Later I go to bed and sit propped against pillows, scribbling notes for this Sunday’s sermon. A paralyzed man was taken to Capernaum by his friends so that Jesus could cure him. The house where Jesus was staying was so crowded that the friends couldn’t bring the man inside. So they went up on the roof of the house and removed some tiles and lowered the paralyzed man down through the hole. I picture the man, tied—he must have been tied—to some sort of raft-like bed, swaying on ropes down through the darkness, or perhaps into and out of a shaft of sunlight from the gap in the tiles, terrified. We don’t know if he had faith, only that his friends did. I ponder again on Evensong. Priests come and go but it rolls on seemingly forever, as regular as the tides, this long conversation with God that is the Church of England at prayer. And I am like a pebble in the undertow, smoothed by their faith, soothed by their faith, and will I be enough for them?

I don’t know.

I bet the owner of that house in Capernaum was furious. What are you doing to my bloody roof? My mind wanders to my own roof and the holes Tom spotted when he stowed the boxes in the attic. Yet more rain must have found its way in. Perhaps he and I could climb up and take a look, when he comes to stay.

I have erred and strayed. Left undone the things I ought to have done.

Two years after Yvette died—it was around then, because he was still a shrimp of a boy, he hadn’t started to grow—Tom picked up the little cedarwood chest from the bookshelf in my bedroom and said, “What’s this?”

“Sand,” I told him. “Sand from Sidi Bishr. Mum’s favorite beach in Alexandria.”

I don’t deserve Tom. I couldn’t tell him the truth then, but I should have done it by now and I failed at this most recent opportunity, all these years later. I lied to my son, an adult. It was cowardly.

Something flickers at the edge of my vision. I would lift my head, curious—was that lightning over the hill?—if I didn’t know this light all too well. It is an interior light, even whiter and more metallic than a magnesium flare.

I get out of bed, remove the chest from its position on the mantelpiece next to Yvette’s urn, and place it on the bookshelf. When I get back into bed I can’t see it at all.

TEN

Yvette

21 April 1964

Alver Shore.