“I don’t know,” she said. “It has been my experience that you can pray but the thoughts run under the prayers, like wires under the ground.”
“Then you are not doing it properly.”
“I have tried.”
“Trying is not enough.” He almost spoke out, giving their game away. He almost said, remember what you were taught in your novitiate. It is not enough to do a thing as well as you can. You must do it perfectly.
“It is impossible, isn’t it?” she said. “You begin innocent enough, but you can’t walk around with your eyes shut, with your ears shut, with your mind a blank. But once you see and hear and think … things lead to things.”
“Oh yes,” he said. “They do that.”
When his penitent had left, Father Angwin gave her time to get out of the church; then, out of old habit, he crossed himself, though he did not see any point in it, and did not believe in the cross, and did not believe he was redeemed; and silently rose, and left the confessional. There, whisking around the corner into the porch, was Dempsey’s pleated skirt.
“Agnes,” he called, his voice surprisingly, sacrilegiously loud. “What are you doing there?”
Miss Dempsey froze to the spot, her fingers in the holy-water stoup. He strode down the centre aisle and bore down on her.
“Saying my prayers, Father.” Her voice was placid; her face told a different story.
“I see. You are unwontedly pious, for the middle of the day. What are you praying for? Have you a special intention?”
Oh yes, she thought. That there should be a splendid scandal in the parish—for we need a good shake-up. “I have been praying for the suppression of heresy, the exaltation of the Church, and concord amongst Christian princes,” she replied.
Since her Child of Mary’s handbook obliged her to do this, and regularly, there was nothing Father Angwin could say.
That evening it turned colder. A wind soughed across the moors, out of England’s autumnal heart; a wind with no breath of the sea, bearing an upland odour of privation and loss. Darkness came early, seeming to swell from the high ground above the church and roll down the carriage-drive, a carpet of night that pushed the children before it, down Church Street and into their lighted homes in Chapel Street and Back Lane. When the last of them had left the gates, the nuns locked the school doors with iron keys and hurried in concert back to their refectory, to the tea and bread and margarine that Sister Anthony had prepared for them.
The margarine had a peculiar, sharp taste tonight, as if something had got mixed with it—which was perfectly possible, as Sister Anthony was absent-minded now, and short-sighted, and, some believed, malicious. The meal was eaten in the silence enjoined by the Rule; but there would be plenty said about the marge at a later date. The faces of Polycarp, Ignatius Loyola, and Cyril were twisted with the effort they made to hold back scathing speech. Their complaints rolled about their mouths, like loose teeth.
The next collation would be the last of the day, and it would be soup. Philomena imagined she could smell it already. She pictured herself in her place at table; for places never changed, unless someone came or went—or died, which would be more likely. Soon I shall be sitting here again, she thought, after the evening routine; after the hard kneeler in the convent chapel, directly behind Sister Cyril; after the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary, and sundry other prayers. The nightly Examination of Conscience, the sign of the cross, then the kitchen, to help Sister Anthony serve and collect my share of black looks and blame. Into the big blue apron, and out with the tureen and the ladle; the usual draught rattles the windows as I step down the corridor to the refectory carrying the tureen, elbows jutting out. “Bless us, oh Lord, and these thy gifts …” The small clank of the metal ladle on the side of each bowl. Spoon raised to lips; she tasted the soup, a greyish, frothy liquid, oversalted, scraps of vegetables (or perhaps peelings) awash in its depths.
A violent pain in her ribs made her jump back, almost drop off the refectory bench. She stifled her exclamation; why add another fault to the fault that Perpetua had just discerned? It was that rigid, cruel forefinger again, meant to wipe the expression off her face; she knew it must have been there, that blank dreaming expression that Purpit took as a personal affront. Her brief absence of mind had put away the day as if she were folding it into a box, telescoped all the time between the bread-and-margarine collation and the soup collation.
But what did it matter? Certainly, when time passed in the ordinary world at its ordinary rate, it would bring her to the same seat, the same spoon, the same sensation, the same salt-and-sour taste on her tongue. All her life was reducible perhaps to one long day starting with the caller’s
And if the future is predictable, does that mean it is planned? If it is predictable, is it in the least controllable? This is old stuff, she thought, in disgust with herself: this is seminarians’ stuff. Is my will free? Outside the wind dropped. The nuns, draining the dregs of their tea, lifted their heads and looked at each other across the table. It was as if in the sudden silence they discerned a voice, a voice speaking out of turn. It was a moment of expectancy, unease. A curious ripple ran around the table. Overhead, the forty-watt bulb that the Order approved flickered once, twice, three times: like St. Peter’s denials of Christ. Then gaunt shadows turned their faces down and muttered a grace; then rose, as if in the grip of flames, and flickered from the room.
The priests had eaten early: hotpot. At least, Father Angwin had eaten his, he did not know what Fludd might have done. It was the usual tale: a full plate, then an empty plate, and that discreet mastication in between quite insufficient to account for the disappearance of the curate’s supper.
Then, too, Father Angwin was seriously concerned about the level of the whisky in his bottle. However much he drank nowadays, it never seemed to drop. Many the night he had said to the curate, we’ll be needing a new bottle if we are to have a drink together tomorrow; but then he had contrived, in the course of the day, to dismiss the unpleasant fact from his mind. And in the evening there always seemed to be enough. Not enough to hold a party with, mind. Not a quantity of whisky. But a sufficiency.
“This place has gone very quiet,” Father Angwin said, helping the curate to a glass.
“The wind has dropped.”
