Fludd. Hilary Mantel
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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