“Tsk-tsk.” He shakes his head. The grin’s still there, but there’s an awful lot more purpose behind it.

“What do you mean, tsk-tsk?”

“I don’t mean how you confirmed your vocation.”

“What, then?”

“How it has all come undone. How you lost your faith.”

“What—what did you say?”

“Your faith, dear boy. You have lost it, haven’t you?”

He holds me in his sights. A big, cumbrous, lonely man. Dogged, and clever, and unfoolable. I’ve always known that.

I am a man fallen sick in Capernaum, tied against my will to a pallet and lowered through broken tiles which let a shaft of light down into the house: I swing into this searing light and out again into bottomless dark. I am powerless, tied as I am to my raft of a bed. I cannot imagine what lies below, I have no belief in this healing:

I have no belief.

I still call on God, even if my call is almost without hope, like the call of a man at his back door for a dog who has long since run away: the man peers through the veil of rain caught in the light from his kitchen but he can see nothing beyond it except the blackness of night.

I have found a way to live in my ministry, prayed with my congregations who answer Amen with the reverberating power of a breaking sea: their faith holds me even when I’m swept into the undertow. By hospital beds and biers I have supported them and in return they throw me a rope, again and again they throw me the rope of their trust. It is a slender line, it does not bear too much weight, but it has held. All these years it has held.

Until now.

I watch Frobisher, kneeling with the faint pallor of daylight on his scalp. Will he ever understand me, this man for whom God’s mighty hand is ready to lift him at any moment into the Life Eternal? How can he? How can he know how long I have kept watch? Day after week after month after year, switching on the airstrip lights at dusk, waiting for that glint on the horizon, for that distant drone to rise to a joyous roar, for that glorious touchdown? Will it make any difference to Frobisher, how hard I tried?

The daylight strengthens, briefly haloes him, then fades once more. Clouds must be passing overhead.

—

“How did you know?”