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pens and mints and small notepads. My breast pocket had a secret fold containing a duplicate of my mother's credit card. I tapped the pocket and knew it was there. Mrs Poole stood by the sofa rubbing her hands together against the non-existent cold, and I tried to look casual.
    She laid a round basket filled with bottles of Baby Bio on the sofa. 'These are for the rubbish,' she said. 'You keep sneaking bottles in and the plants don't need fertiliser.'
    'I'm sure it's very evil, Mrs Poole.'
    'Too right,' she said. 'Evil. Those chemical companies are trying to turn everywhere into Kansas. I saw a thing on the telly.'
    'Maybe you should be putting all the TVs on the rubbish tip.'
    'You can laugh,' she said.
    'I have no opinion.'
    'That's right. You have no opinion. TV's all right in moderation. Maybe if you watched the odd bit of TV you'd know more about the world.'
    'I'm sure you're right.'
    'You'll say anything to keep me quiet,' she said. She rattled the small bottles in the basket and pursed her lips. 'It wouldn't do you any harm at all. But I have to grant you, books are more friendly.'
    I waited a second or two.
    'It's good that you come here,' I said.
    I saw something, a momentary stiffness, perhaps, that seemed at the time like a grade of panic, and I thought to cancel it by placing a friendly hand on her shoulder.
    'None of that now,' she said. 'No banalities, please. It's not the house for that sort of thing.'
    'Right you are,' I said.
    She grinned and I saw the good nature return to her face, though her hand was trembling as it reached out for a tin of polish.
    'Film
music,' she said.
    'Oh, shush,' I said. 'Go about your business, woman.'
    'Au
revoir,
' she said.
    Mrs Poole put the polish under her arm and said nothing more as she walked across the carpet. The day was very fine. She chewed a fingernail as she reached the back of the sitting-room, and she paused there, looking out through the large window at the rose garden and a blackbird drinking from the sundial.

CHAPTER TWO
The Mouth of the River
    DALGARNOCK IS A JUNCTION PARISH on the Ayrshire coast, about thirty miles outside Glasgow. The river now goes to the sea, but when St Ker first arrived there in 682 AD, the river went in the opposite direction, flowing through Ayrshire's bracken woods towards the lowlands of Lanarkshire, where the tributaries of several Scottish rivers gather in green, heathery lochs, and where home-remembering salmon and handmade arrowheads can still be seen glinting in the shallows.
    St Ker was a monk on Iona and the famous annals say he left the Abbey consumed with gout and the whisperings of God. He is thought to have journeyed into the Irish Sea and crossed the inland dark in a skin-covered boat. Arriving in the night to find nothing thereabouts, and half-starved, he cursed the river at the place of Dalgarnock, but the river changed course to outwit the curse and has flowed ever since to Irvine Bay.
    An empty explosives factory marks the skyline of Dalgarnock, but the better part of the town seems to be given over to black and white council houses with windows the size of bibles. Behind the houses there are shops and schools and a wasteland of gorse crowding yellow to the sea. At the furthest edge of the town, next to the late-night petrol station, a graveyard is filled to the edge of a quarry with Protestant bones. You pass the graveyard and its plastic flowers if heading by road towards the old commercial centres of Irvine and Prestwick, Ayr and Kilmarnock, the town where Robert Burns published his first work.
    Bishop Gerard was a friend from my seminary days in Rome. Some years older than me, he worked back then for the English-speaking section of the Congregation of Bishops, and I still recall with some nervousness those Glasgow words and phrases murmured through the grille of a confessional box at the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, a Gothic construction next to the Pantheon. Gerard came from the Calton area of Glasgow.