Fludd lifted his eyes to her face for a second, then dropped them again to her palm. He traced the course of her heartline; it dipped sharply, and ended in a five-pointed star. “Anything I say is superfluous,” he said. “The point is, Sister, you know what your fortune will be.”
She drew back her hand. Smiled. Held it splayed and selfconscious against her thigh; hardly touching the cloth of her habit, as if she thought it was smeared with ink. She looked around again. “I wish we could sit down. I should have thought about it, I could have brought sacks for the floor.” Her foot scraped at the wood-shavings; her words were aimless, random, without meaning.
“You asked me if I could do anything for you. What is it you want?”
She would not look at him; continued that little sidetracking motion with her foot. “Answers to my questions.”
“About Lent?”
“No.”
“Good. I didn’t become a priest to answer that sort of question. I want to answer something deeper.”
She glanced up, just for a moment. “One of the children asked me, what was there before Creation?”
Cigarette in hand, Fludd looked out of the broken window, beyond the rotting coops and the scraps of chicken wire, to where the railwayman’s handkerchief snapped and lashed against its pole. “There was the
“I’m afraid they won’t take that kind of answer.”
He put his cigarette to his lips. “What kind of answer do they want?”
“They go on about guardian angels,” she said. “They expect to be able to see them, walking behind them up the carriage-drive. They think if they could turn round fast enough, they would catch them.”
“Ah,” Fludd said, “if only any of us could turn round fast enough. We might catch a glimpse of our own face.”
“They say—the children—people are getting born and dying all the time, so you need more and more angels, or after somebody’s died do they get reassigned? They say, what if you die young, does your angel get forty years off? One of them said last week, my guardian angel used to be Hitler’s.”
“Angels aren’t following us,” Fludd said. “No one’s following us, except ourselves. Look at you. They sent you out from Ireland. Are you less tormented now? No. Yourself followed you.”
“I have to teach them the Creed. I have problems there. Jesus was crucified, and then, it says, ‘he descended into Hell.’”
“Limbo, is meant,” said Fludd, taking the orthodox line.
“Yes, I know. That’s what I was always taught.”
“But you don’t believe it?”
“Why should he go to Limbo? Just a lot of old patriarchs and prophets, and little dead babies nobody had time to baptise. I like to think it is really Hell that is meant. I like to think of him paying a call. To be reacquainted with it.” Fludd raised an eyebrow. “Reacquainted,” she said. “After all, he made it.”
The air about them was growing colder now, light fading from the sky; he had never known evening come down so early as it did among these hills. The girl’s eyes had lost their daytime glow; they looked slaty now, a Fetherhoughton colour. He shivered a little, dropped his cigarette end on to the floor, put his hands in his pockets.
“I was thinking,” Philomena said, “why does God permit the bishop to exist?”
“It’s more than a permission. God made him.”
“He’s gross. He’s like a pork-butcher.”
“You could ask, why did God make anything that doesn’t please us? But he does not have the same sensibilities as we do. He does not share our tastes.”
“Why did God let my Aunt Dymphna and my sister Kathleen go to the bad?”
“Perhaps he did not take a special interest in undoing them. Perhaps they undid themselves. You said they had hot blood.”
“Will Dymphna roast in Hell for all eternity? Or can it have an end? We are not allowed, are we, to pray for the people in Hell?”
“Not under normal circumstances. Though they say that Gregory the Great prayed out the Emperor Trajan. And we think of Origen’s doctrine of Larger Hope … It was his belief that all men will ultimately be saved. Eternity isn’t really exactly that. The torment of Hell is a purifying process, and there will be an end to our punishment.”
She glanced up, half-hoping. “Is that a respectable belief?”
“No. Most people think that Origen got his wires crossed.”
“Because it occurs to me … if Hell has an end, does Heaven?” She stopped scraping the ground with her foot, came over to stand by him and look out of the broken window. “Are these the sort of questions you became a priest to answer?”
Fludd shivered. “I wish I had a hip-flask.”
“I fancied it was growing warmer.”
“Is it?” His eyes opened wide. He seemed taken aback; he looked away, and seemed to mutter something to himself. He touched the shed’s wall, gingerly, as if fire might have begun in the damp fibres of the wood. Can it be,
