The Translation of the Bones Read Online Free PDF

stand.
    There were eleven worshipers that evening, not bad for a Saturday in London, and Seamus was there to serve. Afterward, Father Diamond asked him to help with the Lenten veils. They were difficult to manage on one’s own. Seamus, who also served on weekdays, was too shaky to be really helpful, but it was good to have an extra pair of hands.
    Together the two men fetched the stepladder from the garage behind the house. Father Diamond had already taken the shrouds out of the cardboard boxes in which they were stored for the rest of the year and had heaped them in the sacristy. Heavy, thick material, a little faded at the folds, a little dusty; redolent of charity shops with their scent of mildew.
    He and Seamus worked systematically, carrying the ladder between them. Our Lady and St. Joseph; the Sacred Heart, which was a statue Father Diamond disliked intensely but dared not upset his congregation by discarding; the crucifix in the Holy Souls. The cross that hung from the ceiling above the sanctuary was always the hardest to cover; too high for Father Diamond to reach with ease, and the material would keep slipping off. Eventually he managed to secure it with safety pins.
    It was dark now, and the violet coverings made it seem darker still. Always such a bleak time for Father Diamond, the flowers gone, the statues shrouded like corpses in their cerements, like possessions under dust sheets in an abandoned house. His foot was on the top rung of depression; if he did not hold on fast he would slip down so far it would take enormous strength to clamber up. He was not sure that he could find the strength again. Before him stretched the final weeks of Lent: Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, the terror of Good Friday, agony and passion, tallow candles and the altar bare.
    I don’t know what I’d do without you, Seamus, he said truthfully. How about a drink, or are you rushing off this evening? Seamus made the sideways movement of his head that expressed regret more courteously than a straightrefusal. Thanks a million, Father, but there’s things I should be doing. Fine, said Father Diamond, bless you.
    Stella did not stay for tea with the other parents after Felix’s match but sped off to get herself ready for the evening. It was desolating to drive away from the school and out through its iron gates, leaving her child behind. Stella had heard other women tell of times when they had forgotten their children in playgrounds and shopping centers; there had been a family recently in the news who were halfway across the Atlantic on a plane before they realized their four-year-old was missing. Stella had laughed in the approved manner at these comic instances of the softening effect of motherhood on the brain but was privately appalled. When her children were small she had felt as if the cords that once connected them to her were still in place; she was as aware of them as her own heartbeat, her own breath.
    Barnaby and Camilla had made their own graceful adjustments to the umbilical ties; stretching them to encompass nights away at first, and later weeks, then holidays with friends, and finally the long intervals of their gap years and university. Camilla at that very moment was in the north of Thailand, near the Burmese border, teaching English to the children of Karen refugees. Barney had spent a year traveling in South America and was now at Cambridge. It had been agony, of course, to let them go. When she waved Barney good-bye at Heathrow Airport, she had felt terribly afraid that it would be forever. At the back of her wardrobe was Camilla’s nightdress, discardedon her bed when she went to Thailand. A faded gray thing, an old favorite, it had reached Camilla’s ankles when it was new and now it skimmed her thighs. Like a frugal addict, Stella allowed herself to bury her face in it, to breathe in its scent, only at the times when she most acutely missed her daughter. As the months went by, the scent was getting fainter.