‘He’ll just smash the place up or something, if they let her die,’ Jane concurred bleakly.

Meaning she herself would like to smash something up, possibly the church.

How many hours had they been here? Hospitals engendered their own time zones. Merrily hung up the phone and turned back into the ill-lit passage, teeming now: visiting hours. Once, she’d had a dream of purgatory, and it was like a big hospital, a brightly lit Brueghel kind of hospital, with all the punters helpless in operation gowns, and the staff scurrying around, feeding a central cauldron steaming with fear.

‘Merrily?’

From a trio of nurses, one detached herself and came across.

‘Eileen? I thought you were over at the other place.’

‘You get moved around. We’ll all end up in one place, anyway, if they ever finish building it, and won’t that be a fockin’ treat?’ Eileen Cullen put out a forefinger, lifted Merrily’s hair from her shoulder. ‘You’re not wearing your collar, Reverend. You finally dump the Auld Feller, or what?’

‘We’re still together,’ Merrily said. ‘And it’s still hot.’

‘Jesus, that’s disgusting.’

‘Actually, I had to leave home in a hurry.’ Merrily spotted Gomer coming out of the ward, biting on an unlit cigarette, for comfort. ‘I came with a friend. His wife’s had a serious heart attack — unexpected. You won’t say anything cynical, will you?’

‘What’s his name?’ Sister Cullen was crop-haired and angular and claimed to have left Ulster to escape from ‘bloody religion’.

‘Gomer. Gomer Parry.’

‘Well then, Mr Parry,’ Cullen said briskly as Gomer came up, blinking dazedly behind his bottle glasses, ‘you look to me to be in need of a cuppa — with a drop of something in there to take away the taste of machine tea, am I right?’ She beckoned one of the nurses over. ‘Kirsty, would you take Mr Parry to my office and make him a special tea? Stuff’s in my desk, bottom drawer.’