But storytellers skip the everyday, mistaking the ordinary for the dull, seizing on the sensational and leaving out the habitual that is in fact the fabric of life. The condition of Father Tom was not only one characterised by domestic catastrophe and distress. This too, this calm, smiling, benignity, this recalled boy in a wrinkled flesh, was how he was. The truth was less dramatic but told a fuller story. The doctor sat awhile, saying nothing.
