“I looked in the wardrobe, I think. I got up—it was five o’clock, still dark—and I went and looked in the sacristy. I opened the press up and felt among the vestments. I knew there was no chance, but you can imagine how it was. I was half out of my mind with fear of the future.”
“And then?”
“I looked on the altar. It wasn’t there. It had vanished while I slept, and I had to accept the fact.” Father Angwin’s head drooped. “I had lost my faith. I no longer believed in God at all.”
“You relive the moment,” Fludd said, “as if it were yesterday. May I ask what you did next?”
Father Angwin placed his hands together, fingertip to fingertip. He considered. “It seemed to me that what I had urgent need of was some kind of survival plan, some kind of strategy. I wondered, is there a diocesan House of Detention for priests in my case? Somewhere they are put to be kept from view? After all, you cannot stop being a priest, can you? No matter how faithless or scandalous a man is, once he is a priest he is a priest for all eternity. I couldn’t abscond, could I, I couldn’t do a moonlight flit?”
“I should say your way was plain,” Fludd said. “A man may preserve the outward form, if he lacks the inward grace.”
“Yes. So I thought, well, I have no faith, I must just pretend I have.”
“And may I venture a guess? You had a parish. It must be served. And yet you would feel—what? On shaky ground. Suppose you made a slip, gave yourself away?”
“I was a charlatan,” Father Angwin said. “A pretender. A fake. Do you know what worried me? That I would stop thinking like a priest. Stop talking like a priest. That one day some parishioner would come at me with some question—is this or that a sin, should I do that or the other—and I’d say, well, what do
“Common sense has nothing to do with religion,” Father Fludd said reprovingly. “And personal opinion has little to do with sin.”
“Exactly. Just my point. I was afraid I’d forget myself, respond as any person might—appeal, as it were, to the human and not the divine. I had to safeguard myself. Against this grievous peril.”
“So did you then become scrupulous? Did you become exacting?” Fludd leant forward in his chair, his eyes alight. “Did you make a point of it to become known in the district for the strictness of your opinions, for your old- fashioned stances, for the rigidity of your views? You would not hear of any innovation, deviation: of any slight departure from the rules of Lenten fasting, say? You would not remit a jot or a tittle?”
“That is about the size of it.” Father Angwin looked morose; he slumped a little. “Any more in that bottle?”
Fludd had secreted it by his chair, it seemed. He reached down, and poured his senior a generous measure. “Wonderful,” Father Angwin murmured. “Go on now, Father Fludd. You seem to be on my trail.”
“Shall we say, for instance, that in the confessional you gave no leeway? Supposing, for instance, some woman with six children came along. What did you recommend?”
“Oh, you know, I said they must abstain.”
“What did they say to that?”
“They said, thank you, Father.”
“They were relieved?”
“The word does not convey the measure of their jubilation. The men of Fetherhoughton are not noted for romance.”
“And if they said to you, Father, I cannot abstain, for the brute insists on his pleasures?”
“I said, then there is no help for it, my dear, you must have six more.”
“I understand,” Fludd said. “Suppose as a good Catholic you meet some very particular hardship, some tiny absurdity, which, as you imagine, is making life very hard for some poor son or daughter of the Church. You think, well now, what can this matter? What can it signify, in the eternal scheme of things? I will just, in this little instance, separate my judgement from the traditions of the Church. But faith, Father Angwin, is like a wall, a big, blank, brick wall. One day, some fool comes with a hairpin and chooses some inch of it, and begins to scrape away at the mortar. When the first dust flies up, the wall falls down.”
Father Angwin took a draught of his whisky. What Fludd said was comprehensible entirely; and he imagined the bishop, producing some dusty, purloined hairpin from the hot depth of his pocket. “I thought to myself,” he said, “a priest must believe in God, or at least pretend to; and who knows, if I pretend for thirty years, for forty years, perhaps the belief will grow back in again, the mask will grow into the flesh. And if you can accept the preposterous notion of a living creator who gives a bugger about every sparrow that falls, why jib at the rest of it? Why jib at rosaries and relics and fasting and abstinence? Why swallow a camel and strain at a gnat? And with that as my philosophy, it somehow seemed possible to go on, enclosed in ritual, safe as houses, as they say. Oh, the central premise was missing, but do you know, it didn’t seem to matter all that much? You wouldn’t think it, would you? You’d think if you lost your faith you couldn’t continue in this life. But I can assure you—this is the one life you can continue in.”
“You made an accommodation,” Fludd said. “It is natural. Suppose a woman marries a man after some great love affair. Then one morning she wakes up beside the chap, and sees that he is a mere nothing, despicable, a blot on her landscape. Does she rise up from her bed and go about the streets proclaiming her error? No, she does not. She gets back under the bedclothes. For the rest of the day she is even more civil to him than she has been before.”
“I dare say you are right,” Father Angwin said. “I dare say the parallel can be drawn. But I have not given much thought to the married state. I put it to myself differently. I thought, suppose your heart were taken out? But you could still walk and talk, and have your breakfast. Well, you wouldn’t miss it, would you?”
“So,” said Father Fludd, “you walked about the district without your heart, and you continued to hear confessions and say early Mass, you did all that was required of you and more; you travelled your necessary way, fettered as you were to this stale bridegroom, the Church. You didn’t shout from the pulpit that you no longer believed in God.”
