It was December, the anniversary of Plunkett’s beatification, and bitterly cold. It was early afternoon when we arrived, and already it was getting dark. It was a long way from the railway station; as we walked the grey streets I knew that we were in a foreign town. The clothes in the shop windows looked different, and the butchers displayed unfamiliar cuts of meat. A fine rain was beginning to fall when we got to the church, which was strangely empty. There was an odour of wax and decaying incense. My father and I were the only ones who knelt by the shrine in a side-chapel, where the head of the Blessed Oliver was displayed, blackened and unrecognisable as having belonged to a human being, seeming to float in the gloom that was lit only by a few guttering candles; and for weeks afterward the head occupied my dreams, hanging bodilessly in a dark space that was at once remote and claustrophobic, like that inside a confessional box.
You’d asked me about Confession, you were intrigued by the concept. You have to make what’s known as an examination of conscience, where you review the past week, and see what sins you might have committed, we used to go to weekly Confession back then, I said. What sort of sins? you said. Well, that I was disobedient to my parents, or that I stole something, or, when I was old enough to have them, that I had impure thoughts, thoughts about girls that is. And how old were you then? you said. Oh, you’d be surprised, Nina, you can have impure thoughts when you’re ten or eleven, maybe younger. And did you steal, Angel? Well, not much, I said, maybe I shoplifted a few sweets, that kind of thing, or I’d take a few coppers from my father’s pockets when he lay sleeping on the sofa after doing a night shift. What they call venial sins, that you don’t get sent to hell for, you only have to do time in purgatory, I said. But what if you didn’t commit any sins, what then? Oh, sometimes you made them up, I said, because if you said you hadn’t committed any sins since your last Confession, the priest would be reluctant to believe you, and he would say, Are you sure, my son? For instance, you wouldn’t have picked a fight with your brother or sister, or you wouldn’t have been tempted to steal an orange or an apple from a greengrocer’s display, when no one was looking, or maybe you’d be reading one of your mother’s magazines, and you’d see a picture of a woman, and you’d have impure thoughts about that woman, the priest would say, and you’d think about it? And you would say, Maybe I did, Father, because it was entirely possible that you would do such a thing, or think such a thing, and the priest would give a little sigh of satisfaction, and say, Ah, I thought so, my son, we’re none of us perfect, and then he’d absolve you from this imagined sin, I said. But that’s bizarre, Angel, you said, it’s like something out of Kafka. Oh, don’t knock it, Nina, I said, it was a good exercise in contemplation, good exercise for the memory, trying to remember what you might or might not have done in the course of that week, reliving those dubious encounters with oranges and apples and women’s magazines. And it did teach you to examine your conscience, to realise that everything you do, every decision you make, every thought, or every thought you imagined you’d had, or might be tempted to have in the future, is important, that it is judged by some absolute standard of morality. That anyone can be guilty of something, if one looks hard enough at oneself. It taught you to know yourself, I said.
I say this now, Nina, knowing how I judged you, you whom I once thought wholly guilty, and yet I still don’t know who you are, Nina, and that is why I still love you. I know I might have pictured you wrongly in the past, and you must forgive me for trying to picture what you might have become, imagining what experiences have lined your face, and where, whether the creases in the forehead, the wrinkles at the corners of the eyes and mouth, what weight you might have put on, and how it might suit you. I need to hold on to some picture of you, even as I know I might be wrong. And when sometimes, leafing through a history of costume or a vintage fashion magazine, I picture you in this outfit or that, dressing you like a doll in eighteenth-century petticoats and flounces, or in an elaborate Japanese kimono, or a 1920s coat and dress ensemble of Art Deco printed silk, you must forgive me for that too, as you must forgive me for sometimes picturing you naked, for you must have known in advance that such thoughts would occur to me, and you must have allowed for that, when you entered into correspondence with me again, with your full knowledge and complete consent, just three months ago, though it seems a lifetime. I think we should spend some time away from each other, you said, the second-last time we met face to face. It was June 1984. We’d just come back from a weekend in London where we’d quarrelled endlessly, you remember, it began when we went to the National Gallery, I expressly wanted to look again at Titian’s The Death of Actaeon, a painting I’d always loved. The narrative that lies behind the picture, as I recounted it to you, is Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
Ovid begins by telling the outcome of the story first, as if assuming it to be already familiar to his audience — this is the story of Actaeon, he says, upon whose brow strange horns appeared, and whose dogs greedily lapped their master’s blood. And if you look for the truth of the matter, you will find it in the fault of fortune, and not in any crime of his, says Ovid. Anyway, Actaeon and his comrades have been hunting since dawn. It’s high noon, and their nets are dripping with their quarry’s blood, says Ovid, so they call it a day.
Then he cuts to another scene, to a beautiful grotto with a stream, and a waterfall, where Diana, the goddess of the woods, is wont to bathe after hunting. On this particular day she’s just come back from the chase, and she lets herself be divested by her nymphs of her robe, her spear, her quiver, and her unstrung bow. And while the nymphs are pouring water over her naked body from big Grecian urns, Actaeon has lost his way, wandering through the unfamiliar woods with unsure footsteps, as Ovid has it. And he enters the grotto, covered in spray from the waterfall, whereupon the nymphs begin to beat their breasts and scream at the sight of him, and they crowd around Diana, trying to hide her body with their own, but Diana stands head and shoulders above them, and her cheeks are as red as the rosy dawn as she stands in full view without her robes. And not having her bow and arrow to hand, she dips her hand into the stream, and throws water into Actaeon’s face, and says to him, Now you can tell everybody that you saw Diana naked — if you can tell.
And, though he doesn’t know it yet, horns begin to sprout on Actaeon’s head, his arms become legs, and his hands feet, his clothes and his skin turn into a spotted hide. Then she puts fear into his heart, and he begins to run, wondering why he has become so swift of foot. And then he sees himself reflected in a pool, he sees the stag’s head, and the horns, and he tries to speak, but all that comes out is a groan. What can he do now? For though he’s got the body of a stag, he’s still got the mind of a man, and he’s thinking, I can’t very well go back to my palace now, I’d be too ashamed, but then again, I’d be very afraid if I stayed out here in the woods. So he’s standing there dithering when his sees his dogs running towards him — Ovid’s got these great names for the dogs, Nina, I said, like Hunter, Fury, Barker, Growler, Gazelle, Catcher, Gnasher, Spot, Runner, Soot, Whirlwind, Wolf, and so on — and he starts to run, the whole pack chasing him, and he wants to cry out, I’m Actaeon, I’m your master! but no words will come, and then the lead dog sinks his teeth into his shoulder, and the rest of the pack pours onto him, tearing at him till his whole body is one great wound, and the worst thing is, his comrades have got wind of what’s going on, they catch up with the dogs and urge them on, all the time shouting for Actaeon, and complaining that he’s missing all the action, and Actaeon lets a groan out of him, not quite a human cry, not quite the cry of a deer, and then he dies.