Saving Agnes Read Online Free PDF Page B

the reassuring crunch of Wellington boots on frosty grass and the caws of winter birds.
    â€˜I’m holding hands with God,’ Agnes had loudly declared before drifting imperviously ahead to leave them standing, a group of sudden strangers huddled in the pale bowl of field and sky like people waiting for a bus.
    At the time they might not have known whether to laugh or cry, but later, large and boisterous in the pagan glowing hub of the kitchen, their confidence in their own grasp of what was essentially what regrouped and sent gales of hilarity whooping up the chimney stacks. Agnes, small and sulky, had sent her own thoughts with them, martyred orbs of saintly passion which found better company amidst the glittering spheres of the heavens than amongst the rabble of her earthly station.
Lord, give me the strength to deal with these infidels,
she would implore before retiring to read her
Lives of the Saints
in which her namesake, worryingly rouged and buxom, appeared to be struggling beneath the weight of the large sheep in her arms.
    Later Agnes denied the truth of this anecdote with almost as much fervour as she had given it life. Her protests inevitably ensured its endurance in family folklore, and it continued to provoke a hilarity with every repetition which her own more deliberate attempts at humour could somehow never match. At such times the possibility of Agnes experiencing some sense of relief that the tip, rather than the underlying iceberg, of her spiritual life had been made public was cold comfort indeed.She was proud of her beliefs, and with the confidence which often accompanies such convictions looked forward patiently to the time when her family would be made to pay for their good humour in this life with the cold flame of perdition in the next. The last laugh, she was sure, would be hers. Nevertheless, their certain punishment did not make hers any easier to bear; and she hid from them the full extent of her love, creeping off to converse in solitude with the Almighty. Such concealments were in fact superfluous. Her mother had often paused by the bedroom door at the sound of Agnes weeping and had judiciously let her alone, surmising that her daughter’s tender age and burgeoning affections had doubtlessly led her to nurture unfulfilled passions for some reassuringly untouchable icon of popular culture. Had she known all passion was being spent in contemplation of a naked man nailed to two sticks of wood she would probably have made some effort to intervene. Uninformed, however, her conclusion that it was all hormonal was in any case accurate enough.
    At university Agnes reclaimed herself as a Catholic, an ethnic minority which, she decided, had undergone enough persecution in the past to make allegiance to it defensible. While no match for the children of Israel on this score, she was surprised to discover that Catholicism held a peculiar attraction for her peers. Agnostics and atheists alike confessed that if they were ever to surrender their religious bachelorhood, their thoughts would in all probability turn lightly to the Vatican.
    â€˜But why?’ said Agnes with ill-concealed amazement, confusing herself and all her dubious charms with those of the creed whose acolytes had murdered and martyred in liberal quantities to spread the good news.
    The reasons, it appeared, were twofold. On the one hand were the attractions of ritual, of incense and jewel-encrusted robes, of transubstantive cannibalism and the horror film ofcrucifixion. On the other were subtler individual perversions like sin and guilt. The former seemed to function as a kind of spiritual scenery; the latter were the regions wherein unfolded the real drama. It had been some years since Agnes’s own idolatry had faded to a kind of grudging, habitual affection; and there lay within the ripe ground for proselytism she had discovered amongst her peers a golden opportunity to resuscitate the honeymoon period of her youth.