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the side aisle, her flat court shoes ringing on the wooden floor which was polished to such a deep shine that Margaret May could see herself reflected there, like a skater on dark ice. She passed the statue of Christ with the briefest of nods, the kind she might give to a stranger who stepped aside to let her go first through a door.
    There’d been a similar statue in the chapel at the orphanage, Christ with his arms outspread in blessing, his long face bland and smooth as cream. ‘ Suf-fer the lit-tle chil-dren ,’ the six-year-old Margaret May had read, the words inscribed in gold letters above his head. Those words, together with the outstretched arms, had made her think the man in the long white robe might understand her, she’d thought he might be kind. ‘Yes, we do suffer,’ she’d whispered, holding out her cracked chilblains for him to see, and the mark on her arm where big Sarah Tyler had got hold of the skin and twisted it right round, and the bruise on her leg that Sister Monica had made. They suffered from the nuns and each other, and some kind of indescribable loss etched deep into their hearts which they could barely understand. There was the crying in the night, too, which Margaret May hated; it sounded like the moaning of the wind in big forgotten trees and it made her think of the grey wolves in the story Sister Barbara had once told them. When the real wind blew and the real trees threw their great black shadows on the barred windows, then the long grey room in which they slept seemed to move as well, sliding forward like a great sled pulled through the snow.
    Margaret May had knelt down in front of the statue of the kind man, her hands folded together as the nuns had taught her and prayed and prayed and prayed, ‘Please, please, let someone come and take me away!’
    But no one had ever come, and in those long cold noisy nights she’d believed that they hadn’t come because she’d been bad. She’d prayed to be taken away from the Sisters, and this was bad because the Sisters were good. Of course they were good. Hadn’t Mother Evangeline told them that the Sisters were brides of Christ? Christ wouldn’t have bad people for his brides, would he?
    Only sometimes they didn’t seem good: Sister Monica with her sly little pinches and funny smile, she wasn’t good. And Sister Therese with her whacky whistly cane, she’d torn out a whole fistful of Noeline Jennings’ hair, just for leaning against the wall. How could that be good?
    Was she bad to think they weren’t good? The thoughts of badness and goodness had chased each other round and round in Margaret May’s head, so fast and furiously that sometimes she couldn’t get to sleep and she’d climb out of bed and creep down to the chapel and pray to the statue again, ‘Please let someone come and take me away.’
    Ah, it’s a long time ago, thought Margaret May now, though inside her, however old she got, that long grey room seemed as close as ever, as if it was right next door to her own pretty room above the shop and any day she could step down the hall and turn the knob of a door and find herself back in there. ‘Ah no,’ she whispered, looking down at the little wooden Virgin standing in her corner beneath the long window where Saint Columba sailed in his coracle of wickerwork and hides.
    The Virgin was small, only half as tall as Margaret May. She wore a plain straight shift which fell in simple folds about her body and halfway down her bare, slender legs. Her feet were bare too, and her hair hung at her shoulders, plain and straight like the shift. She had no veil or halo, only a wreath of leaves twisted around her forehead. She was young, about Ruth’s age, and there was no child.
    â€˜Are you sure it’s the Virgin?’ Margaret May had asked Father Joseph.
    â€˜Eh? Who else would it be, out there in that old church?’
    â€˜Oh, I