room was like the size of a hen coop. My mother said, dear God, did my sister Dymphna and all her fancy frocks live in this little space?’
‘What did she die of?’
‘Dymphna? Oh, her lungs. It was a damp place that she lived. On a farm.’
They whispered, as they were speaking of the dead; Philomena bowed her head, and a sharp picture came into the priest’s mind, of the decaying thatch of her aunt’s cottage, and of chickens, who enjoyed comparatively such liberty, scratching up the sacred soil of Ireland under a sky packed with rain-swollen clouds. It was the day of Dymphna’s funeral he was seeing, a coffin being put into a cart. ‘I trust she is at peace,’ he said.
‘I doubt it. She was a byword in her day. She used to go round the cattle fairs and strike up with men. God rest her.’
‘You are a curious young woman,’ Father Angwin said, looking up at her. ‘You have put pictures in my head.’
‘I wish you could see the end of this,’ Philomena said. ‘I feel sad myself, Father. Weighed-upon, somehow. I liked the little lion. Is it true that there is to be a curate?’
‘So the bishop tells me. I have heard nothing more from him. I expect the fellow will just turn up.’
‘Well, he will be able to see that you have done as you were directed. It is rather poor, what remains.’ She walked away from him towards the altar, stopping to genuflect with a thoughtful, slow reverence. ‘May I light a candle, Father?’
‘You may if you have a match. Otherwise there is nothing to light it from.’
A dim outline in the centre aisle, she reached into the deep pocket of her habit, took out a box of matches, struck one, and picked a new candle from the wooden box beneath the statue of the Virgin. When the wick kindled she shielded the flame with her palm, and held the candle up above her head; the point of light wavered and grew and bathed the statue’s face. ‘Her nose is chipped.’
‘Yes.’ Father Angwin spoke from the darkness behind her. ‘I wonder if you could see your way to doing anything about it? I am not of an artistic bent.’
‘Plasticine,’ Philomena said. ‘I can get some from the children. Then no doubt we could paint it.’
‘Let us go,’ Father Angwin said. ‘Agnes has cooked some undercut for my supper, and besides, this spectacle is too melancholy.’
‘Not more melancholy than the supper that awaits me. I fear it may be the fruit-bread.’
‘I should like to ask you to join me,’ Father Angwin said, ‘on account of the comradeship occasioned by our night’s work, but I think I should have to telephone the bishop to ask him for a dispensation of some sort, and no doubt he would have to apply to Rome.’
‘I will face the fruit-bread,’ Philomena said calmly.
As they left the church, he thought that a hand brushed his arm. Dymphna’s bar-parlour laugh came faintly from the terraces; her tipsy, Guinness-sodden breath, stopped by earth these eleven years, filled the summer night.
Soon after, the school term ended. The mills closed for Wakes Week, and those of the populace who could afford it went to spend a week in boarding houses at Blackpool.
It was a poor summer on the whole, with many lives lost. The thunderstorms and gales of 27 July returned two days later; trees were felled and roofs blown away. On 5 August there were more thunderstorms, and the rivers rose. On 15 August two trains collided in Blackburn Station, injuring fifty people. On 26 August there were further fatalities after violent electrical storms.
In early September the children went back to school; a new intake of infants cowered under the mossy wall, and sought refuge in its shade from Mother Perpetua’s crow-like arm.
It was after nine o’clock on a particularly wet evening late in that month that Miss Dempsey heard a knock at the front door of the presbytery. She took this ill, because it was usual for the parishioners, if in need of a priest, to come to the kitchen door at the side; the nuns, similarly, knew their place. She had not yet fed Father Angwin his evening meal, for it was the night of the Children of Mary’s meeting, and Father had been obliged to give them an improving address.
The meeting had gone much as always. There had been prayers, and Father Angwin’s discourse, more rambling than usual, she thought; then a hymn to St Agnes, Protectress of the Society. There were several such hymns, all of them absurdly flattering to the saint; and Miss Dempsey, on account of her Christian name, was forced to endure both pointed disregard and scornful stares while the verses lurched on. The other Children could not bear to hear her so lauded.
We’ll sing a hymn to Agnes,
The Martyr-Child of Rome; The Virgin Spouse of Jesus, More pure than ocean foam.
Miss Dempsey tried, during the weekly meetings – indeed she hoped she always did try – to look humble and inconspicuous; not to flaunt her status in the parish. But she felt, from the gimlet glances she received, that she was failing.
Oh aid us, holy Agnes,
A joyous song to raise; To trumpet forth thy glory, To sound afar thy praise.
Father Angwin said that he liked this particular hymn, did he not? He said he liked the thought of the Children of Mary blowing trumpets. But a small sigh escaped him, just the same.
After the concluding prayers the other Children were at liberty to go to the school hall to conduct the social part of their business: strong tea, parlour games and character assassination. She herself, knowing her duty, had taken off her cloak at the back of the church, handed it to the president of the Sodality, taken off her ribbon and her medal and hurried through the sacristy and back into her kitchen. She was aware that this proceeding gave the Children every opportunity to shred her reputation, but that could not be helped; on a bad night like this, Father was not to be left with a sandwich.
So who can this possibly be at the door, she wondered. She took off her pinny and hung it up. Perhaps someone is near death, and their sorrowing relatives are here to ask Father to come and give Extreme Unction. Perhaps, even, one of the Children of Mary has met with an accident; a fatal scalding with the tea urn was always a possibility. Or perhaps, she thought, it is some poor sinner, with blood on his hands, ridden over the wild moors to ask for absolution. But glancing up at the clock she knew this could not be so, for the last bus from Glossop had passed through twenty minutes earlier.
Miss Dempsey opened the door a crack. There was a bluish wild darkness outside, and rain rattled past her into the hall. Before her was a tall, dim shape, a man wrapped in a dark cloak, holes for mouth and eyes, a hat pulled over the brow; then, as her eyes became accustomed to the exterior murk, she distinguished the figure of a young man, holding in his left hand what appeared to be a doctor’s black bag.
‘Flood,’ said the apparition.
‘Indeed it is. A flood and a half.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘F-L-U-D-D.’
A gust of
