Therapy

wouldn’t tell me. But she did tell me about her Confession on the school retreat, and how the priest had said it was a sin for me to touch her as I had been doing and that I mustn’t do it any more and that to avoid “the occasion of sin” we mustn’t go down into the area and cuddle when I saw her home but just shake hands or perhaps exchange a single chaste kiss.
    Dismayed by this turn of events, I concentrated all my resources on reversing it. I protested, I argued, I wheedled; I was eloquent, I was pathetic, I was cunning. And of course, in the end, I won. The boy always does win such struggles, if the girl can’t bear to risk losing him, and Maureen couldn’t. No doubt she had given me her heart because I was the first to ask for it. But I was also quite good-looking at that stage of my life. I hadn’t yet acquired the nickname Tubby, and I still had my hair — rather gorgeous blond hair, as a matter of fact, which I combed back in a billowing wave petrified with Brylcreem. Also I was the best dancer in the youth club and star of the football team. Such things matter to young girls more than exam results and career prospects. We both took our O-Level exams that year. Maureen achieved five lowish passes, enough to proceed to the sixth form; I failed everything except English Literature and Art, and left school to work in the office of a big theatrical impresario in the West End, having responded to an advertisement in the Evening Standard. I was only a glorified office-boy, to tell the truth, franking mail, taking it to the Post Office, fetching sandwiches for the staff, and so on, but something of the glamour of the business rubbed off on me. Famous actors and actresses passed through our dingy office above a Shaftesbury Avenue theatre on the way to the boss’s inner sanctum, and they would smile and say a word to me as I took their coats or fetched them cups of coffee. I quickly picked up the language of show business and responded to its febrile excitements, the highs and lows of hits and flops. I suppose Maureen recognized that I was maturing rapidly in this sophisticated milieu, and in danger of growing away from her. I was sometimes given complimentary tickets to shows, but there was no hope that Mr and Mrs Kavanagh would let her go to them with me. We no longer met every morning at the tram stop, because I now took a Southern Electric train from Hatchford Station to Charing Cross. Our meetings on Sundays and our walks home from the youth-club socials therefore became all the more precious. She could not deny me her kisses for long. I coaxed her into the shadows at the bottom of the area steps and slowly I inched my way back to the state of intimacy that had existed before.
    I don’t know what compact she made with God or her conscience — I thought it prudent not to enquire. I knew that she went to confession once a month, and to communion every week, and that her parents would get suspicious if she deviated from this routine; and I knew, because she had explained it to me once, that you couldn’t get absolution for a sin unless you promised not to do it again, and that to swallow the consecrated host in a state of sin was another sin, worse than the first. There was some kind of distinction between big sins and little sins she may have used as a loophole. Big sins were called mortal sins. I can’t remember what the little ones were called, but you could go to communion without being absolved of them. I’m very much afraid, though, that the poor girl thought breast-touching was a mortal sin, and believed she was in serious danger of going to hell if she should die without warning.
    Her air and expression subtly altered in that period, though I was probably the only one to register the change. She lost some of her usual exuberance. There was a kind of abstractedness in her eyes, a wanness about her smile. Even her complexion suffered: her skin lost its glow, a rash of pimples occasionally broke out round her mouth. But most significant of all, she allowed me more freedoms than before, as if she had abandoned all hope of being good, or as she would have put it, in a state of grace, and further defence of her modesty was therefore pointless. When, one warm September night, I unbuttoned her blouse, and unfastened, with infinite care and delicacy, like a burglar picking a lock, the hook and eye that fastened her brassière, I encountered no resistance, nor did she utter a word of protest. She