You can offer it up as Father says, make it an occasion of obtaining grace. Say ‘Sacred Heart of Jesus, help me to eat this fruit-bread.’”
“Is that what you say?” Father Angwin asked her. “I mean, mutatis mutandis, with suitable adaptation? For instance, I believe she burns the porridge?”
“Holy Mary, Mother of God, help me swallow this porridge. Sister Polycarp suggested we might make a novena to St. Michael, the patron saint of grocers, to ask him to guide her a little in the foodstuffs line. We wondered if it was the patron saint of cooks we should apply to, but Sister Polycarp said her problem is more basic than that, it is what she can do with the raw ingredients that God alone knows.”
“And do you all have some pious formula?”
“Oh yes, but we say it under our breath, you know, not to hurt her feelings. Except Mother Perpetua, of course. She gives her a pious rebuke.”
“I’ll bet she does.”
“But Sister Anthony is very humble. She never says anything back.”
“Why should she? She has her means of revenge.”
The moon had risen now, a sliver of light over the black terraces. Judd McEvoy, a singular figure in his knitted waistcoat, gave a pat to the earth above St. Agatha. “Judd?” said Father Angwin. “I did not see you there.”
“Oh, I have been toiling,” Judd McEvoy said. “Toiling unobtrusively. No reason, Father, why you should remark my presence above the others.”
“No, but I generally do.” Father Angwin turned away. Philomena saw the puzzlement on his face. “I like to know where you are, Judd,” he remarked, to himself. And louder, “Are you going to cut along with the others and get your fruit-bread?”
“I shall go directly,” said Judd. “I should not like to be marked out in any way.” He knocked the earth off his spade and straightened up. “I think you may say, Father, that all your saints are safely buried. Shall I take it upon myself to draw up a plan marking the name of each? In case the bishop should change his mind, and wish to reinstate some of them?”
“That will not be necessary.” Father Angwin shifted from foot to foot. “I myself will remember. I will not be in any doubt.”
“As you please,” McEvoy said. He smiled his cold smile, and put on his hat. “I will join the others then.”
The Men’s Fellowship, edified by the words of the remarkable young nun, were touching their foreheads to Father Angwin and setting off in ones and twos down the drive towards the school. Their murmur arose through the scented evening: Sacred Heart of Jesus, help me to eat this fruit-bread. Father Angwin watched them go. McEvoy went with the rest, casting a glance behind him. When finally he rounded the bend by the convent and was lost to view, Sister Philomena heard the priest let out his breath, and noted the relief on his face.
“Come into the church a moment,” Father Angwin said.
She nodded, and followed him. They entered together, through the deep shadows that had gathered in the porch. A chill struck upwards from the stone floor into their feet. Clods of earth lay in the aisles. “I will see to this tomorrow,” Philomena said, her tone low and subdued. They looked about. Without the statues the church seemed smaller and meaner, its angles more gracelessly exposed.
“You would think it would be the other way round,” Philomena said, catching his thought. “That it would look bigger—not that it isn’t big enough. Yet I remember when I was a girl and my Aunt Dymphna died, and when we got all the stuff out into the yard, her bed and the chest and all, we went back in to take a last look at it, and the room was like the size of a hen coop. My mother said, dear God, did my sister Dymphna and all her fancy frocks live in this little space?”
“What did she die of?”
“Dymphna? Oh, her lungs. It was a damp place that she lived. On a farm.”
They whispered, as they were speaking of the dead; Philomena bowed her head, and a sharp picture came into the priest’s mind, of the decaying thatch of her aunt’s cottage, and of chickens, who enjoyed comparatively such liberty, scratching up the sacred soil of Ireland under a sky packed with rain-swollen clouds. It was the day of Dymphna’s funeral he was seeing, a coffin being put into a cart. “I trust she is at peace,” he said.
“I doubt it. She was a byword in her day. She used to go round the cattle fairs and strike up with men. God rest her.”
“You are a curious young woman,” Father Angwin said, looking up at her. “You have put pictures in my head.”
“I wish you could see the end of this,” Philomena said. “I feel sad myself, Father. Weighed-upon, somehow. I liked the little lion. Is it true that there is to be a curate?”
“So the bishop tells me. I have heard nothing more from him. I expect the fellow will just turn up.”
“Well, he will be able to see that you have done as you were directed. It is rather poor, what remains.” She walked away from him towards the altar, stopping to genuflect with a thoughtful, slow reverence. “May I light a candle, Father?”
“You may if you have a match. Otherwise there is nothing to light it from.”
A dim outline in the centre aisle, she reached into the deep pocket of her habit, took out a box of matches, struck one, and picked a new candle from the wooden box beneath the statue of the Virgin. When the wick kindled, she shielded the flame with her palm and held the candle up above her head; the point of light wavered and grew and bathed the statue’s face. “Her nose is chipped.”
“Yes.” Father Angwin spoke from the darkness behind her. “I wonder if you could see your way to doing anything about it? I am not of an artistic bent.”
“Plasticine,” Philomena said. “I can get some from the children. Then no doubt we could paint it.”
“Let us go,” Father Angwin said. “Agnes has cooked some undercut for my supper, and besides, this spectacle is too melancholy.”
“Not more melancholy than the supper that awaits me. I fear it may be the fruit-bread.”
“I should like to ask you to join me,” Father Angwin said, “on account of the comradeship occasioned by our night’s work, but I think I should have to telephone the bishop to ask him for a dispensation of some sort, and no doubt he would have to apply to Rome.”
“I will face the fruit-bread,” Philomena said calmly.
As they left the church, he thought that a hand brushed his arm. Dymphna’s bar-parlour laugh came faintly from the terraces; her tipsy, Guinness-sodden breath, stopped by earth these eleven years, filled the summer night.
THREE
Soon after, the school t
erm ended. The mills closed for Wakes Week, and those of the populace who could afford it went to spend a week in boarding houses at Blackpool.
It was a poor summer on the whole, with many lives lost. The thunderstorms and gales of 27 July returned two days later; trees were felled and roofs blown away. On 5 August there were more thunderstorms, and the rivers rose. On 15 August two trains collided in Blackburn Station, injuring fifty people. On 26 August there were further fatalities after violent electrical storms.
In early September the children went back to school; a new intake of infants cowered under the mossy wall, and sought refuge in its shade from Mother Perpetua’s crow-like arm.
It was after nine o’clock on a particularly wet evening late in that month that Miss Dempsey heard a knock at the front door of the presbytery. She took this ill, because it was usual for the parishioners, if in need of a priest, to come to the kitchen door at the side; the nuns, similarly, knew their place. She had not yet fed Father Angwin his evening meal, for it was the night of the Children of Mary’s meeting, and Father had been obliged to give them an improving address.
The meeting had gone much as always. There had been prayers, and Father Angwin’s discourse, more rambling than usual, she thought; then a hymn to St. Agnes, Protectress of the Society. There were several such hymns, all of them absurdly flattering to the saint; and Miss Dempsey, on account of her Christian name, was forced to endure both pointed disregard and scornful stares while the verses lurched on. The other Children could not bear to hear her so lauded.
We’ll sing a hymn to Agnes,
The Martyr-Child of Rome;
The Virgin Spouse of Jesus,
More pure than ocean foam.
Miss Dempsey tried, during the weekly meetings—indeed she hoped she always did try—to look humble and inconspicuous; not to flaunt her status in the parish. But she felt, from the gimlet glances she received, that she was failing.
Oh aid us, holy Agnes,
A joyous song to raise;
To trumpet forth thy glory,
To sound afar thy praise.
Father Angwin said that he liked this particular hymn, did he not? He said he liked the thought of the Children of Mary blowing trumpets. But a small sigh escaped him, just the same.
After the concluding prayers the other Children were at liberty to go to the school hall to conduct the social part of their business: strong tea, parlour games, and character assassination. She herself, knowing her duty, had taken off her cloak at the back of the church, handed it to the president of the Sodality, taken off her ribbon and her medal, and hurried through the sacristy and back into her kitchen. She was aware that this proceeding gave the Children every opportunity to shred her reputation, but that could not be helped; on a bad night like this, Father was not to be left with a sandwich.
So who can this possibly be at the door, she wondered. She took off her pinny and hung it up. Perhaps someone is near death, and their sorrowing relatives are here to ask Father to come and give Extreme Unction. Perhaps, even, one of the Children of Mary has met with an accident; a fatal scalding with the tea urn was always a possibility. Or perhaps, she thought, it is some poor sinner, with blood on his hands, ridden over the wild moors to ask for absolution. But glancing up at the clock she knew this could not be so, for the last bus from Glossop had passed through twenty minutes earlier.
Miss Dempsey opened the door a crack. There was a bluish wild darkness outside, and rain rattled past her into the hall. Before her was a tall, dim shape, a man wrapped in a dark cloak, holes for mouth and eyes, a hat pulled over the brow; then, as her eyes became accustomed to the exterior murk, she distinguished the figure of a young man, holding in his left hand what appeared to be. a doctor’s black bag.
“Flood,” said the apparition.
“Indeed it is. A flood and a half.”
“No,” he said. “F-L-U-D-D.”
A gust of wind ripped at the trees behind him; their branches, fitfully lit by the storm flickering over Netherhoughton, stretched across his tilted cheek, in a tracery like fingers or lace. “Is this the time for a spelling bee?” Miss Dempsey flung back the door. “Do you really consider it is?”
The young man stepped inside. Rivulets of water cascaded from his clothes and pooled on the floor of the hall. He fixed her with his gaze, and peeled off his outer layers to reveal a black suit and clerical collar. “My name,” he said. “F-L-U-D-D. My name is Fludd.”
So you are the curate, she thought. She felt a sudden urge to say, M-U-D-D; mine, Father, is Mudd. Then his eyes fastened upon her face.
The urge reached her lips, and died. The night chill crept into her, from the open door, and, as she went to close it, she began to tremble, and she clamped her jaws, to stop her teeth from chattering audibly; too much shivering was a vulgar thing, she felt, and would give a bad impression. “Excuse me,” she said. “I’ll draw the bolts. It’s time. Quite late. You’ll not be wanting to go out again tonight.”
She did it. She felt the young man’s eyes on her back when she turned the key in the lock. “No,” he said, “I won’t want to go out again. I’ve come to stay.” Deep within her, behind her cardigan and her blouse and her petticoat trimmed with scratchy nylon lace, behind her interlock vest and freckled skin, Miss Dempsey sensed a slow movement, a tiny spiral shift of matter, as if, at the very moment the curate spoke, a change had occurred: a change so minute as to baffle description, but rippling out, in its effect, to infinity. In later years, when she talked about it she would always say, Did you ever see a pile of pennies pushed over? Did you ever see a house of cards fall down? And whomever she spoke to would look at her, comprehension strained; she could not find the words for that sliding, slipping, tripping sensation that she felt through her entire body. Miss Dempsey felt her mortality; but, in the same instant, she felt her immortality too.
At that instant, also, Father Angwin put his head around the sitting-room door. There could be no mistake about the newcomer, for he had already assumed a proprietorial air, taking off his sodden hat and setting it down on the hall-stand, and extracting himself from his cloak. A look of alarm and distaste crossed Father Angwin’s face: then stronger emotions. As Miss Dempsey was to tell a parishioner, next day: “I really thought for a moment he might fly out against him.” She saw the priest stand poised on the threshold of the room, his frail person quivering, a dangerous golden light in his eyes. A tune began to run through her head: not of a hymn. Despite herself, she began to hum, and a moment later was appalled to hear herself break into song: John Peel’s view hulloo would awaken the dead/ Or the fox from his lair in the morning.
“This is Miss Dempsey, my housekeeper,” Father Angwin said. “She is deranged.”
Before she could make any apology, she saw Father Fludd reach into the inside pocket of his black suit. She waited, her fingers nervously pressed to her lips, for the newcomer to produce some papers, a scroll perhaps, embossed with the Papal seal: some document excommunicating Father Angwin for drunkenness and peculiar behaviour, and installing this young man in his stead. But the curate’s hand emerged with a small flat tin. He held it out to Father Angwin and inquired, “Have a cheroot?”
For the rest of that evening Miss Dempsey went up and down stairs, providing as best she could for the curate’s comfort. He said he would take a bath, which was not at all a usual thing on a week-night. The bathroom, one of the few in Fetherhoughton at that time, was as cold as a morgue, and the hot water a rusty unreliable trickle. Miss Dempsey penetrated the frigid upper storey of the house, a threadbare towel over her arm, and then walked again with bedlinen, Irish linen sheets that were thin and starched and icy to her touch.
She looked out a hot-water bottle, and went into the curate’s room to draw the curtains, and to pass a duster over the small bedside stand, and to turn the mattress. There are those, it is said, who have entertained angels unawares; but Miss Dempsey would have liked notice. Every week she cleaned this room, but naturally the b
ed was not aired. There was no homely touch that she could provide, unless she had brought up a bucket of coal and laid a fire; but she could never remember seeing a fire in a bedroom, and it was better not to encourage any notions that the curate might have. She had somehow formed the idea, just by those first few moments of conversation, and by his elaborate unconcern about her singing, that besides being a priest he was a gentleman. It was an impression only, given by his manners and not his appearance, for the light in the hall was too dim for her to get much idea of what he looked like.
The walls of the upper storey, like the walls of the kitchen and the downstairs hall, were painted a deep institutional green; the panelled doors were varnished with a yellowish stain. There was no lampshade in the curate’s room, just a clear bulb, and the hard-edged shadows it cast. The floorboards creaked in the corridor, and Miss Dempsey stopped, rocking a little on her feet, detecting the point of the greatest noise. Downstairs the floors were made of stone. In every room a crucifix hung, the dying God in each case exhibiting some distinction of anguish, some greater or lesser contortion of his naked body, a musculature more or less racked. The house was a prison for these dying Christs, a mausoleum.
But when Miss Dempsey thought of the bishop’s house, she imagined table-lamps with silk shades, and dining tables on pedestals, and an effulgence of hot electric air. When she thought of the sycophants, she imagined them lolling on cushions, eating Brazil nuts. She imagined that they got food in sauces, and port wine on quite ordinary days, and rinsed their fingers in holy water in little marble basins; that in the grounds of the bishop’s house, where the sycophants walked together plotting in Latin, there were fountains and statuary and a dovecote. Crossing the hall, she paused outside the sitting-room door. She heard conversation in full spate. She could tell that Father Angwin had been drinking whisky. The curate spoke in his light, dry voice: “In considering the life of Christ, there is something that has often made me wonder; did the man who owned the Gadarene swine get compensation?”