MORNING SERIAL
ISSIE stared, with a sensation of unreality, as if she were not present at the table, an island in the commotion of greycardiganed children. The clatter of plates as they were passed along the rows, the wind’s hand shaking the windows with a dull booming sound.
‘I was always an angel at our nativity play at primary school. Never a shepherd.’ Lynne preened herself.
‘The reason there are so many blond kids around,’ Issie burst out, ‘is that the dark ones were culled — killed. It would have spoken better for the Pope’s morals, surely, padre, if he could have taken to ugly, snotty, urchins and called them God’s angels? The ones that are hard to love and easy to bully?’
Uneasy silence circled the table. One of their number had compromised herself with an outrageous solecism. They were ashamed on her behalf and took the English way of covering up for her bad taste with politeness, marking her aberration as the sour grapes of a disaffected brunette.
Patterson hemmed. He rose, scraping his chair, shaking out the wings of his black gown sleeves and clasping his hands before him. The school followed him with a diminishing roar.
‘For what we have received,’ the padre intoned.
‘May the Lord make us truly thankful,’ the three hundred and fifty lambs bleated.
‘My dear Miss Dahl,’ said Patterson, accompanying the flock out of the refectory. ‘I do think we have to call the past the past and carry on into the future.’
‘I don’t suppose we have much option.’
‘No one is more disgusted than myself at Nazzy atrocities. Believe me. But we’ve put the worst scoundrels away or hanged them.’
‘Have we?’ ‘One or two may have got through the net,’ he allowed.
‘That may be. But no more than a handful.’
> The Element of Water by Stevie Davies is published by Parthian in the Library of Wales series www.parthianbooks.com
CONTINUES TOMORROW