"Well, good night, all."
"Good night. Good night."
She took the tube to Russell Square and walked, carrying her suitcase--let herself in and looked in the hall for letters. There was only one from Tom. She knew what that would be about, and her great warm heart softened as she thought: "After all, when all's said, Tom an' I know what Love is." She opened the door onto the basement stairs and called: "Crowe. Old Crowe."
"You, Ida?"
"Come up for a chat an' we'll have a turn with the Board."
The curtains were drawn as she had left them nobody had touched the china on the mantelpiece, but Warwick Deeping wasn't in the bookshelf and The Good Companions was on its side. The char had been in she could see that borrowing. She got out a box of chocolate biscuits for Old Crowe; the lid had not been left properly on and they were a little soft and stale. Then carefully she lifted out the Board, cleared the table, and laid it in the centre. SUICILLEYE, she thought. I know what that means now. The Board had foreseen it all Sui, its own word for the scream, the agony, the leap. She brooded gently with her fingers on the Board. When you came to think of it, the Board had saved Rose, and a multitude of popular sayings began to pass together into her mind. It was like when the switch shifts and the signal goes down and the red lamp changes to green and the great engine takes the accustomed rails. It's a strange world, there's more things in heaven and earth...
Old Crowe came peering in. " What's it to be, Ida?"
"I want to ask advice," Ida said. "I want to ask whether maybe I ought to go back to Tom."
Rose could just see the old head bent towards the grille. The priest had a whistle in his breath. He listened patiently whistling, while she painfully brought out her whole agony. She could hear the exasperated women creak their chairs outside waiting for confession. She said: "It's that I repent. Not going with him." She was defiant and tearless in the stuffy box; the old priest had a cold and smelt of eucalyptus.
He said gently and nasally: "Go on, my child."
She said: "I wish I'd killed myself. I oughta 'ave killed myself." The old man began to say something, but she interrupted him. "I'm not asking for absolution. I don't want absolution. I want to be like him damned."
The old man whistled as he drew in his breath; she felt certain he understood nothing. She repeated monotonously: "I wish I'd killed myself." She pressed her hands against her breasts in the passion of misery; she hadn't come to confess, she had come to think, she couldn't think at home when the stove hadn't been lit and her father had got. a mood and her mother she could tell it in her sidelong questions was wondering how much money Pinkie... She would have had the courage now to kill herself if she hadn't been afraid that somewhere in that obscure countryside of death they might miss each other mercy operating somehow for one and not for the other. She said with breaking voice: "That woman. She ought to be damned.
Saying he wanted to get rid of me. She doesn't know about love."
"Perhaps she was right," the old priest murmured.
"And you don't either!" she said furiously, pressing her childish face against the grille.
The old man suddenly began to talk whistling every now and then and blowing eucalyptus through the grille. He said: "There was a man, a Frenchman, you wouldn't know about him, my child, who had the same idea as you. He was a good man, a holy man, and he lived in sin all through his life, because he couldn't bear the idea that any soul could suffer damnation."
She listened with astonishment. He said: "This man decided that if any soul was going to be damned, he would be damned too. He never took the sacraments, he never married his wife in church. I don't know, my child, but some people think he was well, a saint.
I think he died in what we are told is mortal sin I'm not sure; it was in the war--perhaps..."He sighed and whistled, bending his old head. He said: "You can't conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the... appalling... strangeness of the mercy of God."
Outside the chairs creaked again and again people impatient to get their own repentance, absolution, penance finished for the week. . He said: "It was a case of greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his soul for his friend."
He shivered and sneezed. "We must hope and pray," he said, "hope and pray. The Church does not demand that we believe any soul is cut off from mercy."
She said with sad conviction: "He's damned. He knew what he was about. He was a Catholic too."
He said gently: "Corruptio optimi est pessima."
"Yes, Father?"
"I mean a Catholic is more capable of evil than anyone. I think perhaps because we believe in him we are more in touch with the devil than other people. But we must hope," he said mechanically, "hope and pray."
"I want to hope," she said, "but I don't know how."
"If he loved you, surely," the old man said, "that shows... there was some good..."
"Even love like that?"
"Yes."
She brooded on the idea in the little dark box. He said: "And come back soon I can't give you absolution now but come back tomorrow."
She said weakly: "Yes, Father.... And if there's ababy...?"
He said: "With your simplicity and his force...
Make him a saint to pray for his father .1 '
A sudden feeling of immense gratitude broke through the pain it was as if she had been given the sight a long way off of life going on again. He said: "Pray for me, my child."
She said: "Yes, oh, yes."
Outside she looked up at the name on the confessional box it wasn't any name she remembered.
Priests come and go.
She went out into the street the pain was still there } you couldn't shake it off with a word; but the worst horror, she thought, was over the horror, of the complete circle--to be back at home, back at Snow's they'd take her back just as if the Boy had never existed at all. He had existed and would always exist.
She had a sudden conviction that she carried life and she thought proudly: Let them get over that if they can; let them get over that. She turned out onto the front opposite the Palace Pier and began to walk firmly away from the direction of her home towards Billy's. There was something to be salvaged from that house and room, something else they wouldn't be able to get over his voice speaking a message to her: if there was a child, speaking to the child. "If he loved you," the priest had said, "that shows..." She walked rapidly in the thin June sunlight towards the worst horror of all.
The End