alone say it,’ Fred said. ‘I’ve always made your father welcome here, even if I do find the constant bulletins on the state of his bladder and his bowels rather trying. I know Mother does.’
‘I think I’d better take him back to London tomorrow,’ I said.
‘All right, if you wish,’ Fred said. ‘But please don’t pretend that I’m driving him away.’
When I suggested to Dad that it might be a good idea to take him back to London tomorrow, when the traffic on the M1 was likely to be fairly light, halfway between Christmas and New Year, he agreed without argument. ‘Whatever you say, son. Whatever suits you.’ There was an air of martyrdom about him for the rest of the day, as if he felt he was being victimised but was not going to complain. Perhaps he had picked up vibrations of the ill-feeling between me and Fred, and intuited that he was part of it. Altogether it was an edgy and uncomfortable evening. After dinner, which he ate in silence, he declined my offer to fix him up with my headphones so he could watch the TV without disturbing us (we all wanted to read), and instead chose to listen to his little transistor radio through an earpiece, reclining in an armchair with his eyes closed.
‘Can’t you stop him doing that?’ Fred said to me irritably, looking up from her book.
‘Doing what?’ I said.
She sighed and raised her eyes to the ceiling. ‘Oh of course, you can’t hear it. Can you hear it, Mother?’
Cecilia, who was reading our Guardian, and comparing it pre-judicially to the Telegraph from time to time, said, ‘Hear what, dear?’
‘God give me patience! Am I the only person in this house with normal hearing?’ Fred exclaimed.‘There’s a faint tinny sound leaking from that radio. It’s driving me mad.’
‘It’s leaking from his ear, he’s probably got the volume too high,’ I said. ‘I’ll ask him to turn it down.’
‘No, don’t bother, I’m sure to go on hearing it,’ she said. ‘I’ll read in bed. You can look after him and Mother until they’re ready to go too.’
‘I won’t be long,’ Cecilia said to her; and to me, after Fred had left the room: ‘My late husband had very good hearing up to the end of his life. Mine, I must admit, is not what it was.’
‘But you do very well, considering your age,’ I said. ‘You don’t know how lucky you are.’
‘No, I haven’t had to put up a prayer to St Francis de Sales yet,’ she said with some complacency. ‘You know he’s the patron saint of deaf people?’
I confessed that I didn’t. ‘Was he deaf, then?’ I asked.
‘No, but he catechised a deaf man, so that he could receive Holy Communion. I suppose he invented some kind of sign language. If you were a Catholic, Desmond, you could pray to St Francis de Sales.’ She said this with a slightly mischievous smile. She enjoys having the occasional dig at my godless state.
‘To cure me?’
‘It has been known. But of course it’s not the saints who actually work miracles, you know. That’s a common misunderstanding.’
‘They pass your prayer to God, don’t they?’ I said, remembering the lecture on petitionary prayer.
‘They intercede with God on your behalf,’ Cecilia corrected me.
‘Why go through them when you could pray directly to God?’ I asked.
Cecilia pondered this question for a moment, as if it had never occurred to her before. ‘Perhaps we feel a little shy about bringing our problems directly before God. It feels more comfortable doing it through a saint, or Our Lady.’
‘It makes me think of heaven as being like a Renaissance court,’ I said, ‘with all the saints clustering round the throne of God like courtiers, with petitions in their hands.’
Cecilia smiled. ‘There’s nothing to stop you praying directly to God,’ she said. ‘Our Lord cured many deaf people when he was on this earth.’
‘But they were stone deaf, weren’t they - and dumb too, usually.’
‘You remember your New Testament, then,’ said Cecilia, with an approving nod.
‘I can see that would be a pretty spectacular miracle, making the deaf hear and the dumb speak,’ I said. ‘But hearing impairment is a much less interesting disability. Hardly worth troubling a saint with, let alone the Lord.’
‘You could always pray for patience to bear your cross,’ Cecilia said.
‘Fred just did that,’ I said, ‘but it didn’t seem to work.’ When Cecilia looked puzzled I explained: ‘She said “God give me patience!” but she went to bed