“No, I mean in general. It’s since you came. You haven’t maybe without telling me done a spot of exorcism?”
“No,” Fludd said. “But I have been up and done a spot of minor repair work on the guttering. I take an interest in such matters. I was able to borrow a ladder from a pious household in Netherhoughton. And I have consulted with Judd McEvoy about the downspouts. For a tobacconist, he is very well-informed. He fears the church too needs quite extensive structural renovations. But he says it would cost a mint of money.”
“It wasn’t the drips and creaks that bothered us, though,” Father Angwin said. “We were accustomed to those. But we used to get feet walking up and down overhead, and various banging noises, and you would feel that someone had come in. Or the door would be kicked open, and no one would enter.”
“Well, I entered,” Fludd said. “Did I not? Eventually.”
“Agnes was of the opinion that the house was full of discarnate entities.”
“Of a malign sort?”
“We hardly knew. But Agnes believes in a multiplicity of devils. In that, she is of quite an old-fashioned turn of mind.”
“Yes, I understand you. There is this lax modern way of talking about ‘the devil.’ It surprises me. When you consider that for centuries some of the finest minds in Europe were occupied in counting devils and finding out their various characters.”
“Reginald Scot, I think, towards the end of the sixteenth century, made it fourteen million. Give or take.”
“I can be more precise,” Fludd said. “He made it fourteen million, one hundred and ninety-eight thousand, five hundred and eighty. That excluded, of course, the lords and princes of Hell. That was just the ordinary drone devils.”
“But in those days,” Father Angwin said, “if a devil put in an appearance, they had spells for binding him and questioning him and getting his name and number out of him. They understood very well that devils had their specialities, and that each devil was quite distinct in personality.”
“St. Hilary tells us that each devil had his particular bad smell.”
“But now people just say ‘Satan,’ or ‘Lucifer.’ It is the curse of the present century, this rage for oversimplification.”
“Sister Philomena told me,” Fludd said, sipping his whisky, “that she had encountered a devil as a child. She said that he was nothing like Judd McEvoy. But then, why should he be?”
Father Angwin looked away. “I know that no one agrees with me, in the matter of Judd. But you see, Father Fludd, we do not have the privileges of a former age. Devils do not so readily manifest themselves. Not within the range of our vision. Sister Philomena has been singularly fortunate. When she thinks of a devil she can put a face to it.”
“You have tried to do the same.”
“Every devil must have a face. Even if it is a wolf’s face, even if it is a serpent’s face, even if it is a tobacconist’s. It must be something we can know and recognize, it must be in our own image or very close to it, it must be animal or human or some hybrid of the two. Because what else can we imagine? What else have we seen?”
“Demonology,” Fludd said, taking a sip. “It is an unbearable subject. Deep and unbearable. Especially for you, Father. Since you ceased to believe in God.”
“If it had not been for McEvoy,” Angwin said, looking away again, “I don’t know whether the notion of the devil would have such a strong grip on me either. My mind might have taken a secular turn. I might have become some kind of rational man.”
“I have seen changes.” Fludd followed the other man’s gaze, and looked into the fire. “There was a time when the air was packed with spirits, like flies on an August day. Now I find that the air is empty. There is only man and his concerns.”
Father Angwin sat hunched and brooding, his whisky glass between the palms of his hands. The bottle was as full as ever. “I am ill,” he said. “My soul chooseth hanging, and my bones death.”
“My dear fellow,” said Fludd, removing his gaze from the fire and fastening it anxiously on the priest’s face.
“Oh, a quotation,” Angwin said. “A biblical quotation. The Old Testament, you know. Book of somebody-or- other.”
Fludd thought of Sister Philomena, striding over the fields, failing to recognize his own quotations. When he thought of the nun, a soft, creeping uneasiness made itself felt; it was located in his solar plexus. Well now, he said to himself. I never knew that I had human feelings. He reached for his glass.
“I am like Father Surin,” Angwin said.
“Forgive me. I never knew him.”
“I mean the exorcist of Loudun.” Father Angwin rose, levering himself up with his hands on the arms of his chair; Fludd had noticed how, in the short time he had been in the parish, the priest’s movements had slowed, and his animated features had become masked by a frozen disappointment and grief. He had carried on his pretence so well, so long, never by word or deed betraying the disillusion at the core of his priestly vocation. But my coming here has changed things, Fludd thought; falseness can no longer be endured, truth must out. There must be new combinations within the heart: passions never witnessed, notions never before formed. “What was I saying?” Angwin asked. “Ah yes, Father Surin.” He went to the bookcase, took out a volume, opened it at a place he had marked. “
