“Look, he’s having one of his little moods,” he called up to them. “Go in without me. I’ll catch up when he’s ready to meet God properly.”

“Fine. I’ll save you a pair of seats,” replied his wife.

“I can help you with that as well,” said Sparks as the woman wheeled the pram inside.

“Oh, that would be lovely,” said the woman. “I’m Eleni. That’s Athanasios in the pram—he’s the quiet one.”

“I’m Iris. Shall we grab some seats over on the side in case Athanasios needs any attention?”

“There’s four on the right,” said Eleni.

And now I’m one of the family to any casual observer, thought Sparks as they walked together down the side aisle.

Sparks took the seat by the right aisle while Eleni picked up Athanasios and carried him to the fourth seat in. She dandled him in her lap, wrinkling her nose and making faces to make the baby giggle. Sparks watched, smiling, her eyes scanning the seats beyond them to see who had shown up.

She didn’t recognise anyone, but congregants were trickling in, filling the empty seats like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. Or rather, tiles in a mosaic, she thought, glancing at the decorations of saints and holy scenes on the wall. Mosaics were favoured here, she had once read, because London weather was too damp to sustain frescoes.

The priest was reading some psalm or other.

“In your steadfast love, cut off my enemies,” he intoned, “and destroy all my adversaries, for I am your servant.”

Bloodthirsty enough, thought Sparks. You can always count on David for an appeal to God’s warlike side.

“In peace, let us pray to the Lord.”

Peace. They prayed for peace seven years ago, using the very words she was hearing now. And the other denominations prayed for peace in their own languages, in their own way. No doubt they prayed for peace on Sundays in Germany back then.

When she had declared herself an atheist at Cambridge, she had been following some ostentatious intellectual fad. Look how adorably rebellious I was, she thought with disgust.

Yet there was a basis for it. Every church she had been to, and she had explored many out of curiosity and—and what? Was she looking for something to soothe her soul? To match her spiritual longings?

The Right Sort of God?

Whatever the quest was, it was unfulfilled, and atheism made as much sense as anything. Then came the war. The horrors, the bombings, the betrayals, the deaths, the revelations of atrocities at the end. She may have gone into it mouthing her disbelief in a watchful, just, and merciful deity, but she came out of it absolutely convinced of His nonexistence. Or at least His nonparticipation.

So, on the many occasions where she found herself at a place of worship—and God only knew how many memorial services there had been—she bit her tongue and focused on the aesthetics of the architecture or the decorations, or listened to the music and criticised the performances, or summoned up her Latin and Greek to translate as the service went along so those mental skills wouldn’t rust through dormancy.