into the navy jacket and put a hand up to draw her scarf further over her head. Let it be some Protestant, she prayed, someone who wouldn’t know me. Then she thought, what’s the use of praying for that sort of thing? Or any sort of thing at all?
He must, she thought, be examining with some curiosity my peculiar-looking back. The skin of her neck crawled, almost as if the man were Fludd. She began to turn her head, slowly but inexorably, as if it were subject to a magnetic attraction.
And yes, of course he was staring at her. Their eyes met; shocked, she jerked her gaze away, as if she had seen a corpse on the track.
As the man was Mr. McEvoy, he could hardly have failed to recognize her; but he did not speak. The wind tore through her jacket and sliced her through to the bone; it got under her skirt and barrelled it out around her legs. She turned her eyes down and kept them on her gym pumps; one right, one left.
Then at last the train appeared, a dot in the distance, so faint in the gathering darkness that she could hardly be sure it was there. For seconds it seemed to stick absurdly, going neither forwards nor back; then, when she saw that it was growing larger, she stepped forward to the edge of the platform, and raised her face, caught in the orange glow of the station lamps.
Only when the train drew in did Mr. McEvoy step up beside her. She was trembling all over. “Sister?” he said, in a low voice. He offered his arm. Her fingertips rested on it; she had some thought of fending him off. He swung open the carriage door for her. “Don’t alarm yourself,” he said. “I am only travelling as far as Dinting, just the few stops. I shall pretend not to know you. I am the soul of discretion.”
“Then get away,” she hissed. “Leave me alone.”
“I only wish to be of assistance,” McEvoy said. “Somebody must hand you your bag and see that you have a seat facing the engine. And you know what they say, Sister. Better the devil you know.”
With a simper, Mr. McEvoy placed her bag on the rack. A door slammed. A railwayman gave a wild inchoate shout. Flags waved. And a moment later they were off, rattling across the points to Manchester, her defloration, and the Royal and Northwestern Hotel.
TEN
The Royal and Northwestern Hotel had been designed by a pupil of Sir Gilbert Scott in a moment of absent- mindedness, and when Roisin O’Halloran entered its portals she felt uneasily at home. She turned to her companion. “Like church,” she whispered. The foyer had a marmoreal chill. Behind a mahogany desk, curiously carved, proportioned like an altar, stood a sallow-faced personage, with the bloodless lips and sunken cheeks of a Vatican City intriguer; and he proffered them a great volume, like a chained Bible, and with a pallid, spatulate fingertip indicated the place for Fludd to put his superscription. When this was done, the personage frowned at it, and then smiled a thin wintry smile, like a martyr whose hangman has cracked a joke: “We have a nice quiet room, Doctor,” he said.
Doctor, thought Roisin. So you are up to your old tricks. Fludd caught her eye and smiled faintly, but with more merriment than the personage. The personage eased open a great drawer, like a vestment chest, and selected among the keys; then he drew one out and presented it. In this way, with the same caution, St. Peter selects a key for one of Heaven’s more inconspicuous doors, and hands it to one of the elect who has only just scraped in.
“They’re not over-friendly,” she whispered, on her way to the lift. But then, she thought, it’s not us perhaps, hotel keepers are like it. She thought of Mrs. Monaghan, at Monaghan’s Hotel, grumbling if she had to turn out her back room for a commercial traveller. Dymphna used to wash up at Monaghan’s Hotel, and later, it was said, make herself available in the bar parlour.
When she thought of this, Roisin O’Halloran’s cheeks burned. Then something more obvious struck her. “Is it me?” she mouthed at Fludd. “Is it the funny way I look?”
The iron grilles of the lift clattered behind them, trapping them in. Fludd’s hand crept over her cold hand. With a lurch, the machine began to move; an unseen force drew them upward, up into the bowels of the place. As they vanished into the darkness between floors, for one instant she saw, beyond the bars, Perpetua’s face; it was a mask of fury, and with a snort of jealousy and rage the decapitated vision reached out, and spouted clawing hands, and wormed her fingers between the metalwork.
There was a wardrobe to put your clothes. It was a novelty to her. At home they had only a chest of drawers, and an old musty cupboard in the wall. In a convent, well, you don’t need such things.
“Are you going to unpack your bag?” Fludd said. “Hang things up?”
“I could hang up my costume,” she said, “if I took it off.” As she looked around her, naked pleasure shone from her face. “I could hang up my frock. I’ve brought a frock. It belonged to Sister Polycarp. It’s got a sailor collar. You’ve never seen such a frock.”
Fludd turned away. She was a sore, sharp, grievous temptation; now that he saw her here, in a warm room, amid furnishings, he saw her glow with gentleness and hope. She had never been part of his plans; no woman had, no fleshly tie of any sort. Some spoke of the
Other times, other manners. Philomena took off her jacket. She folded it and laid it on the bed. The room was cavernous, stuffy; some great engine, hidden beneath the floor, chuffed out heat. The bed was made with stiff white linen; the eiderdown was plump and purple, shining and silky, the kind of quilt a Papal legate might have. On the wall, cabbage roses bloomed; blue roses, the white space between them pickled a yellow-brown by the tobacco smoke of previous guests. There was a washbasin in the corner, behind a screen, and upon it a cold cake of green soap, and by it a white towel, with the hotel’s initials sewn on it in a florid scarlet script.
“Must I take my other clothes off too?” the girl said.
When Roisin O’Halloran lay at last beneath the bedsheets, her naked body rigid in their glacial embrace, her thoughts were of her own ineptitude, of how easily everything could have gone awry. Fludd had been wearing, when she met him at the station, a suit made of tweed, and so when the passengers came off the train from Fetherhoughton she had failed to see him, because she was looking for clerical black. She had not told him this, nor how she had panicked in the moment before he hurried up to her and kissed her cheek and took the bag from her hand. The mistake seemed to add a further dimension to her foolishness; was there ever a woman in the history of the world who ran off with a man she could not recognize?
Now Fludd undressed modestly, his back turned to her. She watched him take his handkerchief from his pocket and lay it on the dressing table, like a white nest—into which he dropped his small change. She thought, I am
