While the big girls leant by the wall, and while the big boys with their footballs tacked across the square of asphalt, the juniors of Fetherhoughton, red in tooth and claw, occupied themselves in games of tag, in hopscotch and skipping games. Their games were played in a fever of intolerance, an agony to those who could not hop or skip; as for tag, it was their habit to pick on some poor child more than usually ragged, or stupid, or scrofulous, and to bawl out his name, and declare you had his ‘touch’ and must pass it on. Of those not caught up in these games, a number occupied themselves in jumping, time after time, from the low wall that divided the upper level of the playground from the lower; others started fights. The level of disorder, the incidence of injury, was so high, that Mother Perpetua was obliged to segregate the infant class from the rest of the school at playtime, and corral them in a cobbled, evil-smelling yard at the back of the building; it was here, under the shadow of a moss-covered wall some twenty feet in height, that the school had its privies. It will not do to call them lavatories, for there was no provision to wash. To wash would have been thought an affectation.
Above the school the ground banked steeply, towards the convent and the church; below, it fell away to the village. The dismal wooded slopes that flanked the carriage-drive were referred to by local people as ‘the terraces’. From the wall at the lower end of the playground, the children looked down on tree-tops; behind the school, above the towering wall that fenced the infants in, they could see the gnarled and homeless and jutting roots of other trees, thrust out from the hillside and growing into air. These terraces were lightless places, without footholds, and it was a peculiarity of their trees that they bore foliage only at the very top; so that below the green canopy there twisted a mile of black branches, like a witch’s knitting. Autumn came early; and underfoot, at every season of the year, there was a sunless mulch of dead leaves.
On this particular day, the playground was more than usually animated; the children surged into knots and unravelled themselves again, and streamed wailing across the asphalt, and banked up against the low dividing wall. ‘St Hippo’, they shouted, and ‘St Beehive’; they made their arms into the wings of bombers, and wheeled and dived, and made the snarling whining noise of engines and the crunch of impact and the whoosh of flames.
Mother Perpetua watched them from the school door. She watched for a minute or two, and then with a swift rustle passed back into the shadows, and re-emerged with her cane. She lifted her habit four inches, and thrust out her laced black shoes and strode; then she was amongst the children, arm uplifted, her great deep sleeve falling back to reveal underlayers of black wool. ‘In, in, in,’ cried Mother Perpetua, ‘get in with you, get in.’ Her cane rose and fell across the children’s fraying jerseys. Howling, they dispersed. A bell rang; mouths agape, they ran into little lines, and sniffled back into their classrooms. Mother Perpetua watched them in, until the playground was empty; a damp wind picked at her skirts. She tucked the cane under her arm, and marched out of the school gates, and up the road to see Father Angwin. As she passed the convent she scanned its windows for signs of life, but could see none; could see nothing to displease her.
Quite unable to grasp her name, the local people had always called her Mother Purpiture; the more irreverent schoolchildren called her Old Ma Purpit, and it was some years since Father Angwin himself had thought of her by any other name. Purpit was a stumpy woman, of middle years—it is not proper to speculate about the exact age of nuns. Her skin was pale and rather spongy, her nose of the fleshy sort; she had a hoarse flirtatious laugh, and with this laugh, a way of flicking a corner of her veil back over her left shoulder; she had tombstone teeth.
Miss Dempsey brought her in, doing the office of a maid, her hands clasped before her at about the bottom button of her twin-set. ‘Mother Purpiture,’ she announced, grave and respectful. Father Angwin was not reading his breviary, but he at once picked it up, defensively, from the table beside him. Agnes took a little pace back to admit the nun, and stood uneasily fingering her artificial pearls, her mouth turned down at the corners. ‘Will you be wanting tea?’ she exhaled; and let her eyes travel from side to side. Without an answer, she effaced herself; slid behind Mother Perpetua, and left the room backwards.
Perpetua took a gay little step, arching her instep in the lace-up shoes. ‘Ah, but I’m interrupting you,’ she said.
I hope Agnes does not bring in tea, Father Angwin thought. I hope she does not take that upon herself. It would be encouraging Purpit. ‘Take a seat?’ he said. But Purpit continued her dance.
‘Can I believe the evidence of my ears?’ she asked. ‘Is it true that the bishop wants the statues disposed of?’
‘It is true.’
‘I always thought the church was cluttered. Not that it is for me to say.’
‘Not that it is for you to say,’ Father Angwin muttered.
Purpit flicked her veil back over her shoulder. ‘Do I also hear right? That you mean to bury them? Because what do you want, Father? Do you mean to have the village up here with wreaths? Or do you mean the congregation should just go on as normal and pretend that they are not buried and light their candles round the graves?’
‘It is you who say, graves. I have not said any other than “holes”. It is not a ceremony. It is not a rite. It is a measure.’ Hearing himself say this, Father Angwin found himself consoled a little. ‘A measure’ gave it distance, gave it dignity, gave it an air of calculation.
‘And when do you intend taking this measure?’
‘I thought of Saturday. To have the services of the Men’s Fellowship.’
‘Well, and I can lend you Sister Philomena. A fine strong girl. She can dig. A true daughter of the Irish soil.’
‘Oirish’, she said; it was her little joke. You cannot expect much of the humour of nuns. Purpit gave her hoarse horse laugh, and flicked her veil again. ‘I hear you’re threatened with a curate,’ she said.
Father Angwin noted her choice of word. He looked up. Between Mother Perpetua’s two front teeth, there was a gap; not an uncommon thing, but Father Angwin found that it attracted his eye. He thought of Mother Perpetua as a cannibal; and through that gap, in his imagination, she pulled and sucked the more tender bits of her victims. ‘Well, you never know,’ the nun said. ‘Fresh blood.’
The Saturday following was the day that Father Angwin had marked out for the interment; and he had chosen dusk, to draw a veil of decency over the indecent. The weather had cleared, and the declining sun gold-tipped the battlements; in the damp, moss-scented air, house-martins dipped and wheeled over the presbytery.
The Men’s Fellowship, when they were assembled in their ancient and greeny-black suits, wore an aspect of mourning. ‘I don’t know,’ Father Angwin said, ‘but would not corduroys have been more suitable?’ In all his years in the parish he had not reconciled himself to the strange and hybrid character of the place. He knew in his heart that they were clerks and millhands, that they had no corduroys, no woollen shirts, no rustic boots.
The married men, on the whole, eschewed the Fellowship. They came to church but once a year, and that at Easter or thereabouts; they left such business to their wives. But there were many bachelors in the parish, men of middle years for the most part, desiccated through abstinence and yellow through long devotion; clerics manqués, but most of them too humble or stupid to put themselves forward as candidates for ordination. The smell of mould arose from the speckled shoulders of their jackets, and, being hung about with holy medals, they clanked as they walked. Some of them, as he knew from the confessional, practised austerities: meagre diets, the denial of tobacco. He suspected much else: hair shirts, knotted-string scourges. Only supernumerary devotions
