Perhaps she should revise her opinion of him. Perhaps not just another academic bureaucrat going through his hostly motions, but a soul with the hungers of a soul. Grant that possibility. In fact, perhaps that is what all of them are around this table, in their deepest being: hungering souls. She should not rush to judgement. If nothing else, these people are not stupid. And they must by now have realized that in Sister Bridget, whether they like her or not, they have someone out of the ordinary.

'I do not need to consult novels,' says her sister, 'to know what pettiness, what baseness, what cruelty human beings are capable of. That is where we start, all of us. We are fallen creatures. If the study of mankind amounts to no more than picturing to us our darker potential, I have better things to spend my time on. If on the other hand the study of mankind is to be a study in what reborn man can be, that is a different story. However, you have had enough lecturing for one day.'

'But,' says the young man seated next to Mrs Godwin, 'surely that is precisely what humanism stood for, and the Renaissance too: for humankind as humankind is capable of being. For the ascent of man. The humanists were not crypto-atheists. They were not even Lutherans in disguise. They were Catholic Christians like yourself, Sister. Think of Lorenzo Valla. Valla had nothing against the Church, he just happened to know Greek better than Jerome did, and pointed out some of the mistakes Jerome made in translating the New Testament. If the Church had accepted the principle that Jerome's Vulgate was a human production, and therefore capable of being improved, rather than being the word of God itself, perhaps the whole history of the West would have been different.'

Blanche is silent. The speaker presses on.

'If the Church as a whole had been able to acknowledge that its teachings and its whole system of beliefs were based on texts, and that those texts were susceptible on the one hand to scribal corruption and so forth, on the other to flaws of translation, because translation is always an imperfect process, and if the Church had also been able to concede that the interpretation of texts is a complex matter, vastly complex, instead of claiming for itself a monopoly of interpretation, then we would not be having this argument today.'

'But,' says the Dean, 'how have we come to know how vastly difficult the business of interpretation can be except by experiencing certain lessons of history, lessons that the Church of the fifteenth century could hardly have foreseen?'

'Such as?'

'Such as contact with hundreds of other cultures, each with its own language and history and mythology and unique way of seeing the world.'

'Then my point would be,' says the young man, 'that it is the humanities and the humanities alone, and the training that the humanities provide, that will allow us to steer our way through this new multicultural world, and precisely, precisely' – he almost hammers the table, so excited has he grown – 'because the humanities are about reading and interpretation. The humanities begin, as our lecturer said, in textual scholarship, and develop as a body of disciplines devoted to interpretation.'

'In fact, the human sciences,' says the Dean.

The young man pulls a face. 'That is a red herring, Mr Dean. If you don't mind, I will remain with either studia or disciplines.'

So young, she thinks, and so sure of himself. He will remain with studia.

'What about Winckelmann?' says her sister.

Winckelmann? The young man looks back at her uncompre-hendingly.

'Would Winckelmann have recognized himself in the picture you paint of the humanist as a technician of textual interpretation?'

'I don't know. Winckelmann was a great scholar. Perhaps he would have.'

'Or Schelling,' pursues her sister. 'Or any of those who believed, more or less openly, that Greece provided a better civilizational ideal than Judaeo-Christianity Or, for that matter, those who believed that mankind had lost its way and should go back to its primitive roots and make a fresh start. In other words, the anthropologists. Lorenzo Valla – since you mention Lorenzo Valla – was an anthropologist. His starting point was human society. You say the first humanists were not crypto-atheists. No, they were not. But they were crypto-relativists. Jesus, in their eyes, was embedded in his own world, or as we would call it today his own culture. It was their task as scholars to understand that world and interpret it to their times. Just as it would in due course become their task to interpret the world of Homer. And so on down to Winckelmann.'

She terminates abruptly, glances at the Dean. Has he perhaps given her some signal? Has he, unbelievably, beneath the table, tapped Sister Bridget on the knee?

'Yes,' says the Dean, 'fascinating. We should have brought you down for a whole lecture series, Sister. But unfortunately, some of us have engagements. Perhaps at some time in the future…' He leaves the possibility hanging in the air; graciously Sister Bridget inclines her head.

They are back at the hotel. She is tired, she must take something for her continuing nausea, she must lie down. But the question still nags at her: why this hostility on Blanche's part towards the humanities? I do not need to consult novels, said Blanche. Is the hostility, in some tangled way, aimed at her? Though she has religiously sent Blanche her books as they have come off the press, she can see no sign that Blanche has read any of them. Has she been summoned to Africa as a representative of the humanities, or of the novel, or of both, to be taught a last lesson before they both descend into the grave? Is that really how Blanche sees her? The truth – and she ought to impress this on Blanche – is that she has never been an aficionado of the humanities. Something too complacently masculine about the whole enterprise, too self-regarding. She must set Blanche straight.

'Winckelmann,' she says to Blanche. 'What did you mean by bringing up Winckelmann?'

'I wanted to remind them of what the study of the classics would lead to. To Hellenism as an alternative religion. An alternative to Christianity.'

'That is what I thought. As an alternative for a few aesthetes, a few highly educated products of the European educational system. But surely not as a popular alternative.'

'You miss my point, Elizabeth. Hellenism was an alternative. Poor as it may have been, Hellas was the one alternative to the Christian vision that humanism was able to offer. To Greek society – an utterly idealized picture of Greek society, but how were ordinary folk to know that? – they could point and say, Behold, that is how we should live – not in the hereafter but in the here and now!

Hellas: half-naked men, their breasts gleaming with olive oil, sitting on the temple steps discoursing about the good and the true, while in the background lithe-limbed boys wrestle and a herd of goats contentedly grazes. Free minds in free bodies. More than an idealized picture: a dream, a delusion. But how else are we to live but by dreams?

'I do not disagree,' she says. 'But who believes in Hellenism any more? Who even remembers the word?'

'Still you miss the point. Hellenism was the sole vision of the good life that humanism was able to put forward. When Hellenism failed – which was inevitable, since it had nothing whatever to do with the lives of real people – humanism went bankrupt. That man at lunch was arguing for the humanities as a set of techniques, the human sciences. Dry as dust. What young man or woman with blood in their veins would want to spend their life scratching around in the archives or doing explications de texte without end?'

'But Hellenism was surely just a phase in the history of the humanities. Larger, more inclusive visions of what human life can be have emerged since then. The classless society, for instance. Or a world from which poverty, disease, illiteracy, racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and the rest of the bad litany have been exorcised. I am not putting in a plea for either of these visions. I am just pointing out that people cannot live without hope, or perhaps without illusions. If you turned to any of those people we had lunch with and asked them, as humanists or at least as card-carrying practitioners of the humanities, to state the goal of all their efforts, surely they would reply that, however indirectly, they strive to improve the lot of mankind.'

'Yes. And therein they reveal themselves as true followers of their humanist forebears. Who offered a secular vision of salvation. Rebirth without the intervention of Christ. By the workings of man alone. Renaissance. On the example of the Greeks. Or on the example of the American Indians. Or on the example of the Zulus. Well, it cannot be done.'

'It cannot done, you say. Because – though none of them were aware of it – the Greeks were damned, the Indians were damned, the Zulus were damned.'

'I said nothing about damnation. I am talking only about history, about the record of the humanist enterprise. It cannot be done. Extra ecclesiam nulla solvatio.'

She shakes her head. 'Blanche, Blanche, Blanche,' she says. 'Who would have thought you would end up such a hardliner.'

Blanche gives her a wintry smile. The light flashes on her glasses.

It is Saturday, her last full day in Africa. She is spending it at Marianhill, the station which her sister has made her life's work and her home. Tomorrow she will travel to Durban. From Durban she will fly to Bombay and then on to Melbourne. And that will be that. We will not see each other again, Blanche and I, she thinks, not in this life.

It was the graduation ceremony she came for, but what Blanche really wanted her to see, what lay behind the invitation, was the hospital. She knows that, yet she resists. It is not something she wants. She has not the stomach for it. She has seen it all on television, too often, till she cannot bear to look any more: the stick limbs, the bloated bellies, the great impassive eyes of children wasting away, beyond cure, beyond care. Let this cup be taken from me! she pleads inwardly. I am too old to withstand these sights, too old and weak. I will just cry. But in this case she cannot refuse, not when it is her own sister. And, in the event, it proves to be not too bad, not bad enough to break down over. The nursing staff is spick and span, the equipment is new – the fruit of Sister Bridget's fund-raising – and the atmosphere is relaxed, even happy. In the wards, mingling with the staff, are women in native dress. She takes them to be mothers or grandmothers until Blanche explains: they are healers, she says, traditional healers. Then she remembers: this is what Marianhill is famous for, this is Blanche's great innovation, to open the hospital to the people, to have native doctors work beside doctors of Western medicine.