“Oh, I couldn’t. I couldn’t put on corsets. I’ve never worn corsets in my life.”
Sister Anthony was taken aback. “Don’t you have them in Ireland these days?”
“I shouldn’t know how to manage. What if I wanted to go to the lavatory?”
“You’ll have to have something, you know.” Sister Anthony felt around in the chest. “Try this bust bodice. Come on now. Look lively.”
She couldn’t get any sense of urgency into the girl. It was as if she were dressing up for charades. “Either you may have my silk combinations,” she said, “or you’ll have to go in your drawers, please yourself.” She straightened up. “Look, it’s not too late, you know.” She pointed to the habit folded on the chair. “You can climb back into that now, go straight up to Father Angwin, ask for absolution, say your penance, and forget about the whole thing.”
Philly turned a glance on her: large mild eyes. Then bent of her own accord over the chest: a swooning movement. She stood up, her white arms full of clothes. “Anything,” she whispered. “Anything will do. I can’t stay here now. Purpit would know. She’d see it in my face. I’d rather be like St. Felicity, eaten by the beasts in the circus.”
Finally Sister Anthony got her dressed. The blue serge suit seemed best, because warmest; it seemed no one had ever entered the convent in a top coat. The skirt dropped almost to her ankles, and its large waist swivelled round her small waist, washing about on her narrow frame. The jacket hung on her.
“I wish it were not such bad weather, you could take my straw hat,” Sister Anthony said. “Such a lovely blue ribbon. I remember buying it, the summer before I came in.” She held it for a moment and smoothed the ribbon with her pudgy flour-coloured fingers; then with sudden energy, sent it spinning back into the chest. She had produced from some other source a scratchy woollen headscarf of a kind of ersatz tartan, lime green and maroon. “This will cover a multitude of sins,” she said. It was the kind of thing the Fetherhoughton women wore; perhaps a Child of Mary had mislaid it after a meeting, and Sister had snapped it up.
Shoes were a problem. Philly could just squeeze her feet into the smart little navy pair with the waisted heels; but to walk was another matter. She teetered about the parlour, wincing and crying out, “Oh God,” she said. “I’ve never had high heels. Oh, they do pinch.” She stopped. “I suppose I could offer it up.”
“Not really,” Sister Anthony said. “Not any more. There’s no point in your offering anything up, is there?”
Philomena clung to the back of a chair. “Will I be damned, Sister Anthony?”
“I should think so,” the nun said easily. “Come on now, let me see you walk across the room.”
Philomena bit her underlip. She began; holding out her arms to aid her balance, like a performer on the high wire.
“I have to laugh,” Sister Anthony said, without doing so. “If you wear those you’ll end up in a casualty ward. I’ll run down to school and fetch you a pair of the children’s pumps.”
Philomena nodded. She saw the sense of this. “Get different feet. Not two lefts.”
“And then if you wait another minute, I’ll go into the kitchen and make you up a parcel of provisions for the journey.”
“Oh no, Sister Anthony. Oh no, please don’t trouble. I’m only going to Manchester.”
Sister Anthony’s face said, you do not know where you will be going; and what can it matter to you if the bread gets a little stale? Think of the Pharaohs, their eternal picnics sealed in their tombs.
“Sit down, Sister. Rest your ankles.”
Obediently, Philly sat, then burst into tears. She had done well until now. But it was what the old woman had called her: “Sister.” Soon she would never again hear that form of address.
Anthony regarded her thoughtfully. Then she took a clean, folded handkerchief out of her pocket and passed it over. “Keep it,” she said. “I know you never have one of your own.” Strictly speaking, she knew, it was not hers to give. It was common property, which the Order had prescribed for her personal, temporary use. “By the way,” she said. “What was your name? Before you came into religion?”
Sister Philomena sniffed. “Roisin.” She wiped her eyes. “Roisin O’Halloran.”
Sister Anthony had said: wait until dusk. Now Roisin O’Halloran fled like an animal over the dark ground. In that moment, in that heart-stopping moment before Anthony let her out of the back door—when she stood with her Gladstone bag in her hand, like a runner on his mark—she had heard in the passage, approaching, a little clicking noise. It was Polycarp, Cyril, and Ignatius Loyola; and as they bustled along, their rosary beads clinked together, and made a noise like the gnashing of teeth.
She ran; but when she had gained the path to the allotments, she stopped and looked back, conserving her breath. Four o’clock struck by the church clock. She saw them clustered, all three, at an upper, open window. She wanted to shrink into the scrubby bushes, the standing pools. Then she saw that they were waving their handkerchiefs; dipping them up and down, with a curiously sedate, formal motion.
She turned around fully, her bag clasped before her in two hands, a skinny, dowdy figure in her strange clothes. She looked up at the convent, its many small windows, its smoke-blackened stone; beyond it were the slates of the church roof, slick with the air’s moisture, and above the church the glowering terraces, leaf-mulched, slippery, the jungle of the north. The mill-windows of Fetherhoughton were lit up; the smoke from the tall chimneys had faded into the darkening sky, but factory furnaces burnt, dull slow jewels of the year’s end. She raised her arm, waved. The handkerchiefs bobbed up and down. A voice carried to her.
“Send us an epistle,” said Polycarp.
“Send us a food parcel,” said Cyril.
“Send us—,” said Ignatius Loyola; but she never found out what it was because she had turned again, and loped onwards, towards the first stile. When she looked back again, they were still there, but well out of earshot now; handkerchiefs and faces were indistinguishable in the gloom.
Roisin O’Halloran fled like an animal over the dark ground, observed—from a vantage point on Back Lane—by Mother Purpiture.
In the presbytery, the telephone rang. “I have the bishop for you,” whispered the sycophant, across the wires.
“One moment,” said Agnes Dempsey. She placed the telephone receiver on the hall table, went down the hall,
