3

‘I should never have noticed it, Mrs Scobie,’ Father Rank said.

       ‘Wilson did.’

       ‘Somehow I can’t like a man who’s quite so observant.’

       ‘It’s his job.’

       Father Rank took a quick look at her. ‘As an accountant?’

       She said drearily, ‘Father, haven’t you any comfort to give me?’ Oh, the conversations, he thought, that go on in a house after a death, the turnings over, the discussions, the questions, the demands - so much noise round the edge of silence.

       ‘You’ve been given an awful lot of comfort in your life, Mrs Scobie. If what Wilson thinks is true, it’s he who needs our comfort.’

       ‘Do you know all that I know about him?’

       ‘Of course I don’t, Mrs Scobie. You’ve been his wife, haven’t you, for fifteen years. A priest only knows the unimportant things.’

       ‘Unimportant?’

       ‘Oh, I mean the sins,’ he said impatiently. ‘A man doesn’t come to us and confess his virtues.’

       ‘I expect you know about Mrs Rolt Most people did.’

       ‘Poor woman.’

       ‘I don’t see why.’

       ‘I’m sorry for anyone happy and ignorant who gets mixed up in that way with one of us.’

       ‘He was a bad Catholic.’

       ‘That’s the silliest phrase in common use,’ Father Rank said.

       ‘And at the end this - horror. He must have known that he was damning himself.’

       ‘Yes, he knew that all right. He never had any trust in mercy - except for other people.’

       ‘It’s no good even praying...’

       Father Rank clapped the cover of the diary to and said furiously, ‘For goodness’ sake, Mrs Scobie, don’t imagine you - or I - know a thing about God’s mercy.’

       ‘The Church says ...’

       ‘I know the Church says. The Church knows all the rules. But it doesn’t know what goes on in a single human heart.’

       ‘You think there’s some hope then?’ she wearily asked.

       ‘Are you so bitter against him?’

       ‘I haven’t any bitterness left.’

       ‘And do you think God’s likely to be more bitter than a woman?’ he said with harsh insistence, but she winced away from the arguments of hope.

       ‘Oh, why, why, did he have to make such a mess of things?’

       Father Rank said, ‘It may seem an odd thing to say - when a man’s as wrong as he was - but I think, from what I saw of him, that he really loved God.’

       She had denied just now that she felt any bitterness, but a little more of it drained out now like tears from exhausted ducts. ‘He certainly loved no one else,’ she said.

       ‘And you may be in the right of it there too,’ Father Rank replied.

THE END