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room, library and entrance hall, as well as the chapel and day room, but there were no photographs of these; there was nothing about the bedrooms. While it looked and sounded much like the convent in which Bernard had spent the last seventy-five years, it still terrified her. She wished she could have died earlier.
    She thought of the kitchen knife she had stolen during the war, of another, earlier, autumn night, with the rain on the shutters and the luminous Christ extinguished in the early hours. She had turned the blade over in her palm, stroking it. It had taken the warmth from her flesh and, lodged between the creases on her palm, it was comforting. She had run her free hand over her stomach. She had been ready to die then. It would have been a consolation. But when God had caught her, He had raged and hollered, frightening her; she had leapt from the bed to her knees, the knife slipping from her hand and rattling across the wooden floor towards the window. Trembling, she had pleaded for mercy, begged the Virgin to intercede on her behalf; for the remainder of the night she had wept andmoaned and pleaded, listening to the fury of God. At dawn she had had a nasty headache, but God had been calmer and she had eased herself from her knees to pick up the knife. She had taken it back to the kitchen before breakfast and washed it thoroughly in the sink, letting the tip of it cut her fingers and watching the blood run away, barely pink in the strong flow of water.
    She knelt again now, placing the leaflet on the floor beside her. Through the long night of All Souls she prayed and wept, the years undefined and everything new, her fears fresh. The darkness in her cell was as it had always been. Only God was changed, silent now and unknowable. She could not tell if He was there. But still she knelt, her joints stiff and old, until the stippled light of dawn edged round the shutters and everything was past.

Three
    A lthough he had already won the bet, the soldier contrived several more meetings over the following days. It was as if he could not help it. Each time he looked hard at Bernard with something like wonder, nodded slightly and drew away.
    While she waited for him, Bernard prayed. During morning prayers, she pressed the closed steeple of her hands hard against her face and was surprised to find them wet with tears. During the brittle spring dusk of the evening office she found herself flushed and breathless, tingling, the voices of the other nuns splaying from her, her hold on things precarious. In the long routine of the cold days, she floated; when God spluttered His fury in her ear, she did not mind Him, taking only to sleeping on the hard floor of her cell in an attempt to appease Him. But when, finally, they talked again, coming together in the dip of land where the stream ran low behind the wash house, Bernard felt it only right to mention that God disapproved of what they were doing.
    At first the soldier laughed. He put his sleeve across his face to muffle the noise and looked away towards the orchard where some of his unit were gathered, clustered together, sharing something. Beyond he could see the high blank walls of the convent, ugly and patched with cement, a blot on the honey tones of the village and its shabby French picturesqueness. Everything else was broken-down and decaying, unexpectedly pretty in the brilliant light; the convent’s steadfast neatness was a blight.
    Bernard thought that he had misunderstood and she explained again, more slowly, telling him how God pestered her about their wickedness. And when he looked back at her, the fear creased old and worn in her face, his laughter slipped away.
    â€˜What does He say?’
    He was standing on a flat stone to keep his boots out of the thick wet vegetation that slid down to the water. He shuffled and Bernard, below him, already ankle deep in the marsh, reached out an arm as though to help him.
    â€˜He doesn’t speak to you about