Fludd: A Novel (13 page)

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Authors: Hilary Mantel

BOOK: Fludd: A Novel
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“The way he rose up just now, out of nowhere it seemed to be …”
“I can do that myself,” Fludd said indifferently. “I have my exits and my entrances. It is cheap. A conjuror’s trick.”
“How do I know that it is not you who is the devil?” She came to a halt; they could see the convent below them, and a light burning in an upstairs room. Her voice came out stubborn, hostile. “A man who pretends to be a priest? Hears confession? Gets people’s confidence …” And she thought, what if the white flame I felt in my chest was the first flame of that gnawing Hellfire, the fire that renews as it consumes, so that torture is always fresh? What if the unaccountable heat that wrapped me in the shed were from the first blast of Satan’s bellows?
“You must choose,” Fludd said, his tone practical. “I cannot tell you what to think. If you think I am bad for you I will not try to talk you out of it.”
“Bad for me?” She was aghast at his choice of word. Man or devil, she thought, devil or devil’s pawn, you’ll only damn my immortal soul. That’s all you’ll do.
“But if I were a devil,” Fludd said, “I would have a relish for you. It is strange that though you would think the devil a man of fiery tastes, there is nothing he likes better at his banquet than the milk-toast soul of a tender little nun. If I were the devil, you would not be clever enough to find me out. Not until I had dined on you and dined well.”
A long-drawn wail came from Sister Philomena, a wail of shock
and distress; then she began to cry. She put her fist in her mouth, and cried around it, her mouth working around the knuckle, bleats escaping from around the bone. In the convent parlour Mother Perpetua waited for her, sitting upright by the dead fire, smiling in the dark.
Purpit thumped her. “Going about like a hoyden,” she said. “Traipsing through the fields. Out in the night like a tinker.”
She knew it was the fields, and not the roads, because of the burrs and dead leaves that clung to the girl’s habit, and because of the mud on her shoes. She did not know the girl had been with Father Fludd. If she did, I would get worse, Philly thought. She’s jealous of me, wants him to pay her some attention. No nun, she. Ought to be ashamed. Goes after men. Priests. Tried it with Angwin. Chased her out of the presbytery. Sister Anthony said so. Never forgiven him.
So she kept her own counsel, while Purpit ranted and thumped. This is a sick province, she thought, they’re hopeless people. It’s a place full of devils, it needs a mission sending to it. It wrestles not against flesh and blood but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world. St. Paul would have sorted it out.
“Make my convent a laughing stock,” Perpetua said. Thud, thud with her bony knuckles.
Philomena reached out and grabbed Perpetua’s arm, just above
the wrist. She held it in her farm-girl’s grip. She said nothing, but in her eyes those yellow lights flashed, like chips of gold.
That night, tossing on her hard bed, she couldn’t sleep or lie awake; wakefulness seemed the lesser evil. She tried to rouse herself, but marauding nightmares circled her brain like the outriders of a guerrilla band.
Nigredo
, a huge blackamoor, offered her a cigarette from a silver case.
Albedo
, an angel, lit it for her. They wrestled on the allotments, rolling over and over on the rough ground. Later they linked arms and sang “Danny Boy.”
At five o’clock she heard the rising bell and turned over, ramming her face into the pillow. She thought it was a special penitential pillow that Mother Perpetua had decreed for her; it seemed filled with small stones. Sister Anthony was the caller for the week, and she could hear her progress along the corridor, rapping at each door and calling
Dominus vobiscum.
Philomena yawned and pushed herself upright in the bed. She fumbled at her throat. The strings of her nightcap were thin and waxy from her sweat. She dug her fingernails into the knot, trying to loosen them. But she hardly had any fingernails.
Dominus vobiscum
fluted outside her door, and Sister Anthony tapped and tapped again. “
Dominus vobiscum.
What are you doing in there, Sister?”
She felt she could not trust her voice. She tilted up her chin, still picking at the knots. If I had scissors, she thought. Scissors of my own. That would be against my vow of holy poverty. If I had a looking-glass. That would be against my vow of holy chastity.
“Goodness gracious me, girl,” Sister Anthony sounded cantankerous now. “
Dominus vobiscum.
Are you deaf?”
The knots unravelled. The cap came off. She dropped it on the
coarse blanket. Put her bare feet on the linoleum floor, stretched. Under her shift her upper arms, shoulders, were covered in small blue bruises.
“
Dominus vobiscum.
Are you ill?”
Sick at heart, she thought.
“Et cum spiritu tuo,”
she intoned. Her voice sounded normal; traitor voice. But her throat ached with tears, and her chest felt clogged with unholy expectation.
“I should think so too,” Sister Anthony said, and passed on.
Later, after an hour on her knees in the chapel, she went into the kitchen and helped Sister Anthony fill the jugs with weak tea, for breakfast.
“I think Father Fludd has the gift of prophecy,” she remarked.
“Is that the case now?” the old nun inquired civilly. “I wonder will he prophesy something for Aintree races.”
“Prophecy doesn’t mean telling the future. It means speaking out about the true nature of things.”
Sister Anthony could see that little Philomena had been crying. Dimly she remembered her own early days in the convent, the ritual humiliation and the lonely nights. Since it was she who was in charge of ladling out the breakfast she had it within her means to be kind to the girl; she gave her extra porridge.
Morning: Judd McEvoy, smiling to himself and whistling between his teeth, dusted his shelves and opened up his shop, drawing the bolts on the front door and turning round the cardboard sign that hung in the window. Agnes Dempsey washed up the breakfast dishes. Father Fludd put on his vestments for Mass, praying for each one the correct prayer. Philly could see him, in her mind’s eye: amice, alb, cincture, maniple, stole, chasuble. “Make me white, O Lord, and cleanse my heart …”
That morning she had to take a class for a PE lesson. Not her communion class; these children were older. The gloss had gone off them.
First there was dressing them, in the fug of the classroom; outside it was sharp and cold, and until ten o’clock sparse crystals of frost shone on the ruts of the carriage-drive. The girls, between their desks, had to squirm into thick navy-blue knickers, and out of their frocks and their layers of cardigans; the boys had to take their exercise as best they might in their knee-length grey flannel shorts. There were black pumps to be given out, from the metal cage in the corner of the classroom where they were kept between use: common to the whole class, assorted sizes, in different conditions but mostly poor. Most of the children did not know their shoe size, and if they did, they had no way of securing it; there was no method of distribution, merely a free-for-all, and this was the way it had always been. They were enjoined to keep silence during the proceeding; Philomena stood over them, hefty-seeming this morning, her eyes blazing, making sure not a mutter or groan escaped. But the silence of the exercise rendered it no less violent; arms flailed, pinches were delivered, until in some fashion everyone was shod.
Then the procession. Some walked wincingly, their toes mashed together; others, who had made the contrary error, flapped like water birds. In addition—it was mysterious—there were more left pumps than there were right, and Sister Philomena noticed that it was the poorest, the meekest, the most stupid, who were further disadvantaged by this, and had to edge along with their two feet swerving the same way.
The Nissen hut served as a dining room besides a gymnasium, and smelt of dumplings and fat. The trestle-tables and wooden benches were stacked around the room, and on the floor the children set up their equipment. This was what Mother Perpetua called
it: the Equipment. “The Education Committee is sending us Equipment.” Until this year there had only been small oval mats, one per child. They would set them out and roll about on them; once they began they were no trouble. Then they would stand by the mats and practise jumping on the spot. It was an exercise suitable for all age groups. Most of them could manage it. And it did not strain their taut nerves.
But the Equipment had added a new terror to their lives. It was shiny and hard, with sharp edges. Just setting it up and fitting it together was a problem for an engineer; the half-clad children sweated beneath its weight, as if they were building bridges for the Japanese. There were steps, and slides. There was a great ladder on supports that they were meant to swing on and, she supposed, hoist themselves up and pop their heads between the rungs. And most awful of all, there was a thick round wooden pole; it rested on metal stands, parallel to the ground and at the height of her chest.
“Form teams,” she said, despairingly. “You, you, you.” None of them wanted to go on the pole. They did not know what to do with it, what to make of it at all. Some, when it came to their turn, crouched beneath and threw their arms around it and kicked off with their feet, trying to raise themselves and wrap their ankles over its top. It became the vogue, she noticed; each child would attempt it, some with more feebleness than others, few with any lasting success. In the face of the Equipment their timidity became clear, and the extent of their clumsiness, weakness, poor eyesight. They were embarrassed—for it was an emotion that they could feel. They knew that the Equipment had hidden uses, which they could not discern; they knew that other children, somewhere else, in happier circumstances, might unlock its secrets. The Equipment was a message that the Education Committee had sent them, to prepare them for the humiliations of their future.
Mass would be long over now, Sister Philomena thought. She stood in a shadow at the side of the hut, letting the children do as they pleased, for she knew that none of the other nuns would come
by. Presently they grew tired of their efforts and fell timidly out of line, eyeing her out of the corners of their eyes, and got out their familiar oval mats; they bent over, put their skinny grey arms on the floor, and began to do a thing they called bunny-jumps. The two children from Netherhoughton withdrew into a darker corner and began to hypnotize each other.
He could come and find me, she thought. If he were to inquire at the school they would tell him I was there. But no, he would not do that. He would not inquire.
But he could make some excuse. Something that he wanted me to do for him. What could that be? Now that I am not sacristan, he cannot say, I need polishing doing, Sister, I need extra polishing, I need a very special shine putting on the candlesticks. What could he want then?
But he hardly needs a priest’s reasons for what he wants to do, because he is not a priest. Did I know it all along, or just suspect it; did he make a slip, or did I just feel it in my bones? He is just an ordinary man.
But no, she thought, correcting herself. Not that. Not in any sense an ordinary man. What had struck her forcibly, on waking that morning, now occurred to her again; that she had no clear picture of his features in her mind. At Mass, it was true, she had been forced to study him mostly from the back; but had she not been alone with him at the allotments for an hour or more?
Perhaps, she thought, I have looked so intensely that I have been unable to see. I have looked at him as he seems to look at me, with eyes that see beyond the skin. She had heard it said that you could “devour” someone with your eyes. It was an expression that people used. Yes, that was what she had done. Her eyes had eaten him all up, and rendered his features pulp. Now, like a greedy, heedless child, she had left nothing over for the hour of hunger, the hour of dearth.
When the end of the lesson came, Philomena lined the children up and trailed them along the carriage-drive. The sun had struggled
out, and filtered thinly between the bare branches. “Look, Robin Redbreast.” She pointed to the ditch, where the bird with its mouse-brown back darted in crisp leaves. “Yes, Sister,” they said dutifully. They looked where she pointed but they did not see. They did not know what they were looking for. Sparrows, they knew; pigeons.
In procession, they rounded the curve of the carriage-drive, and there was Father Fludd: stepping towards them in animated conversation with Agnes Dempsey. Sister Philomena made the children stop, stand aside respectfully while the priest passed. They began, more or less as he drew level, a drawling, yodelling chant. “Good mo-or-orning Father. Good mo-or-or-ning Miss Dempsey.”
It was the way the children always spoke, when they spoke together. They learnt it at five years old, in the nursery class; learnt it in their first hour at school. Sometimes Philomena thought that if she ever heard it again she would give way to screaming; she would sit on the floor and rend her garments and put ashes on her head, in reparation for the foolishness of the world. Christ died to free us from the burden of our sin, but he never, so far as she could see, lifted a finger to free us from our stupidity.
And as her thoughts ran on, her heart beat faster. She thought it was climbing into her throat, battering there and twisting inside out, contorting in that small space; nobody would see it underneath her habit, but suppose she were some ordinary woman, in a costume and blouse? People would nudge each other;
that poor woman’s heart is fighting its way out.
It shocked and amazed her, that the thought should occur—that she should think of herself as a woman, when she was in fact a nun. She felt her face grow red, and her hands begin to tremble. “Good morning, children,” Fludd said cheerfully. Agnes Dempsey gave them a thin tight smile.
Fludd’s eyes flickered over her. He inclined his head, sombre; walked on, his conversation with Miss Dempsey proceeding in lower tones, a more subdued manner. Agnes Dempsey walked more slowly. She took a long look over her shoulder at the young nun,
who had turned aside now, and dropped her face, and whose right hand had gone to the wooden crucifix hanging at her chest.
She had not turned aside fast enough to hide her expression from Miss Dempsey—that compound of fear, yearning, and excitement, that had yet to be broken down into its elements and recombined by another’s will. Agnes, in agitation and sadness, touched her wart. I have missed all my chances in life, she thought. Even a nun has not missed more chances than me. Virgins may see unicorns. Spinsters never do.
This time, when Philomena approached the confessional, she knew it would be Angwin.
She knelt, in the fragrance of polish and tobacco; began at once, rattling her words off. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It is no time at all since my last confession. I have a question for you. A German friend of mine, who knows only a few words of English …”
“Oh, hallo there, my dear,” the priest said.

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