Fludd: A Novel

thought, when he put “gold.”

Presently she got up, laying the note down on the pillow. She pulled open the top drawer of the tallboy, where his things had been. Now the drawer was almost empty.

But he had left her the railwayman’s kerchief, which he had torn from the fence pole as he crossed the allotments on his way to the station. “I left them something of my own,” he had said. “I did not wish to go from the parish having made no mark.”

She picked the kerchief up, shook it out. She held it to her face. It smelled of peat and of coal fires, of fog and hen-houses, of the whole year past. She folded it up and laid it on the tallboy’s polished top.

Apart from the kerchief there was nothing but a drawstring bag of grubby calico; the sort of bag the children kept their marbles in, but a good deal larger. She picked it up and felt it; it was bulky and heavy. She pulled at its mouth and stretched it open. Inside, banknotes.

Jesus, she thought, has he done some robbery? Is it spirit-money, or would they take it in the shops? She took the first sheaf out onto her lap and held it as if she were weighing it. It looked real enough. It seemed that those little sixpences that he had put into his handkerchief had multiplied. There were notes of a denomination she had never seen before.

Roisin O’Halloran emptied the bag. She turned the bundles about in her hands and riffled their edges. She did not know how much cash there might be. It would be a body’s work to count it. She felt sure that it would be enough for anything that she might want to buy.

So. She sat for a while, thinking about it. She wanted him back, yes; she imagined the hours, days, months, years, when her heart was going to ache. But leaving that aside, did she not feel remarkably consoled? After all, she would not be going begging to a farmer now. She would not be knocking on some convent door. Nobody would have to take her in and give her charity; not while this lasted, and with her frugal habits she thought it would last a great while. By the time this money runs out, she thought, I shall be somewhere else, somebody else; life will have its second chance with me.

And why indeed should it ever run out, was her next thought. This was no ordinary coin or common gold. This money is like love, she thought at once. Once you have some, once it has come into being, it can go on multiplying, each part dividing itself, doubling and doubling like the cells of an embryo.

She glanced down at her paper wedding ring. I could get a real one, she said to herself. Her spirits rose. She picked up a wad of notes and pressed it to her cheek. And they say it’s the root of all evil. Well, Protestants say that. Catholics know better.

She replaced the money, bit by bit, each sheaf nestling against its fellow; then she drew up the string and put the whole carefully into the bottom of her Gladstone bag. Then she took the letter from the pillow and folded it, and put that in too. It was quite clear, if anyone should challenge her; the gold is yours, it said.

She stood at the washbasin and watched hot water gush from the taps; she took her flannel and wetted it and squeezed it, and washed herself all over with scented soap and then let the water out, and refilled the basin, and washed herself again with water that was clear and almost cold. People live like this, she thought. Every morning they can get up and do this if they want.

She dressed herself. There was only the costume to put on. She had become used to it. After all, she thought, there are more important things to worry you than what other people think.

She made the bed; then she sat down on it and cried for five minutes. She timed it by the clock; she felt it was as much as she should be allowed. Because she had known he would leave her; she did not imagine it could have been different.

When her five minutes were up she went to the washbasin for a last time, ran a corner of the flannel under the cold tap, and bathed her eyes. She straightened up and looked at herself in the mirror. She tied on her checked headscarf; public opinion might not matter, but she told herself that it would be a pity if she were taken up and sent to an asylum. Then she drew back the curtains. A great wave of sunlight poured into the room and washed over the wardrobe and the tallboy and the newly made bed. She stepped back and looked at it in astonishment.

Then, timidly, she quit the room and crept down the corridor; past the large windows curtained with grease and soot, and then with greying net, with crimson velvet drapes restrained by gold ropes and tassels, like a cardinal’s hat in a coat of arms. She descended the wide stone staircase and approached the mahogany altar, behind which the personage stood and gave her a civil greeting. She offered to settle the bill: to which the personage, much surprised, said that the doctor had already done that. Where was the doctor, he wanted to know? Already left, she said.

Oh, I see, then we’d better have you out of here right away, Mrs. Fludd, the man said. She noticed that his manner had changed and become markedly less civil; but she simply said, mildly, that she was leaving at once, did he not see that she had her bag? Oh you could have called a porter, Madam, the personage said, you wouldn’t want to strain yourself: and when she had handed him the key and was crossing the slippery expanse of the foyer, that waste of marble like an iced lake, she heard him say to some colleague of his, well, would you credit it, Tommy, I thought I could spot one a mile off, I’ve never seen such a bloody strange-looking tart in twenty years in the hotel trade.

It was one of those days, rare in the north of England, when a pale sun picks out every black twig of a winter tree; when a ground-frost forms a gilded haze over the pavements; and great buildings, the temples of commerce, shimmer as if their walls were made of air and smoke. Then the city casts off its grim arctic character, and its denizens their sourness and thrift; the grace of affability dawns on their meagre features, as if the pale sun had warmth in it, and power to kindle hearts. Then office workers long to hear Mozart, and eat Viennese pastries, and drink coffee scented with figs. Cleaning women hum behind their mops, and click their stout heels like flamenco dancers. Canaletto pauses on Blackfriars Bridge to take a perspective; gondoliers ply their trade on the Manchester Ship Canal.

Roisin O’Halloran hurried to the station. She passed under the great advertisers’ hoardings that wound their way up London Road, and if anyone noticed her blue serge suit and her black plimsolls, they took them as part of the novelty of the day. Her eyes stung and her cheeks burned; but it was an exhilarating cold, and everything about her—the gilded pavements, the faces of Mancunians, the coloured pictures above her head—seemed to her to have been freshly created—made overnight, manufactured by some new and ingenious process that left them clean and hard-edged and resplendent, faces immaculate, hoardings immaculate, pavements without a stain. I could go anywhere, she thought. Back to Ireland. On a boat. If I liked. Or not.

When she entered London Road Station, its clamorous darkness full of smoke and steam, its railway noises breaking like waves against the roof, she put her bag down carefully, between her feet, and looked up at the destination boards. Then she picked one out.

Father Angwin woke late; Miss Dempsey brought him tea in bed, the first time in all their years together that she had ever done such a thing. The Children of Mary would be scandalized, she thought, if they knew I was in a priest’s bedroom while the priest was in his bed. Perhaps I would be drummed out, and disgraced for ever.