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By Root 7694 0

’s no need for me to work anything out - there is only one answer: to kneel down in the confessional and say, ‘Since my last confession I have committed adultery so many times etcetera etcetera’; to hear Father Rank telling me to avoid the occasion: never see the woman alone (speaking in those terrible abstract terms: Helen - the woman, the occasion, no longer the bewildered child clutching the stamp-album, listening to Bagster howling outside the door: that moment of peace and darkness and tenderness and pity ‘adultery’). And I to make my act of contrition, the promise ‘never more to offend thee’, and then tomorrow the communion: taking God in my mouth in what they call the state of grace. That’s the right answer - there is no other answer: to save my own soul and abandon her to Bagster and despair. One must be reasonable, he told himself, and recognize that despair doesn’t last (is that true?), that love doesn’t last (but isn’t that the very reason that despair does?), that in a few weeks or months she’ll be all right again. She has survived forty days in an open boat and the death of her husband and can’t she survive the mere death of love? As I can, as I know I can.

He drew up outside the church and sat hopelessly at the wheel. Death never comes when one desires it most. He thought: of course there’s the ordinary honest wrong answer, to leave Louise, forget that private vow, resign my job. To abandon Helen to Bagster or Louise to what? I am trapped, he told himself, catching sight of an expressionless stranger’s face in the driving mirror, trapped. Nevertheless he left the car and went into the church. While he was waiting for Father Rank to go into the confessional he knelt and prayed: the only prayer he could rake up. Even the words of the ‘Our Father’ and the ‘Hail Mary’ deserted him. He prayed for a miracle, ‘O God convince me, help me, convince me. Make me feel that I am more important than that girl,’ It was not Helen’s face he saw as he prayed but the dying child who called him father: a face in a photograph staring from the dressing-table: the face of a black girl of twelve a sailor had raped and killed glaring blindly up at him in a yellow paraffin light. ‘Make me put my own soul first Give me trust in your mercy to the one I abandon.’ He could hear Father Rank close the door of his box and nausea twisted him again on his knees. ‘O God,’ he said, ‘if instead I should abandon you, punish me but let the others get some happiness.’ He went into the box. He thought, a miracle may still happen. Even Father Rank may for once find the word, the right word ... Kneeling in the space of an upturned coffin he said, ‘Since my last confession I have committed adultery.’

‘How many times?’

‘I don’t know, Father, many times.’

‘Are you married?’

‘Yes.’ He remembered that evening when Father Rank had nearly broken down before him, admitting his failure to help ... Was he, even while he was struggling to retain the complete anonymity of the confessional, remembering it too? He wanted to say, ‘Help me, Father. Convince me that I would do right to abandon her to Bagster. Make me believe in the mercy of God,’ but he knelt silently waiting: he was unaware of the slightest tremor of hope. Father Rank said, ‘Is it one woman?’

‘Yes.’

‘You must avoid seeing her. Is that possible?’

He shook his head.

‘If you must see her, you must never be alone with her. Do you promise to do that, promise God not me?’ He thought: how foolish it was of me to expect the magic word. This is the formula used so many times on so many people. Presumably people promised and went away and came back and confessed again. Did they really believe they were going to try? He thought: I am cheating human beings every day I live, I am not going to try to cheat myself or God. He replied, ‘It would be no good my promising that, Father.’

‘You must promise. You can’t desire the end without desiring the means.’

Ah, but one can, he thought, one can: one can desire the peace of victory without desiring the ravaged towns.

Father Rank said, ‘I don’t need to tell you surely that there