Molly stared at her, speechless. Mrs Lester put a hand on her arm. ‘A number of our guests have been helped, dear.’

‘I . . .’ Molly gulped. ‘I don’t think I know the hymns.’

Mrs Lester smiled gently. ‘Oh, you’ll soon learn, dear. I can help you. And Mr Lester is a very patient teacher. He’s a good-hearted man when you get to know him.’

Twenty-Six

For someone who could not speak, Mr Lester managed to communicate a powerful sense of his personality. There was something about his bearing – very upright, always dressed in a poorly fitting grey flannel suit, a little too short in the leg so that his brown socks were exposed – and his intense stare through his watery blue eyes, a stare that suggested a furnace of feeling within him, which made Molly nervous.

She stood beside him at breakfast the next morning, with the dog-eared collection of hymn sheets that someone – probably Mr Lester – had taken the trouble to type out. He was not the best of typists and there were a lot of overtypes and XXXXX-ings out. Mrs Lester had called Molly to her the previous night and sat her down in the brown front room.

‘I wanted us to choose a hymn for the morning,’ she said, with the faintest air of apology. ‘Now you look through, dear, and see which ones you know.’

‘I’m not really a church-goer,’ Molly said, shrinking with dread inside. To her, church was just something you did with the army, like PT or drill. It meant nothing to her beyond its form. But there was something about Mrs Lester that was so put-upon and actually sweet-natured that Molly found herself not wanting to offend her. She also wanted to keep her job. Leafing through the worn sheets of paper, she dimly recognized a few of the hymns, but there were none that she could have sung through – except for one.

‘I think I know that,’ she said, pointing at ‘Fight the Good Fight’. They had sung it on Church Parade a number of times.

‘Oh, thank goodness!’ Mrs Lester said, laying a hand over her heart. ‘And that’s one of Bernard’s favourites. I can certainly teach you some of the others. I can’t tell you what it means to me to be able to lie a little longer in bed in the mornings. I know it looks like idleness . . .’ Her eyes blinked in that nervous way she had. ‘But I do wake feeling so very unwell . . .’

So here was Molly – who had been having nightmares for half the night about singing hymns to Bert, her dead brother, in a prison cell – standing trembling beside Mr Lester, amid the smells of porridge and burnt toast. With a sinking heart she saw that there was still only the same couple staying in the guesthouse. Why must Mr Lester force this on them? Molly wondered. They obviously didn’t want to know. Even before she’d started singing, she thought mutinously: I’m never, ever doing this again. I’m going to look for a new job!