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steel comb, combed his hair down in a neat lacquered curve, all the time keeping his bright quizzical gaze fixed upon Cato.
    â€˜Got a drink?’
    â€˜Later.’ What the hell, thought Cato, I need a drink myself. He reached for the neck of the whisky bottle and fetched two tumblers from the washstand. ‘Here.’ He stubbed out his cigarette in a mound of ash and lit another one. Joe did not smoke.
    Joe was smoothing his damp hair down with his fingers, patting out the sleek curves across his cheeks, still watching the priest with an air of affectionate amusement.
    â€˜Father—’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜I haven’t told anyone.’
    â€˜Told anyone what?’
    â€˜That you’re still here. No one knows but me. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?’
    â€˜It doesn’t matter now,’ said Cato. That seemed to be the theme of the present moment. He added. ‘I’m going away. You’d better give me back the door key.’
    Joe gave him the key. ‘That’s sort of sad, Father, you trusted me, it was a sort of symbol, wasn’t it, Father?’
    â€˜I still trust you. This isn’t my house.’
    â€˜Where will you be then, where will I see you?’
    â€˜I don’t know.’
    â€˜Are you going to Rome?’
    â€˜No. What makes you think I’m going to Rome?’
    â€˜Every priest goes there. I’d like to see Rome. I’d like to see His Holiness. When will you be Pope, Father?’
    â€˜Not for a while yet!’
    â€˜Where will I see you?’
    â€˜I don’t know. I’ll—I’ll write to you.’
    â€˜I haven’t an address. I’ll come to you. You want me to, don’t you?’
    Joe was smiling and swinging his hair about, transforming the lank locks into a golden fuzz by teasing them between his fingers. He twitched his shoulders, then drew his damp shirt out of his jeans and unbuttoned it a little so as to pull it free of his back.
    Cato was not looking at him. Cato had imagined that after the ordeal of Easter everything would become simpler and certain moves at least would just have to be made. But it seemed that there was still nothing compulsory in his life and the horror of choice which by now should have passed from him was still there, the awful superimposition of quite different problems producing more and more glimpses and vistas, more and more superfluous possibilities, the longer he gazed.
    If only, thought Cato, instinctively forming his thought as a prayer, everything were not happening to me all at once. Is this an accident, can it be? One thing at a time, oh Lord, and I can manage. I cannot deal with such different things at the same moment. Yet are they different things? They were beginning to seem inextricably connected. But that was impossible. What was the connection, what could it be? He had to solve the problems separately, he had to, and he had to solve one after the other. Perhaps the problem was how to separate them.
    The period of Cato’s conversion now seemed inconceivably remote, a prehistory, a mythical time of creation out of chaos which did not cease to be, even now in his life, a centre of authority and power. He had been invaded by Christ. That he had been ‘armed’ by a strictly rationalist atheist upbringing was nothing. Such arms were exceedingly ambiguous. A reaction was ‘to be expected’ some people said. But Cato had his own deep resistance against sudden emotional religion. He had, as it were, quite early inoculated himself against falling in love with that mystical beauty: the ritual, the intellectual delight, the drama, the power. As a budding historian he had gone into it all and probed in himself the weakness that made him vulnerable to what was after all, in the end, a vast vulgarity. Christ himself of course was untouchably pure and had never put a foot wrong, though this was true also of Socrates. No vulgarity there, no