Road Ends Read Online Free PDF Page B

her get-up made her look much the same shape as the pot-bellied stove behind the counter. The stove was roaring its head off but making no impression at all on the temperature of the room.
    “I keep moving around it,” Betty said, meaning the stove. “It burns one leg so I move to the other side and it burns the other leg, but the rest of me’s still frozen stiff. I’ve been thinking of burning the place down so they’ll have to build a new one.”
    I asked if she could give me a couple of days’ notice so that I could come in and rescue a few of my favourite books, make sure they didn’t go up in flames, and she said certainly, whichones did I want. I said the
Times Atlas
and the entire works of the historian and philosopher Will Durant. She said she’d put them aside for me. She said the handy thing was everyone would assume they’d been destroyed in the fire, so I could just keep them.
    She’s a nice woman. Rather plain, but very nice. I enjoy talking to her. I imagine I’m one of her best customers.
    I’d turned to go when I saw a hunched figure sitting at the table in the other room. It took me a minute to work out that it was Reverend Thomas. He seemed to have shrunk. Even though he was sitting down, that big black coat of his hung on him as if on a skeleton. There was a newspaper on the table in front of him but it hadn’t been opened.
    It seemed a curious place for him to be. If he wanted to get out of the house, why not the church? It couldn’t have been any colder than the library. But then I remembered; he has left the church. He’s now just plain Mr. Thomas. James, his name is. Not Jim, of course.
    My first instinct was to pretend I hadn’t seen him but then I wondered if common decency demanded that I go over and say something. I hesitated, though. It would be awkward; apart from at his son’s funeral, where I offered my condolences, we have not spoken for years. It crossed my mind that he might even think I took some satisfaction from his downfall, which is not so. It is hard to sympathize with someone you dislike, but no man could take pleasure in what has happened in that family.
    “Dislike” is not the right word. I disliked James Thomas long before he made his slanderous accusations about me from the pulpit. In fact I disliked him from the moment we met. There is—was—an arrogant certainty about him that stuck in my craw. He is (only that should be “was” too, because even that appears to have changed) tall and straight—“upright” would be a good word—with pale hair combed back and a long thin nose, thebetter to look down on you. Almost patrician. I suspect he worked at it—at looking patrician. As if he sat at God’s right hand and had a monopoly on the truth.
    I remember he came to the house the day Henry died. Megan answered the door. Emily was in her bedroom and I was in my study. I heard Megan go upstairs, presumably to ask her mother if she wanted to see him, but she did not. She wanted to see no one, including me.
    I am not a believer, as the Reverend knew very well. When he first arrived in Struan, fifteen years or so ago, and noticed that I was not a member of his congregation although Emily and the children were, he came to the house one evening to ask me why. I replied, quite courteously, I think, considering that it was none of his business, that I had no religious faith, whereupon he immediately set about trying to convert me, right there in my own living room. I had had a hard day at work and was not in the best of tempers, so it was a short discussion. Although polite on both sides.
    So we both knew it was Emily he had come to comfort. I did not wish to speak to him or to any man—Henry had died in Emily’s arms less than two hours previously—but I felt obliged to invite him in and he felt obliged to accept. I offered him a chair and he sat down, and the very first thing he said was, “Your child is at peace in the arms of the Lord, Edward.”
    I don’t