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 wind ripped at the trees behind him; their branches, fitfully lit by the storm flickering over Netherhoughton, stretched across his tilted cheek, in a tracery like fingers or lace. ‘Is this the time for a spelling bee?’ Miss Dempsey flung back the door. ‘Do you really consider it is?’
The young man stepped inside. Rivulets of water cascaded from his clothes and pooled on the floor of the hall. He fixed her with his gaze, and peeled off his outer layers to reveal a black suit and clerical collar. ‘My name,’ he said. ‘F-L-U-D-D. My name is Fludd.’
So you are the curate, she thought. She felt a sudden urge to say, M-U-D-D; mine, Father, is Mudd. Then his eyes fastened upon her face.
The urge reached her lips, and died. The night chill crept into her, from the open door, and, as she went to close it, she began to tremble, and she clamped her jaws, to stop her teeth from chattering audibly; too much shivering was a vulgar thing, she felt, and would give a bad impression. ‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘I’ll draw the bolts. It’s time. Quite late. You’ll not be wanting to go out again tonight.’
She did it. She felt the young man’s eyes on her back when she turned the key in the lock. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I won’t want to go out again. I’ve come to stay.’ Deep within her, behind her cardigan and her blouse and her petticoat trimmed with scratchy nylon lace, behind her interlock vest and freckled skin, Miss Dempsey sensed a slow movement, a tiny spiral shift of matter, as if, at the very moment the curate spoke, a change had occurred: a change so minute as to baffle description, but rippling out, in its effect, to infinity. In later years, when she talked about it she would always say, Did you ever see a pile of pennies pushed over? Did you ever see a house of cards fall down? And whomever she spoke to would look at her, comprehension strained; she could not find the words for that sliding, slipping, tripping sensation that she felt through her entire body. Miss Dempsey felt her mortality; but, in the same instant, she felt her immortality too.
At that instant, also, Father Angwin put his head around the sitting-room door. There could be no mistake about the newcomer, for he had already assumed a proprietorial air, taking off his sodden hat and setting it down on the hall-stand, and extracting himself from his cloak. A look of alarm and distaste crossed Father Angwin’s face: then stronger emotions. As Miss Dempsey was to tell a parishioner, next day: ‘I really thought for a moment he might fly out against him.’ She saw the priest stand poised on the threshold of the room, his frail person quivering, a dangerous golden light in his eyes. A tune began to run through her head: not of a hymn. Despite herself, she began to hum, and a moment later was appalled to hear herself break into song: John Peel’s view hulloo would awaken the dead/ Or the fox from his lair in the morning.
‘This is Miss Dempsey, my housekeeper,’ Father Angwin said. ‘She is deranged.’
Before she could make any apology, she saw Father Fludd reach into the inside pocket of his black suit. She waited, her fingers nervously pressed to her lips, for the newcomer to produce some papers, a scroll perhaps, embossed with the Papal seal: some document excommunicating Father Angwin for drunkenness and peculiar behaviour, and installing this young man in his stead. But the curate’s hand emerged with a small flat tin. He held it out to Father Angwin, and inquired, ‘Have a cheroot?’
For the rest of that evening Miss Dempsey went up and down stairs, providing as best she could for the curate’s comfort. He said he would take a bath, which was not at all a usual thing on a week-night. The bathroom, one of the few in Fetherhoughton at that time, was as cold as a morgue, and the hot water a rusty unreliable trickle. Miss Dempsey penetrated the frigid upper storey of the house, a threadbare towel over her arm; and then walked again with bedlinen, Irish linen sheets that were thin and starched and icy to her touch.
She looked out a hot-water bottle, and went into the curate’s room to draw the curtains, and to pass a duster over the small bedside stand, and to turn the mattress. There are those, it is said, who have entertained angels unawares; but Miss Dempsey would have liked notice. Every week she cleaned this room, but naturally the bed was not aired. There was no homely touch that she could provide, unless she had brought up a bucket of coal and laid a fire; but she could never remember seeing a fire in a bedroom, and it was better not to encourage any notions that the curate might have. She had somehow formed the idea, just by those first few moments of conversation, and by his elaborate unconcern about her singing, that besides being a priest he was a gentleman. It was an impression only, given by his manners and not his appearance, for the light in the hall was too dim for her to get much idea of what he looked like.
The walls of the upper storey, like the walls of the kitchen and the downstairs hall, were painted a deep institutional green; the panelled doors were varnished with a yellowish stain. There was no lampshade in the curate’s room, just a clear bulb, and the hard-edged shadows it cast. The floorboards creaked in the corridor, and Miss Dempsey stopped, rocking a little on her feet, detecting the point of the greatest noise. Downstairs the floors were made of stone. In every room a crucifix hung, the dying God in each case exhibiting some distinction of anguish, some greater or lesser contortion of his naked body, a musculature more or less racked. The house was a prison for these dying Christs, a mausoleum.
But when Miss Dempsey thought of the bishop’s house, she imagined table-lamps with silk shades, and dining tables on pedestals, and an effulgence of hot electric air. When she thought of the sycophants she imagined them lolling on cushions, eating Brazil nuts. She imagined that they got food in sauces, and port wine on quite ordinary days, and rinsed their fingers in holy water in little marble basins; that in the grounds of the bishop’s house, where the sycophants Walked together plotting in Latin, there were fountains and statuary and a dovecote. Crossing the hall, she paused outside the sitting-room door. She heard conversation in full spate. She could tell that Father Angwin had been drinking whisky. The curate spoke in his light, dry voice: ‘In considering the life of Christ, there is something that has often made me wonder; did the man who owned the Gadarene swine get compensation?’
Miss Dempsey tiptoed away.
The curate moved his hand over the tablecloth, in a skimming motion, sweeping the topic aside. His fingers – bloodless, pointed fingers – floated over the linen like swans on a lake of milk.
‘I thought you might be one of those modern fellows,’ Father Angwin said. ‘I thought you might have no scholarship. I was sick to think about it.’
Father Fludd looked down,