Berrigan could find at least some confirmation of what Sister Joseph had hinted at in the frequent mention of ‘Sister Assumpta’. Unfortunately the name was never incorporated into a coherent sentence, but was invariably followed by lines of meaningless scribble, or endlessly repeated syllables. Sometimes, close to where he had written the name, occurred the words, ‘under the bed,’ or ‘on the bed’, or, more rarely ‘in the bed’. Once, after Coughlin had written the name and a string of syllables which looked like ‘Bababababababa . . .’ he had scrawled the words: ‘Her mouth wept cold water on my pillow.’
After he had told me this Father Berrigan had to pause and replenish his glass. I was aware that his narration was both a necessity and an ordeal, and could, to a certain extent, understand why it was both, but quite what made the horror of it so compelling was still a mystery to me. Having swallowed his whiskey, Berrigan steeled himself to continue.
‘The last words of the exercise book were written in a childish hand which was still just recognisably Coughlin’s. I know those words by heart. I can see them now. First there were four short sentences in Latin. Abite procul hinc per misericordiam Christi! Noli succubere me, putida saga! Noli abripere me in abbyssum caliginis. Non sum ad te. Then something indecipherable had been written. Then came the words: Crist hav merci. Those misspellings seemed and still seem heartrending to me. And with that the notebook came to an end.’
The words translated literally read, ‘Go far from me, for the mercy of Christ! Do not sleep with me, foul witch! Do not carry me off into the pit of darkness. I do not belong to you!’
There was a long silence, as we both absorbed the meaning of these words. Then Berrigan rose abruptly. ‘The final chapter will have to wait till tomorrow night. May I come to you at about nine?’ I nodded and he left quickly.
**
The following evening, Father Berrigan arrived half an hour before his appointed time. I apologised to him because I had with me a student Bible study group which was due to leave at nine, but he said that he was more than happy to wait in my study until it was over. I had the feeling that he had deliberately arrived early in order to gather his resources for the final episode. Nevertheless his presence in the next room made me feel uneasy and contributed to my impatience with conducting the Bible study, never, in any case, a favourite part of my duties as University Chaplain. Perhaps the poor students sensed this, because we broke earlier than usual, and when I entered my study I think I took Father Berrigan by surprise. He was seated at my desk, his elbows on it, his head buried deep in his hands. When he looked up I saw a face suddenly twenty years older, lined by a worry and perplexity that I had never seen before. With what I imagine was a supreme effort, he reorganised his features into his familiar smile.
‘Are you sure you want to go on with this?’ I asked.
‘Oh, yes. We must bring it to an end.’
So, I fetched the whiskey and the glasses, poured the drinks, sat down opposite him in my study and let him talk.
When Berrigan returned the following Saturday to the House of the Sacred Heart he decided to say nothing about the enquiries he had made. ‘To tell the truth,’ he said, ‘I was a little ashamed of my suspicions. I wanted to believe that the unease I felt was imaginary. I heard the nuns’ confessions. I waited for the Seventeenth Sister to put in an appearance, but she did not come. I felt frustrated rather than relieved. I wanted her to show her hand, you see, but she was too cunning for that. I began to feel that I might have been the victim of a delusion, even that the nuns who passed me in the white passages were looking at me strangely because I was insane. It was a relief to visit the girls in Magdalene House.’
By some hierarchical convention Berrigan did not hear the girls’ confessions in the chapel, but in a small room reserved for the purpose in Magdalene House. He noticed that one of the girls called Aileen, who was notably more pious and serious than the others, had held herself back till all the other girls had made their confession. She came in last and, after he had given her absolution, she remained seated. She looked at him for a long time in silence with frightened eyes before she told her story.
On the Thursday afternoon of the previous week Aileen had gone into the convent chapel, had knelt in one of the choir stalls and had shut her eyes to pray. She had heard no-one enter the chapel but she felt the temperature drop, though she was not conscious of a draught coming from anywhere in particular. On opening her eyes again there was a nun sitting in the choir stalls opposite her. She did not recognise her, but this did not puzzle Aileen particularly because to her, she had told Father Berrigan with a hint of defiant contempt, one nun looked very like another. This one, she said, had a particularly nondescript face. What troubled Aileen was that the nun was staring at her; and this was odd because, unless they had done something bad, the girls were usually ignored by the nuns. It did not seem a malevolent stare to Aileen, nor was it kindly: it was merely steady, unblinking, insistent. Aileen, whose natural spirit had not been totally cowed by her surroundings, decided to stare back. Then the nun did something which sent Aileen into weeping hysterics even as she remembered it. What did she do? It was a long time before Father Berrigan could get a coherent answer.
‘She blew,’ said Aileen eventually. ‘She put her lips together and blew at me from the choir stalls opposite.’ The strangeness of the action was horrible enough. The worst of it was that she actually felt the blast of the nun’s breath across ten feet of convent chapel. At first Aileen thought this must just have been a hideous coincidence: a draught in the chapel had coincided with the nun’s bizarre action. But each time the nun blew she felt a blast of damp icy air full in her face. After the third blast Aileen ran, and she had not been to the chapel since.
Aileen’s story made Berrigan decide to tackle Mother Superior. He had anticipated a difficult interview but his expectations were exceeded by the reality. ‘Perhaps,’ he admitted, ‘I got off on the wrong foot by immediately asking about Sister Assumpta. She virtually accused me of not minding my own business. She kept repeating the phrase: “We don’t talk about Sister Assumpta.” Well, I could see I was getting nowhere so I left. One other thing occurred. As I was getting into my car I happened to look back at the convent building. My eye became drawn to an upper window where I saw the face of a nun, pressed against the glass to such an extent that the nose and mouth were squashed and distorted. The tongue was out and, like a great pink slug, was smearing the glass. At first it puzzled me that any adult, let alone a nun, could do such a childish thing; then I realised. It must be Sister Assumpta. She was mocking me.’
I asked Berrigan how he could have been so sure it was her. He looked a little sheepish and admitted that he couldn’t be sure. After a pause, he said: ‘Everything I tell you is subjective. I can offer you no outside verification. All I have is my memories, and the best I can do is to be true to them.’
On the Monday of that week Berrigan had a call from his Bishop who had received a complaint about him from Mother Superior; he also knew about the visit to St Francis Xavier’s. The Bishop told Berrigan that he was not on any account to make any further enquiries about either Sister Assumpta or Father Coughlin: they were both dead and that was an end of the matter. When Berrigan said to the Bishop that if he was to continue as confessor to the convent, he must know something of what had gone on, the bishop became very indignant but reluctantly vouchsafed him a few bare facts. Sister Assumpta had fallen sick while conducting mission work overseas. On her return to England she had come to the House of the Sacred Heart to recuperate. There she was believed to have formed an ‘improper relationship’ with Father Coughlin. Shortly after its discovery Sister Assumpta had been found drowned in the River Durden about half a mile from the convent. The coroner’s jury had returned an open verdict. Had it been an accident? Had she jumped, or was she pushed? The Bishop was not prepared to say, and would not understand why these questions needed an answer. Father Berrigan was to stop this nonsense and continue his wor
k at the House of the Sacred Heart.
‘So I did go back the following Saturday,’ said Berrigan, ‘for the last time, as it turned out. This is what happened.
‘I heard the nuns’ confessions, as usual, and when this was over I felt the need to spend a little time praying in the chapel alone. I knelt down in one of the choir stalls and tried to take my mind down into myself, into the inner well of quiet, as I call it. I knew from the first that something was disturbing my efforts. I thought that it was my own wayward mind; I tried to untense myself, but slowly it was borne in on me that the unease came from an external source. A damp, rotten smell was beginning to pervade my senses, like old cabbages decaying in a wet cellar. The air became clammy. I looked up from my praying hands to see something black and slightly shiny dip behind the choir stall opposite me. It was humped and shaped like a human back, but who would be crouching in one of the chapel choir stalls? And why?
‘I really can’t describe to you my feelings. The memory of them has been blotted out, so that only the bare physical—if they were physical—facts remain. I remember the objective part of me thinking that it was like a waking dream because I found that I could neither move nor speak. I heard a sort of confused bumping coming from behind the choir stalls as if something was blundering about blindly, and there were long, gasping inhalations and exhalations of breath. Then it began to emerge from behind the choir stalls and crawled out into the aisle. It was without head or limbs but the size of a human being, a great lump made of black cloth like a nun’s habit and wet, dreadfully wet. It oozed water as it inched its way towards me across the chapel floor, headless and black, but not without a purpose.’
Berrigan said nothing for a few moments, but just panted heavily for a while, as if he had been running hard and was out of breath.
‘That was not the worst of it. That was only the physical manifestation, but I was aware that in it a force was concentrating, vibrating and growing. I would say it was like a pulse. It was an essence of some life form, deeply ancient and primitive. . . . But not primitive in the way that we normally mean, not in the sense of crude, or stupid. No. This was a higher form than us, essential, spiritual, above all, pure. It had a profound intelligence too, one that somehow knew what I was thinking almost before I did myself. But I haven’t mentioned the essential fact. It was evil: pure, unadulterated malevolence, nothing added, nothing removed. It was the thing that had operated through that nun. I knew that. How, I can’t tell you. Call it a guess. Call it intuition.
‘Before that moment I had not understood the concept. I had known sin in many of its forms, some of them pretty awful. I had even met a murderer or two. But in that chapel I was confronting evil itself which, in all senses of the word, was unspeakable.’
After a long silence he suddenly laughed.
‘You know the irony of it all? The next thing I remember I was in St Francis Xavier’s. They told me I had had a nervous breakdown or some such.
‘Slowly I began to piece together what had happened, but I doubt if I would be here today if it hadn’t been for a very brave young woman. You remember I told you about Sister Joseph, the little nun with buck teeth who first mentioned the name of Sister Assumpta? Well, she defied her vow of obedience to come and see me. She said she felt responsible and guilty about not telling me more at the time. Bless her, wherever she is. Apparently I had been found lying in the aisle of the chapel in a pool of foul water. I was incoherent, sometimes violent. Only towards myself though, thank the Lord.’
‘So, did Sister Joseph tell you more about Sister Assumpta?’ I asked.
‘She did. Not much, but perhaps enough. You see, Sister Assumpta had been a medical missionary in Western Samoa, highly respected, but when she came back everyone agreed she had changed in some way, not for the better. She was shunted from convent to convent, each time her presence causing trouble of some kind. People were vague: no definite accusation could be laid at her door, she was just trouble. Eventually she ended up at the House of the Sacred Heart, Crampton “on retreat”. She was there for six months altogether. When I asked her about Sister Assumpta, Sister Joseph said her memories were oddly vague, but she knew she had felt from the first that her presence was in some way disquieting and unwelcome. She believed Sister Assumpta’s troublesomeness was connected with her time in Western Samoa. She could not be more specific.’
‘And Father Coughlin?’
‘Sister Joseph said she couldn’t believe that there was anything going on between Father Coughlin and Sister Assumpta, because it was clear he couldn’t stand her. Everyone remarked on it. But in the weeks before her death they had been seen together once or twice in odd places, and on the afternoon of Sister Assumpta’s death Sister Joseph saw Coughlin walking quickly along the banks of the River Durden in which she was later found dead.’
‘Did she tell the police?’
‘No. No. What would have been the point?’
I let that pass. ‘So, is the House of the Sacred Heart still there?’ I asked.
‘The community was disbanded soon after my little fiasco. No reason given.’
‘How very discreet.’
Berrigan gave a half smile and bowed his head in acknowledgement of my implied criticism. ‘When I was better I did some research and discovered that the Samoan tribes among which Sister Assumpta had worked had some strange and rather nasty customs. It gave me an unpleasant shock to read in some work of anthropology that they had a practise known as “Alona Shaga”—those two words which had occurred so frequently in Father Coughlin’s demented exercise book. The words roughly mean “catching the dead man’s breath”. Apparently, if you are able to catch the last breath of a dying man in your mouth, especially if that man was himself a shaman of some sort, you are imbued with all kinds of powers from the spirit world. According to the Samoans you can start hurricanes, strike down your enemies just by breathing on them, all sorts. Only inundation in water can dampen the force of this power, so to speak. Rubbish of course, but there it is.’ Berrigan spoke the last sentence with a forced casualness that carried no conviction. ‘So,’ he concluded briskly, ‘that’s my story.’
There was a pause. Berrigan looked at me with eyes that expressed a lifetime of exhaustion and pain. I was sure he needed to say something more even if he didn’t want to, so I did not move but waited for him to speak again.
‘Why it remains with me till today is that I found myself utterly powerless against it. Whatever it was. Oh, you might say, that is just a blow to your vanity. And perhaps it is. Perhaps. But I felt that I had been up against a force as absolute and inexorable as the love of God. And almost as powerful. . . . Sometimes —I can’t help feeling—more powerful. . . . Not that I believe that, mind! But I felt. And I still feel. I suppose that makes me a sort of Manichee.’
‘Feeling is not believing,’ I said.
‘I hope not,’ said Father Berrigan.
Three weeks later a massive stroke ended his life.
THE COPPER WIG
You almost certainly will not have heard of, let alone read, Mr F. Harrison Budd’s Random Reminiscences of a Strolling Player (privately printed, 1925): it is not a distinguished example of the genre. The observation is commonplace, the humour ponderous and the endless litany of parts played and press eulogies received tedious beyond belief. But, like nearly all the autobiographies I have come across, it contains one story worth preserving, and, as Mr Budd’s literary executor, I consider it my duty to give this a wider audience. Though I have cut out the occasional irrelevant digression I have not rewritten anything. Budd’s style is rather quaint perhaps but it gives us a flavour of the times he lived in and the circles in which he moved.
**
It was in the early Summer of 1893 that I was summoned to join Mr Alfred Manville’s theatrical company at the town of Yarborough in the North of England. I would have preferred to wait for a London engagement—indeed Tree had promised me something in his next season—but my finances were perilousl
y low, my landlady and tailor exigent, and my impatient youth could stand inactivity no longer. Besides, Manville had a fair reputation. He had once been known as ‘the Macready of the North’, but he was now content to manage the company, play the character roles and leave the leading parts to younger men.
Our tour of the Northern Circuit was to open with One of the Best and Harbour Lights, dramas made popular at the Adelphi Theatre by the ill-fated Mr William Terriss. I was engaged for a number of minor but not wholly negligible roles. The company was a comparatively small one, no more than a dozen or so players, but Manville, known by us all as ‘the Guv’nor’, produced on a lavish scale by the simple expedient of employing ‘supers’ in every town we visited to play very small parts and to populate the crowd scenes. These men and women, mostly enthusiastic amateurs, and often supplying their own costumes, would appear on stage for a pint of porter and the privilege of saying that they had once appeared in Mr Manville’s company.
Perhaps for safety’s sake, perhaps on the principle of ‘divide and rule’, the Guv’nor had engaged two leading men, Mr Edwin Marden and Mr Charles Warrington Fisher. They made an interesting and instructive contrast in character and talents. If Fisher was the subtler performer, Marden was the more dashing and undoubtedly the favourite with the public, largely perhaps because of his looks. For, though Fisher was by no means bad looking, Marden was half a head taller than him, wiry and muscular in build, and strikingly handsome. What perhaps distinguished them most, and advantaged Marden, was in the matter of hair. Fisher’s hair was pale, fine and, to tell an unvarnished truth, receding, but Marden had a magnificent head of wavy, copper-coloured locks. Fisher often resorted to a wig, and while wigs are all very well, they can never compete with the genuine article. Audiences in those days could be very cruel on actors they detected wearing them. ‘Remove your headpiece, sir, in front of a lady!’ some wit from the gallery would cry in the midst of a tender scene.
The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and other Strange Stories Page 27