“No.” She dropped her eyes, despondent. “I shall never get it remodelled, not even with your help, Father. We have perfectly good statues, mouldering under the ground.”
He looked up. “Do you think they are mouldering? You too?”
“Oh, you frighten me.” She touched the black cross that hung on a cord around her neck. “It was just an expression I used.”
“But
something
is rotten here.”
“Yes. Have you come to help it?”
“I don’t know. I think it is beyond me. I think I can only help myself. And make, perhaps, one or two little adjustments in the parish.”
“Can you do anything for me?”
“Come down from there.” He held out his hand. She took it and stepped down, with one neat, stately movement. “Once,” he said, “when people made statues, they carved their garments in neat folds, as if there were no body underneath. Then came a time when ideas changed. Even the saints have limbs, even the Virgin. They began to round out the folds.”
“Our statues looked various. Some lifelike, some dead.”
“I’m afraid none of them were so old that they go back to the time of which I speak. If they did not seem lifelike, it was from lack of skill. Or distaste for flesh.”
“Oh, well.” She looked down, then blushed. She began to fumble and tug at her skirts. “I didn’t think anybody would be in here,” she
said. “I usually kilt up my habit when it rains, only don’t tell on me. It gets so miserable when you’re muddy round the hem for the rest of the day, it’s enough to bring on rheumatics. I don’t suppose,” she said, “that St. Theresa would have minded a bit of rain. She’d have offered it up. She’d probably have gone and stood out in it on purpose.”
But when they left the church, they found that the rain had stopped. A weak sunlight, which itself seemed flooded with water, washed the tree trunks of the carriage-drive. Light glazed the puddles and made them opaque; it seemed that the ground had been set for a banquet, with shallow white china bowls.
That night after dinner, Father Angwin said, “I have had a call from the bishop.”
“Oh yes?” Fludd said. “What did he want?”
“He wanted to know if I was relevant.” Father Angwin raised his face to Fludd, expectantly; but it was a barbed expectation. “You are clever and modern, Father Fludd, can you make anything of that?”
Fludd did not reply; indicating by his silence that he did not mean to be drawn out, about his modernity.
“He said, ‘Are you relevant, Father? Are you real?’ I said, ‘Well, that’s one for Plato.’ But the bishop continued without a pause. ‘Are your
sermons
relevant?’ he said. ‘Are you attuned to the modern ear?’”
“I’ve never heard anything of this before,” Fludd said. “Relevant? No, I’ve not heard of it. What did you say?”
“I said I was supremely bloody irrelevant, if he pleased, and I would, by his leave, remain so—for the welfare of my parishioners, and the salvation of their souls. ‘Indeed, how so, my dear chap?’” Father Angwin fell to ferocious mimicry, thrusting his legs forward and patting at an imaginary paunch. “‘Because,’ I said, ‘isn’t irrelevance what people come to church for? Do you want me to greet them with the language of the tramshed? Do you want me to take
such spirituality as they possess and grind it up in the Co-op butcher’s mincing-machine?’” Father Angwin looked up, his eyes alight. “To that, he made no answer.”
“I hope you seized your advantage,” said Father Fludd.
“Well, while I had him on the hop, I raised the matter of my statues again. ‘If saints,’ I said, ‘will not come to Fetherhoughton, may I not have their mute representatives? Are they not the spurs to faith, and is not faith my business, and are the statues not then the tools of my trade?’ I said to him, ‘Why do you take away the tools of my trade? Would you deprive the physician of his black bag? May a barber not have his pole?’”
“Where does the bishop think the statues are?” Fludd asked carefully.
“Oh, he thinks I have them in my garage.”
“And would he concede anything at all?”
“Nothing.”
“And so how did you leave it?”
“I said, ‘I hope I live to bury you.’” Father Angwin brooded for a moment. “He didn’t mention you.”
“Oh well,” said Fludd. “Did he not? Never mind.”
Father Angwin still half-believed, when he thought about it, that Fludd was the bishop’s spy. But he conceived that even the bishop must have a better nature, which made him tactfully gloss over the fact of the spy’s existence, as if he could not quite admit to what he had done. Either that, or his left hand knows not what his right hand is doing.
Father Angwin, of course, was the worse for drink. Father Fludd gently pointed this out to him, and went into the kitchen to get Agnes to make him some coffee. Coffee was an innovation, one that he was working on. “You grind, Miss Dempsey. You measure. You moisten. You heat. You filter.”
“Well,” Miss Dempsey would say, “I don’t know what the result will be; it will be a substance I have never beheld before.”
Father Angwin, left alone, looked into the fire in a dream. Earlier
that evening, he had listened to a most peculiar confession: or rather, to a question put to him in the confessional, by a strange, strained voice, that he believed he had heard somewhere, but could not quite place. It had been Netherhoughton night; a special evening was reserved for the people from up the hill. It had been in his mind to send Fludd, but the curate wasn’t up in their ways yet; either none of them would come at all, or there would be three or four of them trying to get into the box together, all of them fighting to get their version in first. More than once it had degenerated into brawls; the boy was able for that sort of thing, no doubt, he was a strong-looking lad, but discretion is the better part of valour, and he might not have the wit to forestall trouble.
The penitent, first of the evening, had come shuffling into the box, and had knelt, and kept silence, as if waiting for him to speak first. After a while, it had occurred to him that this was some Netherhoughtonian who had come back to church after twenty or thirty years, hoping that the new priest was a soft touch, and who did not know where to begin on his or her sins, and who might anyway have forgotten the usual form of words. Encouragingly, he prompted: “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned … ?”
At the sound of his voice there was a small sigh, and a further silence. He waited. It was clear to him that the Netherhoughtonian had hoped for Fludd. “Well, now you’re here,” he said, “you may as well get on. Don’t worry, I’ll help you out. Why not take it a decade at a time? But first, tell me, how long is it since your last confession?”
“Not long,” the penitent said flatly. It was a woman; her age he could not guess. And what she said might be true, in the Netherhoughtonian perception. Up there, they were still gossiping about the Abdication; not that of Edward VIII, but that of James II. Their quarrels stretched back to time immemorial; they had grievances that pre-dated the Conquest.
“Well,” the voice said; and there was a further pause. “Well, I’ve nothing to tell, really. I could ask you a question.”
“All right. Your question then.”
“Would it be a sin for a man to set fire to his house?”
Now this was the kind of rough, wild stuff you got from the folk of Netherhoughton. “His own house?” the priest asked. “You don’t mean someone else’s?”
“His own,” said the voice impatiently. “If he is poor, and the insurance money would put him in better circumstances.”
“Oh, I see. Well, of course it would be a sin.” Father Angwin thought, I did not know that in Netherhoughton they had insurance, if I were a company I would refuse them. “It’s a crime besides. Arson, and fraud. Oblige me by putting the notion out of your head.”
“All right,” the penitent said, taking his point with surprising alacrity. “I could put another question. May dripping be used for pastry, or is it allowed only for frying fish?”
God help them, Father Angwin thought; accustomed as they are to living on gruel, shall I live to see the day when their tastes are broadened, their puny physiques improved? “I can’t tell you, right off. But,” he said helpfully, “I could ask my housekeeper. Why don’t I do that, and you could come back next week and hear the answer? I’m sure that if you’re struggling she’d be willing to give you many hints and tips in the culinary line.”
A pause. “No,” the voice said. “Fasting and abstinence. That’s what I’m talking about. Lenten regulations. And on a Friday through the year. Does dripping count as meat? Or does it count as butter?”
“That’s a tough one,” the priest said. “Let me think about it, will you?”
“Can you have jam on a fast day?”
“I always do, if I want. I don’t believe there’s an ordinance about it. You must be governed by the general principles, though. You mustn’t be a glutton for jam.”
“If it is a fast day, and you are taking your morning collation, eight ounces of bread that is, can the bread be toasted?”
“Oh yes, it may.”
“But then it would shrink up, Father. Perhaps it might weigh less. So you could have an extra slice.”
“I don’t think there’s anything in Canon Law about that.” He was concerned, and puzzled too, by the scruple and lack of scruple this penitent combined. “Do you get very hungry on fast days? There are some people who do. I believe that all but the most rigid authorities will allow a little more in cases of hardship.”
“I should not want to put myself forward as such a case.”
“Your efforts do you credit.”
“But now tell me, Father, how long has it been permitted to eat meat on Christmas Day, when Christmas Day falls on a Friday?”
“Since 1918, I think you will find,” Father Angwin said readily. “Since the new code of Canon Law came in, at Pentecost that year.”
“And what date did Pentecost fall?”
“I believe it was 19 May.”
“Thank you. And on a Friday, or other day of abstinence … is turtle soup permitted?”
“I rather think so,” Father Angwin said. “Are you accustomed to turtle soup?”
“No,” said the penitent, with more than a tinge of regret. “Well, thank you, Father, you’ve cleared up a couple of points that have been bothering me. Any further thoughts on the dripping?”
“If I had to give an answer—off the top of my head, mind—I’d say dripping may be used for both purposes. But I will certainly look into it. And if you care to come back, you shall have chapter and verse on it.”
He wanted to say, Who are you? There seemed something forced about the penitent’s husky voice; its rough-and-ready tone, that way of shuttling on from one question to the next, bespoke a certain familiarity, although the people of Netherhoughton were no respecters of persons. He couldn’t place it. Yet it was as if the penitent knew his foibles, and divined his motto: fidelity in small things.
“You will come again, won’t you?” he said wistfully; he had enjoyed the questions about dietary laws.
“Mm,” the penitent said.
“Is there anything else? Something you have to tell me?”
“No.”
“You know, I can’t give you absolution. You haven’t confessed.”
“I can’t confess,” the voice said. “I hardly know nowadays if things are sins or not. And if I did, and they were, perhaps I shouldn’t be sorry.”
“You don’t need Perfect Contrition,” Father Angwin said. (He must instruct his penitent; Father Fludd had opined that it was the spell-book, not the catechism, that they used in Netherhoughton.) “Imperfect Contrition will do. That is the kind of contrition,” he explained, “that arises out of fear of Hell, rather than love of God. Don’t you fear Hell?”
A pause. A whisper. “Very much.”
“And then you must have a Firm Purpose of Amendment. That means, you know, that you must really sincerely make your mind up you’re not going to do it again. And then I can absolve you.”
“But I haven’t done it,” the voice said. “I haven’t done anything. Not even once. Not yet.”
“But you are contemplating a particular sin?”
“Well, I don’t know whether it’s in me. I haven’t had the chance to find out.”
“You mustn’t test yourself,” Father Angwin said. “You mustn’t test yourself against the delights of evil. It’s a test you will always pass.”
There was a longer pause. “Who knows,” said the impenitent penitent, “what any of us may come to, in the space of a month or two?”
No one else had been at confession tonight. And now, staring into the fire, with the whisky between himself and the occasion, Father Angwin knew perfectly well who his penitent had been.
Netherhoughton had been a red herring; this was closer to home. He wondered if she had found any comfort in talking to him, although it was not who she expected. Perhaps she will come again, he thought. We can joust on any topic. Circumlocution has its uses. We shall get to what matters in the end.
He heard Father Fludd’s footsteps in the passage. The aroma of fresh coffee wafted through the half-open door.