I think I got that all down.

Oh yes, and … blah blah … Orla had this astonishing … I can only call it a … a gift … a genius for drawing even the most forlorn and the most miserable, the most despised and the most utterly, utterly abandoned back into the loving arms of Mother Church. Yup. God apparently hosts a small party in heaven (sparkling wine, finger food) when the Most Lost and the Most Wretched return to him. Here follow lengthy quotations from the parable of the Prodigal Son etc.

I mean it feels unnecessarily cruel to call what Miss Drury was doing ‘pointless wittering’. But it was. Kind of. Pointless. Wittering.

Next I had the full saga of the sick parrot. Baldo. Turns out the parrot was a girl! A girl! I didn’t mention this (monosyllabic, remember?) but – believe it or not – I actually already knew. I have possessed the unusual ability to sex birds ever since I was a boy. My father kept a small aviary and I was never wrong about the gender of his newborns. In fact, I could often tell before hatching, simply by inspecting the egg. I suppose – if all else fails, and the import/export business finally goes belly-up – I could always fall back on a not-so-distinguished career in the battery hen farming industry.

Hey-ho.

Finally (I mean we’re talking a good hour and a quarter into an already perfectly interminable journey, and she has prattled on – blethered on – virtually non-stop throughout this entire interlude … okay, with one failed attempt to tune in the radio for the news), she started muttering about the fact that while she was praying for Carla in the abbey, she had been approached by an old monk in a wheelchair who was being pushed around by an equally old monk (I have no idea as to the identity of this second old monk, but someone called Brother Symeon aka Brother ‘Hard of Hearing’ [sic] was referred to, sidelong, several times in my presence during my short stay in the sanatorium) who told her that she needed to: ‘Trust him, my dear. Even though your every natural instinct fights against it. Trust him. The child told me most particularly to tell you that.’ Then he tapped his nose, apparently.

What?!

Even though your every natural instinct …?!

Followed, three seconds later, by:

‘Sorry … I … sorry but when you were … you just said that when you were praying for … when you were praying for … for Carla? For Miss Hahn? Isn’t that what you …?’

Silence.

‘Miss Drury?’

Silence.

‘Miss Drury?’

Miss Drury suddenly pulled the van off the road, rested her forehead on the steering wheel and burst into noisy tears. I was unable to comfort her due to lying on the diagonal (I really was jammed like a peg into that tiny space). So I just said, ‘Please don’t cry like that, Miss Drury!’ (Quite tenderly at first.) Then (a couple of minutes later) I said, ‘If you could just find some other way of expressing your emotion that was slightly more constructive and fractionally less irritating …’