the pug dog and his woman; these months on, both were a little grayer, stouter, their feet and pads stepping gingerly on the cobbles.
As she walked up the flagged path of the Anglican church, Emma tried to edit her usual perception—that she was entering an extravagantly designed council house. A poor thing, but our own, she thought: noting the brick arches and brick columns, the stoup for holy water. Holy water, that’s going too far—and in fact there was no need for her to go any further, no need to go inside at all.
ALL WHOSE NAMES ARE INSCRIBED IN THIS BOOK WILL BE PRAYED FOR AT THE SHRINE. She stood in the porch, turning the pages of the great book. Back, right back to—when? What date? When had Felix died? Her eyes ran over the columns. The pages were damp, they stuck together and revealed only a clump of months at a time, a huge aggregation of prayers. Patience was required; she started to scuff up the corners, looking for dates, for clues. But yes, here it is at last: her own handwriting.
RALPH ELDRED
ANNA ELDRED
KATHERINE ELDRED
Then the missing line; then
JULIAN EDRED
ROBERT ELDRED
REBECCA ELDRED
Why did I think God would recognize our real names, our formal and never-used names, instead of the names we are called by? There: that’s a puzzle. She reached into her bag for her pen. Her pen was a present from Felix. It was a serious and expensive object, made of gold.
Damn; not there. Her fingers probed, scraped the worn silk lining. Perhaps a child had borrowed it. She plunged her hand into her coat pocket, and brought out a furred and leaking ballpoint, its plastic barrel cracked, its ink silted. She shook it, and tried a preliminary zigzag in a corner of the page. She shook the pen again, tapped it. If you could scribble the book over, make additions … But it did not seem decent to her to spoil the pages. Pray for Felix, she said to herself. Pray for Ginny. Pray for me.
She began to write. Her pen moved over the vacant line. The ballpoint marked the paper, but nothing appeared: only white marks. She shook it once, slammed it on the wooden desk. At last, like a slow cut, the ink began to bleed. Laboriously—the pen faltering, blotting—she filled in the missing line:
MATTHEW ELDRED
So that’s done, she thought. She ran her finger down the page. Prayers answered; after a fashion. She hesitated, her hand in the air, then placed the defective pen beside the book. You could not know what desperate soul would come along, with no means of writing at all.
She stepped out of the porch. The air held snow. Often it promises, but doesn’t perform; we’re not very far from the sea. She put her hands into the pockets of her coat, and began to walk uphill to the car park. The cloud had thinned, and as she walked the sun showed itself, fuzzy and whitish-yellow, like a lamp behind a veil.
