“Do you think it was a diabolic manifestation?” Angwin asked.
“Tosh,” the bishop replied, with a flash of spirit.
Angwin gave him a warning look. “Nuns have had their troubles in that line,” he said. “Demons threw St. Catherine of Siena into the fire many a time. They pulled her off her horse and tipped her into a freezing river head first. Sister Mary Angelica, a nun from Evreux, was followed for two years by a devil in the form of a green scaly dog.” He paused, enjoying the effect he was making. “A Mother Agnes, a Dominican, was attacked by the devil in the form of a pack of wolves. St. Margaret Mary had her seat pulled from under her as she sat before the convent fire. Three other nuns testified in writing that they saw the holy person repeatedly and by supernatural forces dumped on her backside.”
“There must be some other explanation,” the bishop said pathetically.
“You mean a more modern explanation? A more relevant one? Some ecumenical kind of a reason why it occurred?”
“Do not torment me, Angwin,” the bishop wailed. “I am a man sorely tried. I feel there must have been some chemical reaction that caused it.”
“The devil is a great chemist,” Angwin said.
“Of course there are cases of it, people bursting into flames, though I have never heard of it in a nun. There is a case of it in one of the novels of Dickens, is there not? And that fellow has written a study of it, what do you call him, the fellow with the deerstalker and the violin?”
“I think perhaps you mean Mr. Arthur Conan Doyle,” Father Angwin said. “I did not know you read such sensational stuff. More tea?”
“They call it spontaneous combustion,” the bishop said. He looked wild-eyed at the thought.
“Combustion, certainly,” Father Angwin agreed. Personally he doubted the spontaneity of it; he had doubted it at once, when he learnt that McEvoy was on the scene. It is a wise man, he thought, who can tell the firefighter from the arsonist.
In his room at the Royal and Northwestern, while women in cocktail dresses tripped downstairs to drink gin in the tomb-like bar, Fludd turned over in bed. Roisin O‘Halloran stirred herself from her doze. She reached out, trailing her fingertips across his chest, and switched on the bedside lamp. It was eight o’clock. They had not drawn the curtains, and a streetlamp shone in, lending a parched, sub-lunary whiteness to the room; the lamp’s silk fringe cast a pattern of massive loops onto the wall by the wardrobe.
She sat up. She was beginning to feel a stiffness in the muscles of her inner thighs. Fludd said that they were muscles she had not used before. He said she should go along the corridor and take a hot bath, and put in perfumed bath oil, and revel in the steam and heat and spotless white tiles.
He rolled on to his back now; his eyes were open, looking into the darkness. “It must be time for dinner,” he said. “We could go down.”
“Yes,” she said. Suddenly—perhaps it had happened in her last bout of sleep—she had stopped caring so much about her clothes, her hair, the inadequacies her new life exposed to view. She sat up, and now that she had stopped caring, let the sheets fall away. Her throat and the fine skin of her chest were mottled and glowing, and she brushed a hand across her breasts, which had begun to ache. How heavy they were; she cupped them for a moment. “I must have a brassiere,” she said. “Tomorrow.”
“For tonight you must do without,” Fludd said. “I suppose if I were a man of great ardour I would suggest that we stay here for the rest of the night, but they are said to have French food in this place, and I should like to eat some. You will come, won’t you?”
“Yes.” She leant over to put on her lamp, and sat huddled in the wreck of the bed, her ankles crossed and her knees drawn up to her chest. “Before we get up,” she said, “read my palm again. You saw a star on it, didn’t you? Will you look for it again?”
“It is too dim in here,” said Fludd.
“Later then?”
“Perhaps. Downstairs.”
The bishop seemed to have got paralysed. He sat in silence, looking into the fire, as if he were wondering about its nature. Father Angwin did not know whether he ought to get Agnes to cook something for them both. He wondered what she had bought that day when she went Upstreet, and indeed whether, considering that Upstreet hummed with rumour and speculation, she had remembered to buy anything at all.
“We might have a little something,” he suggested to the bishop. “I could ask my housekeeper to see about it. Whatever she has got, there should be ample for both of us. Father Fludd cannot join us, I’m afraid, he is dining elsewhere tonight.”
He had got excuses ready, to cover for his curate’s disappearance: Fludd has been bidden forth by a member of the Men’s Fellowship, whose sister is visiting from the country and has brought a rabbit for a pie. Better still: Father Fludd has been invited to a funeral tea. He is out comforting the bereaved, and they will be having cold boiled ham.
The bishop looked up. “Fludd?” he said. “Who is Fludd? I know nothing of Fludd.”
Father Angwin heard what the bishop said. He did not answer. It was a moment before the implications came home to him. He sat very still. He was not surprised, when he thought about it: he was not surprised at all.
What was it the angel said, when he explained himself to Tobias? “I seemed indeed to eat and drink with you; but I use an invisible meat and drink, which cannot be seen by men.”
The waiter put a damask napkin in her lap; it was as large as a small tablecloth. She wore the little white muslin dress, with the sailor collar; Fludd had helped her into it, and told her she looked pretty, and now, old-fashioned as it was, its airy summer skirt caressed her calves beneath the table. And the bodice was decent, she thought. Not that she much cared.
A second waiter lit a candle on the table; others moved in the shadows, pushing trolleys and pulling out diners’ chairs. The waiters had stiff white jackets buttoned over their hollow chests, and their faces were the ancient, sharp faces of juvenile delinquents.
“In my former life,” Fludd said, “I never had much to do with women. Now I see what I was missing.”
