and a populace reduced to eating its rats.
Inside the church, in the pit-like gloom, there was a deep font, without ornament, with a single plain shaft, and big enough to cope with a multiple birth, or dip a sheep. There was a west gallery for the organ, with a patch of deeper blackness beneath it; the gallery itself, though you would not know until you had swum into that blackness, was reached by a low little doorway with junior siege-hinges, and a treacherous spiral staircase, with risers a foot deep. There were two side chapels, two aisles, and it was in the arcades that the architect’s derangement was most evident, for the arches were round or pointed, seemingly as a consequence of some spur-of-the-moment decision, and as one blundered through the nave, the confusion of style gave the church a misleadingly heroic air, as if it had been built, like one of the great European cathedrals, in successive campaigns a hundred years apart. The shafts of the columns were squat and massive cylinders, made of a greyish, finely pitted stone, and their uncarved capitals resembled packing cases.
The lancet windows were grouped two by two, and surmounted by grudging tracery, here a circle, here a quatrefoil, here a dagger trefoil. In each of the lights stood a glass saint, bearing his name on an unfurling scroll, each scroll inscribed in an unreadable Germanic black-letter; the faces of these glass saints were identical, their expressions were all alike. The glass itself was of a mill-town sort; there was a light-refusing, industrial quality about its thick texture, and its colours were blatant and vile: a traffic-light green, a sugar-bag blue and the dull but acidic red of cheap strawberry jam.
There were stone flags underfoot, and the long benches were varnished with a treacly red stain; the doors to the single confessional were low and latched, like the doors to a coalshed.
Father Angwin and the bishop came out through the draughty vaulted passage from the sacristy, and emerged by the Lady chapel in the north aisle. They looked about; not that it profited them. In all, St Thomas Aquinas was as dark as Notre-Dame and resembled it in one other alarming particular – that at any given moment, standing in one part, you lost all sense of what might be happening in another. You could not see the roof, although you had – in St Thomas Aquinas—an uneasy, crawling feeling about it, that it might not be so far above your head at all, and that it might lower itself a little from time to time, just that little inch or so that betrayed its ambition to unite, one winter’s day, with the stone flags, and freeze into a solid block of unwrought masonry, with the worshippers between. The church’s inner spaces were aggregations of darkness, with channels of thicker darkness between. There were plaster saints—which the bishop now surveyed as best he might – and before most of them, in severe iron racks that looked like the bars of a beast-house, devotional candles burned; yet it was a lightless burning, like marsh-gas, a flickering in an unfelt, breathless wind. There were draughts, it was true, which followed each worshipper like a bad reputation, which dabbed at their ankles and climbed into their clothes, as cats do with people who do not like them. But when the church was empty the draughts lay quiet, only whistling from time to time about the floor; and the candle flames rose up towards the roof, straight and thin as dressmaker’s pins.
‘These statues,’ said the bishop. ‘Have you a pocket torch?’ Father Angwin did not reply. ‘Then give me a tour,’ the bishop demanded. ‘Start here. I cannot identify this fellow. Is he a Negro?’
‘Not really. He’s been painted. A lot of them have. That’s St Dunstan. Don’t you see his tongs?’
‘What has he got tongs for?’ the bishop asked rudely. He stared at the saint in a hostile way, his paunch thrust out.
‘He was working at his forge when the devil came to tempt him, and the saint seized his nose with red-hot pincers.’
‘I wonder what sort of temptations you might get while working at a forge.’ The bishop peered into the darkness. ‘There are a lot of them, Father. You have more statues than any church in the diocese.’ He passed on down the aisle. ‘How did you get them? Where did they come from?’
‘They were here before my time. They’ve always been here.’
‘You know that is impossible. They were someone’s decision. Who is this woman with the pliers? This place is like an ironmonger’s shop.’
‘That’s Apollonia. The Romans pulled her teeth out. She’s the patron saint of dentists.’ Father Angwin looked up into the martyr’s downturned, expressionless face. He stooped and took a candle from the wooden box at the statue’s foot, and lit it from the solitary flame that burned below Dunstan. He carried it back with care, and fitted it into one of Apollonia’s empty candle-holders. ‘Nobody bothers with her. They don’t go in for dentistry here. Their teeth fall out quite early in life, and they find it a relief.’
‘Pass on,’ said the bishop.
‘Here are my four Church Fathers. You will see St Gregory in his Papal tiara.’
‘I cannot see anything.’
‘You must take my word for it. And St Augustine, holding a heart, you see, pierced with an arrow. And the other Fathers here, St Jerome with his little lion.’
‘It really is a very small beast.’ The bishop leant forward, put himself nose to nose with it. ‘Not realistic at all.’
Father Angwin put his hand on the lion’s arched mane, and traced the length of its stone back with his forefinger. ‘I like him the best of all the Fathers. I think of him in the desert with his wild eyes and his bare hermit’s knees.’
‘Who’s left?’ said the bishop. ‘Ambrose. Ambrose with his hive.’
‘St Beehive, the children call him. Similarly it was mentioned in the parish some two generations back that Augustine was the Bishop of Hippo, and since then I am afraid that there has been a great deal of confusion among the juveniles, passed on carefully, you see, by their parents.’
The bishop made a little growl, deep in his throat. Father Angwin had the feeling that he had somehow played into the bishop’s hands; that the bishop would think that it mattered, if they were confused.
‘Can it matter?’ he said quickly. ‘Look at St Agatha here, poor Christian soul, carrying her breasts on a dish. Why is she the patron saint of bellfounders? Because a little mistake was made, with the shape; you can understand it. Why do we bless bread in a dish on 5 February? Because as well as looking like bells they look like bread rolls. It is a harmless mistake. It is more decent than the truth. It is less cruel.’
They had passed by now almost to the back of the church, and in the north aisle, opposite them, there were more saints; St Bartholomew clutched the knife with which he had been flayed, St Cecilia her portable organ. A Virgin, with the foolish expression imparted by a sickly smile and a chipped nose, held her blue arms out stiffly under her drapery; and St Theresa, the Little Flower, glowered from beneath her wreath of roses.
The bishop crossed the church, and looked up into the Carmelite’s face, and tapped her foot. ‘I make exceptions, Father,’ he said. ‘Our boys in the trenches of Flanders addressed their prayers through the Little Flower, and some of those who did so were I daresay not Catholic at all. There are saints for our time, Father, and this one here is a shining example to all Catholic womanhood. Perhaps this one may stay. I will give it consideration.’
‘Stay?’ the priest said. ‘Where are they going?’
‘Out,’ said the bishop succinctly. ‘And where, I care not. Somehow, Father Angwin, I shall drag you and your church and your parishioners into the 1950s, where we all quite firmly belong.
