Oscar and Lucinda

all. It was time for her to speak. She heard a voice out on the deck. It was the Belgians crying for their Pomeranian. She clasped the back of the chair in her hands. She felt her voice very small. She watched his shoe and shin protruding like a branch from beneath the table. The shoe bounced up and down. The shoe did not match the sacrament, but when she looked up and saw his hair like the hair of angels and very still, limpid grey-green eyes, she confessed. She talked so quietly he had to lean forward to hear her.

It was a little silver voice you could fit in a thimble. It did not match the things it said. The shoe stopped bouncing. The penitent had closed her heavy lids across her eyes. She spoke swiftly but quietly, in a silvery sort of rush.

She confessed that she had attended rooms in Drury Lane for the purposes of playing fan-tan (although she had fled when stared at).

She confessed to playing a common dice game on a train full of 'racing types,' and although she had not gone to the races, she had boarded this train, having read that such things occurred in such trains, for the express purpose of playing dice. She had been asked to leave the game because her sex was apparently repulsive to the patrons.

She had tried to persuade Mr Paxton to take her to a cock fight.

She had eavesdropped on stewards. She had set up a table in her room like a trap for them. She had wished to play poker.

There were other matters but her confessor hardly heard them. He sat with his head bowed, trying to still his wildly beating heart. He clenched his hands and pressed them down between his legs. He groaned.

Lucinda heard this noise. She sat with her head bowed, not daring to look at him. She waited for absolution. She heard another noise, muffled, its meaning not clear. She thought, He will not be my friend now. She clenched her eyes shut to drive out such temporal thought,

Confession

clenched them so tight that luminous bodies floated through the black sea of her retina.

When Oscar tried to think good thoughts he always thought of his father. He did this now: it was this that made him groan-the loneliness he had caused this stern and loving man. The voices of the stewards came through the ventilation, but neither of them listened. Still, the priest withheld absolution.

'This dice you played on the train,' he asked, 'was it Dutch I Hazards?'

I Lucinda looked up quite sharply, but the priest's head was bowed

it and twisted sideways towards his right shoulder. 'Yes,' she said. 'It I was. We also played another game.'

I 'Old British, perhaps.'

I Lucinda felt her bowed neck assume a mottled pattern. 'In New I South Wales,' she said, 'it is known as 'Seventh Man.' ' Her feelings were not focused, were as diffused as a blush, a business of heat and blood. Oscar could not keep the picture of his father clear. A certain reckI. less joy-a thing without a definite form, a fog, a cloud of electricity -

replaced the homely holy thoughts.

: 'And who was it,' he asked, unclenching his hands and bringing them up on to the table, 'who provided the Peter?'

Lucinda Leplastrier put her head on one side. She opened her eyes. Her confessor had a blank face, what was almost a blank face, but was prevented from being completely blank by the very slight compression of the lips.

Lucinda narrowed her green eyes. 'The Peter?' 'Is the term unknown to you?' She was looking at the mouth. She could not quite believe what she saw there. 'No,' she said, very carefully. 'No, I think it is quite

familiar.'

'I thought so,' said Oscar Hopkins. He closed the little prayer book and stuffed it in the pocket which contained the caul. When his hand touched the caul, he remembered the ocean behind his book. It caused no more than a prickling in his spine.

'And these terms, Mr Hopkins, are they also familiar to you?'

' Traid so.' He smiled, a clear and brilliant smile.

Lucinda also smiled, but less certainly. 'Mr Hopkins, this is most improper.' Oscar took a handkerchief from his jacket pocket and wiped first his

Oscar and Luanda

clammy hands and then his perspiring brow. 'Oh?' he said, 'I really do not think so.' He looked so pleased with himself.

'But you have not absolved me.'

'Where is the sin?'

She was shocked, less by what he said, but by the sudden change of mood that took possession of him. He spoke these words in an angry sort of passion quite foreign to his personality. His eyes went hard. He made a jerky gesture towards the cards-ha! he had seen them after all-in front of him. 'Our whole faith is a wager, Miss Leplastrier. We bet-it is all in Pascal and very wise it is too, although the Queen of England might find him not nearly Presbyterian enough-we bet that there is a God. We bet our life on it. We calculate the odds, the return, that we shall sit with the saints in paradise. Our anxiety about our bet will wake us before dawn in a cold sweat. We are out of bed and on our knees, even in the midst of winter. And God sees us, and sees us suffer. And how can this God, a God who sees us at prayer beside our bed…' His hands were quite jerky in their movements. There was a wild sort of passion about him, and the eyes within that sharpchinned face held the reflections of electric lamps. Lucinda felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up. Her eyelids came down. If she had been a cat she would have purred.

'I cannot see,' he said, 'that such a God, whose fundamental requirement of us is that we gamble our mortal souls, every second of our temporal existence… It is true! We must gamble every instant of our allotted span. We must stake everything on the unprovable fact of His existence.' Lucinda shivered, a not unpleasant shiver and one not caused by cold. There were so many reasons for this involuntary ripple, not least the realization that her vice would not lose her his friendship. But it was also caused by recognition: she saw herself mirrored in him, the sudden coldness of the gambler's passion-something steely, angry even, which will not be denied. She was disturbed, too, to find her confessor belittling the worth of her confession and this-the pulling out of the tablecloth beneath the meal-gave a salt of anger to her own emotions even while she delighted-celebrated, even-the vital defence my great-grandfather was assembling, like a wild-haired angel clockmaker gesturing with little cogs, dangerous springs, holding out each part for verification, approbation, before he inserted it in the gleaming structure of his belief.

'Every instant,' said Oscar, and held up a finger as he said it, calling attention to a low roly-poly laugh issuing from the ventilator.

Confession

'There,' he said triumphantly, as if he had caught the laugh, as if the laugh was the point of it all, and he was like a man who has trapped a grasshopper in mid-air, smiling as if the miracle were tickling

his palm. 'There. We will never hear that man laugh that laugh again. The instant is gone.'

It would not be apparent to anyone watching Oscar Hopkins that this was a young man who had sworn off gambling now he had no further 'use' for it. His views seemed not only passionate but firmly held. So even if you had not agreed with him, you would not have doubted his conviction. Lucinda had no idea that she had witnessed a guilty defence. She thought all sorts of things, but not this. She thought what a rare and wonderful man he was. She thought she should not be alone with him in her cabin. She thought they might play cards. She thought: I could marry, not him, of course not him, but I could marry someone like him. There was a great lightness in her soul.

'Every instant,' he said.

She felt she knew him. She imagined not only his passion for salvation, but his fear of damnation. She saw the fear that would take him 'before dawn.' It was a mirror she looked at, a mirror and

window both.

'That such a God,' said Oscar, 'knowing the anguish and the trembling hope with which we wager…' He stopped then, looking with wonder at his shaking hands. This shaking was caused by the fervour of his beliefs as he revealed them, but there was another excitement at work-that produced by the open, admiring face of Miss