Fragrant Harbour by John Lanchester Page B

like that, however much you think she’s talking rot. Still, bit of a rough diamond, isn’t he?’
    ‘Bit of a bully,’ I said.
    ‘You have to get along with people if you work in an office,’ he said, apropos, I then thought, of nothing.
    We got as far as the semi-final stage of the quoits tournament before being knocked out by the eventual winners, the Purser and a young Welsh passenger. The Purser had the physical agility of a plump man and had also had lots of practice. His quoit throwing was a revelation.
    I went into dinner that evening without a thought in my head, beyond hoping there wouldn’t be another argument. On that score I was in for a major disappointment.
    It began innocuously enough. People had been talking about the next few days’ sailing and the question of whether or not they were going to have a chance of spending some time ashore at Aden; it depended on our speed of progress.
    ‘I’ve always wanted to see the souk,’ said Mrs Scott-Duncan, blushing. The young Australian made some casual remark about how much he was looking forward to going through the Suez Canal.
    ‘A remarkable triumph of vision, perhaps even more remarkable as such than as a feat of engineering,’ said Sister Benedicta. ‘A victory of the imaginative and theoretical over the mere empirical. De Lesseps was convinced a canal could be built because his historical researches told him that the ancient Egyptians had managed to do it, and he was sure that anything accomplished in the past by guesswork and forced labour could be matched by the skills of French engineering. Many sceptics, not least some of your own countrymen’ – Sister Benedicta appeared here to be bracketing the Australian in with the rest of us Anglo-Saxons – ‘proclaimed the self-evident impossibility of the scheme. A favourite objection was that the desert winds would fill the canal with sand. De Lesseps of course paid no attention, as confident in his researches as in his calculations and his imagination. As a result the canal is a united triumph of reason and faith, so perfect as almost to resemble a parable.’
    ‘Typical,’ said Marler promptly and loudly. ‘The French dressing up their imperial aspirations in a fog of claims about this and that. The simple truth is that we are a world power, you’re not, and you want to be. No offence,’ he then added.
    ‘Not everything is about power,’ said Sister Benedicta. This made Marler even more angry.
    ‘Come off it, France is the most power-mad country in the world, the only one to conduct their foreign affairs without even a shred of concern for anything beyond national self-interest and self-aggrandisement. Power is precisely what French foreign policy has been all about since before the tyrant Bonaparte.’
    ‘Reason and enlightenment are universal values and France has done what she can to spread them. Not every country can say the same.’
    ‘It fails to make any sense to me how a member of an institution as corrupt and benighted as the Catholic Church can spout about reason. Your church spreads superstition and ignorance wherever she goes. Talk about power, that’s the only thing your church has a significant interest in – the slightest real interest.’
    Sister Maria responded by saying:
    ‘When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
    I summon up remembrance of things past,
    I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
    And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste.
    Then can I drown an eye unused to flow
    For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
    And weep afresh love’s long-since-cancelled woe,
    And moan th’expense of many a vanished sight;
    Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
    And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
    The sad account of fore-bemoanèd moan,
    Which I new pay as if not paid before.
    But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
    All losses are restored, and sorrows end.’
    There was a silence.
    ‘An Irish nun, Sister Bernadette, taught me