I went to confession. I took the bus to the neighbouring parish and told an unseen, unknown priest all that had happened. A sad little tale it sounded, a trivial matter to consign a soul to perpetual separation. I felt apologetic for boring the poor man and was as brief as possible in order to spare, not myself, but him. Afterwards I had no sense that I had been forgiven, but I had done what I was called upon to do and there it must rest.

I told my mother where I had been without explanation as to why I had chosen not to go to our own church, and she said nothing. I wondered whether she believed in God. I knew that she didn’t believe in him as I did because in that case I would have recognized her as I had recognized Mother Joseph, who inhabited a territory which I had visited. My mother, I felt sure, had never been there. She had no travellers’ tales, no air of a person who had been on a journey, and I knew she would be both disbelieving and resentful if I should try to describe the eternal vistas I had glimpsed. To her, religion was morality and appearance, and she kept it in the same compartment of her mind as her dinner napkins. Suspicious of excess and what she thought of as theatricality, she lived—quite adequately and blamelessly—on the lowest level of religious experience. If I should cry, trying to express the inexpressible, that I had walked the wind with archangels, she would have been worried and annoyed; and if I had gone on to say that I had forfeited those heights and lived now in an unremitting shadowless glare of exposure in a runnel of Hell, she would have feared for my mental health. I did myself.

‘I like to go to confession straight after I’ve been to the hairdresser,’ said Lili. ‘It makes me feel so complete, body and soul.’

‘I don’t think you’ve got quite the right idea, Lili,’ said my mother.

‘Yes, I have. It’s all about ease, you see,’ said Lili.

My mother looked irritable. She subscribed on the face of it to the proposition that we are not put here to be happy, although she was the first to complain if she, or the few people she loved, were not. Lili, the hedonist, on the other hand, was clearly familiar with some of the regions of hell. She had described them earlier and I had known what she meant.

That night I was again subjected to the ordeal by wedding dress. I imagined what would happen if I should tear the sleeves out, or cut it up, or run to the kitchen for tomato ketchup and pour it all over the bodice; if I should rip out the collar with my teeth. I could hear the sound of rent cloth in my head, but I stood on a wooden chair while Lili pinned the seams closer, standing quietly like a broken horse to be saddled and bridled. Bridalled and saddled. I said: ‘I feel sick.’