gained simply from Jerkin's presence was extinguished. It was blackness again, ravaged, smashed, crushed, pulverised blackness, like the night after the earthquake, only the dark was silent, there were no voices, no one was there, only herself, her vast awful smashed up self. Tamar, in running to Jenkin, had wanted simply to be saved from some sort of imminent screaming insanity. The speech she had made to him about becoming a Christian and about magic and so on had been entirely impromptu, something wild, even cynical, said to startle Jenkin and perhaps herself. The words were hollow, another voice speaking through her. Of course she had listened, but with unabated despair, even with a kind of contemptuous anger to Father McAlister's talk about `accepting Christ as her Saviour,' which seemed to her like the gabble of a witch doctor. Now, waiting for Jenkin to conic back, she gave herself up to the old repetitive misery, and to waiting impatiently, then anxiously, for his return. After a while she started inventing excellent reasons why he had nol come back, he had said it was an emergency, someone was seriously ill, or even more miserable than she was, or bad attempted suicide, he was holding someone's hand, he was urgently needed, he was detained. During this time Tamar had nothing to do. She thought vaguely of cleaning the house, but the house was clean. She made herself a cup of tea, and washed up her cup and saucer, together with a mug which was beside the sink. After some time, after hours had passed, she could do nothing but feel very anxious, then very frightened, because Jenkin had not returned. She lay down and fell into a chilled coma, she got up, she cried for a while. About five o'clock she decided to go and started writing a letter to Jenkin which sh, then tore up. She put on her coat but could not make up her mind to return to Acton and to her mother. At last she rang upGerard and asked if he knew where Jenkin was. Gerard told her he was dead.
Gerard had been one of the first people to learn of the evcm for a curious reason. The police had asked Crimond if he knew Jenkin's next of kin, or closest connection, and Crimond haul given them Gerard's name and address. Gerard came back from the London Library to find the police on the doorstep. He was taken to a police station in South London where he was questioned about Jenkin, about Crimond, about the situation, about their relationship. It was partly, perhaps largelv, Gerard's testimony which saved Crimond from being treated as a 'suspect'. Gerard was saved from having to identify his friend's body by the fact that Marchmcnt had instantly, on Crimond's 'phone call, made contact with the local police and made his own appearance on the spot in the role of best friend. The whole matter remained, during that day, in a state of confusion and coming and going, during which Gerard might well have come face to face with Crimond but did not. He got back home in fact just in time to receive Tamar's telephone call. Gerard asked her where she was. Tamar said she was in a telephone box. Gerard told her to wait there and he would fetch her by car. Tamar said, no, thank you, she would go home, her mother was waiting, and rang off, leaving Gerard to reproach himself for having, in his own shocked state, told her,the news so bluntly. She went back to Acton, said nothing to Violet, listened to Violet's complaints, toyed with her supper and went to bed early. Her condition then, as she saw it fterwards, was the sort of suspended shock which enables a oldier whose arm has been blown off to walk, talk sensibly, ven crack jokes, before quite suddenly falling dead. Tamar ever told anyone, except Father McAlister, that she had been ith.jenkin on that day. The idea of being questioned about it as intolerable. Anyway, that meeting was a secret between her and Jenkin. Tamar had not waited to be told by Gerard how Jenkin had died, it was sufficient to know that he was dead. Then after she had gone to bed that night and was lying in the darkness choking with grief, it occurred to her that,,whatever might have happened to him, he had been killed by the dead child; and henceforth and forever anyone who ame near to her would be cursed and destroyed. So she was responsible for Jenkin's death.
On the following day Tamar had an appointment to see the priest which she had intended to cancel but had forgotten to do so. She kept the appointment, and thereafter saw him at regular intervals. Father McAlister specialised in desperate cases. Over Tamar, he might positively have been said to gloat. His eyes sparkled but he did not underestimate his difficulties. His father had been a High Anglican clergyman, his mother a devout Methodist. Father McAlister could pray as soon as he could speak and the high spiritual rhetoric of the Bible and of Cranmer's Prayer Book was more familiar to him than nursery rhymes. His God was that of his father, but lik Christ was that of his mother. He spoke the dignified and beautiful language of a reticent spirituality, but he breathed the fire of instant salvation. Beyond this felicitous amalgam lay Father McAlister's secret: he had by now ceased to believe in God or in the divinity of Christ, but he believed in prayer, in Christ as a mystical Saviour, and in the magical power which had been entrusted to him when he was ordained a priest, a power to save souls and raise the fallen. Herein, carefully judging her needs and her intelligence, he colluded with Tamar. He sought diligently in her despair for the tiny spas k of hope which could be kindled into a flame. When she called herself evil he appealed to her reason, when she proclaimed disbelief he explained faith, when she said she hated God lie spoke of Christ, when she rejected Christ's divinity he preached Christ's power to save. He sang both high and low. He promised strength through repentance, and joy through renewal of life. He exhorted her to remake herself into an instrument fit for the service of others. He used the oldest argument in the book (sometimes called the Ontological Proof) which, in Father McAlister's version, said that if witha pure passion you love God, then God exists, because He has to) After all, what your best self, your most truthful soul desires must be real, and not to worry too much about what it's called, To these arguments, this struggle, this as it were dance which she was executing with the priest, Tamar become addicted She surrendered herself to him as to an absorbing task. She, was moving, as it seemed to her, and thus it came to her also in dreams, through a vast palace where doors opened, doom closed, rooms and vistas appeared and vanished and she knew no way, yet there was a way, and the thing to do was to keep going forward. A great many different things had to fit together, had to, for her, for Tamar, for her salvation from despair and degradation and death. That breathless, precautions, often tearful, prolonged and ingenious 'fitting together' was perhaps the cleverest thing that Tamar had ever done. Shy must live, she must be healed. This hope, appearing first as an intelligent determination, coexisted with the old despair, which now began to seem like self-indulgence, her sense that she deserved no happiness and no healing and was doomed. At this early period she recalled with bitter tears the time when she had felt innocent and was proud and pleased to be called an angel, and a 'good girl' who would always `do people good'. Her fallenness from this state made her especially anxious to avoid Gerard who had done so much to build up this illusion. This shunning of Gerard, almost a resentment Against him, was what gave Gideon his chance since he emerged as the only person with whom Father McAlister.Could discreetly cooperate. Here the priest found an eager, even too enthusiastic, ally; and hence the surprising appearance of Tamar and even Violet at the Christmas rituals.
At a certain point surrender almost seemed a matter of logic. When so much had clearly happened to her, been done for her and to her, must she not acknowledge the reality of the source? These formalities were important as symbols and assertions and promises. This belongingness would express a real bond and a real freedom. It was time for citizenship, for the initiation into the mystery. Tamar was moved by gratitude, by the loving diligence of her mentor, and by a liberal carelessness which was, she sometimes thought, a fresh, perhaps better, form of her despair. Why not? Had she not come to believe in magic? She wanted even to brand herself as having moved away from those whose opinions she had once valued so much, moved into a different house, a different world, which they would condemn in terminology which now seemed to her shallow and banal. There was a way and she must go on moving forward, she was not yet safe. The rites of baptism and confirmation took place on the same day. A;godmother and a godfather were necessary. Tamar found her godmother, a Miss Luckhurst, one of her school teachers now living in retirement. Father McAlister provided a hastily introduced godfather in the person of an almost speechless young curate. Immediately after the ceremony she took communion. The magic, for which she was now ready, exerted its power. Tamar could rest, her breath was quiet, her eues serene. She put on the 'sleekness' of which Gerard had spoken and the tranquillity which had led him to say that she did nol care about Jenkin's death. She was able to pray. The priest had talked much to her about prayer, how it was simply a quietness, an attentive waiting, a space made for the presetwo, of God. Tamar felt that she made the space and something filled it.
Tamar was perfectly aware of her cleverness, was evert ready to accuse herself of 'cheating'. She once used this word to her mentor who replied, 'My child, you can't cheat – heir., and here alone, you cannot cheat. What you desire purely and with all your heart is of one substance with the desire.' He curl this
