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sponge in her hand and the crumbs fell to the floor.
    â€˜I thought you liked pasta,’ she said.
    Thérèse sprang from her chair. She thumped her hands down onto the puzzle book, sending the pen dancing along the table, and she set her gaze on a point through the window, above Bernard’s head.
    â€˜Sister,’ she said, the word snapping shut. ‘Sister…’ There was a moment when she could not think how to go on. ‘How can you do it, Sister? You haven’t even been there. You don’t even care. You’ll just do as they say. You’ll just go along with it, with God’s will, if that’s what it is, and you’ll never say a word, never even wonder.’ She dropped her eyes for a moment and saw Bernard’s unruffled face gazing at her. ‘God have mercy, how can you be so… good?’
    Thérèse pushed back from the table, and her chair clattered to the floor. Bernard could see pink spots spreading across her cheeks and tears gathering.
    â€˜I’ll put the coffee on,’ she said, as some kind of comfort. ‘For All Souls.’
    Thérèse shook her head. ‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘I can’t do that tonight.’
    â€˜You’re not coming to the chapel?’
    â€˜Is Sister Marie?’
    Bernard was confused.
    â€˜No,’ she said.
    â€˜No. Well then. We are not gathering in the chapel. Not this year.’
    â€˜No one will pray for us, Sister, when our time comes. We’ll be trapped there, in purgatory, with our sins. We’ll be lost. No one will think of us.’
    Thérèse could not bear Bernard’s panic. ‘I’m sorry, Sister,’ she said. ‘It’s too much. I can’t do the vigil for AllSouls.’ She gripped the edge of the table, startled at having said such a thing. She did not know what was happening.
    Bernard sat for a long time in the refectory. Then she went to the chapel, lighting a single candle at the back, near the door, and sitting near its puttering glow. The shadows around her would not stay still. The altar loomed, undeniable, but the crucifix above was flat and unreal, disappearing into the gloom. Bernard did not kneel. She kept her hands gripped together, her fists tight. The words of the prayer would not come, just the thought of her soul, spinning in a dark place, cold and sick and in pain, entirely forgotten.
    She blew out the candle and waited for the smell of the smoke to clear. Then she went back to her cell. The convent was closed in behind the shuttered windows, and the greyness within it hung steady. But Bernard could not sleep. She could hear rain starting and a car struggling up the hill out of the village. Somewhere downstairs something cracked.
    She switched on the light by the side of her bed. The luminous yellow Christ which had glowed in the dark above her head went out, leaving only a badly modelled plastic blob, the colour of old bone. From the drawer in the bedside table she took out a thin leaflet, a photocopy folded clumsily where the binding would have been in the original. The front page displayed dark trees with something, impossible to pick out, in the smudgy ink beneath them. The words ‘
Les Cèdres
’, italicized, were draped above the trees, and beneath, in a smaller, plainer font, ‘Diocesan rest home for the elderly.’ It had been sentto her in the post, along with a list of the things she was permitted to take with her, which included medication, nightwear and items for individual prayer, but not soap or toothpaste, which would be provided communally. This would prevent, so the letter had suggested, unnecessary expenditure or ‘personal hoarding’.
    The photocopied leaflet offered little information. There was a photograph of the chapel, looking dingy, and another of the day room, at which Bernard peered long and hard. The description listed the ‘public areas’ as a refectory, television