Fludd: A Novel

“I would help you, Sister,” Fludd said. “But. You know.”

“I’ll have them off in a minute,” she said, kicking and wrestling. He turned his eyes away. She laughed, grunted, and tussled. “There.” The boots fell over onto the stone flags. Spry and nimble now, she stepped up on to the bench where he had been sitting, and stretched out to reach the Virgin. “What would you think?” she asked. “Make the nose first, then slap it on, or try to work it while I’m up here?”

“I think you should model it in situ. May I try? I am taller.”

“Hop up then, Father. You will certainly have a longer reach.”

He stepped up on the bench beside her, and she took a sideways step to accommodate him, then gave him the plasticine from her fingertips. It was the colour of bloodless skin, and cold to the touch; he worked it in the palm of his hand. He faced the Virgin at point-blank range, and stared into her painted blue eyes.

Sister Philomena watched intently as he reached forward and planted his model on the statue’s face. He could feel her attention, fastening on his hand; he could smell the wet serge of her habit, and, when he looked sideways, in an unspoken request for her opinion, he could see the white-blonde down on her cheek. As if to steady herself, she put out a hand to the Virgin’s slippery narrow shoulder, and it lay there cold and blue-veined against the blue of the painted cloak.

For a moment, Fludd supported the girl, a hand under her elbow; then he leapt backwards to the floor. He stood off, to consider. “Not a success,” he said. “On the whole. Will you come and look?”

“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.”