Fludd
Hilary Mantel

Copyright

Fourth Estate

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This edition published by Fourth Estate 2010

FIRST EDITION

First published by Viking 1989

Published in paperback by Harper Perennial 2005

Copyright © Hilary Mantel 1989

PS section copyright © Sarah O’Reilly 2010

PS™ is a trademark of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

Hilary Mantel asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is a work of fiction.

The characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination.

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Source ISBN: 9780007172894

Ebook Edition © APRIL 2010 ISBN 9780007354931

Version: 2019-06-07

For Anne Ostrowska

Note

The Church in this story bears some but not much resemblance to the Roman Catholic Church in the real world, c. 1956. The village of Fetherhoughton is not to be found on a map.

The real Fludd (1574–1637) was a physician, scholar and alchemist. In alchemy, everything has a literal and factual description, and in addition a description that is symbolic and fantastical.

Excerpt

You are familiar, no doubt, with Sebastiano del Piombo’s huge painting The Raising of Lazarus, which hangs in the National Gallery in London, having been purchased in the last century from the Angerstein collection. Against a background of water, arched bridges and a hot blue sky, a crowd of people – presumably the neighbours – cluster about the risen man. Lazarus has turned rather yellow in death, but he is a muscular, well-set-up type. His grave-clothes are draped like a towel over his head, and people lean towards him solicitously, and seem to confer; what he most resembles is a boxer in his corner. The expressions of those around are puzzled, mildly censorious. Here – in the very act of extricating his right leg from a knot of the shroud – one feels his troubles are about to begin again. A woman – Mary, or maybe Martha – is whispering behind her hand. Christ points to the revenant, and holds up his other hand, fingers outstretched: so many rounds down, five to go.

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Note

Excerpt

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

P.S. Ideas, interviews & features…

About the author

A Kind of Alchemy

LIFE at a Glance

A Writing Life

Read on

Have You Read?

By the same author

About the Author

Praise

About the Publisher

Chapter One

On Wednesday the bishop came in person. He was a modern prelate, brisk and plump in his rimless glasses, and he liked nothing better than to tear around the diocese in his big black car.

He had taken the precaution – advisable in the circumstances – of announcing himself two hours before his arrival. The telephone bell, ringing in the hall of the parish priest’s house, had in itself a muted ecclesiastical tone. Miss Dempsey heard it as she was coming from the kitchen. She stood looking at the telephone for a moment, and then approached it gingerly, walking on the balls of her feet. She lifted the receiver as if it were hot. Her head on one side, holding the earpiece well away from her cheek, she listened to the message given by the bishop’s secretary. ‘Yes My Lord,’ she murmured, though in retrospect she knew that the secretary did not merit this. ‘The bishop and his sycophants’, Father Angwin always said; Miss Dempsey supposed they were a kind of deacon. Holding the receiver in her fingertips, she replaced it with great care. She stood in the dim passageway, for a moment, thinking, and bowed her head momentarily, as if she had heard the Holy Name of Jesus. Then she went to the foot of the stairs and bellowed up them: ‘Father Angwin, Father Angwin, get yourself up and dressed, the bishop will be upon us before eleven o’clock.’

Miss Dempsey went back into the kitchen, and switched on the electric light. It was not a morning when the light made a great deal of difference; the summer, a thick grey blanket, had pinned itself to the windows. Miss Dempsey heard the incessant drip, drip, drip from the branches and leaves outside, and a more urgent metallic drip, pit-pat, pit-pat; it was the guttering. Her figure moved, the electric light behind it, over the dull green wall; immense hands floated towards the kettle; as in a thick sea, her limbs swam for the range. Upstairs, the priest beat his shoe along the floor, and pretended to be coming.

Ten minutes later he had got himself up; she heard the creak of the floorboards above, the gurgle of water from the washbasin, his feet on the stairs. He sighed as he came down the hallway, his solitary morning sigh. Suddenly he was behind her, hovering: ‘Agnes, have you something for my stomach?’

‘I daresay,’ she said. He knew where the salts were kept; but she must get it for him, as if she were his mother. ‘Were there many at seven o’clock Mass?’

‘It’s funny you should ask,’ Father said, just as if she did not ask it every morning. ‘There were a few old Children of Mary, along with the usual derelicts. It wouldn’t be some special feast of theirs, would it? Walpurgisnacht?’

‘I don’t know what you mean, Father. I’m a Children of Mary myself, as you perfectly well know, and I’ve not heard of anything.’ She looked aggrieved. ‘Were they wearing their cloaks and all?’

‘No, they were in mufti, just their usual horseblankets.’

Miss Dempsey brought the teapot to the table. ‘You ought not to make mock of the Sodalities, Father.’

‘I wonder if something has got out about the bishop coming? Some intelligence of a subterranean variety? Am I to have bacon, Agnes?’

‘Not with your stomach in its present state.’

Miss Dempsey poured from the pot, a thick brown gurgling stream, adding to the noise: the dripping trees, the wind in the chimneys.

‘And another thing,’ he said. ‘McEvoy was there.’ Father Angwin hunched himself over the table. He warmed his hands around his cup. When he said the name of McEvoy, a shadow crossed his face, and hovered about his jaw, so that Miss Dempsey, who was given to imagination, thought for a moment she had seen what he would look like when he was eighty years old.

‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘and did he want something?’

‘No.’

‘I wonder why you mention him then?’

‘Dear Agnes, give me some peace. Go and let me compose myself for His Corpulence. What does he want, do you think? What’s he after this time?’

Agnes went out, a duster in her hand, her face full of complaints. Whatever he had meant about subterranean intelligence, surely he was not accusing her? Nobody but the bishop himself, forming the intention in his deep heart, had known he meant to visit – except perhaps the sycophants might have known. Therefore she, Miss Dempsey, could not know, therefore she could not hint, divulge, reveal, to the Children of Mary or anyone else in the parish. Had she known, she might have mentioned it. Might – if she had thought that anyone needed to know. She herself was the judge of what anyone needed to know. For Miss Dempsey occupied a special mediatory position, between church, convent and everyone else. To acquire information was her positive duty, and then what she did with it was a matter for her judgement and experience. Miss Dempsey would have eavesdropped on the confessional, if she could; she had often wondered how she might manage it.

Left at the breakfast table, Father Angwin stared into his teacup, and shifted it about. Miss Dempsey had not mastered the use of a strainer. Nothing in particular could be seen in the leaves, but for a moment Father Angwin thought that someone had come into the room behind him. He lifted his face, as he did in conversation, but there was no one there. ‘Come in, whoever you are,’ he said. ‘Have some stewed tea.’ Father Angwin was a foxy man, with his dead-leaf-colour eyes and hair; head tilted, he sniffed the wind, and shied away from what he detected. Somewhere else in the house, a door slammed.

Consider Agnes Dempsey: duster in hand, whisking it over the dustless bureau. In recent years her face had fallen softly, like a piece of light cotton folding into a box. Her neck too fell in floury, scalloped folds, to where her clothing cut off the view. Her eyes were round, child-like, bright blue, their air of surprise compounded by her invisible eyebrows and her hair, a faded gold streaked with grey, which sprang up from her hairline as if crackling with static. She had pleated skirts, and short bottle-shaped legs, and pastel twin-sets to cover the gentle twin hummocks of her bosom. Her mouth was small and pale and indiscernible, made to ingest the food she liked: Eccles cakes, vanilla slices, miniature chocolate Swiss rolls that came wrapped in red-and-silver foil. It was her habit to peel off the foil carefully, fold it as thin as a pencil, twist it into a ring, and pop it on her wedding finger. Then she would hold out both hands – fingers bloodless and slightly bent by incipient arthritis – and appraise them, a frown of concentration appearing as a single vertical line at the inner corner of her left eyebrow. Then she would rest her hand on her knee for a little; then remove the ring, intact, and throw it on to the fire. This was Miss Dempsey’s private habit, which no one had ever seen. Above her upper lip, on the right-hand side, she had a small flat wart, colourless as her mouth itself. It was hard for her not to touch it. She was afraid of cancer.

By the time the bishop came bustling in, Father Angwin had got over his hangover. He sat in the parlour, with his neat ingratiating smile. ‘Father Angwin, Father Angwin,’ the bishop said, crossing the room, and taking him in a grip; hand squeezing upper arm, hand pumping hand, quite beside himself with joviality, and yet those episcopal bifocals glinting and swimming with suspicion, and the episcopal head turning, turning from side to side, like a mechanical toy that you shoot for at a fair.

‘Tea,’ Father Angwin said.

‘No time for tea,’ said the bishop. He took up a stance on the hearthrug. ‘I’ve come to talk to you on the subject of uniting all right-thinking people in the family of God,’ he said. ‘Now then, now then, Father Angwin. I’m expecting trouble from you.’

‘Are you going to sit, or what?’ Father Angwin asked him diffidently.

The bishop clasped his pink hands before him. He looked severely at the priest, and swayed a little on the spot. ‘The next decade, Father Angwin, is the decade of unity. The decade of gathering-in. The decade of Christ’s human family. The decade of the Christian community in communion with itself.’ Agnes Dempsey came in with a tray. ‘Oh, since you’ve brought it,’ the bishop said.

When Miss Dempsey had left the room – her knees had become stiff, owing to the wet weather, and she was obliged to take her time – Father Angwin said, ‘Do you mean the decade of burying the hatchet, by any small chance?’

‘The decade of reconciliation,’ the bishop said, ‘the decade of amity, the decade of coexistence and the decade of the many-in-one.’

‘You’re talking like a person right outside my experience,’ Father Angwin said.

‘The ecumenical spirit,’ the bishop said. ‘Don’t you feel it in the breeze? Don’t you feel it wafted to you on the prayers of a million Christian souls?’

‘I feel it breathing on my neck.’

‘Am I ahead of my time, or what?’ the bishop asked. ‘Or is it you, Father Angwin, closing your ears and deaf to the wind of change? And you might pour the tea, for I can’t abide tea stewed.’

When Father Angwin had poured the tea, the bishop picked up his cup, and jiggled it in his hand, and took a scalding gulp. Standing before the fireplace, he turned his toes out more widely, and placed his superfluous arm behind his back, and breathed in a noticeable way.

‘Exasperated,’ Father Angwin said, speaking in a low voice, but not to himself. ‘Exasperated with me. Tell me, is that tea hot enough? Good enough? Whisky in it?’ He raised his voice. ‘I hardly understand you at all.’

‘Well,’ said the bishop, ‘have you heard of the vernacular Mass? Have you thought of it? I think of it. I think of it constantly. There are men in Rome who think of it.’

Father shook his head. ‘I couldn’t be part of that.’

‘No choice, my dear man, no choice; in five years, mark my words, or a little more than five…’

Father Angwin looked up. ‘Do you mean,’ he said, ‘that they could understand what we were saying?’

‘Exactly the point.’

‘Pernicious,’ Father muttered audibly. ‘Arrant nonsense.’ Then, louder, ‘I can well understand if you think that Latin’s too good for them. But the problem I have here is their little grasp of the English language, do you see?’

‘I take account of that,’ the bishop said. ‘The people of Fetherhoughton are not on a high level. I would not claim that they were.’

‘Then what am I to do?’

‘Everything conspires to improve them, Father. I will not refer to council housing, as I know it is a sore point in this district…’

‘Requiescant in pace,’ Father murmured.

‘…but have they not free spectacles? Free teeth? In the times we live in, Father Angwin, everything that can be done to improve their material welfare shall be done, and it is for you to think of improving them in the spiritual line. Now, I have some hints and tips for you, which you will kindly accept from me.’

‘I don’t see why I should,’ Father Angwin said, quite loudly enough to be heard, ‘when you are such an old fool. I don’t see why I can’t be a Pope in my own domain.’ He looked up. ‘Consider me at your disposal.’

The bishop stared; it was a pebbly stare. He pursed his lips and said nothing till he had drunk a second cup. Then, ‘I want to look at the church.’

At this early point, the topography of the village of Fetherhoughton may repay consideration. So may the manners, customs and dress of its inhabitants.

The village lay in moorland, which ringed it on three sides. The surrounding hills, from the village streets, looked like the hunched and bristling back of a sleeping dog. Let sleeping dogs lie, was the attitude of the people; for they hated nature. They turned their faces in the fourth direction, to the road and the railway that led them to the black heart of the industrial north: to Manchester, to Wigan, to Liverpool. They were not townspeople; they had none of their curiosity. They were not country people; they could tell a cow from a sheep, but it was not their business. Cotton was their business, and had been for nearly a century. There were three mills, but there were no clogs and shawls; there was nothing picturesque.

In summer the moorland looked black. Tiny distant figures swarmed over the hummocks and hills; they were Water Board men, Forestry Commission. In the folds of the hills there were pewter-coloured reservoirs, hidden from sight. The first event of autumn was the snowfall that blocked the pass that led through the moors to Yorkshire; this was generally accounted a good thing. All winter the snow lay on the hills. By April it had flaked off into scaly patches. Only in the warmest May would it seem to vanish entirely.

The people of Fetherhoughton kept their eyes averted from the moors with a singular effort of will. They did not talk about them. Someone – it was the mark of the outsider – might find a wild dignity and grandeur in the landscape. The Fetherhoughtonians did not look at the landscape at all. They were not Emily Brontë, nor were they paid to be, and the very suggestion that the Brontë-like matter was to hand was enough to make them close their minds and occupy their eyes with their shoelaces. The moors were the vast cemetery of their imaginations. Later, there were notorious murders in the vicinity, and real bodies were buried there.

The main street of Fetherhoughton was known to the inhabitants as Upstreet: ‘I am going Upstreet,’ they would say, ‘to the Co-op drapers.’ It was not unprosperous. Behind window displays of tinned salmon, grocers stood ready at their bacon slicers. Besides the Co-op draper, the Co-op general store, the Co-op butcher, the Co-op shoe shop and the Co-op baker, there was Madame Hilda, Modes; and there was a hairdresser, who took the young women into private cubicles, segregated them with plastic curtains, and gave them Permanent Waves. There was no bookshop, nor anything of that sort. But there was a public library, and a war memorial.

Off Upstreet ran other winding streets with gradients of one in four, lined by terraced houses built in the local stone; they had been put up by the mill-owners towards the end of the last century, and rented out to the hands. Their front doors opened straight on to the pavement. There were two rooms downstairs, of which the sitting room was referred to as the House; so that in the unlikely event of anyone from Fetherhoughton explaining their conduct in any way, they might say, ‘I cleaned miyoopstairs this morning, this afternoon I am bound fert clean the House.’

The speech of the Fetherhoughtonians is not easy to reproduce. The endeavour is false and futile. One misses the solemnity, the archaic formality of the Fetherhoughtonian dialect. It was a mode of speech, Father Angwin believed, that had come adrift from the language around it. Some current had caught them unawares, and washed the Fetherhoughtonians far from the navigable reaches of plain English; and there they drifted and bobbed on waters of their own, up the creek without a paddle.

But this is a digression, and in those houses there was no scope to digress. In the House there would be a coal fire, no heating in any other room, though there might be a single-bar electric fire kept, to be used in some ill-defined emergency. In the kitchen, a deep sink and a cold-water tap, and a very steep staircase, rising to the first floor. Two bedrooms, a garret: outside, a cobbled yard shared between some ten houses. A row of coalsheds, and a row of lavatories: to each house its own coalshed, but lavatories one between two. These were the usual domestic arrangements in Fetherhoughton and the surrounding districts.

Consider the women of Fetherhoughton, as a stranger might see them; a stranger might have the opportunity, because while the men were shut away in the mills the women liked to stand on their doorsteps. This standing was what they did. Recreational pursuits were for men: football, billiards, keeping hens. Treats were doled out to men, as a reward for good behaviour: cigarettes, beer at the Arundel Arms. Religion, and the public library, were for children. Women only talked. They analysed motive, discussed the serious business, carried life forward. Between the schoolroom and their present state came the weaving sheds; deafened by the noise of the machines, they spoke too loudly now, their voices scattering through the gritty streets like the cries of displaced gulls.

Treeless streets, where the wind blows.

Consider their outdoor (not doorstep) dress. They wore plastic raincoats of a thick, viscous green, impermeable, like alien skins. Should it chance not to rain, the women rolled these raincoats up and left them about the house, where they appeared like reptiles from the Amazon, momentarily coiled in slumber.

For shoes, the women wore bedroom slippers in the form of bootees, with a big zip up the middle. When they went outdoors they put on a stouter version of the same shoe in a tough dark brown suede. Their legs rose like tubes, only an inch or so exposed beneath the hems of their big winter coats.

The younger women had different bedroom slippers, which relatives gave each other every Christmas. They were dish-shaped, each with a thick ruff of pink or blue nylon fur. At first the soles of these slippers were as hard and shiny as glass; it took a week of wear before they bent and gave under the foot, and during that week their wearer would often look down on them with pride, with a guilty sense of luxury, as the nylon fur tickled her ankles. But gradually the fur lost its bounce and spring, and crumbs fell into it; by February its fibres were matted together with chip fat.

From the doorsteps the women stared at passers-by, and laughed. They knew a joke, when it was pointed out to them, but for the most part their entertainment lay in the discernment of physical peculiarities in those around them. They lived in hope of seeing a passer-by with a hunchback, knock knees or a hare lip. They did not think that it was cruel to mock the afflicted, they thought it was perfectly natural; they were sentimental but pitiless, very scathing and unforgiving about any aberration, deviation, eccentricity or piece of originality. There was a spirit abroad in the village that discriminated so thoroughly against pretension that it also discriminated against ambition, even against literacy.

Off Upstreet was Church Street, another steep hill; it was unpopulated, lined with ancient hedgerows, smoke and dust forming a perpetual ash-like deposit on the leaves. Church Street petered out at its summit into a wide track, muddy and stony, which in Fetherhoughton was known as the carriage-drive. Perhaps sometime in the last century a carriage had driven up it, conveying some pious person; the drive went nowhere except to the village school, to the convent and to the Church of St Thomas Aquinas. From the carriage-drive, footpaths led to the hamlet of Netherhoughton, and the moors.

Atop one of the smaller village streets sat a Methodist chapel, square and red, and about it was its cemetery, where chapel-going people came to early graves. There were a few Protestants sprinkled through the terraced rows; each yard might have some. The Protestants’ houses did not have, pinned to the door of the cupboard in the sitting room, a coloured picture of the Pontiff with a calendar beneath; but otherwise, their houses were not readily distinguishable.

And yet the Protestants were quite different, in the eyes of their neighbours. They were guilty of culpable ignorance. They refused to take on board the precepts of the True Faith. They knew that St Thomas Aquinas was there, but they refused to go in it. They refused to turn over their children to Mother Perpetua for a good Catholic education, and preferred to send them on a bus to a school in another village.

Mother Perpetua would tell the children, with her famous, dangerously sweet smile: ‘We have no objection to Protestants worshipping God in their own way. But we Catholics prefer to worship Him in his.’

The Protestants were damned, of course, by reason of this culpable ignorance. They would roast in hell. A span of seventy years, to ride bicycles in the steep streets, to get married, to eat bread and dripping: then bronchitis, pneumonia, a broken hip: then the minister calls, and the florist does a wreath: then devils will tear their flesh with pincers.

It is a most neighbourly thought.

The Church of St Thomas Aquinas was a massive building; its walls were plastered by deposits of soot and grease, so that their original grey was black. It stood on a kind of pimple of higher ground, and this fact occasioned little flights of stone steps and cobbled ramps, slippery and mossy underfoot; clustering at the base of the tower, they looked like household terriers running at the feet of some dangerous, dirty tramp.

The Church was in fact less than a hundred years old; it had been built when the Irish came to Fetherhoughton to work in the three cotton mills. But someone had briefed its architect to make it look as if it had always stood there. In those poor, troubled days it was an understandable wish, and the architect had a sense of history; it was a Shakespearian sense of history, with a grand contempt of the pitfalls of anachronism. Last Wednesday and the Battle of Bosworth are all one; the past is the past, and Mrs O’Toole, buried last Wednesday, is neck and neck with King Richard in the hurtle to eternity. This was – it must have been – the architect’s view. From the Romans to the Hanoverians, it was all the same to him; they wore, no doubt, leather jerkins and iron crowns; they burned witches; their buildings were stone and quaint and cold, their windows were not as our windows; they slapped their thighs and said prithee. Only such a vision could have commanded into being the music-hall medievalism of St Thomas Aquinas.

The architect had begun in a vaguely Gothic way and ended with something Saxon and brutal. There was a tower at the west end, without spire or pinnacles, but furnished with battlements. The porch had stone benches, and a plain holy-water stoup, and malodorous matting that was beaten thin by scuffling feet – matting that was always sodden, and might have been composed of some thirsty vegetable matter.

The doorway had a round arch of a Norman persuasion, but no recessed arches, no little shafts, no ornament, not so much as a lozenge, a zigzag, a chevron; stern had been the mood the day that doorway was designed, and the door itself was strapped and hinged in a manner that put one in mind of siege warfare and starvation and a populace reduced to eating its rats.

Inside the church, in the pit-like gloom, there was a deep font, without ornament, with a single plain shaft, and big enough to cope with a multiple birth, or dip a sheep. There was a west gallery for the organ, with a patch of deeper blackness beneath it; the gallery itself, though you would not know until you had swum into that blackness, was reached by a low little doorway with junior siege-hinges, and a treacherous spiral staircase, with risers a foot deep. There were two side chapels, two aisles, and it was in the arcades that the architect’s derangement was most evident, for the arches were round or pointed, seemingly as a consequence of some spur-of-the-moment decision, and as one blundered through the nave, the confusion of style gave the church a misleadingly heroic air, as if it had been built, like one of the great European cathedrals, in successive campaigns a hundred years apart. The shafts of the columns were squat and massive cylinders, made of a greyish, finely pitted stone, and their uncarved capitals resembled packing cases.

The lancet windows were grouped two by two, and surmounted by grudging tracery, here a circle, here a quatrefoil, here a dagger trefoil. In each of the lights stood a glass saint, bearing his name on an unfurling scroll, each scroll inscribed in an unreadable Germanic black-letter; the faces of these glass saints were identical, their expressions were all alike. The glass itself was of a mill-town sort; there was a light-refusing, industrial quality about its thick texture, and its colours were blatant and vile: a traffic-light green, a sugar-bag blue and the dull but acidic red of cheap strawberry jam.

There were stone flags underfoot, and the long benches were varnished with a treacly red stain; the doors to the single confessional were low and latched, like the doors to a coalshed.

Father Angwin and the bishop came out through the draughty vaulted passage from the sacristy, and emerged by the Lady chapel in the north aisle. They looked about; not that it profited them. In all, St Thomas Aquinas was as dark as Notre-Dame and resembled it in one other alarming particular – that at any given moment, standing in one part, you lost all sense of what might be happening in another. You could not see the roof, although you had – in St Thomas Aquinas—an uneasy, crawling feeling about it, that it might not be so far above your head at all, and that it might lower itself a little from time to time, just that little inch or so that betrayed its ambition to unite, one winter’s day, with the stone flags, and freeze into a solid block of unwrought masonry, with the worshippers between. The church’s inner spaces were aggregations of darkness, with channels of thicker darkness between. There were plaster saints—which the bishop now surveyed as best he might – and before most of them, in severe iron racks that looked like the bars of a beast-house, devotional candles burned; yet it was a lightless burning, like marsh-gas, a flickering in an unfelt, breathless wind. There were draughts, it was true, which followed each worshipper like a bad reputation, which dabbed at their ankles and climbed into their clothes, as cats do with people who do not like them. But when the church was empty the draughts lay quiet, only whistling from time to time about the floor; and the candle flames rose up towards the roof, straight and thin as dressmaker’s pins.

‘These statues,’ said the bishop. ‘Have you a pocket torch?’ Father Angwin did not reply. ‘Then give me a tour,’ the bishop demanded. ‘Start here. I cannot identify this fellow. Is he a Negro?’

‘Not really. He’s been painted. A lot of them have. That’s St Dunstan. Don’t you see his tongs?’

‘What has he got tongs for?’ the bishop asked rudely. He stared at the saint in a hostile way, his paunch thrust out.

‘He was working at his forge when the devil came to tempt him, and the saint seized his nose with red-hot pincers.’

‘I wonder what sort of temptations you might get while working at a forge.’ The bishop peered into the darkness. ‘There are a lot of them, Father. You have more statues than any church in the diocese.’ He passed on down the aisle. ‘How did you get them? Where did they come from?’

‘They were here before my time. They’ve always been here.’

‘You know that is impossible. They were someone’s decision. Who is this woman with the pliers? This place is like an ironmonger’s shop.’

‘That’s Apollonia. The Romans pulled her teeth out. She’s the patron saint of dentists.’ Father Angwin looked up into the martyr’s downturned, expressionless face. He stooped and took a candle from the wooden box at the statue’s foot, and lit it from the solitary flame that burned below Dunstan. He carried it back with care, and fitted it into one of Apollonia’s empty candle-holders. ‘Nobody bothers with her. They don’t go in for dentistry here. Their teeth fall out quite early in life, and they find it a relief.’

‘Pass on,’ said the bishop.

‘Here are my four Church Fathers. You will see St Gregory in his Papal tiara.’

‘I cannot see anything.’

‘You must take my word for it. And St Augustine, holding a heart, you see, pierced with an arrow. And the other Fathers here, St Jerome with his little lion.’

‘It really is a very small beast.’ The bishop leant forward, put himself nose to nose with it. ‘Not realistic at all.’

Father Angwin put his hand on the lion’s arched mane, and traced the length of its stone back with his forefinger. ‘I like him the best of all the Fathers. I think of him in the desert with his wild eyes and his bare hermit’s knees.’

‘Who’s left?’ said the bishop. ‘Ambrose. Ambrose with his hive.’

‘St Beehive, the children call him. Similarly it was mentioned in the parish some two generations back that Augustine was the Bishop of Hippo, and since then I am afraid that there has been a great deal of confusion among the juveniles, passed on carefully, you see, by their parents.’

The bishop made a little growl, deep in his throat. Father Angwin had the feeling that he had somehow played into the bishop’s hands; that the bishop would think that it mattered, if they were confused.

‘Can it matter?’ he said quickly. ‘Look at St Agatha here, poor Christian soul, carrying her breasts on a dish. Why is she the patron saint of bellfounders? Because a little mistake was made, with the shape; you can understand it. Why do we bless bread in a dish on 5 February? Because as well as looking like bells they look like bread rolls. It is a harmless mistake. It is more decent than the truth. It is less cruel.’

They had passed by now almost to the back of the church, and in the north aisle, opposite them, there were more saints; St Bartholomew clutched the knife with which he had been flayed, St Cecilia her portable organ. A Virgin, with the foolish expression imparted by a sickly smile and a chipped nose, held her blue arms out stiffly under her drapery; and St Theresa, the Little Flower, glowered from beneath her wreath of roses.

The bishop crossed the church, and looked up into the Carmelite’s face, and tapped her foot. ‘I make exceptions, Father,’ he said. ‘Our boys in the trenches of Flanders addressed their prayers through the Little Flower, and some of those who did so were I daresay not Catholic at all. There are saints for our time, Father, and this one here is a shining example to all Catholic womanhood. Perhaps this one may stay. I will give it consideration.’

‘Stay?’ the priest said. ‘Where are they going?’

‘Out,’ said the bishop succinctly. ‘And where, I care not. Somehow, Father Angwin, I shall drag you and your church and your parishioners into the 1950s, where we all quite firmly belong. I cannot have this posturing, Father, I cannot have this idolatry.’

‘But they are not idols. They are just statues. They are just representations.’

‘And if I were to walk out on to the street, Father, and I were to lay hold of one of your parishioners, do you think he would be able to distinguish, to my satisfaction, between that honour and reverence that we give the saints and that worship that belongs to God?’

‘Windbag,’ said Father Angwin. ‘Dechristianizer. Saladin.’ He pitched his voice up. ‘It isn’t what you think. But the people here are very deficient in the power of prayer. They are simple people. I am a simple man myself.’

‘I am aware of that,’ the bishop said.

‘The saints have their attributes. They have their areas of interest. A congregation latches on to them.’

‘They must latch off,’ said the bishop brutally. ‘I won’t have it. These are to go.’

As he passed Michael the Archangel, Father Angwin looked up and saw the scales in which that saint weighs human souls, and he dropped his eyes to Michael’s foot: a bare, muscled, claw-like foot, that had sometimes seemed to him like the foot of an ape. He passed under the gallery, into the thicker, velvet blackness where St Thomas himself, the Angelic Doctor, stood central and square on his plinth, his stone gaze on the high altar, and the star that he held in his fine hands shedding lightless rays into the greater dark.

Chapter Two

When they returned to the house, the bishop was boisterous and offensive. He wanted more tea, and biscuits too. ‘I won’t dispute it,’ he said. ‘I won’t dispute it any more. Your congregation have superstitions that would disgrace Sicilian peasants.’

‘But I am afraid,’ Father Angwin said, ‘that if you take away the statues, and next the Latin, next the feast days, the fast days, the vestments –’

‘I said nothing about this, did I?’

‘I can see the future. They won’t come any more. Why should they? Why should they come to church? They might as well be out in the street.’

‘We are not here for frills and baubles, Father,’ said the bishop. ‘We are not here for fripperies. We are here for Christian witness.’

‘Rubbish,’ Father said. ‘These people aren’t Christians. These people are heathens and Catholics.’

When Agnes Dempsey came in with the Nice biscuits she could see that Father Angwin was in a poor state, quivering and sweating and passing his hand over his forehead. She hung about in the corridor, to catch what she could.

‘Well, come now,’ the bishop said. She could hear that he was alarmed. ‘Don’t take on so. I’m not saying you may not have an image. I’m not saying that you may not have a statue at all. I’m saying we must make an accommodation to the times in which we live.’

‘I don’t see why,’ Father said, adding audibly, ‘you fat fool.’

‘Are you quite well?’ the bishop said. ‘You keep talking in different voices. Insulting me.’

‘If the truth insults you.’

‘Never mind,’ said the bishop. ‘I am of robust character. But I think, Father Angwin, that you must have an assistant. Some young chap, as strong as myself. It seems to me you know next to nothing of the tide of the times. Do you look at television?’ Father Angwin shook his head. ‘You don’t possess a receiving set,’ said the bishop. ‘You should, you know. Broadcasting is our greatest asset, wisely used. Why, I cannot count the good that has been done in the Republic, in helping the denominations understand each other, by Rumble and Carty’s “Radio Replies”. Depend upon it, Father, that’s the future.’ The bishop smote the mantelpiece, like Moses striking the rock.

Father Angwin surveyed him. Irish as he was, where had he got that Anglo complexion, rosy and cyanosed by turn? At a public school, surely, a minor English public school. If it had stood to Father Angwin, the bishop would not have been educated, or at least not in that way. He needed to know who was Galileo, and to chant in choir for a few hours at a time. The lives of the saints would have been enough for him, and the movement of the spheres, and a touch of practical wisdom on dairy farming or some such, that was useful to a pastoral economy.

All this he voiced to the bishop; the bishop stared. Outside the door Miss Dempsey stood with her blue eyes growing brighter, sucking one finger like a child who has burnt it on the stove. She heard footsteps above, in the passage, in the bedroom. It is ghosts, she thought, walking on my mopping. Angelic doctors, virgin martyrs. Doors slammed overhead.

The rain had stopped. Silence crept through the house. The bishop was a modern man, no patience with scruples, no time for the ancient byways of faith; and what can you do, against a modern man? When Father Angwin spoke again, the note of contention had gone from his voice; fatigue replaced it. ‘Those statues are as tall as men,’ he said.

‘Get help,’ said the bishop. ‘You have plenty of help. Get the parishioners to assist. Get the Men’s Fellowship on to it.’

‘Where am I to put them? I can’t break them up.’

‘Well, agreed. It wouldn’t be wholly decent. Stack them in your garage. Why don’t you do that?’

‘What about my vehicle?’

‘What? Is that the thing, outside?’

‘My motor car,’ Father said.

‘That heap of junk? Why not expose it to the elements?’

‘It’s true,’ Father Angwin said humbly, ‘it’s a worthless car. You can see the road through the floor as you drive.’

‘I can remember,’ the bishop said abrasively, ‘when chaps got about on bicycles.’

Chaps, Father thought. Chaps is it, now? ‘You couldn’t go to Netherhoughton on a bicycle,’ he said. ‘They’d knock you off it.’

‘Good heavens,’ the bishop said. He looked over his shoulder, being imperfectly certain of the geography of this most northerly outpost of the diocese. ‘Are they Orangemen up there?’

‘They have an Orange Lodge. They are all in it, Catholics too. They have firework parties in Netherhoughton. Ox-roasts. They play football with human heads.’

‘At some point you exaggerate,’ the bishop said. ‘I am not sure at which.’

‘Would you care to make a pastoral visit?’

‘Indeed not,’ said the bishop. ‘I have pressing matters. I must be getting back. You may keep Thomas Aquinas, St Theresa the Little Flower and the Holy Virgin herself, only try if you can to get her nose repaired.’

Miss Dempsey moved away from the door. The bishop came out into the hall and gave her a piercing look. She wiped her hands nervously on her pinny and knelt on the floor. ‘May I kiss the ring, M’ lud?’

‘Oh, get away, woman. Get into the kitchen. Contribute something practical, will you?’

‘The bishop cannot abide the piety of the ignorant,’ Father Angwin said.

Miss Dempsey got painfully to her feet. Two strides carried the bishop through the hall, a thrust of his arms carried him into his cape, and he threw open the front door, tussling on the path with the damp, windy day. ‘Summer’s over,’ he observed. ‘Not that you see much of it at this end of the diocese.’

‘Allow me to attend you into your princely vehicle,’ Father Angwin said. He had bowed his shoulders, and adopted a servile tone.

‘That will do,’ the bishop said. He eased himself into the driver’s seat, grunting a little. He knew that Angwin was mad, but he did not want a scandal in the diocese. ‘I shall visit you again,’ he said, ‘when you least expect it. To see that everything has been done.’

‘Okey-dokey,’ Father Angwin said. ‘I’ll prepare the boiling oil for you.’

The bishop roared away, with a clashing and meshing of gears; around the next bend the schoolchildren brought him to a halt, processing out of the gate to the Nissen hut for their dinners. The bishop put his fist on his horn and blew out two long blasts at the mites, scattering them into the ditch. They crawled out and stared after him, wet leaves sticking to their bare knees.

In Father Angwin’s parlour the tinny little mantel-clock struck twelve. ‘Too late,’ Agnes Dempsey said, in a discouraged tone. ‘Only, Father, I was thinking to cheer you up. If you pray to St Anne before twelve o’clock on a Wednesday, you’ll get a pleasant surprise before the end of the week.’

Father Angwin shook his head. ‘Tuesday, Agnes my lamb. Not Wednesday. We have to be exact in these matters.’

Her invisible eyebrows rose a fraction. ‘So that’s why it has never worked. But there’s another thing, Father—I must alert you. I can hear a person walking about upstairs, when nobody is there.’

Nervously, she put her hand up to her mouth, and touched the pale flat wart.

‘Yes, it happens,’ Father Angwin said. He sat on a hard chair at the dining table, huddled into himself, his rust-coloured head bowed. ‘I often think it is myself.’

‘But you are here.’

‘At this moment, yes. Perhaps it is a forerunner. Someone who is to come.’

‘The Lord?’ Miss Dempsey asked wildly.

‘The curate. I am threatened with a curate. What a very extraordinary curate that would be…a walker without feet, a melter through walls. But no. Probably not.’ He forced himself to sit up straighter. ‘I expect the bishop will send some ordinary spy. Just with ordinary powers.’

‘A sycophant.’

‘Just so.’

‘What will you do with the statues, Father? You know the garage has not got a roof, in the proper meaning of the word. They would be exposed to the damp. They would get mould. It hardly seems right.’

‘You think we should treat them with reverence, Agnes. You think they are not just lumps of paint and plaster.’

‘All my life,’ Agnes said impressively, ‘all my life, Father, I have known those statues. I cannot think how we will find our way around the church without them. It will be like some big filthy barn.’

‘Have you any ideas?’

‘They could be boarded out. With different people. The Children of Mary would take St Agatha, turn and turn about. We would need a van, mind. She couldn’t fit in your car.’

‘But they would get tired of her, Agnes. Suppose one of them got a husband? He might not like its presence in the house. And then, you know, people in Fetherhoughton have so little room. I’m afraid it would not be a permanent solution.’

Miss Dempsey looked stubborn. ‘They ought to be preserved. In case of a change of bishop.’

‘No. I’m afraid they will never be wanted again. We are asking for time to run backwards. The bishop is right about so many things, but I wish he would stick to his politics and keep out of religion.’

‘Then what’s to be done?’ Miss Dempsey put up her hand, and wavered, then touched her wart. ‘They’re like people, to me. They’re like my relatives. I wouldn’t put my relatives in a garage.’

‘Faith is dead,’ Father Angwin said. ‘Its time is up. And faith being dead, if we are not to become automatons we must hang on to our superstitions as hard as we may.’ He looked up. ‘You’re quite right, Agnes. It isn’t proper to put them in a garage like old lumber, and I’ll not farm them out around the parish and have them left on street corners. We’ll keep them together. And somewhere we know where they are. We’ll bury them. That’s what we’ll do. We’ll bury them in the church grounds.’

‘Oh, dear God.’ Tears of fright and fury sprang into Agnes’s eyes. ‘Forgive me Father, but there’s something inexpressibly horrible about the idea.’

‘I shan’t have a service,’ Father Angwin said. ‘Just an interment.’

You could not say that in Fetherhoughton there was a bush telegraph, for in that place, scoured as it was by Siberian winds, you could not find a bush. Nevertheless, by the time the schoolchildren were released next day for their morning break, everyone had heard of the developments.

St Thomas Aquinas School had been, in their grandparents’ time, one long schoolroom; but the rowdyism and ill-behaviour of successive generations had rendered this hugger-mugger sort of education impossible, and now flimsy partitioning divided one age of children from the next. Of course, when the school had been founded, great girls and boys of twelve years old were recognized to have no more need of arithmetic and improving verses, and were launched on the world to begin their adult careers among the textile machines. But now civilization had advanced so far that fifteen-year-olds occupied the Top Class, towering over Mother Perpetua, who was the headmistress, and who was responsible for keeping this Top Class from the excesses of frustrated youth.

And yet it was not youth as we know it, because Youth, elsewhere, was in the process of being invented. A faint intimation of it reached Fetherhoughton; the boys of fifteen slicked their hair greasily over their knobbly foreheads, and sometimes, like people suffering from a nervous disease and beset by uncontrollable tics, they would make claws of their hands and strum them repetitiously across their bellies. Mother Perpetua called it ‘imitating skiffle groups’. It was a punishable offence.

These boys were undergrown youths, their faces burnt from kicking footballs into the moorland wind. They were vague and heedless, and their childhoods hung about them. The narrow backs of their necks showed it, and their comic papers, and their sudden indecorous bursts of high spirits – indecorous, because high spirits are a foolish waste in those destined for the chain gang of marriage and the mill.

But in the Big Girls there was no vestige of childhood left. The Big Girls wore cardigans, and at playtime they skulked together in a knot by the wall, their faces moody, spreading scandal. They clasped their arms across their chests, hands hugging woollen upper arms: podgy hands, and low-slung bosoms like their grandmothers. Their cheap clothes were often small for them, and it was this that gave them their indecent womanliness; it was a rule, in the outside world, that girls stopped growing at about this age, but if you had seen the big girls of Fetherhoughton you would say, they will never stop growing, they will devour the world. The schoolroom chairs creaked under their bottoms; from time to time, nodding forward, swaying, and raucous, rhythmic, terrible, they would laugh: hehr, hehr, hehr.

The girls had learnt nothing; or if they had, they had forgotten it, immediately and as a matter of policy. The school was a House of Detention to them. Many of them suffered poor sight, and had done from their early years; the school nurse came, with letters on cards, and tested their eyes, and the State gave them spectacles. But they would not wear them. ‘Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.’ But no one will make passes at them anyway. The process by which they will eventually mate and reproduce is invisible and had better remain so. They may as well have their astigmatism corrected, for all the sexual success it will bring them.

While the big girls leant by the wall, and while the big boys with their footballs tacked across the square of asphalt, the juniors of Fetherhoughton, red in tooth and claw, occupied themselves in games of tag, in hopscotch and skipping games. Their games were played in a fever of intolerance, an agony to those who could not hop or skip; as for tag, it was their habit to pick on some poor child more than usually ragged, or stupid, or scrofulous, and to bawl out his name, and declare you had his ‘touch’ and must pass it on. Of those not caught up in these games, a number occupied themselves in jumping, time after time, from the low wall that divided the upper level of the playground from the lower; others started fights. The level of disorder, the incidence of injury, was so high, that Mother Perpetua was obliged to segregate the infant class from the rest of the school at playtime, and corral them in a cobbled, evil-smelling yard at the back of the building; it was here, under the shadow of a moss-covered wall some twenty feet in height, that the school had its privies. It will not do to call them lavatories, for there was no provision to wash. To wash would have been thought an affectation.

Above the school the ground banked steeply, towards the convent and the church; below, it fell away to the village. The dismal wooded slopes that flanked the carriage-drive were referred to by local people as ‘the terraces’. From the wall at the lower end of the playground, the children looked down on tree-tops; behind the school, above the towering wall that fenced the infants in, they could see the gnarled and homeless and jutting roots of other trees, thrust out from the hillside and growing into air. These terraces were lightless places, without footholds, and it was a peculiarity of their trees that they bore foliage only at the very top; so that below the green canopy there twisted a mile of black branches, like a witch’s knitting. Autumn came early; and underfoot, at every season of the year, there was a sunless mulch of dead leaves.

On this particular day, the playground was more than usually animated; the children surged into knots and unravelled themselves again, and streamed wailing across the asphalt, and banked up against the low dividing wall. ‘St Hippo’, they shouted, and ‘St Beehive’; they made their arms into the wings of bombers, and wheeled and dived, and made the snarling whining noise of engines and the crunch of impact and the whoosh of flames.

Mother Perpetua watched them from the school door. She watched for a minute or two, and then with a swift rustle passed back into the shadows, and re-emerged with her cane. She lifted her habit four inches, and thrust out her laced black shoes and strode; then she was amongst the children, arm uplifted, her great deep sleeve falling back to reveal underlayers of black wool. ‘In, in, in,’ cried Mother Perpetua, ‘get in with you, get in.’ Her cane rose and fell across the children’s fraying jerseys. Howling, they dispersed. A bell rang; mouths agape, they ran into little lines, and sniffled back into their classrooms. Mother Perpetua watched them in, until the playground was empty; a damp wind picked at her skirts. She tucked the cane under her arm, and marched out of the school gates, and up the road to see Father Angwin. As she passed the convent she scanned its windows for signs of life, but could see none; could see nothing to displease her.

Quite unable to grasp her name, the local people had always called her Mother Purpiture; the more irreverent schoolchildren called her Old Ma Purpit, and it was some years since Father Angwin himself had thought of her by any other name. Purpit was a stumpy woman, of middle years—it is not proper to speculate about the exact age of nuns. Her skin was pale and rather spongy, her nose of the fleshy sort; she had a hoarse flirtatious laugh, and with this laugh, a way of flicking a corner of her veil back over her left shoulder; she had tombstone teeth.

Miss Dempsey brought her in, doing the office of a maid, her hands clasped before her at about the bottom button of her twin-set. ‘Mother Purpiture,’ she announced, grave and respectful. Father Angwin was not reading his breviary, but he at once picked it up, defensively, from the table beside him. Agnes took a little pace back to admit the nun, and stood uneasily fingering her artificial pearls, her mouth turned down at the corners. ‘Will you be wanting tea?’ she exhaled; and let her eyes travel from side to side. Without an answer, she effaced herself; slid behind Mother Perpetua, and left the room backwards.

Perpetua took a gay little step, arching her instep in the lace-up shoes. ‘Ah, but I’m interrupting you,’ she said.

I hope Agnes does not bring in tea, Father Angwin thought. I hope she does not take that upon herself. It would be encouraging Purpit. ‘Take a seat?’ he said. But Purpit continued her dance.

‘Can I believe the evidence of my ears?’ she asked. ‘Is it true that the bishop wants the statues disposed of?’

‘It is true.’

‘I always thought the church was cluttered. Not that it is for me to say.’

‘Not that it is for you to say,’ Father Angwin muttered.

Purpit flicked her veil back over her shoulder. ‘Do I also hear right? That you mean to bury them? Because what do you want, Father? Do you mean to have the village up here with wreaths? Or do you mean the congregation should just go on as normal and pretend that they are not buried and light their candles round the graves?’

‘It is you who say, graves. I have not said any other than “holes”. It is not a ceremony. It is not a rite. It is a measure.’ Hearing himself say this, Father Angwin found himself consoled a little. ‘A measure’ gave it distance, gave it dignity, gave it an air of calculation.

‘And when do you intend taking this measure?’

‘I thought of Saturday. To have the services of the Men’s Fellowship.’

‘Well, and I can lend you Sister Philomena. A fine strong girl. She can dig. A true daughter of the Irish soil.’

‘Oirish’, she said; it was her little joke. You cannot expect much of the humour of nuns. Purpit gave her hoarse horse laugh, and flicked her veil again. ‘I hear you’re threatened with a curate,’ she said.

Father Angwin noted her choice of word. He looked up. Between Mother Perpetua’s two front teeth, there was a gap; not an uncommon thing, but Father Angwin found that it attracted his eye. He thought of Mother Perpetua as a cannibal; and through that gap, in his imagination, she pulled and sucked the more tender bits of her victims. ‘Well, you never know,’ the nun said. ‘Fresh blood.’

The Saturday following was the day that Father Angwin had marked out for the interment; and he had chosen dusk, to draw a veil of decency over the indecent. The weather had cleared, and the declining sun gold-tipped the battlements; in the damp, moss-scented air, house-martins dipped and wheeled over the presbytery.

The Men’s Fellowship, when they were assembled in their ancient and greeny-black suits, wore an aspect of mourning. ‘I don’t know,’ Father Angwin said, ‘but would not corduroys have been more suitable?’ In all his years in the parish he had not reconciled himself to the strange and hybrid character of the place. He knew in his heart that they were clerks and millhands, that they had no corduroys, no woollen shirts, no rustic boots.

The married men, on the whole, eschewed the Fellowship. They came to church but once a year, and that at Easter or thereabouts; they left such business to their wives. But there were many bachelors in the parish, men of middle years for the most part, desiccated through abstinence and yellow through long devotion; clerics manqués, but most of them too humble or stupid to put themselves forward as candidates for ordination. The smell of mould arose from the speckled shoulders of their jackets, and, being hung about with holy medals, they clanked as they walked. Some of them, as he knew from the confessional, practised austerities: meagre diets, the denial of tobacco. He suspected much else: hair shirts, knotted-string scourges. Only supernumerary devotions could kindle their dull eyes. Each lived for the day when he might help an elderly nun across the road, or be nodded to by a monsignor.

The ground had been professionally prepared, for Father Angwin was not about to overtax or overestimate his crew. The gravedigger and his assistant had been called in from the cemetery that St Thomas Aquinas shared with the neighbouring parish; the Fetherhoughtonians did not merit a facility of their own. There had been a discussion (heated) in the church porch, and eventually, and after money had changed hands, the two craftsmen had seen the logic of the priest’s case. True, they were not employed to dig holes; it was not their vocation, it did not agree with them. For that he might better have employed, as one of them pointed out, a landscape gardener. But given that the holes were grave-shaped, it might be seen as trespassing on their speciality should he retain some other professional; and the holes need not be so deep as graves, so the work would be easy. They had conceded the point, and excavated the ground behind the garage.

When Father Angwin saw the holes he clasped his arms across his chest, hugging behind his soutane a nameless, floating anxiety; what he saw was a graveyard prepared for some coming massacre or atrocity, and he said to himself, as clever children always say, if God knows our ends, why cannot he prevent them, why is the world so full of malice and cruelty, why did God make it at all and give us free will if he knows already that some of us will destroy ourselves in exercising it? Then he remembered that he did not believe in God, and he went into the church to supervise the removal of the statues from their plinths.

Father Angwin had himself a good knowledge of the principles of levers and pulleys, but it was Sister Philomena who, by example, spurred the Men’s Fellowship on to the effort needed. By the time the statues were out of doors, and the men had coiled their ropes and picked up their shovels, the scent of her skin had seeped to them through her heavy black habit, and they edged away, their celibate frames shaken by what they did not understand. She was a big, healthy girl, in her woollen stockings. You were conscious of the smell of soap from her skin, of her eyebrows and of her feet, and of other parts you do not notice on nuns. It was possible to think of her having knees.

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.

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