into the driver’s seat, grunting a little. He knew that Angwin was mad, but he did not want a scandal in the diocese. ‘I shall visit you again,’ he said, ‘when you least expect it. To see that everything has been done.’
‘Okey-dokey,’ Father Angwin said. ‘I’ll prepare the boiling oil for you.’
The bishop roared away, with a clashing and meshing of gears; around the next bend the schoolchildren brought him to a halt, processing out of the gate to the Nissen hut for their dinners. The bishop put his fist on his horn and blew out two long blasts at the mites, scattering them into the ditch. They crawled out and stared after him, wet leaves sticking to their bare knees.
In Father Angwin’s parlour the tinny little mantel-clock struck twelve. ‘Too late,’ Agnes Dempsey said, in a discouraged tone. ‘Only, Father, I was thinking to cheer you up. If you pray to St Anne before twelve o’clock on a Wednesday, you’ll get a pleasant surprise before the end of the week.’
Father Angwin shook his head. ‘Tuesday, Agnes my lamb. Not Wednesday. We have to be exact in these matters.’
Her invisible eyebrows rose a fraction. ‘So that’s why it has never worked. But there’s another thing, Father—I must alert you. I can hear a person walking about upstairs, when nobody is there.’
Nervously, she put her hand up to her mouth, and touched the pale flat wart.
‘Yes, it happens,’ Father Angwin said. He sat on a hard chair at the dining table, huddled into himself, his rust-coloured head bowed. ‘I often think it is myself.’
‘But you are here.’
‘At this moment, yes. Perhaps it is a forerunner. Someone who is to come.’
‘The Lord?’ Miss Dempsey asked wildly.
‘The curate. I am threatened with a curate. What a very extraordinary curate that would be…a walker without feet, a melter through walls. But no. Probably not.’ He forced himself to sit up straighter. ‘I expect the bishop will send some ordinary spy. Just with ordinary powers.’
‘A sycophant.’
‘Just so.’
‘What will you do with the statues, Father? You know the garage has not got a roof, in the proper meaning of the word. They would be exposed to the damp. They would get mould. It hardly seems right.’
‘You think we should treat them with reverence, Agnes. You think they are not just lumps of paint and plaster.’
‘All my life,’ Agnes said impressively, ‘all my life, Father, I have known those statues. I cannot think how we will find our way around the church without them. It will be like some big filthy barn.’
‘Have you any ideas?’
‘They could be boarded out. With different people. The Children of Mary would take St Agatha, turn and turn about. We would need a van, mind. She couldn’t fit in your car.’
‘But they would get tired of her, Agnes. Suppose one of them got a husband? He might not like its presence in the house. And then, you know, people in Fetherhoughton have so little room. I’m afraid it would not be a permanent solution.’
Miss Dempsey looked stubborn. ‘They ought to be preserved. In case of a change of bishop.’
‘No. I’m afraid they will never be wanted again. We are asking for time to run backwards. The bishop is right about so many things, but I wish he would stick to his politics and keep out of religion.’
‘Then what’s to be done?’ Miss Dempsey put up her hand, and wavered, then touched her wart. ‘They’re like people, to me. They’re like my relatives. I wouldn’t put my relatives in a garage.’
‘Faith is dead,’ Father Angwin said. ‘Its time is up. And faith being dead, if we are not to become automatons we must hang on to our superstitions as hard as we may.’ He looked up. ‘You’re quite right, Agnes. It isn’t proper to put them in a garage like old lumber, and I’ll not farm them out around the parish and have them left on street corners. We’ll keep them together. And somewhere we know where they are. We’ll bury them. That’s what we’ll do. We’ll bury them in the church grounds.’
‘Oh, dear God.’ Tears of fright and fury sprang into Agnes’s eyes. ‘Forgive me Father, but there’s something inexpressibly horrible about the idea.’
‘I shan’t have a service,’ Father Angwin said. ‘Just an interment.’
You could not say that in Fetherhoughton there was a bush telegraph, for in that place, scoured as it was by Siberian winds, you could not find a bush. Nevertheless, by the time the schoolchildren were released next day for their morning break, everyone had heard of the developments.
St Thomas Aquinas School had been, in their grandparents’ time, one long schoolroom; but the rowdyism and ill-behaviour of successive generations had rendered this hugger-mugger sort of education impossible, and now flimsy partitioning divided one age of children from the next. Of course, when the school had been founded, great girls and boys of twelve years old were recognized to have no more need of arithmetic and improving verses, and were launched on the world to begin their adult careers among the textile machines. But now civilization had advanced so far that fifteen-year-olds occupied the Top Class, towering over Mother Perpetua, who was the headmistress, and who was responsible for keeping this Top Class from the excesses of frustrated youth.
And yet it was not youth as we know it, because Youth, elsewhere, was in the process of being invented. A faint intimation of it reached Fetherhoughton; the boys of fifteen slicked their hair greasily over their knobbly foreheads, and sometimes, like people suffering from a nervous disease and beset by uncontrollable tics, they would make claws of their hands and strum them repetitiously across their bellies. Mother Perpetua called it ‘imitating skiffle groups’. It was a punishable offence.
These boys were undergrown youths, their faces burnt from kicking footballs into the moorland wind. They were vague and heedless, and their childhoods hung about them. The narrow backs of their necks showed it, and their comic papers, and their sudden indecorous bursts of high spirits – indecorous, because high spirits are a foolish waste in those destined for the chain gang of marriage and the mill.
But in the Big Girls there was no vestige of childhood left. The Big Girls wore cardigans, and at playtime they skulked together in a knot by the wall, their faces moody, spreading scandal. They clasped their arms across their chests, hands hugging woollen upper arms: podgy hands, and low-slung bosoms like their grandmothers. Their cheap clothes were often small for them, and it was this that gave them their indecent womanliness; it was a rule, in the outside world, that girls stopped growing at about this age, but if you had seen the big girls of Fetherhoughton you would say, they will never stop growing, they will devour the world. The schoolroom chairs creaked under their bottoms; from time to time, nodding forward, swaying, and raucous, rhythmic, terrible, they would laugh: hehr, hehr, hehr.
The girls had learnt nothing; or if they had, they had forgotten it, immediately and as a matter of policy. The school was a House of Detention to them. Many of them suffered poor sight, and had done from their early years; the school nurse came, with letters on cards, and tested their eyes, and the State gave them spectacles. But they would not wear them. ‘Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.’ But no one will make passes at them anyway. The process by which they will eventually mate and reproduce is invisible
