In a Good Light by Clare Chambers

stomachs. Cakes, chutney and jam were packed up and handed over to the church fête or the Scouts’ bazaar, and sold in aid of the Less Fortunate.
    A week after this conversation I walked into Cindy’s room uninvited early one Sunday morning and found a strange man lying in her bed. I made the mistake of mentioning him to my parents over porridge, and that was the end of Cindy’s sojourn in the Old Schoolhouse and the end ofmy introduction to the cosmetic arts. Having taken to heart Mother’s advice about using her talents, and decided that casual sex was their natural outlet, she was now sent packing for her trouble.
    â€˜Where’s Cindy?’ I asked, when I came in from school to find her room bare and abandoned, and Mother stripping the bed. The chair was no longer draped with clothes, and all the colourful lotions and potions had vanished. Only a few traces of her presence remained: a talc footprint on the carpet, the stencilled outline of her bottles picked out on the dressing table in loose powder, and the fairy-dust glitter of crumbled eyeshadow.
    â€˜She’s gone to stay with relatives,’ said Mother, peeling the undersheet away from the mattress and tossing it downstairs.
    â€˜Is she coming back?’
    â€˜No, I’m afraid not.’ Mother folded the blanket into a neat square, hesitated a moment, and then chucked that over the banisters too.
    â€˜Why not?’
    â€˜Well, it didn’t really work out,’ she replied evasively.
    â€˜Was it because of that man?’ I asked, drawing an E in the fluff on the bedpost.
    â€˜Partly. We couldn’t have her bringing people back to the house.’ Mother held the eiderdown out of the window and gave it a good, hard shake.
    â€˜You have friends back,’ I pointed out.
    â€˜Yes, but that’s different. This man could have been anybody.’
    â€˜Do you mean a burglar?’ I said, suddenly full of fear and excitement.
    â€˜No, not a burglar,’ said Mother, who was beginning totire of this line of questioning. ‘Go and bring me a clean pillowcase from the trunk.’
    â€˜Will we be getting someone else?’ I wanted to know.
    â€˜Oh, I expect so,’ Mother sighed. ‘Sooner or later.’

4
    OUR FATHER WAS the only person we knew who went to work on a Sunday, apart from the man in the newsagent’s on the green.
    He took two services at the prison every Sunday – Holy Communion and Evensong. Attendance was voluntary, and sometimes the homicidal altar boy would be the only person to turn up. ‘God was there,’ Father used to say.
    If we were very lucky he would bring home stories from work. One thing he told us, which made my scalp tingle, was that you could never let a prisoner so much as
glimpse
a key. Some of the young men in there were so desperate and so cunning that they could memorise the exact shape and dimensions of any key in the blink of an eye, and reproduce a perfect replica when it was their turn in the workshop.
    But our favourite was the one about the prisoner who took a warder hostage in his cell. Father was the only personwho had been able to talk him into releasing the warder and giving up. He had succeeded where the trained negotiator had failed, because months earlier he had given the prisoner, who was going out of his mind in solitary confinement, a pack of cards. The moral of this story, Father said, was that even the most hardened criminal could be moved by a small act of kindness. ‘No,’ said Christian. ‘The moral of this story is: never let a prisoner get between you and the door.’
    We liked to imagine our father as a hero. Chaplaincy didn’t generally offer much scope for heroics, so those few incidents that qualified tended to be somewhat exaggerated. By the time Christian and I had retold the story a few times we had managed to convince ourselves as well as our audience that it had been Father himself who had been