“About Lent?”
“No.”
“Good. I didn’t become a priest to answer that sort of question. I want to answer something deeper.”
She glanced up, just for a moment. “One of the children asked me, what was there before Creation?”
Cigarette in hand, Fludd looked out of the broken window, beyond the rotting coops and the scraps of chicken wire, to where the railwayman’s handkerchief snapped and lashed against its pole. “There was the
prima materia
, without dimension or quality, neither large nor small, without properties or inclinations, neither moving nor still.”
“I’m afraid they won’t take that kind of answer.”
He put his cigarette to his lips. “What kind of answer do they want?”
“They go on about guardian angels,” she said. “They expect to be able to see them, walking behind them up the carriage-drive. They think if they could turn round fast enough, they would catch them.”
“Ah,” Fludd said, “if only any of us could turn round fast enough. We might catch a glimpse of our own face.”
“They say—the children—people are getting born and dying all the time, so you need more and more angels, or after somebody’s died do they get reassigned? They say, what if you die young, does your angel get forty years off? One of them said last week, my guardian angel used to be Hitler’s.”
“Angels aren’t following us,” Fludd said. “No one’s following us, except ourselves. Look at you. They sent you out from Ireland. Are you less tormented now? No. Yourself followed you.”
“I have to teach them the Creed. I have problems there. Jesus was crucified, and then, it says, ‘he descended into Hell.’”
“Limbo, is meant,” said Fludd, taking the orthodox line.
“Yes, I know. That’s what I was always taught.”
“But you don’t believe it?”
“Why should he go to Limbo? Just a lot of old patriarchs and prophets, and little dead babies nobody had time to baptise. I like to think it is really Hell that is meant. I like to think of him paying a call. To be reacquainted with it.” Fludd raised an eyebrow. “Reacquainted,” she said. “After all, he made it.”
The air about them was growing colder now, light fading from the sky; he had never known evening come down so early as it did among these hills. The girl’s eyes had lost their daytime glow; they looked slaty now, a Fetherhoughton colour. He shivered a little, dropped his cigarette end on to the floor, put his hands in his pockets.
“I was thinking,” Philomena said, “why does God permit the bishop to exist?”
“It’s more than a permission. God made him.”
“He’s gross. He’s like a pork-butcher.”
“You could ask, why did God make anything that doesn’t please us? But he does not have the same sensibilities as we do. He does not share our tastes.”
“Why did God let my Aunt Dymphna and my sister Kathleen go to the bad?”
“Perhaps he did not take a special interest in undoing them. Perhaps they undid themselves. You said they had hot blood.”
“Will Dymphna roast in Hell for all eternity? Or can it have an end? We are not allowed, are we, to pray for the people in Hell?”
“Not under normal circumstances. Though they say that Gregory
the Great prayed out the Emperor Trajan. And we think of Origen’s doctrine of Larger Hope … It was his belief that all men will ultimately be saved. Eternity isn’t really exactly that. The torment of Hell is a purifying process, and there will be an end to our punishment.”
She glanced up, half-hoping. “Is that a respectable belief?”
“No. Most people think that Origen got his wires crossed.”
“Because it occurs to me … if Hell has an end, does Heaven?” She stopped scraping the ground with her foot, came over to stand by him and look out of the broken window. “Are these the sort of questions you became a priest to answer?”
Fludd shivered. “I wish I had a hip-flask.”
“I fancied it was growing warmer.”
“Is it?” His eyes opened wide. He seemed taken aback; he looked away, and seemed to mutter something to himself. He touched the shed’s wall, gingerly, as if fire might have begun in the damp fibres of the wood. Can it be, he thought, that the transformative process is already underway? In these days, he no longer worked in metal, but practised on human nature; an art less predictable, more gratifying, more dangerous. The scientist burns up his experimental matter in the
athenor,
or furnace, but no scientist, however accomplished, can light that furnace himself. The spark must be set by a shaft of celestial light; and in waiting for that light, a man could waste his life. “It is warmer,” he said, aloud. “I dare say the wind has dropped.”
The girl stared out at it, riffling the twilit grass. Her cheeks glowed. She knew it was no use to look around her for the source of heat; it was inward. Since he came here, she thought, a match had been put to her future. She did not think she loved him, but still, something burned: a slow, white flicker of approaching change.
“Well, tell me,” she said. “What made you enter the priesthood, Father?”
“There are some men,” Fludd said, “who are driven to be surgeons. From an early age they have an appetite to slit up persons and
look into their guts. Some men are so consumed by it, that if want of money or education impedes them from obtaining the qualifications they desire, they will simply impersonate surgeons. Many an appendix has been whipped out, in our major hospitals, by some fellow who’s walked in off the street.”
She was impressed. “Wouldn’t you ever think they’d be found out? Wouldn’t you ever think they’d kill somebody?”
“Sometimes they do. But not more than their quota.”
Jesus, she thought. In England they have a quota. “So they get away with it, you’re saying?”
“Sometimes for years. But then you know there are other men, the would-be priests, they have a complementary desire; they want to take a scalpel to the soul. Sin is their intestinal loops. You can see them drape it around their hands as they go probing into the depths.”
His language was not strange to her. Each morning as she ate her breakfast she regarded the neat antiseptic wounds of Christ.
One of the soldiers with a spear opened his side, and immediately there came out blood and water.
“But it’s not quite the same as doctors,” she said. “You can’t cure sin, can you?”
“The physicians can’t cure a half of the corporeal diseases that they go after. They only do it out of curiosity, and to keep the patients’ relatives satisfied, and to earn a crust.”
The temperature around her seemed to have increased now. Why did he not feel it? It was a Mediterranean frenzy of heat, a Sicilian afternoon. The wool of her undergarments fretted her skin, and she felt a heat-rash prickle between her shoulder-blades and along her forearms. She said, “Father Fludd, you’re not a real priest, are you? I thought it all along.”
Fludd didn’t answer. He might well not answer, she thought. But his features seemed less pinched now; the warmth had touched even his usual corpse-like pallor. “In my former trade,” he said, “a trade which I seem to have forgotten now, or at least I have lost my touch with it, there was a business which we called the
nigredo
, which is a
process of blackening, of corruption, of mortification, of breakdown. Then there is a process we call the
albedo
, it is a whitening … Do you see?”
She seemed afraid; looking at him with her eyes large, her expression drawn. “What is that trade?”
“It was a deep science,” he said. “Releasing spirit from matter. It should be every man’s study.”
“A killer does it. When he kills. Is that a deep science?”
“There are things in one’s self one must kill.”
“Oh, I know,” she said wearily. “The flesh and its appetites. I have been hearing it since I was seven. I am sick of hearing it. Don’t you start.”
“I meant something else really. I meant that there are times in life when you must murder the past. Take a hatchet to what you used to be. Ax down the familiar world. It’s hard, very painful, but it is better to do it than to keep the soul trapped in circumstances it can no longer abide. It may be that we had a way of life that used to satisfy us, but it does so no more; or a dream which has soured by longkeeping, or a pleasure which has become a habit. Outworn expectations, Sister, are a cage in which the soul rots away, like a mangy beast in a menagerie. When the reality in our head and the reality in the world are at a disjunction, we feel pained, fretted—” He broke off and stared at her, at the crucifix on her chest, the serge and flannel behind it, the epidermis behind that; and she felt her skin crawl, itch, flame. “Fretted,” he said, sucking his lip. “Irritated. Itching. Flayed. Besides, I’m not sure about this killing the flesh. We have a saying,
If it
were not for the earth in our work, the air would fly away, neither would the fire have its nourishment, nor the water its vessel.”
“Those are lovely words,” she said. “Like a psalm. You weren’t some kind of Protestant, were you? A lay-preacher?”
“I think we must accommodate our bodies, you know. I think we must find some good in them. Otherwise, as you say, the most blessed men would be the executioners. Besides, grace perfects nature. It doesn’t destroy it.”
“Who says so?”
“Um,” Fludd said, unwilling to name-drop. “St. Thomas Aquinas.”
She put out a hand: that palm on which he had already seen the star of a happy destiny. “Oh, him,” she said. She smiled slowly. She reached out, touched his shoulder. “Him,” she said. “He was always a friend of mine.”
She hoped the warmth would follow them, out into the evening; but Fludd had become cold and silent, and the hand he offered to steady her over the rough ground hardly seemed to be the hand of a human being, so spare and chilly was the flesh. The wind rushed the clouds across the chimneys of Fetherhoughton, down below them; she looked up at the black wild jut of moorland, and felt suddenly sobered and afraid.
She let the priest—the man—tow her along; he seemed to know the way, although he was a stranger to the district, and if he had walked the allotments in the daylight it could not have been more than a half a dozen times. He turned without faltering on to the convent path. He must eat a lot of carrots, she thought; can see in the dark.
“The stile,” Fludd said. “Just ahead of us now. Can you manage?”
They reached it; he mounted first. Philomena was half over, putting out her long leg in its thick fuzzy stocking. A shape materialized from, it seemed, the ditch.
“Good evening,” Fludd said. “Mr. McEvoy, isn’t it?”
She imagined, though she could not see, that the parishioner gave him a look: as if to say, yes, young fellow, you will learn who I am. But when McEvoy approached, and took out a pocket torch, and shone it, his face wore its normal expression, amiable but knowing.
“Taking my constitutional,” he explained.
“In the dark?”
“It is my habit,” said McEvoy. “I seem, Father, better equipped than you and Sister Philomena, although by venturing the observation I mean no breath of criticism. Would you care to borrow my pocket torch?”
“Father Fludd can see in the dark,” she said.
“Handy,” said McEvoy. His tone was sardonic. His torch beam travelled downwards; it came to rest on her leg, and slithered over it, as if her stocking had fallen down.
“Come, Sister,” Fludd said. “Don’t stick there. Hop over.” He held out his hand; but the tobacconist was there before him, courtly but insistent. “I should never like to see a Sister struggle,” McEvoy said. “You will find me always at your service, a strong arm and a willing heart.”
He seemed to know it was effusive, uncalled-for; backed away under Fludd’s sharp look, and then touched his cap. His exit was as sudden as his entrance: sucked away into the murk.
She shuddered. “Father Angwin says he is the devil.”
Fludd was surprised. “McEvoy? Why, but he’s a harmless man.”
She felt the distance between them increase; a shaft of cold, as he moved from her side.
“Has Father Angwin never spoken to you of it? Of meeting him one afternoon?”
“Yes. He has spoken of something of that kind. But he did not say the man’s name.”
“I don’t know why he thinks it. I saw the devil myself when I was seven. He was nothing like McEvoy.”
“Seven,” Fludd said. “The age of reason. What was he like?”
“A beast. A great rough thing. Breathing outside my bedroom door.”
“You were a brave girl to open it.”
“Oh, I knew I must. I had to see what was there.”
“Did he come another night?”
“He had no need.”
“No. Once is enough.”
“But now,” she said, “if Father Angwin is right, the devil has come much closer.”
“Indeed. He has taken your arm. He has proffered his assistance. Any time, he seemed to say. At your service. Does that alarm you?”