“You must fast,” Sister Philomena said. Her voice was very clear; carrying to the naughty, scuffling children, those who sat in the back row. “Before you take communion, you must fast. You mustn’t have your breakfast that day. But then when you get home you can have your Sunday dinner.”
It was ten o’clock in the morning. The lights were on. The rain came down outside. The children near the radiators had a baked smell coming from them. Their wellington boots stood tenantless along the far wall; they swung their feet, woollen sausages of sock extending six inches beyond their toes.
The children were almost seven years old. She was preparing them. Next spring they would go to confession for the first time—she would lead them up to the church on a Friday morning—and on the Sunday following they would make their first communion. She wondered if there was anything they could do, between Friday and Sunday, to make a mess of her efforts. How can you tell if they are in mortal sin? You can’t keep them in your pockets. Philomena was no sentimentalist; she knew what they were capable of. Great sins, of violence and uncharity, were open to them now; as adults, they would find their range smaller.
A child put up his hand. “If we only have to fast for three hours, Sister, couldn’t we have us breakfasts if we got up very early?”
“You could. It might not be good for your digestion, eating at such an hour.”
“What if I did get up though, Sister, and had us breakfast, and then I found out that us clock was wrong? Mustn’t I go to communion that day?”
“Well, if it was a genuine mistake …” The children flustered her. “I don’t know,” she said. “I will ask Father Angwin.” Or I might look it up in my question-and-answer book, she thought. What is time, anyway? The book went on about real times and mean times; it made reference to meridians. It talked about deductions for summer time, and indicated the good practice for people who went by sundials. “It’s to do with Greenwich,” she said. “All would be well if you were right by Greenwich.”
“Is Greenwich like Lourdes?” they said, putting up their hands. “Is there cures? Is there miracles there?”
Philomena found the children difficult: more difficult week by week. Perpetua said that the sacrament worked of itself. They didn’t have to understand; she, Philomena, was only required to see that they could go through the motions.
“What if I’m doing the fast,” one said, “and my tooth comes out, and I swallow it?”
“That would just be a little accident,” Philomena said. “You could still take the sacrament.”
“But Sister, you said we wasn’t to touch the host with us teeth. When it was in your stomach—”
From the next classroom, she heard Perpetua’s voice raised. She knew the signs and symptoms; soon she would have her cane out.
“What if I’m doing the fast, and a fly flies down us throat?”
“That’ll do now,” she said. “There’s plenty of time for the answers to these questions. Now we’re going to get up very quietly”—from us desks, she nearly said—“from our desks, and form a line to put on our wellingtons, and then we’re going to form up two by two and walk up to church and have a Holy Communion practice.”
Up to church. Oh God, oh God, she thought, feeling her heart beat faster. What her heart chose to do was nothing she could control;
let it thump away and batter and lurch at her ribs, like a puppy locked in a barn. There was no door she could open to let it free.
The mournful crocodile, up the hill and into the church; whispers stilled in the porch, an epidemic of shushing. “They are so slow,” Purpit had said. “We must rehearse them all winter for communion in spring. Otherwise they will be blundering into each other and goodness knows what all.” She had offered Philomena the use of her most formidable cane, but the young nun had declined. She knew, perfectly well, that Purpit would like to use it on her.
If only there were a bit of light in the place, she thought. The children’s skinny shapes passed into the benches like a file of ghosts, like the ghosts from some children’s hospital, an empty fever ward. She picked up a fistful of candles from the Little Flower’s box, lit them from those that were burning, and juggled them into their holders. “Now,” she said. “Begin.”
At once, and all together, the children leapt up from their kneelers, tripping over each other’s legs, scrabbling for the centre aisle. “Stop, stop, stop,” Philomena yelled. “Back, back, back. As you were. Kneel down. Close your eyes. Join your hands. When I give the word, first child stand up, walk, second child stand up, walk. Follow on in a line. First child turn left, second child follow, all children follow. Get to the altar rail and kneel down reverently. Join your hands, close your eyes, wait your turn for the Holy Eucharist. When the altar rail is all filled up, children behind stop, there, just there, d’you see, at the top of the aisle. You people that are waiting, don’t crowd up behind the people at the rail. Keep a distance. Or however will they get back when they’re finished?”
At first they tended to close their eyes at the wrong time and bump into each other, but after a half hour you could see that they were beginning to get the idea. They knelt at the altar rail with their mouths open, and at the word of command they closed them and
paused for a reverent moment, and then rose to stamp back to their places. The signs of strain were evident on their faces. She was not so old that she had forgotten what troubled them. Will you find your place again in the crowded church at eleven o’clock Mass? Will you struggle into the wrong bench, so that people will laugh and point? Will you (worse) attempt to get back down the wrong aisle and lose your bearings completely? How will you inch and scramble out of your place at the start, without bruising the shins of non-communicants? Will you fit smoothly into the shuffling stream, or somehow hold up the proceedings?
“You must keep your eyes open,” she advised them. “No, what I mean is, you must keep your wits about you, keep a look-out. The woman on the end of your row, now suppose she’s wearing a funny hat. Take a good look at that hat as you go up. Then when you turn from the altar, use it to navigate by.”
She stood at the back of the church, looking up the centre aisle, to judge if the traffic flow was smooth. Her back was to St. Thomas Aquinas, the cold saint with his plaster star, and from that direction (as if behind the statue, as if beneath it) she heard a whisper, a rustle, like the feet of a family of mice. Beneath her veil, the hairs pricked at the back of her neck. Then she felt eyes resting on her. She knew it was Fludd. His scrutiny seemed to pass through her black veil, through her starched white under-veil, through her drawstring cap, and revel in what hair she had left these days, and play along her scalp. “Once more,” she called. “Eyes closed now. Heads down. Say a little prayer. When I give the word, begin … Now.”
She waited only long enough to see the first child, the second child, on their feet and embarked on their march. Then she turned urgently. “Father? Father?”
Fludd lurked behind the statue. He would not advance. She heard the children, in their wellington boots, clumping towards the altar. She took a step or two, almost running, to the back of the church and the deep shadows under the gallery. “Are you there?” she whispered. “Mother Perpetua has taken me off being sacristan. She saw
us, the other day, when we were mending the nose. She’s in a rage with me for monopolizing your time. I want to talk to you. There are some things I must ask you.”
“Yes,” Fludd said. It was as if the Angelic Doctor had spoken; Fludd’s black form could hardly be discerned.
“At the allotments,” she said. “There’s a shed …” She could hear the first batch of children now, shuffling back into their places. Too quick, she thought. They should have spent more time at the altar, their knees have barely touched the ground. And feeling these moments of her life begin to slip away, she launched herself forward and clung to the statue’s base, to the unyielding plaster hem of the robes, reached out her blue-veined hand and knotted her fingers between the point of the star. Fludd saw her clinging, like a drowning woman to jetsam. He wanted to step forward, but held himself back. His eyes rested upon her. In destrier moments, he thought. In death’s drear moments. Make me only thine.
Outside the purlieus of the convent Philomena had a different kind of walk. She strode ahead of him, swinging her arms carelessly, hopping over the tussocks of grass.
“I came up here one day last year.” The wind scattered her voice. “Quite early … it would be April. There were daffodils. Small ones, wild. Not those big yellow brutes you get in the shops.”
Tramping after her, Fludd imagined these blooms. He saw them flinching from the spring winds: frail and whitish yellow, like Chinese hands in sleeves. “Last year, or this year? I thought last year you weren’t here?”
She stopped, catching her breath. “This year is what I meant. Dear Lord, the months have dragged past. The days seem so long, Father Fludd. They seem to be stretching themselves out. I don’t know when that started. I think it was since we buried the statues.”
“I do not find it so,” Fludd said. He felt old, and breathless from the uphill climb, and weary from thankless enterprises.
“‘My days have passed more swiftly than the web is cut by the weaver, and are consumed without any hope.’”
The girl did not recognize a quotation. “Have you no hope?”
She looked up at him for a second. Her eyes were extraordinary, he thought: a smoky fawn flecked here and there with yellow, a colour more suitable in a cat than a nun. The question seemed to have struck her. Rather than give an answer, Fludd walked on.
“Are you not afraid to be seen?” he asked. “I doubt you should be here. I may walk where I please, but not you. This is a strange place for a spiritual conference.”
“I came to confession. Netherhoughton night. I thought you would be there. It was the old fellow. I had to hold his attention with some questions about Lent.”
“I have heard a thing about you.”
She turned. Because of her headdress a full turn of her head was necessary, if she were to meet his eyes, and he saw how this fact laid a veneer of import over every exchange. “The stigmata?”
They had reached the shed of which she had spoken. Its broken door flapped. On the floor were wood-shavings and the chalky droppings of long-dead fowl.
“Yes,” Fludd said. He ducked his head under the lintel. Inside he had just room to stand upright. A draught, blowing straight from Yorkshire, was unimpeded by the broken window.
Philomena followed him in, ducking her head in turn. “’Twasn’t true,” she said.
“But you pretended it was?”
Philomena looked at her surroundings without contempt. “I don’t care where I come,” she said, “to get an hour out of that place. People think a convent’s quiet, don’t they? They should hear Perpetua, going on all day.” She cast around, and leant against a kind of rough workbench, folding her arms. “I had no choice, you see. They gave me none. Father Kinsella got my mother in on it. You’d have thought they’d got all their birthdays at once.”
“What was it really, if it was not the stigmata?”
“Nerves.”
“What had you to be nervous about?”
“It’s a long story. It’s about my sister.”
Fludd leant against the wall. He wished he might have a cigarette; it would have been a natural thing. “Tell it then. Since we are here.”
“Well, she—my sister—came in the convent just after me. Kathleen was her name at home but Finbar was her name in religion. She never said she had a vocation, you know, but my mother’s burning ambition was to have us all in the convent, she didn’t somehow take to the idea of sons-in-law, and being a grandma and all. At least, that’s what we used to say, we girls, and that she wanted to get in with the priest, and have people pointing at her after Mass on a Sunday, saying, ‘Oh, could you credit that woman’s sacrifice, all her daughters given to religion.’”
“You had no brother?”
“No. Or he could have been a priest, and perhaps she might not have been so hot on us. One priest in a family equals three or four nuns. That’s the way they count in Ireland.”
“So your sister Kathleen entered without a vocation. And it went wrong.”
“She disgraced herself.” Sister Philomena picked up a fold of her habit and ran it between her fingers. She too wished she had, not a cigarette, but something to occupy her, something to distract her from the moment, the place, the person. “And after she disgraced herself, we got a bad name in the neighbourhood. When I came out in the rash, my mother thought we were going to recoup our fortunes. She was a cleaner, you know, up at the convent, did their shopping for them. I was never away from her a day until I came here. As soon as she noticed it, this thing on my hands, she hauled me off to Father Kinsella, my feet didn’t touch the ground.” She imitated her mother’s ingratiating mode, her semi-genuflection. “‘Look at this, Father, appeared last Friday on Sister Philomena, the very spit and image of the nail marks in the palms of Our Blessed Lord.’”
Fludd folded his arms, in a judicious way. “But what did your sister Kathleen do, to disgrace herself in the first place?”
“She was only just the victim of a muddle. She wasn’t a bad-hearted
girl at all. Only a novice when the whole thing occurred. In some Orders the novices are kept shut up and taught theology, but in our Order they are set the dirty jobs. When I was a novice I didn’t learn much about the spiritual life. I spent the time peeling potatoes. It was more like the army.”
“Was Kathleen—Sister Finbar—was she a rebel?”
“Oh, nothing of that sort. But you know, Father, how nuns can’t travel alone? Well, there was a Sister Josephine, a cross old creature with short sight and bad legs, and she got sent to another of the Order’s houses, a few miles away. The Order does that, especially when you’ve been settled about fifty years, they like to put you on general post before you die. Well, our Kathleen—Sister Finbar—was to go with her. Kathleen delivered her safe and sound, but then she had to get back to where she came from. So another sister, Sister Gertrude, she had to escort her, didn’t she?”
“Yes, I see a difficulty looming,” said Fludd.
“But when Kathleen got back to her own convent, there was Sister Gertrude, wasn’t she? Now, who was to take Gertrude back where she belonged?”
Fludd thought about it. “Kathleen.”
“I see you’ve a quick grasp of these matters. I suppose some other mind, like Mother Provincial say, might have cut through the difficulty. But Kathleen’s superior wasn’t any great thinker.”
“What happened then?”
“Our Kathleen took Gertrude back to Gertrude’s convent. She asked if she could stay a day or two while she thought it out, but they couldn’t have that, they didn’t have a permission for it, so they turned her round and sent her straight back again, and another nun with her—Sister Mary Bernard, I think it was.”
“They changed the personnel but failed to grapple with the principle.”
“Now it was Sister Mary Bernard that was at the wrong end of things. Our Kathleen escorted her back. By this time after all the travelling she was fit to drop. The soles of her shoes were worn thin.
When she had handed Sister Mary Bernard over she was hanging about in the parlour, waiting to see who was going to bring her back home this time, and her nerves just snapped. She ran out of the front door.”
“What? She just bolted, did she?”
“She couldn’t take it one more time, she said. She knew if they saw her they’d call her back and send somebody with her. So she got over a gate and legged it across the fields. When she came out on to the road she walked along a bit, then she saw a lorry coming. The driver stopped and asked her was she lost or what. He said, hop up here beside me, Sister, and I’ll take you where you want to go, so she did. He was a good sort, she said, a real gentleman. He gave her half this cheese sandwich that he’d got for his dinner—she was starving, you see, because she’d always arrived in places at the wrong time for a collation, and in a convent you can only eat at the set times. This man, this lorry driver, he went out of his way for her, took her back to her own convent, right to the door. But when she rolled up, I’m afraid they were anything but pleased to see her.”
“It was innocent,” Fludd said. “I’m sure it was. The girl was desperate.”
“The lorry driver turned out to be a Protestant, that was what made it worse.”
“The whole thing could have been avoided,” Fludd said, “if the original sister had only set out with two escorts, instead of one.”
“That would have been reasonable.” Sister Philomena looked gloomy. “But then, the whole process was very far from reason.”
“So what happened to Kathleen? Did they throw her out?”
“Oh, she got her marching orders all right. They had her out of there before the evening collation—booted out on an empty stomach again, she said, that’s what made her bitter. She didn’t even get to say goodbye to me. To me, her own sister.”
“What did she do then?”
“She had to go home. My mother couldn’t hold her head up in
the parish. Soon after that Kathleen went to the bad. Like Aunt Dymphna. Drinking and going to dances. She talked about having her hair bleached, my mother said.” She looked up at him, her face puzzled. “It’s something in our family, I think. Hot blood.”
“Would you mind if I smoked a cigarette, Sister?” Fludd reached for his silver case. He must have something to do. “I can imagine the effect all this must have had on you.”
“Soon afterwards my hands broke out. I believed it myself, not that I would have shown anybody if it had been left up to me. Is a stigmatic a good person, that’s what I wondered. A stigmatic could be the greatest crook.” She looked up. “Yes, smoke away, I don’t mind. Well, it was a nine-days’ wonder, my stigmata. The bishop took a dim view of it, they won’t hear of miracles nowadays. That’s how I came to be here. Tossed out of believing Ireland to this Godforsaken place.”
“You were harshly dealt with. When one considers, say, how much of the mystic vision may be put down to temporal-lobe epilepsy.”
“To what, Father?”
“When St. Teresa of Avila had her three day vision of Hell, she was merely working up to a fit … the flames and the stench were a part of her aura. And the Blessed Hildegard, seeing God’s fortress—she was having a migraine attack.”
She looked dubious. “I don’t have fits. I have thin skin. That’s all.”
“You don’t have as much between you and the world as other people do. Let me see your hand, please.”
She raised one, shaking back her sleeve, and stared fixedly at the palm: as if here, a year on, the delicate embroidery of blood might seep through the skin. Father Fludd leaned forward and reached for her hand with his, as tentative as a cat. He placed the tip of his index finger on to the tip of her second finger. Her outstretched hand, palm upturned, dipped towards him. “Why are you doing that?” she asked. She too gazed down at her palm. “You look as if you were going to tell my fortune. But it’s forbidden.”
“I could tell your fortune,” Fludd said.
“I tell you,” she said quietly, “the Church forbids it.”
Fludd touched her forefinger. “This is the finger of Jupiter,” he said. “The Ram governs the tip; the middle phalange is governed by Taurus the Bull, and the base by Gemini. This, now,” he took her middle finger, “is the finger of Saturn. The Goat governs its tip. Here in the middle comes the Water Carrier, then the Fishes. Your third finger is the finger of Apollo, God of the Sun. The Crab governs here, then the Lion, then the Virgin. Venus rules the thumb; the little finger is ruled by Mercury. Libra the Scales governs its tip, Scorpio its middle phalange, the Archer its base.”
“What does it all mean, Father?”
“God knows,” Fludd said. Her lifeline was long and unbroken, curling out of sight into her snug inner sleeve; the Mount of Venus was large and fleshy. He saw a nature active, mutable, fiery; a rationalist’s finger-tips. There were no shipwrecks in her palm, no danger from four-legged beasts, or iron instruments; but danger from the malice of women, and from self-doubt, and faintness of heart. “The line of Saturn is doubled,” he said. “You will wander from place to place.”
“But I never go anywhere.”
“I am not known to be wrong.”
“It’s only an old gypsy thing, anyway.”
“I must differ. This science was practised before gypsies were thought of.”
“Well, if you know so much … aren’t you going to tell me what’s there?”
Fludd lifted his eyes to her face for a second, then dropped them again to her palm. He traced the course of her heartline; it dipped sharply, and ended in a five-pointed star. “Anything I say is superfluous,” he said. “The point is, Sister, you know what your fortune will be.”
She drew back her hand. Smiled. Held it splayed and selfconscious against her thigh; hardly touching the cloth of her habit,
as if she thought it was smeared with ink. She looked around again. “I wish we could sit down. I should have thought about it, I could have brought sacks for the floor.” Her foot scraped at the wood-shavings; her words were aimless, random, without meaning.
“You asked me if I could do anything for you. What is it you want?”
She would not look at him; continued that little sidetracking motion with her foot. “Answers to my questions.”