‘That we are all the creatures of circumstance, that things are never what they seem, that there’s more to this than meets…’
‘We’ll see about that,’ said the Inspector.
Wilt got up. ‘I don’t suppose you’ll want me for anything else,’ he said. ‘I’ll be getting along home.’
‘You’ll be doing no such thing. You’re coming with us to pick up Mrs Wilt.’
They went out into the courtyard and got into a police car. As they drove through the suburbs, past the filling stations and factories and out across the fens Wilt shrank into the back seat of the car and felt the sense of freedom he had enjoyed in the Police Station evaporate. And with every mile it dwindled farther and the harsh reality of choice, of having to earn a living, of boredom and the endless petty arguments with Eva, of bridge on Saturday nights with the Mottrams and drives on Sundays with Eva, reasserted itself. Beside him, sunk in sullen silence, Inspector Flint lost his symbolic appeal. No longer the mentor of Wilt’s self-confidence, the foil to his inconsequentiality, he had became a fellow sufferer in the business of living almost a mirror-image of Wilt’s own nonentity. And ahead, across this flat bleak landscape with its black earth and cumulus skies, lay Eva and a lifetime of attempted explanations and counter-accusations. For a moment Wilt considered shouting ‘Stop the car. I want to get out’, but the moment passed. Whatever the future held he would learn to live with it. He had not discovered the paradoxical nature of freedom only to succumb once more to the servitude of Parkview Avenue, the Tech and Eva’s trivial enthusiasms. He was Wilt, the man with the grasshopper mind.
Eva was drunk. The Rev St John Froude’s automatic reaction to her appalling confession had been to turn from whisky to 150% Polish spirit which he kept for emergencies and Eva in between agonies of repentance and the outpourings of lurid sins, had wet her whistle with the stuff. Encouraged by its effect, by the petrified benevolence of the Vicar’s smile and by the growing conviction that if she was dead eternal life demanded an act of absolute contrition while if she wasn’t it allowed her to avoid the embarrassment of explaining what precisely she was doing naked in someone else’s house, Eva confessed her sins with an enthusiasm that matched her deepest needs. This was what she had sought in judo and pottery and Oriental dance, an orgiastic expiation of her guilt. She confessed sins she had committed and sins she hadn’t, sine that had occurred to her and sins she had forgotten. She had betrayed Henry, she had wished him dead, she had lusted after other men, she was an adulterated woman, she was a lesbian, she was a nymphomaniac. And interspersed with these sins of the flesh there were sins of omission Eva left nothing out. Henry’s cold suppers, his lonely walks with the dog, her lack of appreciation for all he had done for her, her failure to be a good wife, her obsession with Harpic…everything poured out. In his chair the Rev St John Froude sat nodding incessantly like a toy dog in the back window of a car, raising his head to stare at her when she confessed to being a nymphomaniac and dropping it abruptly at the mention of Harpic, and all the time desperately trying to understand what had brought a fat naked–the shroud kept falling off her–lady, no definitely not lady, woman to his house with all the symptoms of religious mania upon her.
‘My child, is that all?’ he muttered when Eva finally exhausted her repertoire.
‘Yes, Father,’ sobbed Eva.
‘Thank God,’ said the Rev St John Froude fervently and wondered what to do next. If half the things he had heard were true he was in the presence of a sinner so depraved as to make the ex-Archdeacon of Ongar a positive saint. On the other hand, there were incongruities about her sins that made him hesitate before granting absolution. A confession full of
