there is a feeling that Our Lord has been crucified again.’
‘But that’s ridiculous!’
‘I am saying so, miss. Coolly ridiculous, everything back to front. The trouble is that starvation causes a lightness in the head.’
‘Do the Pulvertafts know of this? No one but you has mentioned this child to me.’
‘I heard the matter mentioned at the dinner table. Mr Pulvertaft said that Mr Erskine had passed on to him the news that there was some superstition about. “D’you know its nature, Fogarty?” Mr Pulvertaft said, and I replied that it was to do with the marks of Our Lord’s stigmata being noticed on the feet and hands of a child.’
‘And what did anyone say then?’
‘ “Well, what’s the secret of it, Fogarty?” Mr Pulvertaft said, and I passed on to him the opinion of Miss Fogarty and myself: that the markings were inflicted at the time of birth. They had all of them reached that conclusion also: Mrs Pulvertaft and Miss Emily and Miss Charlotte and Miss Adelaide, even Master George Arthur, no doubt, although he was not present then. As soon as ever they heard the news they had come to that assumption. Same with Mr Erskine.’
I stared, astonished, at the butler. I could not believe what he was telling me: that all these people had independently dismissed, so calmly and so finally, what the people who were closer to the event took to be a miracle. I had known, from the manner in which Fogarty spoke after his introduction of the subject, that he was in some way dubious. But I had concluded that he doubted the existence of the marks, that he doubted the reliability of the priest. I had never seen Father Horan, so did not know what kind of man he was even in appearance, or what age. Fogarty had told me he’d never seen him either, but from what he gathered through the maids the priest was of advanced years. Fogarty said now:
‘My sister and I only decided that that was the truth of it after Cready and Brigid had gone on about the thing for a long time, how the priest was giving out sermons on it, how the bishop had come on a special journey and how a letter had been sent to Rome. Our first view was that the old priest had been presented with the child after he’d had a good couple of glasses. And then oiled up again and shown the child a second time. He’s half blind, I’ve heard it said, and if enough people raved over marks that didn’t exist, sure wouldn’t he agree instead of admitting he was drunk and couldn’t see properly? But as soon as Miss Fogarty and myself heard that the bishop had stirred his stumps and a letter had gone to Rome we realized the affair was wearing a different pair of shoes. They’re as wily as cockroaches, these old priests, and there isn’t one among them who’d run a chance of showing himself up by giving out sermons and summoning his bishop. He’d have let the matter rest, he’d have kept it local if he was flummoxed. “No doubt at all,” Miss Fogarty said. “They’ve put marks on the baby.” ’
I couldn’t eat. I shivered even though I was warm from the fire. I found it difficult to speak, but in the end I said:
‘But why on earth would this cruel and blasphemous thing be done? Surely it could have been real, truly there, as stigmata have occurred in the past?’
‘I would doubt that, miss. And hunger would give cruelty and blasphemy a different look. That’s all I’d say. Seven other children have been buried in that family, and the two sets of grandparents. There was only the father and the mother with the baby left. “Sure didn’t they see the way things was turning?” was how Miss Fogarty put it. “Didn’t they see an RIP all ready for them, and wouldn’t they be a holy family with the baby the way they’d made it, and wouldn’t they be sure of preservation because of it?’ ”
In his dark butler’s clothes, the excitement that enlivened his small face lending him a faintly sinister look, Fogarty smiled at me. The smile was grisly; I did not forgive it, and from that moment I liked the butler as little as I liked his sister. His smile, revealing sharp, discoloured teeth, was related to the tragedy of a peasant family that had been almost extinguished, as, one by one, lamps are in a house at night. It was related to the desperation of survival, to an act so barbarous that one could not pass it by.
‘A nine days’ wonder,’ Fogarty said. ‘I’d say it wasn’t a bad thing the child was buried. Imagine walking round with a lie like that on you for all your mortal days.’
He took the tray and went away. I heard him in the lavatory off the nursery landing, depositing the food I hadn’t eaten down the WC so that he wouldn’t have to listen to his sister’s abuse of me. I sat until the fire sank low, without the heart to put more coal on it even though the coal was there. I kept seeing that faceless couple and their just-born child, the woman exhausted, in pain, tormented by hunger, with no milk to give her baby. Had they touched the tiny feet and hands with a hot coal? Had they torn the skin open, as Christ’s had been on the Cross? Had either of them in that moment been even faintly sane? I saw the old priest, gazing in wonder at what they later showed him. I saw the Pulvertafts in their dining-room, accepting what had occurred as part of their existence in this house. Must not life go on lest all life cease? A confusion ran wildly in my head, a jumble without a pattern, all sense befogged. In a civilized manner nobody protested at the cacophony in the drawing-room when the piano was played, and nobody spoke to me of the stigmata because the subject was too terrible for conversation.
I wept before I went to bed. I wept again when I lay there, hating more than ever the place I am in, where people are driven back to savagery.
*
‘The men have not arrived this morning,’ Erskine reports. ‘I suspected they might not from their demeanour last evening. They attach some omen to this death.’
‘But surely to heavens they see the whole thing was a fraud?’
‘They do not think so, sir. Any more than they believe that the worship of the Virgin Mary is a fraud perpetrated by the priests. Or that the Body and the Blood is. Fraud is grist to their mill.’
Mr Pulvertaft thanks Erskine for reporting the development to him. The men will return to their senses in time, the estate manager assures him. What has happened is only a little thing. Hunger is the master.
Emily packs for her travels, and vows she will not forget the lake, or the shadows and echoes of the monks. In Bath and Florence, in Vienna and Paris she will keep faith with her special corner, where the spirit of a gentler age lingers.
Mrs Pulvertaft dreams that the Reverend Poole ascends to the pulpit with a bath towel over his shoulder. From this day forth we must all carry bath towels wherever we go, and the feet of Jesus must be dried as well as washed. ‘And the woman anointed the feet,’ proclaims the Reverend Poole, ‘and Jesus thanked her and blessed her and went upon his way.’ But Mrs Pulvertaft is unhappy because she does not know which of the men is Jesus. They work with shovels on the estate road, and when she asks them they tell her, in a most unlikely manner, to go away.
Alone in front of the drawing-room piano, Adelaide sits stiffly upright, not wishing to play because she is not in the mood. Again, only minutes ago, Captain Coleborne has not noticed her. He did not notice her at lunch; he did not address a single word to her, he evaded her glance as if he could not bear to catch it. Charlotte thinks him dull; she has said so, yet she never spurns his attentions. And he isn’t dull. His handsome face, surmounting his sturdily handsome body, twinkles with vigour and with life. He has done so much and when he talks about the places he has been he is so interesting she could listen to him
