‘The one we had at our wedding?’

‘What?’

‘Corinthians, Chapter 13. Your brother read it.’

‘Mark didn’t read anything about charity. It was all about love. That corny one that everyone has.’ Please forgive me, St Paul, because I don’t think it’s corny; I think, and have always thought, that it’s beautiful, even if everyone else does, too, and the reading was my choice.

‘I don’t know. All I know is that Corinthians, Chapter 13 is what we had at our wedding.’

‘OK, so I got the number wrong. But the one they read in church on Sunday was all about charity, and how true charity is not puffed up, and I thought of you and your puffed-up friend.’

‘Thank you.’

‘It’s a pleasure.’

We drive on in silence, but then David suddenly thumps the steering-wheel.

‘It’s the same thing,’ he says.

‘What?’

‘Love is not boastful, nor proud. It vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up. See? What Mark read was translated.’

‘Not love. Charity.’

‘They’re the same word. I remember this now. Caritas. It’s Latin or Greek or something, and sometimes it’s translated as “charity” and sometimes it’s translated as “love”.’

That is why the reading seemed strangely familiar, then: because my own brother read it at my own wedding, and it is one of my own favourite pieces of writing. For some reason I feel dizzy and nauseous, as if I have done something terrible. Love and charity share the same root word… How is that possible, when everything in our recent history suggests that they cannot coexist, that they are antithetical, that if you put the two of them together in a sack they would bite and scratch and scream, until one of them is torn apart?

‘ “And though I have the faith to move mountains, without love I am nothing at all”. That one.’

‘We’ve got that song,’ says Molly.

‘It’s not a song, idiot,’ says Tom. ‘It’s the Bible.’

‘Lauryn Hill sings it. On that CD Daddy bought ages ago. I’ve been playing it in my room. The last song, she sings that.’ And Molly gives us a pretty, if occasionally off-key, rendition of St Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 13.

When we get home, Molly plays us the Lauryn Hill song, and David disappears off upstairs and comes down with a box full of bits and pieces from our wedding day, a box that I don’t think I knew we owned.

‘Where did that come from?’

‘The old suitcase under our bed.’

‘Did my mother give it to us?’

‘No.’

He starts to rummage through the box.

‘Who did, then?’

‘Nobody.’

‘What, it just appeared on its own?’

‘You can’t think of any other explanation?’

‘Don’t be stupid, David. It’s a very simple question. There’s no need for all this mystery.’

‘It’s a very simple answer.’

And still I cannot think of it, so I make a frustrated, impatient growling noise and start to walk away.

‘It’s mine,’ he says quietly.

‘Why is it yours all of a sudden?’ I say aggressively. ‘Why isn’t it ours? I was there, too, you know.’

‘No, I mean, of course it’s yours as well, if you want it. I just mean… I bought the box. I got the stuff together. That’s how it came into the house.’

‘When?’ And still I can hear a snort in my voice, as if I don’t believe him, as if he is somehow trying to put one over on me.

‘I don’t know. When we came back from our honeymoon. It was a fantastic day. I was so happy. I just didn’t want to forget it.’

I burst into tears, and I cry and cry until it feels as though it is not salt and water being squeezed from my eyes, but blood.

13

‘ “Without love I am nothing at all,” ’ Lauryn Hill sings for the twelfth and seventeenth and twenty-fifth time on Janet’s CD player, and each time I think, yes, that is me, that is what I have become, nothing at all, and I either cry again, or merely feel like crying. That’s why David’s box devastated me, I realize now—not just because I had no idea that my husband still felt anything at all about our wedding day, but because the part of me that should feel things is sick, or dying, or dead, and I never even noticed until tonight.

I’m not too sure when this happened, but I know that it was a long time ago—before Stephen (otherwise there wouldn’t have been a Stephen), long before GoodNews (otherwise there wouldn’t have been a GoodNews); but after Tom and Molly were born, because I was something and someone then, the most important person in the whole world. Maybe if I kept a diary I could date it precisely. I could read an entry and think, oh, right, it was on 23 November 1994, when David said this or did that. But what could David have possibly said or done to make me close down in this way? No, I suspect that I closed myself down, that something in me just got infarcted, or dried up, or sclerotic, and I let it happen because it suited me. And there is just enough for Molly and Tom, but it doesn’t really count, because it’s a reflex, and my occasional flashes of warmth are like my occasional desire to wee.

Maybe that’s what’s wrong with all of us. Maybe Mark thought he was going to find that warmth in church, and all those people in our street who took the street kids in thought they could find it in their spare bedrooms, and David found it in GoodNews’s fingertips—went looking for it because he wanted to feel it once more before he died. As do I.

Oh, I’m not talking about romantic love, the mad hunger for someone you don’t know very well. And the feelings that constitute my working week—guilt, of course, and fear, and irritation, and a few other ignoble distractions that simply serve to make me unwell half the time—are not enough for me, nor for anybody. I’m talking about that love which used to feel something like optimism, benignity… Where did that go? I just seemed to run out of steam somewhere along the line. I ended up disappointed with my work, and my marriage, and myself, and I turned into someone who didn’t know what to hope for.

The trick, it seems to me, is to stave off regret. That’s what the whole thing is about. And we can’t stave it off for ever, because it is impossible not to make the mistakes that let regret in, but the best of us manage to limp on into our sixties or seventies before we succumb. Me, I made it to about thirty-seven, and David made it to the same age, and my brother gave up the ghost even before that. And I’m not sure that there is a cure for regret. I suspect not.

The new patient seems vaguely familiar, but I’m not feeling very sharp: the little Turkish girl I have just seen probably has something seriously wrong with her, and I have been attempting to explain to her mother, through the Turkish-speaking health visitor, why I am sending her for a brain scan. So my nerves are jangling a little, and initially I don’t have as much interest in the new patient’s skin complaint as I would wish.

I ask her to take her top off, and she says something jovial about how she hates showing disgustingly slim doctors her fat stomach, and at the very moment the jumper covers her face, I recognize the voice. It belongs to the nice lady from the church.

She stands up so that I can see the rash on her back.

‘Have you had this before?’

‘Not for a long time. It’s stress-related.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘Because the last time I got it was when my mother died. And now I’ve got a lot of work problems.’

‘What kind of work problems?’

This is an unprofessional question. I am always hearing that people have work problems, and I have never before shown the slightest interest, although if I am feeling especially sympathetic I might cluck a little. The nice lady, though… Of course I want to know about what is wrong with her job.

‘It’s utterly pointless, and I hate my… I hate the people I work for. Especially… Well, especially the boss.’