arthritis – and appraise them, a frown of concentration appearing as a single vertical line at the inner corner of her left eyebrow. Then she would rest her hand on her knee for a little; then remove the ring, intact, and throw it on to the fire. This was Miss Dempsey’s private habit, which no one had ever seen. Above her upper lip, on the right-hand side, she had a small flat wart, colourless as her mouth itself. It was hard for her not to touch it. She was afraid of cancer.
By the time the bishop came bustling in, Father Angwin had got over his hangover. He sat in the parlour, with his neat ingratiating smile. ‘Father Angwin, Father Angwin,’ the bishop said, crossing the room, and taking him in a grip; hand squeezing upper arm, hand pumping hand, quite beside himself with joviality, and yet those episcopal bifocals glinting and swimming with suspicion, and the episcopal head turning, turning from side to side, like a mechanical toy that you shoot for at a fair.
‘Tea,’ Father Angwin said.
‘No time for tea,’ said the bishop. He took up a stance on the hearthrug. ‘I’ve come to talk to you on the subject of uniting all right-thinking people in the family of God,’ he said. ‘Now then, now then, Father Angwin. I’m expecting trouble from you.’
‘Are you going to sit, or what?’ Father Angwin asked him diffidently.
The bishop clasped his pink hands before him. He looked severely at the priest, and swayed a little on the spot. ‘The next decade, Father Angwin, is the decade of unity. The decade of gathering-in. The decade of Christ’s human family. The decade of the Christian community in communion with itself.’ Agnes Dempsey came in with a tray. ‘Oh, since you’ve brought it,’ the bishop said.
When Miss Dempsey had left the room – her knees had become stiff, owing to the wet weather, and she was obliged to take her time – Father Angwin said, ‘Do you mean the decade of burying the hatchet, by any small chance?’
‘The decade of reconciliation,’ the bishop said, ‘the decade of amity, the decade of coexistence and the decade of the many-in-one.’
‘You’re talking like a person right outside my experience,’ Father Angwin said.
‘The ecumenical spirit,’ the bishop said. ‘Don’t you feel it in the breeze? Don’t you feel it wafted to you on the prayers of a million Christian souls?’
‘I feel it breathing on my neck.’
‘Am I ahead of my time, or what?’ the bishop asked. ‘Or is it you, Father Angwin, closing your ears and deaf to the wind of change? And you might pour the tea, for I can’t abide tea stewed.’
When Father Angwin had poured the tea, the bishop picked up his cup, and jiggled it in his hand, and took a scalding gulp. Standing before the fireplace, he turned his toes out more widely, and placed his superfluous arm behind his back, and breathed in a noticeable way.
‘Exasperated,’ Father Angwin said, speaking in a low voice, but not to himself. ‘Exasperated with me. Tell me, is that tea hot enough? Good enough? Whisky in it?’ He raised his voice. ‘I hardly understand you at all.’
‘Well,’ said the bishop, ‘have you heard of the vernacular Mass? Have you thought of it? I think of it. I think of it constantly. There are men in Rome who think of it.’
Father shook his head. ‘I couldn’t be part of that.’
‘No choice, my dear man, no choice; in five years, mark my words, or a little more than five…’
Father Angwin looked up. ‘Do you mean,’ he said, ‘that they could understand what we were saying?’
‘Exactly the point.’
‘Pernicious,’ Father muttered audibly. ‘Arrant nonsense.’ Then, louder, ‘I can well understand if you think that Latin’s too good for them. But the problem I have here is their little grasp of the English language, do you see?’
‘I take account of that,’ the bishop said. ‘The people of Fetherhoughton are not on a high level. I would not claim that they were.’
‘Then what am I to do?’
‘Everything conspires to improve them, Father. I will not refer to council housing, as I know it is a sore point in this district…’
‘Requiescant in pace,’ Father murmured.
‘…but have they not free spectacles? Free teeth? In the times we live in, Father Angwin, everything that can be done to improve their material welfare shall be done, and it is for you to think of improving them in the spiritual line. Now, I have some hints and tips for you, which you will kindly accept from me.’
‘I don’t see why I should,’ Father Angwin said, quite loudly enough to be heard, ‘when you are such an old fool. I don’t see why I can’t be a Pope in my own domain.’ He looked up. ‘Consider me at your disposal.’
The bishop stared; it was a pebbly stare. He pursed his lips and said nothing till he had drunk a second cup. Then, ‘I want to look at the church.’
At this early point, the topography of the village of Fetherhoughton may repay consideration. So may the manners, customs and dress of its inhabitants.
The village lay in moorland, which ringed it on three sides. The surrounding hills, from the village streets, looked like the hunched and bristling back of a sleeping dog. Let sleeping dogs lie, was the attitude of the people; for they hated nature. They turned their faces in the fourth direction, to the road and the railway that led them to the black heart of the industrial north: to Manchester, to Wigan, to Liverpool. They were not townspeople; they had none of their curiosity. They were not country people; they could tell a cow from a sheep, but it was not their business. Cotton was their business, and had been for nearly a century. There were three mills, but there were no clogs and shawls; there was nothing picturesque.
In summer the moorland looked black. Tiny distant figures swarmed over the hummocks and hills; they were Water Board men, Forestry Commission. In the folds of the hills there were pewter-coloured reservoirs, hidden from sight. The first event of autumn was the snowfall that blocked the pass that led through the moors to Yorkshire; this was generally accounted a good thing. All winter the snow lay on the hills. By April it had flaked off into scaly patches. Only in the warmest May would it seem to vanish entirely.
The people of Fetherhoughton kept their eyes averted from the moors with a singular effort of will. They did not talk about them. Someone – it was the mark of the outsider – might find a wild dignity and grandeur in the landscape. The Fetherhoughtonians did not look at the landscape at all. They were not Emily Brontë, nor were they paid to be, and the very suggestion that the Brontë-like matter was to hand was enough to make them close their minds and occupy their eyes with their shoelaces. The moors were the vast cemetery of their imaginations. Later, there were notorious murders in the vicinity, and real bodies were buried there.
The main street of Fetherhoughton was known to the inhabitants as Upstreet: ‘I am going Upstreet,’ they would say, ‘to the Co-op drapers.’ It was not unprosperous. Behind window displays of tinned salmon, grocers stood ready at their bacon slicers. Besides the Co-op draper, the Co-op general store, the Co-op butcher, the Co-op shoe shop and the Co-op baker, there was Madame Hilda, Modes; and there was a hairdresser, who took the young women into private cubicles, segregated them with plastic curtains, and gave them Permanent Waves. There was no bookshop,
