Southend U3A

Writing for Fun

December 2019

Conviction - Anne Wilson

He picked up the letter from the table once again; fingering it, re-reading it and then laying it back down with a sigh of frustration.

‘If you look at that once more,’ remonstrated his wife, ‘I shall scream. You must know the contents inside out and backwards.’

‘It’s alright for you,’ her husband retaliated, ‘you’re not the one with the problem.’

‘There are a good many who would like your problem,’ came the answer. ‘Bernard, for goodness sake start to live in the real world just this once, like everyone else has to. We can’t all afford to take the moral high ground. This family in particular.’

He recoiled visibly; her words stinging him with their reminder that his job had not enabled him to be the generous provider he would like to have been.

‘We’ve never gone without,’ he said defensively. ‘And there’ve been other things to make up for the lack of material possessions. Love, for example.’

She didn’t reply. Words like integrity, self-sacrifice, duty had all become meaningless when weighed against the small pleasures she would have liked for the family but had accepted they would never have, without complaint. Nice holidays, presents for the children so they could feel part of their peer group and furniture that wasn’t out of fashion decades ago; all these things would have been so nice and had always been out of reach. She had got to the time in her life when love did not compensate for their loss and neither did noble sentiments.

They sat in stony silence for a while, until she could bear it no more.

‘Why can’t you just take it and be grateful? He wanted to leave you something to remember him by. Goodness only knows we could do with it.’

‘It’s where the money comes from. That’s what I can’t accept.’

She was a woman who rarely lost her temper – irritation being the strongest of her emotions in the normal course of events – but she banged her fist on the table with a vehemence he had never experienced from her before. ‘Good God, Bernard,’ she exploded, invoking the Almighty’s name in a manner unbecoming to her husband’s profession. ‘He wasn’t drug dealing or knocking old ladies over the head and stealing their pension money, he was a hard-working man who thought he’d pop into his local corner shop and buy himself a lottery ticket one evening. You’ve spent your whole life devoting yourself to the church and yet when Providence smiled upon him you couldn’t even bring yourself to congratulate him on his good fortune.’

Her husband bristled. ‘I have my convictions, you knew that when you married me. I thought we believed in the same things. You know I don’t believe in gambling. That’s why I won’t sanction holding raffles at the church – even if the proceeds do go to charity.’

‘The more I see of life and its cruelties, the less I see spending money on a raffle ticket as a sin,’ she reasoned. ‘Even a lottery ticket, come to that.’

‘We mustn’t expect to profit by the roll of a dice, or the turn of a card,’ argued her husband. ‘Or by balls flying out of a machine on a Saturday night. By accepting my father’s money I’m going against everything I preach to my parishioners and that I cannot live with. I can’t accept any of the proceeds from a lottery win; which is no different to gambling on the horses. Nor do I want to take responsibility in dividing up the money and giving part of it to charity. I don’t want any involvement in it. I’ll ask the executors to distribute it as they see fit but to exclude me from their considerations.

His wife looked over at him. ‘Even though some of it would go a long way to making our lives better.’

‘Even then.’

‘But nobody would know, would they?’

There was a pause before her husband spoke. ‘I would know.’

She rose steadily from her chair.

‘Then we have nothing more to say to each other, have we?’

He sank back in his chair.

‘Do you know the hardest part of all this?’

‘What?’ she replied tonelessly.

He put the letter back in its envelope and then into his coat pocket. ‘It’s that I don’t know you at all. You’re not the person I thought you were.’

‘That,’ she said, ‘is your cross to bear.’ She looked round the cold, Spartan room that had been part of their lives for years. ‘Turn the light off before you come up to bed,’ she instructed. ‘We can’t afford to waste the electricity.’