Fludd

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.