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of money or contacts or suchlike. But position, prestige, something to bustle about, be self-important about.”
    Mills had nodded when she talked about money and contacts, the little smile playing around his lips as she showed him how she viewed him—which was probably why he had asked the question in that form in the first place. As usual, he’d got what he wanted. Now he started for the door.
    â€œVery odd, that’s what I say. Well, I must be on my way. TellPaul I’ve collected this, will you, Rosemary? And—” he put his face close to hers—“go on fighting back. Show them what you’re made of.”
    But over the next week Rosemary found very little call for fighting or for showing what she was made of. If anybody brought up the matter of her loss of faith she repeated the formula of “leaving it up to the members” of any organisation she was involved with to decide whether it made any difference. But very few people brought it up. It was increasingly accepted: it had happened, it was nobody’s fault, and Rosemary was just the same person she had always been. It had been a nine days’ wonder, and the nine days were over. Rosemary could imagine that when she brought the matter before the Mothers’ Union committee the members’ main reaction would be to wonder why she had raised it at all.
    She was told by a friend that Florrie Harridance had tried to get a local Yorkshire Post reporter interested in the matter as a news story. But in the reporter’s view it had not had the human interest to compete with the declining fortunes of Leeds United or the total hopelessness of the Yorkshire cricket team. It lacked sex, passion or fanaticism, and news stories involving clergy and their families had to have at least one of those. The reporter had shaken his head and gone on his way.
    Rosemary went about her parish work as usual, but she no longer went to church on a Sunday. This meant that she saw much less of Florrie Harridance and her cronies. She did bump into Selena Meadowes one day in the library, and they fell into their usual topic of conversation, the needs of several elderly members of the congregation. For once, though, Selena gave the conversation a personal twist.
    â€œYou can’t tell me anything about the decline of the elderly,” she said, still in her bright tone which seemed so inappropriate.“My poor old Mum seems to have less and less interest in life every time I see her or call her.”
    â€œI didn’t know you had elderly parents, Selena.”
    â€œOne, just the one: my mother.”
    â€œYou must have been a late child.”
    â€œI was. What can you do, Rosemary, if they just seem not to want to go on living any more?”
    â€œI don’t know. My mother’s still very lively. Isn’t she interested in the grandchildren?”
    â€œNot very. Oh—I’m being unfair. She likes to see them, but then quite soon she’s had enough and wishes they’d go away. I wonder whether I shouldn’t try a change of scene for her.”
    â€œWhere does she live?”
    â€œNear Skipton. She used to go to Morecambe for her holidays when my father was alive, but she says she wouldn’t want to go back, with all the changes, and from what I hear it’s a depressing place now. I wondered whether to try to get her to Scarborough.”
    â€œWell, I certainly enjoyed it. But it might be less attractive for someone who’s less active. All those hills.”
    â€œWhere did you stay?”
    â€œIt’s a place called Cliff View. On St Nicholas’s Cliff, near where Anne Brontë died.”
    Selena Meadowes bridled a little.
    â€œThat’s literary, isn’t it? We’re not a very literary family, I’m afraid. Is the food good—traditional, I mean? She’s very conservative.”
    â€œYes—anyhow it’s perfectly decent.”
    â€œI think I might try