“No, Father.”
“You are wrestling with your problem still. Your temptation to sin. Or has the temptation passed?”
“No. If anything—”
He cut in. “I have been praying for you.”
He heard her breathing, beyond the grille and the curtain: the hiccups in her breathing’s rhythm, as if she might cry. “Any more questions today?”
“Oh yes, many.”
She reads them off a paper, he thought.
“A doctor has human bones in his possession, from the days of his studies. He is anxious to get rid of them. He got them while he was a student in a Protestant country.”
“Germany again?”
She stopped. His question had thrown her. He was not meant to interrupt. “Do go on.”
“Where is he supposed to bury them?”
“Protestant bones,” Father said. “I hardly know.”
“In Ireland,” she said timidly, “there are special plots, in the major hospitals, for burying the bits of bodies that are taken away in operations.”
“There may be a similar dispensation here.”
“If they might be useful to some hospital, he could donate them?”
She has answers on her paper, he thought, as well as questions. “I don’t see why not.”
“But he must be reverent with them, must he not? They were part of a living body once, he must recollect, and that body was the temple of the spirit. Even though it was a Protestant. Probably.”
“Again,” Father Angwin said, “if in the parish there were a funeral, I mean just in the ordinary course of events, a funeral of some elderly person … and the relatives could be prevailed upon … it might be a good thing to lay them to rest in that way.”
“Protestant bones in a Catholic grave …” She paused for thought. “Just say nothing to the relatives,” she said. “That would be my way. Because you know how people are. They wouldn’t take account of how old the bones were, they’d carry on about it just the same. Just slip them in, while the mourners are all gossiping. That would be how to do it. There’s no need to cause unnecessary fuss and alarm and give people a chance to get on their high horses.”
“Do I know this doctor?”
“Oh no, Father.”
“Because I was thinking … I myself have this graveyard. Of sorts.” But I am like the elder Tobias, he thought: “wearied with burying.”
She said, “It is a hypothetical case.”
“Yes. Of course it is. Any more?”
He felt that she moved closer, that she had shuffled forward on her kneeler and put her face inches from his own.
“Suppose I can save a man from drowning. And I have not the courage to do it? Am I in justice bound to repair the loss to his family?”
“Repair the loss? Well, how could you do that?”
“I was considering their situation in life. How they would be left. Financially. They would be badly off. He would be the breadwinner. And suppose I could have saved him—should I make some restitution, do you think? Am I obliged to?”
“In justice, no. In charity, perhaps.”
This is the world we inhabit, he thought: burning houses, drowning men, alien bones on the loose; all perplexity and pain to the tender conscience that cannot speak of its dearest concerns.
“I think that is enough,” he said, “in the way of hypotheses.”
“If you think … ,” she said, “if you think of a sin, but you do not do it, can that be as bad as if you had actually done it?”
“It can be. I would need to know more.”
“Supposing a person entertains certain thoughts … but he does not know at the time that they are bad? Suppose they start off as quite ordinary, permissible thoughts, but then he feels where they are tending?”
“He should stop thinking at once.”
“But you cannot stop thinking. Can you? Can you?”
“A good Catholic can.”
“How?”
“Prayer.”
“Prayer drives thought out?”
“With practice.”
