The two men sat on, talking through the night. Soon it came, the peevish dawn. The fire fell to ash. Father Angwin felt his way upstairs in the dark, his hand against the wall. He had an hour or two before he must be up to say Mass. He lay down, removing only his shoes, and fell at once into a deep sleep.
When he woke up, he did not know what time it was. His mouth felt dry, there was unaccustomed sun outside the window. He lay thinking, not caring about anything very much. It seemed possible—probable, even—that he had dreamt Father Fludd. The details of their conversation were remarkably clear, but he found that he could not call the young man’s face to mind. Bits of it he could get: an eye, the nose. He could not somehow fit it together. It seemed possible that Fludd was some composite figure he had got out of his imagination; perhaps he had fallen asleep before the fire.
He sat up, rubbed his palms over his face, put the heel of his hands into his eyes and rubbed them, stroked his chin and thought of shaving, conversed mentally with his empty stomach and promised it a digestible coddled egg. Then, in his stockinged feet, his shoes in his hand, he crept down the passage and pushed open the door of the curate’s room.
It was not empty. Fludd was in bed and asleep. He lay on his back, staring sightlessly at the ceiling, and his reserved, almost severe expression forbade Father Angwin’s close inspection. The room smelled of incense. Father Fludd wore some kind of old-fashioned nightshirt, starched and with a ruffled collar; it was a pattern that Father Angwin had never seen before, and immediately it excited his envy.
He turned away and tiptoed from the room, closing the door softly behind him; though it did not seem to him, as he remarked later, that an earthquake would have disturbed the curate. He looked like a bishop upon his catafalque; immediately this image occurred to him, Father Angwin thought bishop, bishop, we had no discussion of the bishop last night. His name was not even mentioned. If Fludd is a spy, I am ruined; but would any spy sleep so soundly? Then he thought, I am ruined anyway.
And there was the housekeeper, downstairs, about her morning round, and singing once more—Miss Dempsey, he thought, had conceit of her voice—to impress that oblivious, motionless, waxen image in the room behind him. He wondered, for an instant, whether he should return and take the curate’s pulse. But no: if Father Fludd was in the habit of dying during the night, that was a matter for himself. A fragment came back to him from last night’s conversation; had not the curate quoted Voltaire? “It is no more surprising to be born twice than to be born once.”
Father Angwin put out a hand, to steady himself. He was overwhelmed with hunger; he felt quite giddy and faint. I must persuade Agnes, he thought, to forgive me my trespasses and let me have two
eggs. She was in the kitchen now, pursuing in her uncertain soprano the theme of the martyrdom of St. Agnes:
As men go to a banquet,
As bride to meet her groom;
So thou with joyous footsteps
Didst haste to meet thy doom.
The soldiers wept in pity,
The headsman blushed for shame;
One sigh alone escaped thee.
’Twas Jesus’ sweetest name.
That afternoon, Father Fludd undertook a parish tour. Father Angwin conducted the curate to the front door. “They may ask you into their houses,” he said. “For God’s sake don’t eat anything. Be back before dark.” He hovered, anxious. “Perhaps you shouldn’t go alone?”
“Don’t fuss, man,” Fludd said.
Father Angwin felt the weight of his responsibility. He had taken to the boy; the topic of the bishop lay uneasily between them, but since so far there had been no communication from that quarter, Father Angwin assumed that Fludd was not much in favour. He imagined that the bishop would be disconcerted by Fludd; that he would feel threatened by his scholarship, and affronted by his way of getting to the heart of a matter. No doubt, then, the parish was to become a dumping ground; Fludd was a discard, like himself.
“Here,” he said, “take this umbrella. The glass has been falling. There was a halo around the moon. It will rain before evening.”
Fludd accepted the umbrella; the two priests shook hands formally, and then Fludd strode out downhill.
On the carriage-drive, he met a bunch of little wild-looking
children. They had scabs on their knees, and their heads were shaved to deter lice. Each one of them clung on to the neck of his misshapen jersey.
“We saw an ambulance, Father,” they said. “
Touch my shoulder, touch my knee, Pray to God it won’t be me.
Then we have to hang on to us collars till we see a white dog.”
“But you haven’t got collars,” Fludd said.
“Where they would be, if we had,” the children explained; and one small girl said, “We have to make do.”
“I see,” Fludd said. “Well, I hope you see a white dog soon. Do they do this all over the district?”
“Not in Netherhoughton,” the children said, after some thought; the girl added, “The ambulances don’t go up there.”
Fludd was curious. “Who told you that you must do this?”
The children looked at each other. They could not remember being told. It was a thing that they had always known. A few of them said, “Mother Purpit.” The little girl said, “God.”
Father Fludd passed the school gates, and soon the rough track ceased to be the carriage-drive and became Church Street; there were cobbles underfoot, and high hedges, grey in aspect, leaves drooping. Through their gaps he glimpsed fields, hummocks of coarse grass flattening in the wind. He stopped to examine a leaf; he wetted his finger and passed it over the surface, which felt greasy, with an overlay of fine grit. He licked his finger; it tasted of soil and smoke. Below him he saw the mill chimneys of Fetherhoughton, like pillars for stylites, or the towers on which heathens place their dead.
In Upstreet, matrons with baskets over their arms stood in knots, and interrupted their talk to stare at him as he went by. He raised a hand; half-greeting, half-blessing. He turned off into Chapel Street, the ground climbing steeply again; he pictured himself knocking at each of these doors, making himself known. At number 30, a woman was kneeling in the open doorway, whitening her step with donkey stone. He stood and watched her, uncertain whether to
speak; then, thinking himself without manners, strode on. A little way ahead of him other doors opened; housewives appeared and, with a big heave of their elbows, hauled on to the pavement buckets of soapy water. Head first, crouching, they intruded into his view like dogs coming out of their kennels, and set to work with their scrubbing brushes. Their flowered pinnies were secured tightly, taped round their middles and round again. Each placed to hand her donkey stone: some palest cream, some mushroom colour, some a deep butterscotch, others as yellow as best butter. Their elbows jutted as they scrubbed, their jerseys rolled up beyond the joint; he saw their fine, bluish skin, the labouring swell of their slack abdomens, the tops of their heads with the fading hair.
He pitied these women. Several of them, Father Angwin said, had lost their husbands in the Council House Riots of the previous year. The site of the riots—razed now—seemed to smoke still in the afternoon air; and where the men had fallen, each asserting his right to the fat of the land, impromptu crosses were stuck in the rubbly ground. “Either they should have built houses for all of them,” Father Angwin said, “or none at all.” Last night he had spoken of those days as his worst in Fetherhoughton: the gangs of muttering, mutinous women, handbags filled with kitchen knives and bottles of paraffin; the misspelt placards on the church door; and finally, one summer afternoon, the call to say that the constabulary had moved in, that there were casualties, that the fire brigade was on its way.
Opposite the site of the riots stood the Methodist chapel, a lowbrowed, red-brick building; it was from within its door that the first wave of rioters had burst, with their anti-Papist battle-cries. Father Fludd accorded it a searching glance, then set out across the Methodist graveyard, where some of the Protestant fatalities had been laid to rest. He vaulted the low wall and found himself on Back Lane; he turned right, up the hill towards Netherhoughton.
Back Lane was hardly alive to his presence; a couple of women came out and leant in their doorways, watching him with impassive faces, and one of them called out that he might come in and she
would brew tea. Remembering Father Angwin’s warning, he raised his hat to her, courteously, and showed by a gesture that he must hurry on. “Turn back,” the woman said and laughed scornfully; then went in, slamming her door.
Soon the houses ran out; the street narrowed, became a lane. There was a good three-mile tramp, Father Angwin had told him, around the loop of unfrequented road that would take him towards the hamlet and the moors. And no shelter, not a house or a tree, simply the moors on the traveller’s right hand, and on the left unfenced fields that had once been allotments. It was the railway workers who had rented them, for here you were not far, as the crow flies, from Fetherhoughton’s small branch-line station. Besides growing vegetables, some of them had kept hens, even an occasional pig. But the coops and sties were empty now and damply rotting. The raiding parties had come down from Netherhoughton and carried off the spring greens, and at last the men had grown weary of patching and mending their fences, and replanting what was torn out. They had abandoned the site, and told their wives to frequent the Co-op greengrocers; the fields were reverting rapidly to their waste-ground character, and the only sign that the railway men had once been there was a red spotted kerchief, tied to a crumbling fence pole, and whipping defiantly in the breeze.
Father Fludd halted and looked at the empty road before him; he felt chilled and tired. He fished in his pocket for the sketch map that Father Angwin had drawn for him, and saw that if he were to retrace his steps, down Back Lane to Upstreet, a short climb would bring him to the station yard, and from there a footpath cut straight across the fields to Netherhoughton’s main street. He squashed the map back into his pocket, and turned on his heel; as he passed the house where the woman had offered him tea, he thought he saw a curtain shift at an upper window.
Upstreet was largely deserted now. Once you had done your shopping, he supposed, there was nothing to detain you. He looked at his watch; it was almost five o’clock, and the inhospitable chill of
an autumn evening was already in the air, a compound miasma of leaf-mould, coal fires, wet wool, cough syrup.
As he neared the station, Fludd saw advancing upon him another gang of juveniles, older this time, more orderly, a dozen or so adolescents in tight formation. These young Fetherhoughtonians were the pupils of the grammar school in the nearest town. They were few but conspicuous; their maroon school uniforms, bought large so that they could grow into them, stood out from their bodies like the dark capes of Crusaders. There was a wary, darting-eyed expression on the faces of the gawky lads of eighteen, their little caps on their heads, satchels like postage stamps slung over their great bony shoulders. Some of the girls carried cake tins, held against their bodies like shields, and others had bags of knitting, from which metal needles poked; the boys carried wood-working tools which they did not trouble to hide. The outriders of the group, grim-faced girls of twelve and thirteen, bore their hockey sticks at a vigilant, offensive angle.
“Good evening,” the priest said. “I am the new curate, Fludd’s my name. How are you enjoying the new term?”
Startled, offended eyes passed over him. As he stood in their path they could not proceed, and, unwilling to break ranks, they came to a halt.
“May we pass?” said one of the stick-wielding girls.
“I was only wondering,” Fludd said, “what the young such as yourselves find to do in this place.”
“Our homework,” said a voice from the centre of the group.
“Do you not find yourselves with a bit of free time at the weekend?”
“We don’t go out,” the girl said firmly. “We don’t want fights with teddy boys.”
“We stay in,” another voice said; adding, in explanation, “It is called bettering ourselves. We have to get into Manchester University.”
“Do you come to Mass?” Fludd said. “We could have a meeting after. We could have games. Table—tennis.”
The children looked at each other. Their expressions softened; one of the small boys said, with a lingering regret, “We are atheists.”
“I don’t think that would be a good idea at all,” the girl said. “You see, Father, our parents won’t let us outside without we put our uniforms on, and it attracts trouble.”
The little boy said, “Them from Thomas Aquinas bash us up.”
“They’ll be upon us now,” the girl said, “if you don’t excuse us.”
Behind her, in unison, three girls held out their cake tins, and rattled them in unison:
odi, odas, odat.
“I hate,” the girl explained balefully. “You hate. He she or it hates.”
“You need not go on,” Fludd murmured. “I know the rest.”
“Nothing personal,” a large boy said; and the rattlers, holding their cake tins aloft, explained, “We pelt’em with our domestic science.”
Fludd stood aside and watched them go, their heads swivelling to check the doorways of the shops. In the station yard he climbed over the stile that let him on to the footpath and struck out across country, swiping at the tussocks of grass with Father Angwin’s umbrella. The incline, slight at first, became steeper, and he stopped to catch his breath before mounting the next stile; he handed himself over it, and found himself in Netherhoughton’s main street.
It proved to be a straggling settlement, with two dilapidated inns, the Old Oak and the Ram; a tobacconist’s shop, shuttered, which must surely be the one Father Angwin had mentioned; a general grocer, with a pyramid of tea packets in the window; and a baker, whose shelves were quite empty except for the sleeping form of a large black cat. The cottages here were of a different design, some of them only one room deep; low, sway-backed roofs showed their age, and he noted at once the Netherhoughtonian habit of bricking up any window deemed superfluous. All about him he saw the lively
signs of alchemy: the black hens scratching in the small back-plots, and the nine-runged ladder, the
scala philosophorum,
leaning casually against a wall. He walked on until the houses petered out, and he reached the rusting iron gate that gave on to the moorland paths. He stood for a moment, looking up into the wild landscape and the rushing sky, and as he turned away he felt the first drops of rain on his face.
He put up the providential umbrella and retraced his steps down the lane. Before he had time to turn up the collar of his cape, a thick and viscid-seeming mist had crept up around him. In the failing light the dirty windowpanes seemed opaque, as if thinly curtained with lead. Shivering, he huddled against a wall and studied his map again; another footpath, branching off the one that had brought him there, would take him across the former allotments and bring him out within ten minutes, he calculated, at the back of the convent.
He must pay his courtesy call on the nuns soon, in fact today; otherwise they might be offended. No doubt, out of Christian charity, they would offer him some hot chocolate; buttered biscuits perhaps; even teacakes and jam. They would be glad of a visitor. Climbing once more over the stile, he smiled to himself, and with fresh heart picked up his feet out of the thickening mud.
The parlour in the convent was both stuffy and cold, and smelled mysteriously of congealed gravy. It was little used; Fludd sat by the empty fireplace, on a hard chair, waiting for Mother Purpit. Under his feet was dark, shiny linoleum in a pattern of parquet squares, relieved by a red fireside rug. Over the mantelpiece, Christ hung in a heavy gilt frame, thin yellow tongues of light streaming from his head. His ribcage was open, neatly split by the Roman spear, and with a pallid, pointed finger he indicated his exposed and perfectly heart-shaped heart.
Against the far wall was a big, heavy chest with a stout-looking
iron lock; oak, it might be, but varnished with a heavy hand over the years, so that its surface seemed sticky and repelled the light. I wonder what is in that chest, thought Fludd. Nuns’ requisites; now what would they be?
Tired of waiting, he shifted on his chair. The chest tempted him; his eyes were drawn to it, back and back again. He got up, froze in mid-movement as the chair creaked; then took courage, and crept across the room. He tested the lid of the chest, gingerly; it didn’t give. He shifted it an inch, to see how heavy it was: very.