Models of sermons for young students. What do these sermons contain that had spoken of salvation, love, forgiveness to the frail, weak flock he ministered to. Would they, even today, sixty years later, speak with the same chiselled language—that alien, colonial language—to that refined and genteel congregation who sat in high-backed pews surrounded by stained glass windows which burned with brilliant ruby red, gold, blues of cobalt, Prussian, turquoise, azure and viridian; engulfed in that rich and sensuous religiosity, unstiffening momentarily their upright spines, feeling the touch of silk and chiffon, tweed and woollen clothes thrill against the honeyed flesh sated with gilded texts from the St. James version of the Bible …. The young priest from his carved pulpit, fresh from one of the English Universities, taking them along the straight and narrow, and even as he grew older and they, his congregation, aged, no hint of chastisement lay its harsh whip against the flesh of the renegade or the penitent.

‘The sermons for the Theological College? No, they won’t read them. I’ll keep them.’

‘Why don’t you publish them?’ Lydia suggests, as if in connivance with that hovering spirit.

‘Shall we sit down and read them together one day?’

It is not what Lydia wants to do, share the sadness of those forgotten sermons and think of that ghostly congregation long since mouldering in their cerements. But she is too polite to reject Serena’s suggestion—as she is always too polite to reject her suggestions, her offerings of bits of lace and candles, hot bread, yoghurts, oil paints that have dried in their tubes, crayon pencils, the Gauguin print—wild flowers for Lydia who now knows, at long last, what she wants and what she does not want. But she is always too polite, and leaves it at that, for all these are offerings of friendship. Never to be rejected.

‘Come, I’ll show you the photographs. That’s my uncle, the priest.’